IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat - <AUTHOR> https://investorplace.com/2019/08/ibm-stops-buybacks-to-pay-for-red-hat/ <comment><AUTHOR> A dying company trying to extend their "squeeze your base" policy to another vendor. I think they overpaid for RedHat. After a particularly painful audit at my Fortune 500, we kicked out RedHat. We spend more time talking to IBMs auditors than we do to their Salespeople and engineers. This merger seems like the modern version of HP and Compaq. The only winners are the shareholders who bolt early. Customers, employees and late shareholders are all losers.

<comment><USER2> Forgive my ignorance,but what is an IBM auditor?

<comment><USER3> IBM products have no license-checking built in, on purpose. They _want_ you to make more copies than your negotiated license agreement allows. Then, when the auditor comes in, they charge you the sky-high list price, backdating it as well.

<comment><USER4> I have some employees in India and apparently, Adobe does this there. They will just randomly show up and ask to look at all your systems and see if you are using pirated Adobe products.

I have no idea what the laws are there, but the companies they show up at don't even necessarily have any license with Adobe. I can't imagine that is legal in India, but apparently it happens unabetted.

<comment><USER5> welcome to licensing by companies in the Business Software Aliance:

notorious for using disgruntled former employees for starting audits. (they did to my friends company a decade ago and found nothing..)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_\(The_Software_Alliance\))

lots of major companies: (apple/adobe....)

[https://www.bsa.org/membership](https://www.bsa.org/membership)

<comment><USER6> The trick? They tell to fuck off and file a lawsuit if they want to audit. They back off. Unless the former employee has actual proof other than a statement they won't bother.

<comment><USER7> That trick does not work in countries where they come along with the police department responsible for checking if business activities are in accordance with the law.

Here is the Portuguese variant of such police department.

[https://www.asae.gov.pt/cooperacao-nacional-e- internacional/...](https://www.asae.gov.pt/cooperacao-nacional-e- internacional/cooperacao-internacional-/relacoes-bilaterais/cooperacao- institucional--paises-e-territorios-de-lingua-oficial-portuguesa/igae- inspecao-geral-das-atividades-economicas.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The big risk is that IBM drags Redhat down to their level. This wouldn't be unusual, most takeovers fail to deliver shareholder value.

<comment><USER9> There is nothing to drag. A single server distro is becoming irrelevant as the unit of computation resources is the kubernetes cluster. I.e. all the app see is a set of kubernetes nodes, it does not really care what server disto you are running on.

<comment><USER10> You do realize that those containers eventually need to be hosted _somewhere_ , right? That somewhere is a server running an operating system. Containers are more a threat to virtual machine OSes than ones that host containers.

<comment><USER11> But the hosts no longer need the full distro stack traditionally provided by a RHEL. Just a thin enough veneer for a container runtime with live kernel updates.

Maybe there's a market for intra container licenses but it's a harder sell as even there the goal is to go slim.

<comment><USER12> So you remove all the traditional services from the OS "definition", and roll your owns (in _one_ particular context). Don't worry, soon enough some people will be tired of reinventing the wheel each in their own corner, and what you call "a market for intra container licenses" (potentially in the form of free commoditized open-source licensed components -- but that is not really new for that comparison, because truly free open-source distro already exist; you don't _have_ to use RHEL) will exist, simply because it makes absolutely no economical sense that everybody redevelops or even just manages everything all the time.

<comment><USER13> "ReDevelOps" is an accurate buzzword for a lot of the market these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What laypeople need to realize is the following relation:

Low federal funds rates allow companies to acquire huge amounts of debt very cheaply.

Huge amounts of cheap debt allow companies to buy lots of stock, driving up prices.

Stock prices inflated in such a way are not supported by fundamentals and so the downside risk greatly increases.

Once the downside eventually materializes, markets drop violently. At first, the FED ignores this, but eventually it bails. The funds rate is once again lowered, so the game can continue.

In any event, the game _must_ continue, because companies need new debt to service old debt. If the new debt was more expensive, the companies would eventually risk defaulting.

To understand the risk of corporate defaults, one must look at the importance of corporate bonds in pension funds. Ironically, the low federal funds rate is part of what drives pension funds to purchase more risky corporate debt, in order to meet their yield requirements.

All of this causes massive asset price inflation. Stock prices are detached from actual revenue, real estate prices are detached from rent income. The rich are getting richer - at least on paper - because they own most of the assets.

The CPI doesn't immediately reflect this kind of inflation, so the FED gets to claim "there is no inflation" and everything is "just fine". Well, it's not fine and they know it, they just can't really do anything about it.

<comment><USER15> Are there buyback limits? Is it possible that company could buy all of it's stock?

<comment><USER16> Nope, remember, share buybacks are just a more tax efficient form of returning profits to investors than dividends. As they buy more and more of their stock, the remaining shareholders end up owning a larger and larger percentage share of the company.

Taken to the extreme, there would finally be 1 share left held by someone and thus that person would own 100% of the company and be entitled to 100% of the profits from said company. The company cannot just buy the last stock because the stock itself is worth all the cash the company holds and the future profits it will make. Saving up more cash to buy the final stock just raises the price because the stock is entitled to that cash and nobody is going to loan a company enough cash to be worth the expected future profits of said company which makes up the remainder of the shares value.

Funnily enough though, I think they would still do share buybacks by first splitting the stock and then buying a subset of the split stock because then the sole owner would only have to pay taxes on the sale price minus the price he paid for the stock whereas dividends are taxed in their entirety.

<comment><USER15> > The company cannot cannot just buy the last stock because the stock itself > is worth all the cash the company holds and the future profits it will make.

The last share is worth whatever the person that holds it is willing to sell it for, right? A share of IBM is worth $136 right now because there are two parties willing to buy/sell a share of IBM at that price.

I realize this would never happen in a million years, but could a company exist that is owned by nobody?

<comment><USER17> It would cause some practical difficulties if the corporation owned all its shares. For example, in the case of a Delaware corporation, shares owned by the corporation itself can't vote, so it would not be possible to elect board members. Some jurisdictions might have legal limits on how much stock can be bought back as a percentage of the outstanding shares.

It's not that unusual to have entities that essentially own themselves, in the sense that nobody is entitled to the profits and the board or managers elect their own successors. This is the case for foundations and trusts in many countries, usually with some kind of charitable purpose. Some of them even operate businesses. It might be possible for a company to take on some debt, buy out all its shareholders, and reorganize into a charity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting. This seems like a big bet for IBM given that they used over 70% of their cash pile to buy Redhat.

That said the picture painted by this article is that doing nothing wasn't an option, declining revenues is not a good picture at a time when the competition are posting record numbers...

<comment><USER19> > If all goes according to plan, IBM forecasts a sales bump of 2% over the > next 5 years, but it will take 2 years before Red Hat contributes to > earnings.

These are not good projections. It's really hard to understand how RedHat acquisition makes any financial sense whatsoever if this is the actual effect. RH annual revenues were $3.36B for FY2019. [1] That's a tiny fraction of IBM's current revenue.

[1] [https://investors.redhat.com/news-and-events/press- releases/...](https://investors.redhat.com/news-and-events/press- releases/2019/03-25-2019-201454520)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can someone explain why Red Hat is so valuable? Why would IBM put such a big bet?

<comment><USER21> The general strategy seems to be: IBM's customers have been slowly transitioning from proprietary IBM OSs (AIX, z/OS) to Linux for a lot of their workloads, and IBM has accommodated this out of necessity, but wants to retain licensing revenue and some degree of branding/control in that situation by having such customers on an Enterprise IBM Linux. RHEL more or less already owned the Enterprise Linux space, so IBM just bought them instead of developing something in-house. Along with IBM getting an Enterprise Linux brand out of it, they also seem to be hoping some RHEL customers who aren't otherwise IBM customers might be converted to buy more stuff (e.g. maybe some of them can be sold on RHEL/POWER9 servers).

(Whether that justifies the valuation I don't know enough to guess on.)

<comment><USER22> _IBM 's customers have been slowly transitioning from proprietary IBM OSs (AIX, z/OS) to Linux for a lot of their workloads_

Yes, but that's only a coincidence. What they have really been doing is transitioning from proprietary to commodity hardware. Which IBM no longer makes. Where does IBM make money? Mainframe sales. There can be only one winner here... IBM will need to kill off their mainframe business to justify this purchase, something they have proved very reluctant to do.

<comment><USER23> There is no reason to discontinue their mainframe business. Banks and other institutions have applications running successfully on those platforms. The industry has learned that it is better to integrate applications than to replace—especially when the replacement is a 40 year old app that runs the business.

IBM's mainframe margins are safe for decades to come.

<comment><USER22> But, don't you see the paradox there? If customers are happy with their mainframe why would they switch to Red Hat? And if they don't want to switch why did IBM buy it?

<comment><USER24> They may not want to get rid of the hardware, but they may want to run something other than z/OS on it. RHEL is well supported on both IBM midrange and mainframe systemd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So when IBM is desperate for cash in a few years, who buys Red Hat?

Microsoft? Tencent? Dell? _gulp_ Oracle?

<comment><USER26> What about "Suse"? ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE) )

I understood that it's often used in corporations as an alternative for RedHat => maybe Suse will have to merge as well with some other company if the combo RedHat&IBM in/directly shrink their revenues?

E.g. maybe Suse will be excluded from IBM's support? ( [https://www.suse.com/partners/alliance/ibm/](https://www.suse.com/partners/alliance/ibm/) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> PSA: If you want exposure in your portfolio to the M&A market there's an ETF that does it:

[https://www.etf.com/MNA](https://www.etf.com/MNA)

It's perhaps the single biggest "alternative" strategy ETF.

<comment><USER28> YTD isn't even 1%, almost anything else has done better.

<comment><USER29> I mean SPY has returned like 3% YTD. But that's not really the point. M&A has zero to very low Beta exposure, so it's almost completely uncorrelated to the market. This, in general, is a good thing.

A lot of quant market neutral hedge funds only return 3-5% per year. Compared to the S&P, this looks pretty bad. But the goal of these funds isn't to provide the best returns, it is to provide the best risk adjusted returns. You may ask, why would I care about that?

The answer is that you can synthetically match any return by either buying or selling (borrowing) at the risk free rate. So if I had a fund that had returns of 4% and volatility of 2%, I could turn it into 2 and 1, 8 and 2, or 16 and 4, or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > On July 9, IBM closed on its $34 billion purchase of Red Hat, a Linux > software operating system mainly used by cloud operators.

Completely conflates Red Hat with RHEL and makes it sound like IBM purchased a linux distro for 34b.

</comment><comment><USER31> " leaving it with only $12 billion in cash." " But IBM's dividend was hiked only 3.2% this year"

Sounds like a first-world financial scenario, no?

</comment><comment><USER32> I remember when 3x yearly revenue was the proper purchase price for a an established business like this. 10x huh? Glad, I am not in IBM. But wish the best of luck

</comment><comment><USER33> I miss the old IBM Thinkpads; sure, they cost $4,000 during the height of the dot-com boom, but those things were built like tanks. I got a 600X when a dot- com was liquidating its assets for $700 and it was my primary computer for over six years.

The newer Thinkpads from Lenovo are more like wannabe Macbooks; I miss batteries you could swap out without opening the computer and Thinkpads you could open without using a spudger.

<comment><USER34> lol what does that have to do with anything?

<comment><USER35> Do you even thinkpad bro?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Debt should not be a tax deductible expense.

Simple.

</comment><comment><USER37> What does that mean for Fedora?

</comment><comment><USER38> IBM missed a great marketing opportunity. They should have told the public that the decision to acquire Red Hat was made by Watson

<comment><USER39> Lying like that is a great way to have to deal with lawsuits from every investor who isn't convinced that the deal is a good idea.

<comment><USER38> It's not a lie if you believe it ;)

<comment><USER39> It is, however, if there's documentation showing something else which comes up in discovery. Seriously, never try this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Learning RHEL now :)

<comment><USER41> You're much better off learning core Linux utilities like from installing Arch, rather than outdated distro specific management.

<comment><USER42> Assuming he's coming from a Windows background learning core Linux utilities on Redhat is also possible. At least going through rhel he can reference the Redhat documentation which tend to be far better written than the million free guides out there.

As a real life example, the other day I needed to migrate /var on a Linux box. The freely available CentOs guides covered it well, but when I was done the applications were having a lot of issues. Going through Redhat's documentation it quickly became obvious that the other articles neglected to mention rebuilding the grub boot files and getting SELinux running on the new directory.

<comment><USER41> Considering that after RHEL took over CentOS, they are again significantly behind RHEL, and RHEL isn't cost-effective... he could find equal support and probably much more from the Ubuntu community. CentOS or RHEL doesn't even have a public package search, and for good reason. When you find out that they are using an outdated kernel, and outdated qemu/libvirt components, you'll quickly find yourself installing RPMs from a bunch of different locations from Google searches.

<comment><USER43> Looking at the "Delay" column in the release tables in Wikipedia, it appears that it's CentOS7 releases that have longer delays, the CentOS6 delays haven't changed in recent years (and there's nothing like the huge delays in 2011). Possibly because there are more packages being updated in 7?

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

Package search is on [https://git.centos.org/](https://git.centos.org/)

For example, libvirt is at version 4.5 in CentOS 7.6, while CentOS 7.0 shipped with version 1.1: [https://git.centos.org/rpms/libvirt/commits/c7](https://git.centos.org/rpms/libvirt/commits/c7)

Whereas in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it's at version 4.0: [https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=libvirt&searchon...](https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=libvirt&searchon=names&suite=bionic&section=all)

The RHEL kernel's version number is doesn't signify as much as you'd think, there are whole subsystems backported into it from later upstream kernel releases.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Personal Finance Management in Node.js and Google Sheets - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kika/hackerwallet <comment> dugite-code Looks nice and quiet simple.

I have something very similar, with a complicated spreadsheet modeled after You Need a Budget, but done with Python and selenium instead of Node.js. I even have notifications with Pushbullet set up inside the spreadsheet.

I really should clean it up and put it up on github one of these days but it's one of my earliest examples of scripting and honestly I'm quite embarrassed by it now</comment>


YouTube live TV streaming service goes live in five US cities for $35 per month - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/05/youtubes-35-live-tv-streaming-app-is-now-available-in-five-us-cities/ <comment><USER2> _YouTube TV_ \- thirty five dollars.

 _YouTube Red_ \- nine dollars and ninety nine cents.

Watching MasterCard commercials for free - Priceless.

[http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7DF5EB5148CC31FE](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7DF5EB5148CC31FE)

</comment><comment><USER3> 35/mo is pricey but nothing compared to cable prices.

I will be interested to see what channels this will offer in the UK. If it offers all existing freeview channels + some premium ones I can see a lot of people cutting the cord.

Set my VPN to LA but still can't get in even in incognito. Not sure how it's determining location. As I have other location tracking blocked.

edit: got it working with this [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/manual- geolocation...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/manual- geolocation/jpiefjlgcjmciajdcinaejedejjfjgki/related?hl=en)

<comment><USER4> Would have to see what freeview ones, I mean everybody has all freeview or freesat channels through an aerial or dish already right ?</comment></comment>


Groovy 2.0 introduces static type checking and compiling - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Groovy-2-0-introduces-static-type-checking-and-compiling-1628119.html

<comment><USER2> I'm curious how this will evolve in the Groovy culture / ecosystem. Will using static type checking become a best practice, with people 'falling back' to dynamic typing only when necessary? Or will people keep using it dynamically, except for "those Java weirdos who don't know any better"?

<comment><USER3> I don't know about others, but I'm thinking I would turn on static typing when I think I'm done developing something (as a way of verifying my code is correct).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why all the hype around the "release" of Groovy 2.0, what with the OP's h-online link, one at jaxenter ([http://jaxenter.com/groovy-2-0-is-finally- here-interview-wit...](http://jaxenter.com/groovy-2-0-is-finally-here- interview-with-guillaume-laforge-project-lead-43450.html)), one at InfoQ(<http://www.infoq.com/articles/new-groovy-20>), and the barrage of emails and cross-postings, all within a day of each other? Makes me wonder if the VMWare-employed marketers behind it all are on some sort of performance incentive.

It's the extreme opposite of the release of quality products like Linux and Clojure, both "announced" with low-key mentions in emails.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like a stop gap for Java 8 (the static portion that is). Please Oracle let me have my closures sooner so the .NET programmers will stop making fun of us :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hasn't Groovy always been a compiled language?

<comment><USER3> Yes, but the new static compilation feature generates faster code. The only downside is you are restricted from using some of the more dynamic aspects of groovy (mostly meta-programming).</comment></comment>


It's not just p=0.048 vs. p=0.052 - <AUTHOR> https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/09/06/__trashed-2/ <comment><USER2> Put a Number on It! did a piece a while ago going through some psychology pieces that were part of a replication effort. They found that half failed to replicate but that people in a betting market could often tell which ones were going to replicate or not. The author also did a blind test himself and was also able to guess which ones would replicate. He laid out several rules of thumb, most significantly to the article _Jacob's Rule of Anti-Significance: A result with a p-value just above 0.05 could well be true. A result with a p-value just below 0.05 is almost certainly false._

 _More importantly, p=0.06 means that the researchers are honest. They could have easily p-hacked the results below 0.05 but chose not to. The opposite is true when p=0.049._

[https://putanumonit.com/2018/09/07/the-scent-of-bad- psycholo...](https://putanumonit.com/2018/09/07/the-scent-of-bad-psychology/)

<comment><USER3> This is true in more than just psych. A strategy for systems papers is to select the system that is second on the graphs. The author's results are not trustworthy, but the second place system was usable and ran reasonably well in the hands of somebody other than the original author.

<comment><USER4> For ML practitioners out there, this is a great method for a field also in a replication crisis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related, about p-values:

> Here's the problem in a nutshell: If you run 1000 experiments over the > course of your career, and you get a significant effect (p < .05) in 95 of > those experiments, you might expect that 5% of these 95 significant effects > would be false positives. However, as an example shown later in this blog > will show, the actual false positive rate may be 47%.

> […] However, this is a statement about what happens when the null hypothesis > is actually true. In real research, we don't know whether the null > hypothesis is actually true. If we knew that, we wouldn't need any > statistics! In real research, we have a p value, and we want to know whether > we should accept or reject the null hypothesis. The probability of a false > positive in that situation is not the same as the probability of a false > positive when the null hypothesis is true. It can be way higher.

[https://lucklab.ucdavis.edu/blog/2018/4/19/why-i-lost- faith-...](https://lucklab.ucdavis.edu/blog/2018/4/19/why-i-lost-faith-in-p- values)

> Here's a more simple thought experiment that gets across the point of why > p(null | significant effect) /= p(significant effect | null), and why > p-values are flawed as stated in the post.

> Imagine a society where scientists are really, really bad at hypothesis > generation. In fact, they're so bad that they only test null hypothesis that > are true. So in this hypothetical society, the null hypothesis in any > scientific experiment ever done is true. But statistically using a p value > of 0.05, we'll still reject the null in 5% of experiments. And those > experiments will then end up being published in scientific literature. But > then this society's scientific literature now only contains false results - > literally all published scientific results are false.

> Of course, in real life, we hope that our scientists have better intuition > for what is in fact true - that is, we hope that the "prior" probability in > Bayes' theorem, p(null), is not 1.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16917158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16917158)

<comment><USER6> For about a year or so now Ive been wanting to make a game about science. It'd basically be a research and discovery simulator, and there would be a free- play mode. Some of the knobs would be # of required replication, required p-value and how good people are at generating hypothesis.

I think it'd be eye opening.

<comment><USER7> There is a "people will mostly replicate/extend articles about X, and ignore articles about Y" (groupthink) effect that I imagine is also very relevant.

<comment><USER6> Oooh, that's a great one to add to the list!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the problem with p-values is that it trains us to think about uncertainty without nuance. It hides the inherent trade off between the cost of taking on risk and the cost of reducing uncertainty, since it sets the threshold at p=0.05. Taken to the extreme, with a large enough sample we can nearly always find significant differences between populations, the difference will just be very small and n size will be enormous.

Recently I worked with a client to interpret results from an A/B test where A performed better than B with 85% confidence (based on credible intervals, accounting for multiple comparisons). We therefore recommended A. In a group phone call, the client told her colleagues that our company doesn't know what we're talking about because 85% confidence of a difference isn't statistically significant (i.e. isn't 95% confident). We lost their business.

This was a shame because gathering the data for the experiment was expensive and the downside of making the wrong choice was low. It is often the case that taking on more risk makes more sense than hitting diminishing returns on shrinking p-values with extra sample.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think p-values are actually somewhat demonized and I have grown to like them more and more over time. The standard interpretation is actually overly complicated for some reason and it can be simplified to "your p-value cutoff is an upper-bound on the rate of type I errors," over the long term. That's simple and actionable and is an immediate consequence of the definition of p-values! Frankly, I don't know why text-books don't give this as the definition of p-values, and they should reserve "probability of an event at least as extreme conditional upon the null hypothesis" as the thing-you-show- to-prove-it's-a-p-value.

The current trend of saying that "cutting p-values off at a specific value is bad" makes me worry. Now you can argue that your p=0.06 result shouldn't be rejected when really we should probably be pushing for stricter standards rather than inching towards looser ones. It also destroys the nice interpretation of p-values above. P-values were literally made to be cut off - if you want to stop doing that, you need to show me a coherent philosophy of what to do instead.

What I do think is true is the problem you have where part A of the experiment suggests X so you test X more directly in part B with a weaker but more specific test and get p=0.06 and now you can't publish. That's a dumb cutoff, clearly a p=0.06 test is likely to shift our belief towards X so it does nothing but bolster part A. Typically papers do this several times and the marginal 'failure' of one step should not sink the entire ship. This is a case where a Bayesian analysis might be more useful as it can incorporate weak evidence.

But the problem I see often is not that p-values are misused but that they were junk in the first place. For example, the widely-used DESeq2 (as well as some competitors in RNA-seq differential expression analysis) will happily spit out p-values of 10^-100 for an experiment with only four replicates in each of two conditions! There is no way you can get that level of evidence from just four replicates, even if the values are 0,0,0,0 and 1e6,1e6,1e6,1e6. The assumption of normality is reasonable near the mean but gets increasingly inaccurate in the tail, which is exactly where you end up when you do things like sort 30,000 tests by their p-values. In fact taking a p-value cutoff is probably the only reasonable thing to do here - that way you'll ignore the fact that it's absurdly small and just treat it as "small enough".

<comment><USER10> That interpretation makes the test basically useless because we know _a priori_ that any two variable for things within each others light cone affect each other at least a little. More practically, since the test tells you nothing about size of effect, it will pick up on the tiniest of bias in your experimental procedure and always reject the null if you have enough data.

From the author of the article: "The general point reminds me of my dictum that statistical hypothesis testing works the opposite way that people think it does. The usual thinking is that if a hyp test rejects, you've learned something, but if the test does not reject, you can't say anything. I'd say it's the opposite: if the test rejects, you haven't learned anything—after all, we know ahead of time that just about all null hypotheses of interest are false—but if the test doesn't reject, you've learned the useful fact that you don't have enough data in your analysis to distinguish from pure noise."

([https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/18/i-feel- lik...](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/18/i-feel-like-the- really-solid-information-therein-comes-from-non-or-negative-correlations/))

<comment><USER9> Compound/interval null hypotheses basically solve this effect-size problem and probably should be used more.

<comment><USER10> Yes, it should be required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It looks like the blog author completely missed the point of the statistical significance discussion going on. Most first-tier journals in the social sciences have an acceptance rate of about 5%. At the margins, the differences between acceptance and rejection could be having one more statistical significance result in the table than the paper that was submitted right before or after yours.

The problem with a 0.048 and a 0.052 is not a mathematical one but an interpretation one. Reviewers are condition to be very skeptical of non- significant results and use "under power-ness" as a grounds for rejection. As a result, we get publication bias and p-hacking.

<comment><USER12> I think you should reread the article because it's exactly what the blog author says. Blog author who btw is Andrew Gelman, not just some random guy on Medium, his blog is well well worth reading. Fighting bad stats in science is kind of his hobby/life mission.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, he had a major part in _creating_ the stats discussion that is going on. I doubt that he has missed its point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's worth noting that at their inception, null hypothesis testing and p-values were separate methodologies; there was even a bitter rivalry by their chief developers (Fisher and Pearson).

It wasn't until much later textbooks started to merge both. It may be worth to review Neyman and Pearson's attacks on Fisher in this matter.

</comment><comment><USER15> > To say it again: it is completely consistent with the null hypothesis to see > p-values of 0.2 and 0.005 from two replications of the same damn experiment.

I don't really follow this. Could someone clarify what is meant here? At what point would this author say something is _not_ consistent with the null hypothesis?

<comment><USER11> He is coming at that conclusion from a Bayesian point of view to statistics. He is seeing the p-value as a random variable that can take values from 0 to 1 and follows some distribution. Under these hypotheses, observing a p-value of 0.20 and 0.005 is completely reasonable even if unlikely. Those are just two draws from a random variable.

Edit. Under Bayesian statistics testing the null hypothesis is a moot point as it becomes possible to directly model the distribution of the possible effects. Thinking of it as being able to look at a picture of something (the p-value) vs looking at a movie of it (the distribution of the effects).

<comment><USER16> What he says is (I gather) worse: those events are only separated be 1.1std deviations, which is little.

<comment><USER15> I think that's what he's saying too, but what is that supposed to show? Is he arguing against some claim that every interval of 1 standard deviation is equally significant? Did anybody make this claim? So far as I know, nobody considers (say) a 6-sigma effect to be 6 times stronger than a 1-sigma effect...

<comment><USER17> I don't get it either. It's a trivial consequence of having a threshold: if we say two cities are "far" when they are at least 1000 miles away then Washington D.C. is not far from Jacksonville while Boston is far from Jacksonville, even though Boston is not far from Washington.

<comment><USER18> That's not quite the problem.

Let's assume you've already decided in advance what "far" means.

Without moving either city from its current location, the same experiment can give you "very far" and "very close" in identical replications.

<comment><USER17> I'm commenting on pfortuny's (correct) interpretation "those events are only separated be 1.1std deviations, which is little" of the original post by Gelman (the difference between a significant result and a non-significant result may not be significant = a city which is far from Jacksonville and a city which is not far from Jacksonville may not be far from each other).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Also, to get technical for a moment, the p-value is not the "probability of > happening by chance." But we can just chalk that up to a casual writing > style.

Isn't it though? The probability of this large (or larger) of a variance happening purely by chance[1]?

This article is highly critical, but the criticism goes over my head at least.

[1] assuming a normally distributed population

<comment><USER20> I think the part that you have correctly included that people forget or elide is that it's the probability under a specific null hypothesis. So it's a function of what you have chosen for that - normal distributions, a certain parameter value of 0, etc. So this means that a) it's not the probability you'd see in the real world under repeated performance b) it's not the probability under other reasonable null hypotheses. Like maybe under the hypothesis parameter = 0 you get an improbably large p-value, but under parameter = 0.1, or with different assumed underlying distributions, you wouldn't see something so extreme.

I'd guess that the original writer understands this, and that Gelman is only pointing it out because casual readers sometimes don't mentally retain the full baggage that the p-value carries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> For somebody who has never had formal training in statistics and similar discussions, what is a good/book to start groking these concepts?

<comment><USER22> If you want a college textbook, there are literally hundreds with titles similar to "introduction to probability and statistics" and you should choose the cheapest second hand book you can find (or that they have in your library). Content is mostly the same, of course the writing style will be different and some may be more appealing to you personally. Search engines are your friend for narrowing down your list.

For a popsci work, you could check out "how to lie with statistics", a classic.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Also, to get technical for a moment, the p-value is not the "probability of > happening by chance."

Is it not? According to Wikipedia, it's "[...] the probability that, when the null hypothesis is true, the statistical summary [...] would be equal to, or more extreme than, the actual observed results." This sounds pretty much like "probability of happening by chance".

<comment><USER22> It sounds pretty much the same, but is distinctly different. That's where much of the confusion in the popular press comes from.

The difference is that, as highlighted in your quote, there is some null hypothesis that is assumed when discussing p-values.

For example: what is the probability of drawing x>2 when the underlying distribution is assumed to be a standard normal distribution N(0,1)?

The probability is small in this case, and could provide evidence to reject the null hypothesis (i.e. the distribution is not standard normal). It doesn't tell you about the probability of drawing x>2, it only gives evidence to reject (or not) the null hypothesis.

The wiki has more elaborate explanation. And probably better examples than mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> All this reminded me of an exchange where similar games were closed the fastest. [0] [https://www.bestbitcoindice.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/11/Y...](https://www.bestbitcoindice.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/11/YoBit_Screenshot_1903x1080.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER25> A 5% chance of the results being reproducible by fluke even if the hypothesis is false is obviously too high for anything important. Splitting hairs over .048 and .052 is ridiculous: it revolves around tiny differences in a gaping uncertainty. Neither value is anywhere in the neighborhood of where the benchmark should be.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just putting this here in case anyone is interested in a slightly different view on p values.

[https://mindbowling.wordpress.com/2016/07/19/p-values/](https://mindbowling.wordpress.com/2016/07/19/p-values/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Well, obviously, the result with p=0.052 is the will of the people and should be implemented to its most extreme.

</comment><comment><USER28> If p = np, what's the chance that n = 0.045 or 0.052?

<comment><USER29> 1/420 :)

<comment><USER24> The cube has 420 sides?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sure. Apply some fuzzy logic. Highly significant. Somewhat significant. And honestly, we're in an age where somewhat significant can often be bolstered later (in the drug industry) by coupling drugs. It's really time to stop believing everything has to be unifactor. Everything that we care about is multifactor and even slight significance could make a difference if added up.</comment>


Color pies of movies - <AUTHOR> http://www.alanwoo.ca/project/pie/

<comment><USER2> OK, pretty, but what does it mean? If I were doing this, I would group similar colors together and render a pie slice for each color group, sized proportionally to the frequency of that color group's occurrence. That's what I assume this is doing, but it doesn't look like it -- there are no large color groups, only a weird gradient for each movie.

Also, the black-and-white movies have colors, which confuses me.

</comment><comment><USER3> And here's a color histogram/cloud of movie posters. [http://www.discerniblepreferences.com/2008/06/what-movie- pos...](http://www.discerniblepreferences.com/2008/06/what-movie-posters-tell- us-a-clustering-analysis.html)</comment>


Tough Title City - A video game in your browser's title bar - <AUTHOR> http://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/tough-title-city/

<comment><USER2> I do not understand how this game works. All I get is a lot of squares (Opera, IE9, Chrome)

<comment><USER3> What version of Opera and Chrome? Opera 12.01 and Chrome 21 work - this is what you should see in your title bar: <http://o25.img-up.net/screen1239.png>

<comment><USER4> it's all (unicode) boxes, no graphics.

chrome 21.0.1180.79 + ff 14.0.1 on mac os x

<comment><USER5> I use chrome 21.0.1180.79 on mac os x, and it works fine here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fantastic work - I love these kinds of zany hacks. Though, this should be combined this with some "Defender of the Favicon" magic for extra gameplay options! <http://www.p01.org/releases/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/>

</comment><comment><USER7> If anyone else is wondering how the characters are generated:

      states = {
        // policeman
        "0": decodeEntities("👮"),
        ...
        // octopus
        "3": decodeEntities("🐙"),

        // explosion
        "4": decodeEntities("💥")
      };

From <http://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/tough-title-city/game.js>

<comment><USER8> That's weird, I'm fairly sure JS strings are Unicode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As lovely as it is, this will probably only work on Mac as both Windows and Linux don't support Emoji

<comment><USER10> And only current Macs to boot... it doesn't work under Snow Leopard.

EDIT: Looking at his home page, it's pretty clear he is designing towards tablets first, and other machine types second…

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I also only get squares. But if you hold down the space key you get endless amount of points :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice idea, but I can't help being reminded of the old days of JavaScript, where the status bar was abused for scrolling text marquees.

</comment><comment><USER12> have no title bar in chrome :/

<comment><USER5> It works on the tab bar in chrome.</comment></comment>


Show HN: GitHub webhooks made easier to work with in python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/meetmangukiya/ghooks <comment><AUTHOR> Just decorate a function that you want to trigger on a particular event with @ghooks.events(*args) decorator, with args as the list of events that it should listen to.</comment>


Show HN: Chirpss = Google Analytics + Sounds - <AUTHOR> http://chirpss.com/?hom <comment><USER2> Upvoted because this is an interesting hack, but I don't see it as useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> it is fun to try, i'm applying this to one of my lowest traffic website.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I enforce software licensing, and if so, how? - <AUTHOR>

I am creating a commercial, installable software product, which I intend to launch next month.
I intend to license it at around $50/server.  Most use cases need the software on multiple servers.  Is there any way to encourage/enforce that customers who install 20 copies to pay for 20 copies instead of just one?
Is there a way of doing this without annoying the honest majority (minority?) of customers.
(I'm intending to build the customer's email address into the binary and help screen, to dissuade copying.)
What is current best practice re: licensing and enforcement? <comment><USER2> Have your application periodically register with a registration service and monitor for excessive use. If you detect something, call up the customer and ask what's going on and present your data. Tell them they are not licensed to run unlimited number of instances and they need to pay up. If they don't, have a built-in shutdown command that you can issue to the software instances that are unlicensed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think "phoning-home" would be considered bad behaviour?

Are there other applications which already do this?</comment></comment>


Why Nerds are unpopular - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

<comment><USER2> This rant is absolutely ridiculous and unintentionally highlights the reason that people hate nerds. As most "popular" kids consistently try to prove their own popularity, nerds do the same with intelligence. Most normal people at some point realize that there's more to life than being smarter than the next guy, but nerds ne'er do. This article is chock full of pseudoanalysis, providing what the author believes to be concrete reason for nerd persecution, but to the reader it comes across as a pathetic attempt to gain virtual sympathy and assault the reader with his pathetic life stories. Why? Because he goes on and on, distracting his nerd audience with justification for its obnoxious behavior towards the rest of the world.

I dislike nerds and nerd culture - I don't get any pleasure from proving to other people that I'm smart via rambling about a specific body of knowledge that I've immersed myself in, I think dr who is a dumb show, and I thought star wars was all right at best. According to nerd criteria, I must be an idiot popular kid. And yet, I'm in the top 10% of cs majors at my college. It's people like this author and his friends who make my life miserable every day in this major by constantly trying to prove somehow that the world is black&white, and that since I am not part of nerd culture then I must be dumb. No, assholes - there are people that are smart and not social retards and the fact that you can't grasp this proves how simplistic your mind really is. There is such a thing as being an intellectual, although you would never know it by talking to the asperger majority in cs.

Tl;dr - there are more ways to classify the world than "smart" and popular, being nerdy != being smart, I hate cs nerds because every conversation turns into an intelligence pissing contest ending with some obscure video game reference that I don't get because my parents wouldn't buy me a console since I'm a girl and thus should love barbies instead.

Tl;you have ADD - I hate people that need to shove the world into disjoint sets.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone in Venezuela with updates from the front? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Is internet access "up" in Venezuela at the moment? I would think Amateur Radio would probably be the most reliable means of communication, and CW (Morse code) at that since antenna and power requirements are the lowest.</comment>


George Ellis Knocks Physicists for Knocking Philosophy, Falsification, Free Will - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/07/22/physicist-george-ellis-knocks-physicists-for-knocking-philosophy-free-will/ <comment><USER2> "Physics experiments are approaching the highest energies it will ever be possible to test by any collider experiment, both for financial and technical reasons. We can't build a collider bigger than the surface of the Earth"

We can't build a collider bigger than the surface of the earth TODAY.

We had not gone outside of the earth, but that does not mean that in the future they wont.

That "we already know everything about the world" had been said for long. It was said to Socrates centuries before Jesus was born, and it was said to the inventor of the microscope(why do we need something to see everything we already know bigger?).

The interesting part is that we don't know what we don't know. E.g we know 0 about the real cause of gravity.

<comment><USER3> > _We can 't build a collider bigger than the surface of the earth TODAY._

Yeah, I'm sure the processor that so eloquently addressed tons of issues in his interview also knew that. The thing is the possibility of doing it tomorrow is not that big either. We are more like to regress or kill everybody (from nuclear war to bacterial resistance), than to conquer the universe. And even if we did fan out to the Solar system planets, the logistics stil look bad for us. Plus, some things we investigate approach physical limits, so no amount of "larger colliders" or "more energy" will help us with those.

> _That "we already know everything about the world" had been said for long._

There's nothing about saying something and being wrong for a long time that precludes it eventually being true.

Plus, it's not like we actually have said that "we know everything about the world" for a long time. Most societies, from ancient Egypt to Greece, to medieval times and renessaince and so one, believed there are tons of mysteries to be solved and things to be explained, and worked on finding things out. Yes, even the during the so called "dark ages" (mediaval times) they did that, math and other kind of sciences, from medicine to cartography, was practiced strongly even then. The common misconception about those ages thinking "they know everything" is just an old wives tale -- often just based on the sayings of some fundamendalists.

<comment><USER4> It sounds like you're saying that we should focus on things that give us a bigger bang for our buck today, instead of hoping that tomorrow we'll be able to turn the asteroid belt into a collider. And that's true. But we were more pessimistic about our survival prognosis during the cold war, and we seem to have made it through that. There surely is a middle ground between "let's see what this dollar will get us" and "maybe, in the future, when we have a quajillion dinaros".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Dr. George Ellis speaks about physicists that knock philosophy, while they themselves regularly engage in metaphysics.

 _[...] George F. R. Ellis, the physicist-mathematician-cosmologist, an authority on the Big Bang and other cosmic mysteries. [...]_

 _Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do you agree?_

 _Ellis: Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can't._

 _Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It's a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can't get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being. Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality._

<comment><USER5> This is a twisting of what Krauss says. Krauss merely shows that the current known laws of physics are not inconsistent with this scenario. He does not claim there is evidence that proves this is what happened. It's not much different than seeing that some solutions of General Relatively permit warp travel. It doesn't prove it can work, merely that the current known theories allow it.

Also, the comments he makes on determinism are nonsense, and resemble the claims of creationists. A computer can't arise from the laws of physics because it had a designer? By transitivity, this implies human beings could not have been the result of bottom up physical processes either. Is what way is this claim scientific or testable?

"there is a group of people out there writing papers based on the idea that physics is a computational process. But a physical law is not an algorithm. So who chooses the computational strategy and the algorithms that realise a specific physical law? (Finite elements perhaps?) What language is it written in? (Does Nature use Java or C++? What machine code is used?) Where is the CPU? What is used for memory, and in what way are read and write commands executed? Additionally if it's a computation, how does Nature avoid the halting problem? It's all a very bad analogy that does not work."

This just seems really poorly reasoned out. What does the halting problem have to do with it? Total non-sequitur. Why can't the physical laws merely be a kind of cellular automata? No need to solve any halting problems. Things interact iteratively, new states arise, some of those states lead to more complex forms, etc.

Since cellular automata have been proven to be universal, that means in principle, any thing that is computable can be carried out, and therefore, all of classical computer science fits perfectly in this view without having to invoke some kind of Penrose-like "the universe solves non-computable functions" magic.

If you asked Ellis how planets or galaxies formed, he would not say "What algorithm caused star/galaxy/solar system formation", or "how does the computer solve N-body problems of trillions of elements". There's no need to posit a designed algorithm for these things, merely that the system interacts with itself in ways that evolve towards these structures, that human beings produce higher level mathematical models to predict and manipulate more easily.

I don't think any scientist working today works under the delusion that our theories are anything but models.

<comment><USER6> _I don 't think any scientist working today works under the delusion that our theories are anything but models._

This. I think this is a key point that the general population doesn't understand. And it leads to debates like this. The debate itself is moot because the debate would be a non-issue if all sides understood this point.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that an understanding of the concept of models would make the general public understand. Science is replacing religion. And a religion can do anything it wants, on any subject, except for one thing : it can't say "we don't know" on any popular question.

Science has a lot of "we don't know" answers. They only really came to light in the 20th century however, after the enlightenment had already so thoroughly captured academia and philosophers in general there was no going back. The enlightenment had also already caused so much death, corruption (resulting in economic disasters) and severed heads, of course, that it was getting swiftly kicked out of government as well, and serious government funds were going to the restoration of the churches' position in society (that only partly worked because of the sheer numbers of clergy killed by said government). So a massive rift between academia and general society opened up, and I'd say it's still mostly there.

But after all the hubhub around enlightenment and the switchover of academia, ever more "we don't know" type answers kept coming in. But philosophers are famous for ignoring practicalities, whether we're talking ancient, medieval, renaissance, enlightenment or modern era philosophers. And thus the story that science has all the answers and that it isn't possible that scientific theories have serious shortcomings. In practice, I would say that scientific theories are merely "the best available" theory.

And of course, there's the little matter of these theories being used against religion. Big bang theory is rather important. But, let's compare inflation and the speed of light. That can't possibly be right ... (yes I know it explains another "bigger" inconsistency, but I think reasonable people should agree at a rather high cost). Evolution theory. Oops ... higher animals don't evolve through mutation. And the trend towards that evolution works, not on a species level but more on a group, or "group of groups" level. The trend that you can split the genes that are unique to humans in 2 groups : about 30% that come from known bacteria, and 70% we don't know where they came from, but they sure as hell did not come from mutation. And let's just not go anywhere near climate science, or you'll notice just how biased hacker news is, when, of course, there is legitimate criticism against climate science that could mean the whole thing is just simply wrong.

Now of course, most of these are interesting questions. So you have some criticism, great ! Let's do some research. But of course, part of the criticism comes from groups that want to push religion (and we're in the west, in the middle east it works entirely different) or government policies. Like in the middle ages and during the renaissance, science is an important source of government policies, and this of course means that politicians can't ignore universities or just leave them be.

The enlightenment is a great and horrible thing. It's the new religion. Can't go spoiling that with "we don't know".

<comment><USER8> You seem to be treading on thin ice here: espousing things that are cracks in the plaster of ... what I think you think ... is a common-sense-ish scientific body of knowledge that most people instill which has displaced a space once occupied by religion.

But you do this having a weak grasp on the very concepts for which you claim inconsistencies or inadequacies, sprinkled with a dash of anti-intellectual falsehoods/misinformation.

This is probably why you got downmodded, not that you didn't have a larger point with showing how common beliefs are common beliefs, whether they be from science, rhetoric, cultural tradition, or religion; and that media or governments (or other institutions representing the "will of the people") often color the inquiry that can ultimately shape and theoretically improve these commonly held beliefs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm disappointed with how he brushes determinism aside. "If you don't have free will then you are not responsible for what you say." is supposed to imply "you aren't worth talking to"?

Pretty crappy given his declared respect for philosophical foundations.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, pretty weak. Determinism means that the concept of "responsibility" is a social construct created by deterministic events, for example: if you kill someone you go to jail; such course of action was a reaction of your events. Accountability for what you say is just the reaction from saying it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To understand Ellis' motivation, note:

"Q: You are a Christian, more specifically a Quaker. Does your faith have any effect on your scientific views, or vice versa?

Ellis: It may affect to some degree the topics I choose to tackle (...)"

He just wants to remain religious. Good that the interviewer didn't miss that question.

On another side, it's interesting that one of the books by the interviewer is: "Horgan, John and Reverend Frank Greer (2002). Where Was God on September 11? (A Scientist Asks a Ground Zero Pastor). San Francisco: Browntrout Publishers." Why "scientist" when the Wikipedia article on Horgan cites his education as "Columbia University School of Journalism (1983)" I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not a physicist.

But I look at statements like the ones in this article--that we've probed pretty much everything we can probe--and I think, what have we learned? Aren't the best estimates now that dark energy makes up 68%, dark matter 27%, and normal matter 5% of the mass-energy of the universe?

If the dark stuff does not interact electromagnetically, then wouldn't we need gravitational observatories to probe 95% of the known universe? Which are in their infancy. We haven't reliably detected one gravity wave yet, let alone probed all frequencies.

Like I said, I'm not a physicist, but when 95% of the known universe is a mystery, it seems early to call the game.

<comment><USER13> The end of physics has been predicted many times. I remember reading an article in Sci Am about the end of physics a few months before starting my physics undergrad in the late 80s.

The exciting thing is that it has often been followed by huge breakthroughs -- if I remember correctly, the last time it was widely believed that we had it all figured out was at the turn of the 20th century, just before Quantum Physics and General Relativity were discovered.

I'm still patiently waiting for string theory to die and us to start working on something that we can actually do experiments on.

<comment><USER14> >string theory to die and us to start working on something that we can actually do experiments on.

You might already be able to do experiments that would confirm or deny string theory, but we haven't been able to work out the math in sufficient detail to come up with one.

The thing about physics is that the deeper we get into the nature of the Universe, the stranger it looks.

In the special theory of relativity, Einstein didn't just do strange things to physics. He had to work with a sort of mathematical object -- Minkowski space -- that most mathematicians either had never heard of or ignored, because they thought it was too weird. Turns out we live in Minkowski space.

And when he worked with Hilbert on the general theory, they had to go and study Elie Cartan's tensor calculus to make sense of things, and then bring that into Minkowski space. The enterprise spawned a new kind of mathematical notation -- the Einstein repeated index summation convention.

And when Dirac tried to quantize the special theory he found himself in the unruly situation of taking the square root of the gradient operator -- the square root of a derivative! The solution relied upon an anticommuting algebra now called the Clifford algebra, represented by Dirac matrices.

And when Feynman wanted to quantize action, he had to take an integral over paths. When Schwinger studied particle[1] propagation, the integrals went from the paths of one particle to the paths of all possible particles and particle creation events.

When you bring in gravity, the absence of any sort of repulsive action of the field and the number of degrees of freedom mean that any attempt to apply the path integral leads to infinite energies and infinite numbers of particles.

String theory appeared as sort of a way, essentially, of restricting the "impact" of new particles by attaching an energy term to the "shape" of the particle. For simplicity particles were 1D manifolds. This led to the Nambu- Goto action.

Then they had multiple dimensions, and Witten called it M-theory. It's not going away: you always end up with something like this to fix gravity.

In any case, it's not string theory we can't test. It's quantum gravity period. Perhaps another issue is that string theory doesn't work well with QCD, which itself isn't rigorous, etc.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems#Yang....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems#Yang.E2.80.93Mills_existence_and_mass_gap)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_quantum_field_theo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_quantum_field_theory)

[http://chaosbook.org/fieldtheory/](http://chaosbook.org/fieldtheory/)

[1]: There aren't actually any particles, but it makes the math easier to think about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting fact to consider about free will as it relates to philosophy and religion: A god can have free will and predict the future, but he (or she or it) can't do both. If you can predict exactly what will happen at any point in time, you don't have the ability to change it. And absolute free will prevents you from predicting the future.

<comment> alok-g Why cannot God have free will and "dictate" (and thereby predict) the future? (The situation becomes different when multiple entities possess free will.)

<comment><USER16> Depends on your definition of God. If it includes perfect and omniscient, then that being can't make any decisions. They've already been made for him / her. That god is an automaton.

<comment><USER17> Or alternatively, s/he has "already" made all decisions outside of time/at the moment time began. From this point of view, any being that is both omniscient and omnipotent cannot change his/her mind, if said being changes over time, this implies s/he will make decisions now based on how s/he will feel about things later, after taking her/his own evolution into account.

I'm sure we're not saying anything that hasn't been said literally millions of times before half-drunk at countless frat parties.

<comment><USER18> > From this point of view, any being that is both omniscient and omnipotent > cannot change his/her mind, if said being changes over time, this implies > s/he will make decisions now based on how s/he will feel about things later, > after taking her/his own evolution into account.

You see, the problem is that people think of the evolution of an omniscient deity as a strict linear progression from cause to effect, but actually it's more like a great big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey... stuff.

:P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "the computer on which I am writing this could not possibly have come into being through the agency of physics alone.

The issue is that these scientists are focusing on some strands in the web of causation that actually exist, and ignoring others that are demonstrably there – such as ideas in our minds, or algorithms embodied in computer programs. These demonstrably act in a top-down way to cause physical effects in the real world. All these processes and actual outcomes are contextually dependent, and this allows the effectiveness of processes such as adaptive selection that are the key to the emergence of genuine complexity."

"they should stop indulging in low-grade philosophy in their own writings."

I think Dr. Ellis needs to take his own advice on this one.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow, I never knew of George Ellis. What an insightful and smart man! I'll be looking into him.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get started in hardware hacking? - <AUTHOR>

I have been into various kinds of application development(all web/mobile/desktop) and startups since last 10 years. When it comes to software and business I know what to learn and how to learn but I can't say same for hardware. I have heard about things like arduino but have no idea if this is what a beginner should try to learn. So what is the way forward for a software hacker to get into hardware hacking? How to get started?<p>I have deep knowledge of C (it is my first language) and basic understanding of Assembly(8086), if that matters. <comment><USER2> I'm not a hardware expert as well. I've a technical ham radio license from when I was at school (pre 2000) which gave me a small advantage when getting into hardware hacking.

IMO Arduino's are great for getting started - especially the Arduino Uno as it's not stripped down like the Mini or Nano and can nicely be used with a breadboard. Plus in case you blow up the Atmel chip (e.g. by shortening pins so that they are dead) you could get a replacement chip for a few dollars and pull the old one out of the socket.

I would recommend browsing over the tutorials here: <http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage>

That should give you a hint on what you can do (programming and electric circuits).

There's Arduino IDE which hides the toolchains from you (which is not bad at the beginning). As soon as you advance you can setup your own toolchains and use C directly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Much like an approach to learning software, I'd say pick a project that you'd like to control in some fashion. Could be something like:

\- Turn on a desklamp when I enter the room

\- Remotely open my garage door without modifying the hardware

\- Tell me the status of the sprinkler system

One good place to get ideas is look at a product that does something interesting, but you want it to do more. Examples from my own current project list:

\- LED strips with a remote control that give the option of 16 colors. Modifying said controller to give me more colors (as the LEDs are RGB LEDs)

\- Hacking a wireless power socket to not need the remote but be computer controlled.

If nothing else, pick up a copy of Make magazine and have fun...

</comment><comment><USER4> Would you mind sending me an email (in profile). I'm working on a product aimed at people like you and would like to give you a test run.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> jdrake3, from your comment history it appears that you have been hell-banned.</comment>


Introducing the FBI's Zeus Trojan crime ring most wanted poster - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/66892

<comment><USER2> They look so... normal.

<comment><USER3> This is the face of terrorism. Surprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Gary Warner has a great blog, talks about Zeus a lot.

garwarner.blogspot.com</comment>


Simple Made Easy (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy <comment><USER2> This is posted every week in one form or the other. A classic talk though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I find myself referencing parts of this talk a lot when talking with my coworkers. In particular, the guardrail and knitted castle analogies are quite elegant.</comment>


Men in committed, romantic relationships have lower testosterone - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13129483 <comment><USER3> I have access to the article. This statement is key: "By increasing libido, higher T may encourage mateseeking behavior."

Of course testosterone drops when you find a mate. You don't have to fight for one any more.

They go on to show that it further decreases when you have children. Since virility _is_ affected by T levels, it's a good hypothesis that having kids is likely a trigger to reduce the risk-seeking behavior in males after children are born.

It's kind of a "no duh" result in that light, and they sought to find evidence that supports this hypothesis. However, they are clear to state that they cannot address causation directly.

"High-T men may be less likely to enter stable, romantic relationships. Additionally, affiliative interactions with a partner may decrease T levels, in turn reducing mating effort. We also expect T variation within the group of paired men to be consistent with variation in mating effort, although we are not able to test this with our data set. For example, it may be that paired- male T levels will be highest during times of sexual activity with a partner (as suggested in Hirschenhauser et al., 2002) or that variation in the strength of the pair bond might explain variance in T levels among paired individuals. These are all topics for which longitudinal data would be of great help in teasing apart cause and effect."

<comment><USER4> The nice thing about "no duh" results is that, every once in a while, something unexpected happens. And then, if you're lucky, a new glimpse of the world happens.

<comment><USER3> Science is built on layers and layers of dull data collection (like this one). But yah, a no-duh result that doesn't come through is fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The paper's flaw is that it doesn't look at other potential confounders. Here is a simple, but important one: Is there a difference between the amount of sleep that partnered and unpartnered people get? (My experience is lots less sleep when partnered.) It's important because testosterone production depends on pulsatile secretions of other hormones from the pituitary gland that occur during sleep. So, getting less sleep means lower testosterone levels. Take heed, start-up slaves! :-)

<comment><USER6> Less sleep, definitely, and maybe less time working out—relationships take up lots of time, even if you're not with someone who's especially needy. Very easy to let one's workout routine slip to avoid cutting in to other solo activities too badly. Even worse if you add kids to the mix.

Less time hittin' the weights means lower T.

(obviously plenty of couples work out together and still get some exercise in that way, but even then either or both of time and intensity could drop compared with when single)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A lot of comments are missing a basic fact of how science works. In science we have a theory, make predictions, then stress test them.

This is one study examining a theory which we have various lines of evidence for. It is not supposed to prove the theory - just test one prediction. It is not supposed to be the end of research on this topic. It is not supposed to be final. Criticizing it for any of those things is a demonstration that you do not understand how science is supposed to function.

For some of the background on this particular theory I highly recommend reading [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the- self/2009...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the- self/200904/the-testosterone-curse-part-1) and the follow-up [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the- self/2009...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the- self/200905/the-testosterone-curse-part-2). (If you want to get to the point, it is probably better to start with the follow-up.)

<comment><USER8> > Criticizing it for any of those things is a demonstration that you do not > understand how science is supposed to function.

Good luck criticizing science when you forbade yourself to criticize pretty much all study shortcomings using those all-encompassing guidelines that all point to a single conclusion, i.e. "Don't criticize me, I'm just a prediction bro".

<comment><USER7> There are useful criticisms, and useless criticisms. It is easy to criticize studies for not being what you want them to be, but the exercise is useless. It is harder to criticize studies for failing to be what they are supposed to be, but the exercise is far more useful.

Here are some valid criticisms of studies. It doesn't clearly state the theory. It doesn't clearly state the prediction. It doesn't actually test what it tries to test. It doesn't have references to where you can learn more about the theory. It fails to refer to important evidence in the literature that it should have. It doesn't describe the limitations of the design. It doesn't have suggestions about how to better follow up on the result.

In the end a study is supposed to be one point in a grand logical argument that eventually comes to a conclusion about said theory. It should be criticized based whether it is a well-made point, not on whether it is a complete argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's odd that "low Testosterone levels" (as in "lower T levels compared to ...") is automatically considered to be something bad (by male readers). High T-levels are connected with higher susceptibility to inflammation f.x.

<comment><USER10> Low testosterone is pretty bad... fatigue, mental fog, low sex drive, weak muscles, ED, etc. I have low test and it's not something that I consider normal. The difference between low and high T is night and day. It greatly affects the well being.

<comment><USER9> so all the husbands in the world have weak muscles and mental fog ... ? :D

that's why I wrote my comment precisely as I did. the article is not about low T levels but comparatively low T levels (comparing to single guys)

<comment><USER10> Nah, I wasn't making that link but I see what you meant now in your post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see no problem with the Wording of this study. Firstly the study is not trying to go so far as to determine the reasons for such results. That is it is not statinng the reason behind why ltrs have lower testosterone.

Instead it is seeking to determine "[...] whether being in such a relationship (rather than being married) is the meaningful predictor of male testosterone levels."

Emphasis on meaningful predictor.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anecdotal question: there's an area, around occipital and cerebellum where romantic memories or grief activate pain, and arousal become impossible. As if having someone there forbids the sexual system to function.

</comment><comment><USER13> New dating service idea. Testosterone tester.

<comment><USER14> Women kind of have one of these. They're able to identify males with high testosterone by looking at them and being near them.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/18/mens-smell- testoste...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/18/mens-smell-testosterone- attractive-to-women-study_n_3110182.html)

[http://healthmad.com/mens-health/women-can-smell- testosteron...](http://healthmad.com/mens-health/women-can-smell- testosterone/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> (Sample of 1). I think my personal experience would seem to indicate so. I've been in a committed relationship for 2 years. But sometimes the wife travels, and I hang out with my single friends, going to bars, flirting with chicks, etc. And I find that I'm a lot more 'affectionate' after this episode. Could it be that I miss the wife so much? I have noticed a difference between when I do the bar scene, and when I don't.

<comment><USER9> I second this ... I actually even encourage my gf to flirt with other men - <USER2> keeps you mentally fresh and vital

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Let's not forget: Correlation != Causation.

Does being in a relationship lower your testosterone?

Or are women(assuming the men in study were heterosexual, not sure on that, either) more interested in entering into LTRs with men with lower testosterone levels?

Edit: Also, was this controlled for age?

<comment><USER17> Or, are men with naturally lower testosterone levels more likely to stay in a single LTR?

<comment><USER16> ooh, also a possibility!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Makes sense. Those who are hungry must hunt. Those whose appetites are satiated can relax.

<comment><USER19> Anecdotally, it's the opposite for me. When I'm in a relationship my sex drive is a lot higher, and since sex becomes more part of daily life, sex starts coloring things a lot more almost unconsciously, looking at other women more sexually, thinking about it more etc. If I'm single I usually just focus on me and my projects and sex kind of fades away into the background.

However, multi year, really long relationships I could see your testosterone and sex drive drop off, as the excitement of it (neurotransmitter-ly speaking) wears off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Let me guess: they were all straight.

<comment> mkr-hn The added stress of homophobia might affect the results. I wonder what a study of testosterone levels in different areas and orientations would show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _To test this hypothesis, 122 male Harvard Business School students filled > out a questionnaire and collected one saliva sample (from which testosterone > level was measured). Results revealed that men in committed, romantic > relationships had 21% lower testosterone levels than men not involved in > such relationships._

Since I can't read the paper without credentials, let's say half the participants indicated they are in a relationship. Won't a sample size of 61 potentially result in confidence interval issues?

<comment><USER22> This is the kind of question that you get when you read the abstract but not the article itself.</comment></comment>


Google and Yahoo furious over reports that NSA secretly intercepts data links - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google-reports-nsa-secretly-intercepts-data-links <comment><USER2> There is nothing new about NSA. We all knew this years back too that US Govt watches the internet for national security.

If they can't do that then who would be doing it?

All companies with big data must have a single governing body and i think NSA is the best.

They are not spying, they are just watching after you.

Get over the NSA stuff...too 90s</comment>


Oceans Are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html <comment><USER2> Its a quite common problem when detonating old naval mines, torpedoes or other unexploded ordnances at sea. In Germany the Kampfmittelräumdienst (Bomb disposal service) uses bubble curtains

[https://dosits.org/galleries/audio-gallery/anthropogenic- sou...](https://dosits.org/galleries/audio-gallery/anthropogenic- sounds/bubble-curtain/)

to dampen the noise when they have to detonate those at sea.

[https://youtu.be/GlxADbslYHw?t=944](https://youtu.be/GlxADbslYHw?t=944)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a single word on turbine foundations? Construction of offshore wind turbines often involves ramming steel foundations into the ground with a set of pulses that are really loud [1]:

> A hydraulic or diesel fuelled hammer hits the pile repeatedly to drive it > into the seabed. The single acoustic pulse created during impact is between > 50 and 100 ms in duration with app. 30 - 60 beats per minute. It usually > takes several hours to drive one pile into the bottom. This activity creates > high levels of sound pressure and acoustic particle motion that are > transferred through the pile into the water and seabed. Noise is radiated > from the pile itself, but it could also radiate back from the seabed into > the water column. The sound from pile driving is transient and > discontinuous, to be compared with the more broadband and continuous sound > from an operational wind farm. Several acoustic measurements of sound > pressure during piling have been performed, showing source levels of over > 180 dB re 1μPa(peak) at 1 m (Madsen et al., 2006; Betke et al., 2004; Betke, > 2008; Erbe, 2009).

So 180 dB re 1μPa. While this is well below air guns or sonar (around 240 db for the air guns) [2], this is definitely comparable to the noise created by tankers (around 180 dB as well) [3].

[1]: [https://www.diva- portal.org/smash/get/diva2:391860/FULLTEXT0...](https://www.diva- portal.org/smash/get/diva2:391860/FULLTEXT01.pdf) [2]: [https://www.arc.id.au/SoundLevels.html](https://www.arc.id.au/SoundLevels.html) [3]: [http://cetus.ucsd.edu/Publications/Publications/PAPERS/McKen...](http://cetus.ucsd.edu/Publications/Publications/PAPERS/McKennaJASA2012.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Are the construction of offshore windfarms unique in this regard? What about other construction in the ocean? Piers, waterfront building etc. If not, I find it odd that it's framed as an "offshore wind turbine" issue and not a "ocean construction" issue.

<comment><USER5> Not only that, but construction is usually once and done, besides maintenance or repairs. Unlike ship paths that are ongoing indefinitely.

And this discussion is disregarding the net benifits of why we're building wind farms to begin with. It's a weird dig at wind farms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My wife's PhD project has been modeling sound in a marine environment. She is using data collected around an offshore tidal generation site in Washington state and using finite differencing to create models of the whole region. While I understand very little of the math behind the research, it has been interesting to see how complex the system really is. Her models account for bathymetry, soil density of the sea floor, salinity, and temperature to name a few of the inputs. The goal of the project is to have a general model that can be used to help determine impacts of noise in any underwater environment.

[edit] minor grammar changes

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the premise of the 2-year old art/sci project[0] I've been working on (since last Summer in order to add interactive elements). The point of the project is to raise awareness about deafening sound affecting all creatures, especially microscopic plankton which are at the bottom of the food chain and responsible for at least 50% of global oxygen production.

[0]: www.NoiseAquarium.com

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems like there is some opportunity here for some military tech transfer in the form of quiet turbines for shipping. Surely there are some outdated but much quieter Cold War era designs that could be declassified and put into production.

<comment><USER9> Not sure there are any easy wins here as steam turbines have fallen out of favor. Most commercial ships use diesel main engines due to lower overall costs (capital, fuel, crew, maintenance). Most new warships employ gas turbines (vs. steam turbines) due to power-to-weight and power-to-size ratios, but these are things that commercial shipping does not need and will not pay for. Steam turbines are still kicking around on older ships (like the Jones Act specials rusting up and down the West Coast) and nuclear-powered stuff, and that's about it.

<comment><USER10> A lot of time and money was spent learning how to reduce cavitation because it's the significant component of the noise produced.

It feels like more efficient screws (which are incidentally quieter) would be a fairly popular sell to the shipping industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We should manufacture on the moon, then send steel cylinders at mach 5 pummeling towards humanity as from Thor in order to satisfy same day delivery demand (with no air brakes of course, to satisfy the malthusains).

<comment><USER12> It's all fun and games until the Loonies figure out they can use the payload delivery mechanism to start launching rocks at us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow. Humans are affecting _everything_ en masse... even in the oceans where we don't live.

We better be careful with our actions.</comment>