Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better - <AUTHOR> http://startops.namecast.net/rants/2013/12/05/failed-HN-launch-vs-reddit-paid-advertising:-which-converts-better/ <comment><USER2> Um, one thought is that HN users are more targeted than just people hanging out on /r/programming.

I've done a lot of PPC over the years and the one thing I learned over and over again is the best ROI always comes when you inject yourself into the end of the buying cycle. What I mean is, the closer to making a purchasing decision they are, the more likely they are to buy whatever product fits what they are looking for because they've already been educated about the problem, solution, etc.

In the affiliate marketing world, this is why review sites are so darn popular for making money. People go to them when they are making a buying decision and if they click on the product link after reading the review, it drops a cookie and in many cases they will buy that same session anyway.

Price comparison or deal sites are also kind of in the same end point of the buying cycle. The person has already decided to buy a particular item, so whoever can offer the best deal or whoever has the best bonus item/service/brand is going to probably make the sale.

By being on HN, there are probably a lot more people looking for your particular solution than just the average reddit reading programmer. There is some overlap, but I would imagine the average HN user is closer to a devops role than the average reddit programmer. If only cuz I'd imagine a lot of reddit programming readers are working on some enterprise software where they aren't allowed to touch the DNS anyway.

Also, good job on making a follow up post that did make it on HN. When life gives you lemons...

</comment><comment><USER3> With such a small sample size, I generally tend to shy away from speaking of results in percentages. Stating the results as "5 conversions from 26 visits" keeps things in perspective. I appreciate the insight into your experience, but the sample size is way too low to draw meaningful general conclusions.

<comment><AUTHOR> The individual sample sizes are small, yes. The variance between the paid vs organic conversions was still stark to me, e.g. 54 paid visitors had a 0% conversion rate to trial vs ~20% with 5 of 26 organic users converting to trial.

FWIW, the reddit ad campaign is at nearly a hundred views now, and still no trials.

<comment><USER4> My experience in ads is that most digital display ads for technical people are a waste of money. You will have zero conversions, period. Our demographic does not click and convert. My data include million-impression campaigns for other salesforce products on channels like Reddit, AOL, Yahoo, and Google...

For perspective, 100 views is extremely small in advertising. Hobby-small. You'll need a sample size of a few thousand views before you'll get even 100 interactions to compare. The sample sizes of conversion for this experiment are too small to make any conclusions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685928)

I suspect you will see better conversions from this content ad (i.e. blog post) posted to HN. Which, coincidentally, I fear blog ads are a large percentage of the content posted to HN today.... still nice to see others' findings, so thank you for posting.

Anyway, good luck with the product, but I can't emphasize enough that you should be skeptical with any of the results you have. You simply have too few data points to deduce any trends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One possible reason for the failed HN launch is the landing pages makes the basic mistake of listing features rather than benefits or use cases. It is a description of what the code does, rather than why it was written.

I am still lost to the benefits of managing DNS with github. I can't see the documentation, and the free trial button leads to the scariest signup page in history. It wants read/write access to my private repos.

<comment><USER6> _the free trial button leads to the scariest signup page in history_

To be specific, this goes to the OAuth page for GitHub. That's _NOT_ a good experience. You need a page before it explaining what is going to happen.

The same thing happens with the link on the blog post. It says "check us out....", I clicked and ended up with an OAuth page.

Once I finally got to your site (manually typing in the URL..) I thought it looked interesting.

 _GeoIP? Weighted records? Round Robin Load Balancing?_

Ok.. I'm interested - I've build CDNs before, and I'd like to understand how your GeoIP is implemented... hmm, no docs, but _" Our quickstart tutorial will have you up and running in no time"_.

Ok, I can read a tutorial. Umm.. where?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've done a bit of advertising on reddit (though it was a few years ago), and my one take away is don't target specific subreddits.

I think a general pattern is people subscribe to subreddits and just let reddit do it's thing to populate their front page, never actually visiting the specific subreddit. I do this myself for a lot of subreddits I subscribe to.

I wonder if reddit has any plans to modify the ad display logic to display ads on the front page that are targeted to specific subreddits if the user is subscribed to the same subreddit. I think that'd be interesting.

<comment><USER8> That's actually how it works. If you target an ad to /r/programming it will show up on the frontpage for users subscribed to /r/programming.

<comment><USER9> Which probably accounts (in part) for Reddit's low conversion rates— a significant portion of the page-views will be from people not in `programming- mode', compared with almost none from HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great article! One question - The math doesn't work, does it?

 _A 1.2% conversion ratio end-to-end for SaaS startups that don't ask for a credit card in advance suggests that if we can get 1000 visitors, then we should expect 100 trial users, converting to 1 paid user. At least that's the theory._

I follow that the 1.2% is from the total visitors. 10% * 15% * 80% = 1.2%. So they should have expected 12 paid users per 1000 visitors.

One question on the conclusion... Indeed Show HN seems to be a much better (more efficient) option for a good product. But how do you scale it? There are only so many communities you can find. Advertising can be much more easily scaled. If you want 100 more view, pays 100 more times the money. Or perhaps 50 times the money if you can get a volume discount.

</comment><comment><USER11> On our website, [http://clara.io](http://clara.io), we found that HN sent us about 8000 hits the day we were hovered around item 15.

In general, our conversion rate from visit to signup is around 30% but with HN traffic it was significantly lower, around ~8% for that burst of traffic. Obviously, HN is not our target demographic of users.

We do not have a paying option, thus we only have the front end conversion number at this point.

<comment><USER12> OT to OP, I hadn't seen your site before.

It is really cool! I'm teaching kids to code games and I really like using browser based tools as it makes it easier for kids to practice at home and I don't have to worry about specific OS's and hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hope this works as something of a second launch for them, because it seems like a great product.

</comment><comment><USER14> As a marketing person I had to do a double-take when I read this:

> The conclusion I've drawn from this is that paid advertising, even highly > targeted paid advertising, is no match for actual user outreach.

What you did was not "highly targeted." Nor does it make sense to draw a conclusion about an entire form of advertising from a single attempt. Paid advertising works very well for some companies (I've run them dozens of times), and can be optimized over time to do even better.

<comment><AUTHOR> True on both counts. I should have qualified that statement by 1) removing highly (would you at least spot me "barely targeted"? and 2) added "in the ultra-short term" to the end of that sentence. If I'd have known I'd be on the front page of HN all day I'd have toned down the hyperbole. Lazy writing on my part, mea culpa.

<comment><USER14> That's fair.

If you have any budget for marketing, I do recommend you give paid advertising another shot. Just not Reddit. Try AdWords, but do some basic reading about it first to increase the likelihood of a decent first campaign.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just curious if anyone else saw a disparity between the amount of traffic Reddit claimed you were getting from paid ads, and what your analytics showed?

My numbers were _very_ different.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't even mention that! Reddit reported 100% more traffic than I actually saw with any analytics service. Not only that, I saw a bunch of suspicious hits from reddit referrers that didn't load any CSS or javascript. Like someone was just running GET requests by hand.

<comment><USER16> Could this be partly caused by people running noscript and the like? Although I haven't heard of many people opting not to load CSS by default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I posted a launch post for [http://wecombinate.com](http://wecombinate.com) and also linked [http://paymentsplugin.com](http://paymentsplugin.com) on HN as well as other places.

For WeCombinate, I received 84 visits from HN or HN related (showhn.com etc) but for Payments Plugin I saw a spike up to 386 for one day straight from HN.

The WeCombinate post fell away very quickly with zero comments but the post with the Payments Plugin link stayed around on the bottom on the home page for about 6-8 hours.

Overall, I didn't see any conversions as a result of the HN traffic although I don't think HN is my target audience really.

Just thought I'd add some more data points into the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER18> Did you do analytics of which HN users actually signed up? Is it the ones that follow the Show HN twitter? ie. People highly targeted for signing up for trials of new products?

I would say your sample size is not nearly large enough to be conclusive. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> True, this is way anecdotal. Believe me, if I could have gotten a bigger sample size, I would have! As it stands I was excited that I had at least two different traffic sources within the same order of magnitude to offer a semi- well-not-completely-unreasonable comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't think /r/programming was the correct choice for this campaign. I would think that the web development subs and even the sysadmin subs would be a better place for this stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be willing to try again on more dev and devops related subs, though the audience reach is a bit smaller there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> /r/programming doesn't get that specific into programming. I think it's mostly an aggregator of resources for beginners learning how to program. (a large percentage of the posts are questions like 'which language')

I think its possible that your product could have gone over many peoples heads, at least in that particular sub.

Have you looked into subreddits like r/webdevelopment or r/html5( or javascript,CSS)? They have less readers but maybe they're more your target?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll poke around. I admittedly have a bit of 'subreddit blindness'. I'll check those subs out on www.stattit.com. Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I recently did a couple of tests with paid advertisement through buysellads. Actually it was not for a startup but for some affiliate link (Udemy courses with good discounts) and the result I got was very bad:

\- a generic Udemy ad on a generic site: 10k impressions, 11 clicks, 0 conversion \- a specific course advertised on a niche newsletter: 1800 impressions, 15 clicks, 0 conversion

And for conversions I mean neither a sale nor a new signup into the system.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm currently (attempting to) use reddit advertising, and I'm quite confused by how it works. I purchased all of the available impressions for a given subreddit over the next 4 days, but I've yet to actually see my ad (or any other ad for that matter) displayed despite reddit indicating 800 impressions.

<comment><USER14> They may not be showing to you if you're signed in, because they don't want to charge you for an impression to yourself.

Also, depending on how many days have passed and the subreddit you've chosen, 800 impressions may be a very small number of overall pageviews, in which case only a small percentage of people will see the ad.

<comment><USER22> I eventually saw the ad while I was logged in. It appears that ads are only shown for a percentage of page impressions, so even if I purchase all of the available impressions, my ad won't be shown for all pageviews. I suppose this makes sense, I just wish they made it more clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My gut tells me that part of the reason why Reddit was a flop is AdBlock. I would not be surprises is much of r/programming ran it. These guys are tech savy without necessarily being in the start-up scene.

Numbers that low could be attributed to miss-clicks, users who thought it was an r/programming post.

All speculation mind.

</comment><comment><USER24> I like the idea and would've offer it for my company, but we have 200+ domains so your plans little off.

<comment><AUTHOR> vittore - ping us and maybe we can discuss? i'd like to hear more about your use case at least. You can hit us up at support at namecast dot net, or just log in, start your free trial and ping us via the support button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> And now, amusingly, they are on the front page with a post about the post. That's around 10k views, although the conversion rate to the namecast link at the start might be low it will still be lot more traffic than the original show HN post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which shocked me, to be honest. I think I may have tapped into some latent reddit vs. HN rivalry? Also, I put in graphics. HN loves graphics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If your launch on HN fails to get any votes in the first 5-10 minutes, and you feel your post has significant merit for the community, your best course of action is to just delete the submission and try again.

<comment><USER27> Don't do this.

pg has said that this is a ban worthy offense. And I still see people doing it.

<comment><USER28> I've never done it, but considering how random it is to get or not get just a first upvote from someone else (let alone the 5+ needed for front-page), I can't blame people.

HN still needs a vastly better way of separating the wheat from the chaff for new submissions, that involves the whole community, not just the few who occasionally look at "new".

<comment><USER29> I reckon they should make every submission appear as the last item on the front-page for 60 seconds. Essentially make that little slot an extension of "new".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does this service offer anycast DNS? If not, why not?

</comment><comment><USER31> Surely there are subreddits more relevant than /r/programming? May not have been targeted well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably. My thinking is that the low CTR (click through rate) can be explained by poor targeting, but once you arrive to the landing page you should have a pretty good indication of whether you want to trial or not. The low number of conversions to trial just from reddit is a bit strange.

That said: any ideas for better subs to target? /r/sysadmin, /r/linux were some of the smaller ones i'd considered, or i could go wide with /r/technology, but this experiment has left me feeling cautious.

<comment><USER32> /r/sysadmin is a pretty active community in general. You could always just try to post to their subreddit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting post, but your blog has a horrible bug that scrolls the page to the top on Android randomly.

<comment><AUTHOR> damn you, jekyll! i'll see if i can fix that bug.</comment></comment>


Pairing with Junior Developers - <AUTHOR> https://devmynd.com/blog/2015-1-pairing-with-junior-developers/

<comment><USER2> Thought this was really interesting. Wish I'd read it a year ago before I started working with my juniors. I feel so inept at times because I can be impatient and rude without even meaning to be. I regularly get paranoid that I'm not teaching anything other than bad habits.

Will be interesting to see how long I can keep up the "just don't type" advice...

</comment><comment><USER3> As a student currently on an internship. I would really love to try pair programming. Unfortunately my supervisors are almost always abroad :/ This is something I'd really like to see myself doing when I graduate.</comment>


The Busy Beaver Game - <AUTHOR> https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2016/05/21/the-busy-beaver-game/ <comment><USER2> _Edit: whoa, they really buried the lede: the upper bound for the knowable values may be as low as BB(1919) as of May 15!_

I'm confused by the winning TM given for BB(2). It has 3 non-halt states, but N==2 should be a TM with 2, shouldn't it?

Did they merely put the illustration for BB(3) in the wrong place?

 _Edit: yeah, looks like they just put the illustration for BB(3) in the wrong place:_ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine#/media/File:Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine#/media/File:State_diagram_3_state_busy_beaver_2B.svg)

<comment><USER3> The author has the first name "John Carlos". Why not take an educated guess and use ( _gasp_ ) gendered pronouns?

<comment><USER2> Because the byline wasn't easy to find on the device I read it on, and the possibility that someone might be offended by gender neutrality seemed far- fetched at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article says "if the usual axioms of set theory are consistent, we can never use them to determine the value of BB(7910)." But why does this imply that BB(7910) is uncomputable? Perhaps another axiomatic system could compute its value?

<comment><USER5> > Perhaps another axiomatic system could compute its value?

Of course another axiomatic system could. If you could tell us such an axiomatic system for which you can prove that it can determine the value of BB(7910) and have strong arguments why it is probably consistent (by Gödel one will not be able to prove this property if it is able to express basic arithmetic) mathematicians would love to get to know it, since they really have no idea how such a system might look like.

<comment><USER6> It's easy to specify such a system that's more powerful than ZFC and has strong arguments for its consistency: ZFC+con(ZFC), which is consistent iff ZFC is consistent.

And it's easy to go one level up, I.e that system plus it's own consistency.

These systems will be stronger than ZFC, and will prove the machine in question halts.

Of course, the lowest unknowable from ZFC BB number is probably around BB(15), so likely none of those systems get that high, but they do probably give us more than just ZFC does.

See also [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=697](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=697) for some limitations on this.

Also, there are large cardinal axioms which imply the consistency of ZFC and are believed to be consistent, but I'm not so familiar with them. I think mathematicians would consider those axioms as "what such a system would look like".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They created a Turing machine that may run forever. However we can't prove that. It could stop the next second, or tomorrow, or the day after.

They also proved however that you'll never see it halt. Because that would be a proof of consistency.

Wait. What?

<comment><USER8> If you're refering to Yedidia and Aaronson's machine, the machine searches for counterexamples in ZFC. We believe, but cannot prove, that ZFC is consistent. Also, we can prove that assuming ZFC is consistent, ZFC cannot prove that ZFC is consistent. Hence, since we believe ZFC is consistent, we believe that the machine will not halt, but we can't prove it. This implies that BB(7910) cannot be computed.

<comment><USER6> BB 7910 can be computed: it's just a finite number. What you mean is that the value can't be proven correct in ZFC.

<comment><USER8> If you write down a value for BB 7910 but can't prove that it is correct, I wouldn't say that you "computed it".

<comment><USER6> But ZFC isn't the only system in town. It's possible (although highly unlikely) that we could prove its value in another system that we can see to be just as valid as ZFC. (Like adding consistency axioms and so on.)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, sure, if we agree to do math in the system ZFC+Con(ZFC) we can prove that Yedidia's machine does not halt. But then we can just construct another machine (call it M', a n'-state turing machine) that searches for contradictions in ZFC+Con(ZFC), and now we believe that M' does not halt, but we can't prove it; and now, BB(n') can't be computed.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but that n' will be larger.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but no matter what model of math we choose to work in, I can come up with some n such that I can say "...hence, BB(n) cannot be computed", and you cannot reply "BB(n) can be computed; it's just a finite number. What you mean is the value can't be proven correct..."

<comment><USER6> It can always be computed. If you're choosing a specific model of math, you need to specify that in your statement.

It will still be computable within that model, just not provably so within that model.

Computable has a very specific meaning in computability theory, and any finite number is computable.

The _function_ BB(n) is not computable, but this was known for decades, it has nothing to do with the recent result.

<comment><USER8> > If you're choosing a specific model of math, you need to specify that in > your statement.

I mean, in my most recent statement I quantified over all consistent models...

> It will still be computable within that model, just not provably so within > that model.

OK, now I'm confused; what is the specific definition of "computable number" you're using?

Also, informally speaking, say we're both working in ZFC. You claim that BB(7910) is computable. What does that mean? Does it mean you can write down its value as a normal decimal number?

<comment><USER6> >I mean, in my most recent statement I quantified over all consistent models...

Not quite, as I pointed out in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753020). You can easily have a consistent system that proves the value of all BB numbers, it just won't be computable.

If you restrict us to computable consistent systems, then for any given model there will be some value of BB it doesn't prove, but also for any given value of BB there will be some consistent model that proves it. There's nothing in particular added about knowability by Aaronson's et al result, only about provability.

>OK, now I'm confused; what is the specific definition of "computable number" you're using?

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

Any finite number is computable, we just can't prove that a specific machine _is_ the one that computes BB(N). We can prove that some machine in a finite set (all TMs of size N we haven't seen to halt or proven nonhalting) computes it, but we can't pin down which one, within that model.

>Also, informally speaking, say we're both working in ZFC. You claim that BB(7910) is computable. What does that mean? Does it mean you can write down its value as a normal decimal number?

Lol nope. We can't even write down anything above BB(6). BB(7) has more digits than atoms in the observable universe.

My claim that BB(7910) is computable means there's a Turing machine that computes it. That's easy to prove, as any finite integer can be computed by a Turing machine.

There's no Turing machine that computes every BB number sequentially, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm trying to get an intuition about why this whole game can even be played, and it's proving (ha) rather tricky. I'm ok with the idea that things sometimes cross into the realm of the impossible when transitioning from discrete/finite to continuous/infinite, or maybe from countably to uncountably infinite, but the notion that there's some _constant threshold_ seems so counterintuitive. The link at the end of the article is pretty good [1] as is wikipedia [2], but I'm clearly missing some intuition here. Help!

[1] [https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/the- complexi...](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/the-complexity- barrier/) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Chaitin....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Chaitin.27s_incompleteness_theorem)

<comment><USER6> You can't solve the halting problem. Therefore, if you take a program that takes a Turing machine as input, searches for a proof in ZFC (or your favorite alternative) that the program halts or that it doesn't, and if it doesn't find a proof either way then it runs forever, your program is not a halting solver.

Therefore, there are some Turing machines which can't be proven to halt or run forever in any given consistent system that can be computed.

(Because if every TM had a proof, then the program above would solve the unsolvable halting problem).

Therefore, there is a smallest such program that's independent of ZFC.

Does that help?

<comment><USER9> Yeah a bit. This part

> searches for a proof in ZFC (or your favorite alternative)

is tripping me up though. It's not obvious to me that you can do this in an automated fashion. I assume this is a standard tool for theorists though? How does such a program work?

<comment><USER9> It's not letting me reply any deeper, but that makes sense, thanks!

<comment><USER10> I think it's that you can't reply to posts that are too new.

<comment><USER11> You can, you just have to click on the timestamp to visit the comment's item page first, something like [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11750351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11750351)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I made a small implementation of the Busy Beaver game in React a while ago: [http://rajk.me/static/busybeaver.html](http://rajk.me/static/busybeaver.html). (Click the rules to toggle them).

Start with 1-state, and 2-state is a decent challenge. Not sure if 3-state is possible by hand.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wrote an interesting article a while ago with graphs of how the beaver walks across the tape, and other interesting info.

[http://www.catonmat.net/blog/busy-beaver/](http://www.catonmat.net/blog/busy- beaver/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Numberphile did a great video on Busy Beaver which I found easy to follow - [https://youtu.be/CE8UhcyJS0I](https://youtu.be/CE8UhcyJS0I)

</comment><comment><USER15> FWIW, I implemented some BB code in Python and made some pretty neat plots:

[https://github.com/cslarsen/busy-beaver](https://github.com/cslarsen/busy- beaver)

Of course I cheat by knowing S(n).</comment>


Show HN: Tempo, a simple way to visualize how much email you get - <AUTHOR> http://usetempo.com

<comment><USER2> "CONNECTION LOST" error?

<comment><USER3> Ditto. This might be related to the service itself, vs. an individual attempt to connect, which I suspect due to the speed of the error.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hacker News. This is an app I built over the last few days when I realized I didn't know which email lists were sending me the most email. Please let me know your thoughts, ideas, or questions.

<comment><USER4> Give me a picture! No way am I giving you access to my inbox without anything more than a pretty button.

<comment><USER5> Totally agree. This might be very cool (didn't read comments) but without knowing what I'm signing up for I can't grant access to my GMail... The value proposition is unknown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really want to try this but I am still getting a connection lost error.

</comment><comment><USER7> If I deny access to my gmail, I get the generic rails 404 "The page you were looking for doesn't exist."

</comment><comment><USER8> I archive everything re: the "inbox zero" lifestyle (<http://inboxzero.com/>) and when i click see my results it is just a blank page.

I would be really interested if you could pull from my archives! :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> An example would be nice before I connect my GMail

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://usetempo.com/learn>

<comment><USER10> Along with a call to action, this would serve as a better homepage than the current one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bug report: you need to manually add some multi-part TLDs, right now it's listing "co.uk", "org.uk" etc. as domains

</comment><comment><USER12> I keep getting a connection error, I'll try later. Also, you still have the generic Rails README in the git repo.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting, although it only works with TLDs (e.g. "amazon.co.uk" is reported under "co.uk")

</comment><comment><USER14> An explanation of the results would be very helpful. It works but I have no idea what its telling me. Why are some boxes orange and some black?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on ways to have this be more obvious with outright explaining it.

Each column is a week, a black box means you had a day with an email, an orange box means you had a day with > 1 email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> connection lost.</comment>


Review of A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ <comment><USER2> And in 2012, the follow-up, "Ten Years of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity:"

[http://bactra.org/weblog/915.html](http://bactra.org/weblog/915.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> The title should indicate that it is linking to a book review (of a now rather dated doorstop of a book). Although the linked article follows a standard journal book-review format, which makes it obvious on context what is going on, it is not obvious to someone following an HN link.

</comment><comment><USER4> _wow_.

I mean, I knew Wolfram was nuts, despite Mathematica's success. But this... this is beyond nuts. It's not just crazy, it's also immoral (not citing people who do your research, suing everybody left and right, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER5> I was really confused. The title and author in the header really looked like the title and author of that post with that formatting. Until I read the tiny link at the top. Just goes to show that minimalist HTML/CSS can be used for terrible layouts - just like an overuse of JS.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was in the fist or second year of college and I asked for A New Kind of Science book as a gift. I believed the book, not knowing much about the history of the related fields NKS supposedly compelely revolutionized. That's how cult following starts, isn't it?

But then as years rolled by I realized that stuff is too far out of the ordinary, with the claims which are too lofty. Even as far as style goes, at first phrases like "I discovered this...", "I did that.." seems impressive, excuded confidence, but then, they started to sound grating and excessively arrogant. I just couldn't stand to read it anymore. The book collected dust for a few years, then I gave it away to someone.

</comment><comment><USER7> Has Wolfram's "new kind of science" led to any predictions of natural phenomena in the 15 years or so since his book appeared? This is usually how we decide if a physical theory is interesting. Generating patterns that look like natural phenomena that we already know about doesn't count.

<comment><USER2> The review's author claims that in the decade following it's publication, neither the book nor Wolfram have made any contribution to the field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting analysis of a very brilliant but very flawed personality

</comment><comment><USER9> Why do people always mention that someone is smart? It's a non-informative sentence. How many times do you hear that someone is dumb?

I'll take my community college educated mother over this "child prodigy" on the vast majority of subjects, so he must not be that great.

<comment><USER10> On the contrary, 99.99% of the population is really dumb. (I'd like to think I'm part of the other 0.01%, but the low prior probability of that situation suggests that I don't have enough evidence to justify that conclusion.) Wolfram is not part of that 99.99%. He's part of the 0.01%. But he's squandered his talent on self-indulgent and self-destructive projects instead of contributing to the intellectual and cultural advancement of humanity.

It turns out that human nature is such that being really smart doesn't give you a high probability of being right about things, especially when the truth is not favorable to you, just a slightly better one.

<comment><USER9> You missed my point. If he is smart and yet not right as you say, doesn't that make him dumb?

<comment><USER11> Arrogance makes smart people idiots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This website is quite fun. Here's another. [http://bactra.org/notebooks/prigogine.html](http://bactra.org/notebooks/prigogine.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> (2005)

</comment><comment><USER14> Not sure why we're still discussing this book. It's old, and it's been thoroughly debunked many times. One of few ~1000 page books from which I've learned nothing.

<comment><USER14> > This book was more valuable when it was a tree.

'nuff said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Aren't we done flogging this guy yet?

<comment><USER4> The beatings will continue until Wolfram stops.

Just kidding. If we beat on this guy anymore, he'll die, and turn into a horse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> From title thought this was an article about Trump.

don't down vote me. I finally got to 100 :)

update: comment referred to original title, not current.</comment>


In saliva, clues to a 'ghost' species of ancient human - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-07-saliva-clues-ghost-species-ancient.html <comment><USER2> That persistent overlay Acura ad was so obnoxious, I abandoned trying to read this.</comment>


OpenCog - open source artificial general intelligence framework - <AUTHOR> https://launchpad.net/opencog

<comment><USER2> Douglas Lenat, the founder of Cog project, is absolutely fascinating hacker. His earlier work on on AM and EURISKO was amazing, even if proved to be a dead end.

That said I remember reading about Cog when I was a freshman (around 1994), and to the day it doesn't seem to deliver the promise, despite many million of DoD money. The idea was that a reasonable featured AI will emerge when Cog ontology reaches critical mass, but it just doesn't seem to be happening yet.

EDIT: disregard this, a case of my confusion among three-letter names.

<comment><USER3> You're thinking of Cyc, not OpenCog.

<comment><AUTHOR> Eliezer is right, OpenCog it's not a knowledge base. It's (from Wikipedia):

\- An API to manipulate an extended hypergraph of terms and relationships, dubbed the "AtomSpace".

\- An implementation of a probabilistic reasoning engine based on probabalistic logic networks (PLN).

\- A probabilistic genetic program evolver called Meta-Optimizing Semantic Evolutionary Search, or MOSES, originally developed by Moshe Looks.

\- An attention allocation system based on economic theory.

\- An embodiment system for interaction and learning within virtual worlds.

\- A natural language input system consisting of Link Grammar and RelEx, both of which employ AtomSpace-like representations for semantic and syntactic relations.

\- A natural language generation system called SegSim, with implementations NLGen and NLGen2.</comment></comment></comment>


Honey Fences - <AUTHOR> http://www.ediblegeography.com/honey-fences/ <comment><USER2> Given that relationship, it's doubtless some species of trees intentionally play hosts to hives as a means to protect themselves from being harvest.

Reminds me of a tree that grows homes for ants.

oh wait. That was the Acacia tree as well!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3blzcbll7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3blzcbll7Q)

<comment><USER3> I wondered whether elephants might actually be beneficial to acacias, by maybe spreading seeds or something (I'm not very familiar with the plant).

On the contrary, it seems elephants' relationship with the acacia is sort of mixed: [http://www.primitivism.com/elephant- acacia.htm](http://www.primitivism.com/elephant-acacia.htm)

I love how interesting things like this lead me to discover even more interesting tidbits. Praise be the Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It took me a while to realize this isn't about intrusion detection.

</comment><comment><USER5> All is fun and honey until bears arrive by thousands and someone gets poked in the eye.

Now seriously... seems a good idea. I wonder if elephants will learn to visite the place at night and avoid touching the beehives.

</comment><comment><USER6> Beeline?</comment>


My Plea to Oracle: Axe Java Applets - <AUTHOR> http://thexploit.com/blog/my-plea-to-oracle-axe-java-applets/

<comment><USER2> Nobody except the German tax authorities. As a company in Germany you have to hand in your tax statements electronically. In order to do so you have to go through some weird Applet-based authentication process.

The sooner Oracle axes Applets the sooner the German tax authorities will have to axe their completely messed up software as well. This will take some time, though.

While I completely agree with the underlying sentiment, you can hardly say Applets aren't used anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yikes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _"I can attest that nobody uses applets anymore"_

<http://danielrapp.github.com/mcstats-analysis/>

Minecraft disagrees - you know, one of the best selling games of the last year or two... 9.4m copies sold. And according to this analysis 33% of people play it in an applet. To me this sounds absolutely insane. But we should never underestimate the insanity of the general populous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Small percentage but still interesting. Although if this functionality didn't exist, would it really be missed? I suppose these are the people playing on guest computers/at work. Wonder how many of those 33% of people have an up-to- date Java plugin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nobody uses Java Applets just like nobody uses Windows XP and IE6.

</comment><comment><USER5> Java applets are necessary for folder uploads. Right now, only 1 browser supports folder uploads, and that's Google Chrome. All others allow single or multi-file uploads, but not folders. This is a HUGE problem for some medical and document-management use cases. Until folder uploads work natively in other browsers (IE7+, FF, Safari), applets are not only necessary, but essential.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is somewhat unfortunate and someone should really light a fire under the HTML5 implementors. However, I wouldn't call it essential since you can archive/zip/tar a bunch of files and upload them all at once and do the processing server side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oracle ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), one of the major business software products that Oracle sells to corporations that they do IT consulting for, is fully Applet-based. They're not going to dump Applets because Applets are the framework of their core product.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yea I'm sure Oracle will do this based upon your plea...not... Do you have any idea what would happen to the internet as we (the world, not just yourself) if we all just stopped supporting applets? I don't think you do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, I have an idea of what would happen ... we'd have a ton less people getting their boxes easily owned because they visited some webpage and happen to have some old technology installed that they don't ever even use.

<comment><USER8> If they never use it, then a better solution is for browsers to ship with applets disabled. Or without an applet plugin at all -- if you need it, go install it at your own risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As long as there isn't such a thing as PrinterSockets for the browser, Java Applets are the only way we can provide printing services for our clients, because a browser can only send documents for printing and not byte streams, which is what we need in order to use termic printers for adhesive labels.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why are there so many security vulnerabilities related to Java applets?

I always thought that Java's been specifically designed to sandbox untrusted code, and applets are mature technology: They've been around for 15+ years.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just disable the plug-in in your browser. Problem solved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Except the common user likely doesn't even know it's enable or how to disable it. Thankfully, Firefox disables by default now.

<comment><USER12> Off by default is a good step to take today. I can't see eliminating them, but this makes a lot of sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most Brazilian banks still use Java applets - which sometimes don't work in newer browser versions and have odd bugs with 32-/64-bit compatibility.

</comment><comment><USER14> Last I checked many Norwegian online banking and credit card payment systems use applets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Somewhat ironic considering you'd think banks would do a security assessment of the technologies they use.</comment></comment>


The cost of memory safety - <AUTHOR> http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/58740445602/the-cost-of-memory-safety

<comment><USER2> <cynical view> Known solutions are not used by developers, because the cost of memory safety bugs in C/C++ code is, in general, not borne by the developer, but by the client.</comment>


Report finds D.C. area a hotbed for cybersecurity jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/report-finds-dc-area-a-hotbed-for-cybersecurity-jobs/2014/03/08/1b72ff1e-a560-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html

<comment><USER2> I think it's important to read between the lines here. DC/VA/MD are a hotbed of contract jobs that require a security clearance and a CISSP. If you don't think working for a defense contractor on a succession of relatively short term gigs (6 month - 2 years), and/or you don't have the qualifications (or can't get them for some reason), it's not that hot a place to be.</comment>


The Day I Bought $15,000 From the US Mint - <AUTHOR> http://tylertervooren.com/advancedriskology/the-day-i-bought-15000/# <comment><USER2> This was figured out by FlyerTalk last year and worked for about 3 months before the Mint caught on and changed the terms of credit purchase to be a cash advance, which doesn't qualify for rewards and carries additional interest terms. That said, it was pretty clever and awesome while it worked.

WSJ article: "US Helps Frequent Fliers Make A Mint" <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126014168569179245.html>

<comment><USER3> That's not true, at least not absolutely true. I've done this as recently as a month ago. I've been doing $2000 a month for the last year on my Bank of America 2% cash back rewards card ($40 cash a month into my bank account).

The way the Mint reacted was by imposing a new limit to the dollar amount one can buy in a month.

<comment><USER4> With all due respect, is this really the best way you can think of to convert time and risk into $40? Just seems like a lot of hassle for not a lot of money...

<comment><USER3> Truthfully, it takes absolutely no time at all. I'm not so wealthy that I'll turn down $500 a year for virtually no work. I don't think I'll ever be.

Buying the coins takes a matter of minutes. They sit at home until I need to run to the bank. And at the bank, depositing rolled coins is painless. Never had even a hiccup at the bank.

My usual contracting rates for smaller projects are $75 to 100 an hour so this is right inline with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In his assessment of the risks involved, the author didn't mention the possibility that purchasing coins from the mint could be considered a cash advance, which is like taking a 15% APY loan with interest accruing immediately after you take the advance.

EDIT: Also, looks like the mint has caught on to this guy ([http://catalog.usmint.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductD...](http://catalog.usmint.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10001&storeId=10001&productId=16063&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=27238)):

 _The immediate bank deposit of $1 coins ordered through this Program does not result in their introduction into circulation and, therefore, does not comply with the intended purpose of the Program._

Not sure that's legally binding, but it's at least a dishonest thing to do.

<comment><USER6> I would say this is more _naughty_ than dishonest. Definitely something I would use to answer the naughtiness question in the YC application.

<comment><USER7> Well, I mean, you're kinda stealing from the government. They're the ones paying the processing fees. Just because it's legal doesn't make it honest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Assuming the US Mint and my bank weren't trying to scam me, that only left myself as the scam artist and I knew I wasn't trying to cheat anyone, so that took care of that concern."

I guess if ignorance of the way he's hurting people counts as "not cheating them" this is true.

He gets the airline miles because the US mint takes in between a 1% and 3% loss on the transaction to pay the credit card company. They also lose money when they ship him the coins for free. The reason the US mint is willing to do this is because coins are so much cheaper for them in the long run than bills, once they go into circulation; they're paying this guy and UPS a fee for helping them put dollar coins into circulation. This guy is taking that fee, but not putting the coins into circulation. Its not like the money in his rewards account appeared out of nowhere.

<comment><USER9> The US Mint buys brass slugs an turns them into US dollars -- I bet there is a pretty high margin in that business so I don't think they are taking any loss. More like the US taxpayer is taking the loss.

<comment><USER7> The intrinsic value of the metal has literally nothing to do with it. If you take $0.01 of brass and turn it into $1 coin you didn't make any "profit."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I bought a $250 pack (minimum purchase) of these coins from the Mint, incented slightly by the $5 in profit I'd make from the credit card transaction, but mostly because I thought it would be fun.

I however have intentionally tried to "put them into circulation", using them to pay for small items at the farmers market, drive-through windows, tips, etc. I've had to explain them a few times, but most people think it's interesting and it makes for a few seconds of friendly conversation. I think I've burned through around half so far.

<comment><USER3> I use them all the time for $1 tolls.

I expected to have a "this is a quarter, sir" moment but I've used them hundreds of times and never have.

Leads me to believe this is commonplace.

<comment><USER11> I love the golden dollars and I'd be ok with getting rid of paper dollars entirely because coins last a LOT longer.

I'm not sure what certain uh, industries, that deal in single bills a lot would do, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a taxpayer, I'd just like to say, "screw you".

<comment><USER2> This exploit wasn't at the expense of the taxypayer; it's net-zero for the Mint. It's at the expense of the airlines who have to back the miles generated from nothing.

Edit: Ok I admit defeat here. I don't think the costs are anywhere near interesting from a where-does-my-tax-money-go perspective, but I concede that the Mint must spend _some_ amount of money on it. I won't delete the comment for historical purposes but consider it retracted!

<comment><USER10> Doubtful. Credit card companies charge a percentage of the transaction cost to the seller. Usually sellers just mark up their goods accordingly, so the buyer is the loser. The buyer's only recourse is to use a rewards program to get some of that markup back. The credit card company lost little if anything, and probably profited on the transaction.

The mint was eating the entire credit card transaction cost, so that $300 came from the mint, and probably more as well. Not to mention the shipping charges, and the cost to re-process all of those coins when they came right back to the mint. The line item profit to the mint is still positive since it cost way less than $15,000 to make those coins and they can re-sell them. But in reality, it just means that either the mint prints more dollars to make up for the loss (taxpayer loses in inflation) or more taxes are raised to pay for the loss (taxpayer loses more directly).

The bank where he deposited the coins also was forced to eat processing cost and shipping charges to return the coins to the mint. If lots of people started doing this, the bank would end up having to raise rates, charge for the service, or put significant limitations that would hurt legitimate usages (ex: laundromats).

All in all, this is a naughty hack. The hacker came out ahead, the credit card company came out ahead. The bank lost a little, the US government and taxpayer lost big. The economy as a whole loses as well - a lot of busywork was created, but no net value.

<comment><USER13> Not sure why you were downvoted, you made good points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > that only left myself as the scam artist and I knew I wasn't trying to cheat > anyone, so that took care of that concern.

Er, yes you are. You are causing a bunch of people to do a bunch of work producing no useful value for your own enrichment. Sounds like a scam to me; even if it's technically legal, it's still unethical.

There are really two scams going on here. One is the credit card companies charging merchants fees and passing some of the money on to their customers in order to incentive the use of the cards. This eats into the profit margins of the merchants, who don't have much power to refuse credit card payments because the guy down the street/other store on the web will accept them.

The other is using a credit card to buy cash, deposit it, and collect the rewards. Those rewards are coming out of merchant fees that the mint is paying; you're basically just having the mint pay you to give some extra work to your bank to sort out the coins. And of course, you're abusing the good will of you bank, who's (probably) sorting out those coins for free, which you just have on credit and are doing nothing of value with, and will not be deposited in your account long enough to be worth anything to the bank in interest.

So yeah, it's a scam, and you're the scammer. This is not something to be proud of. Go produce something of value, that someone will pay you money for; don't try to find clever ways to get "free money," since anything that involves "free money" is either a charity or a scam on someones part.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think this guy is making this story up. It used to be true, back in early 2009. The mint changed their policies long ago. He wrote this post in summer 2010.

I call BS.

<comment><USER16> He does start of his post with "Late last year", I would say it is entirely possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> He's trying to write this up as a neat hack ($300 for an hour of work? where do I sign up?), but all he's really done is waste a lot of other people's time to exploit a silly loophole. I wonder how many man-hours the bank spent moving and counting 300 pounds of coins, not to mention how much tax money was spent shipping the damn things to him. What an unproductive waste.

<comment><USER18> Now imagine the same feat repeated every 10ms with billions of dollars and you have the modern institution of high frequency trading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Neat arbitrage play (with some minor risk as noted in the article).

If the Mint isn't losing any money on the credit card transactions (think PayPal fee's), then he's essentially getting free money from his credit card company. Otherwise I'm curious who wrote the law to let the Mint sell $15,000 for ~$14,500 (guess) after CC fee's and shipping... ;)

The poor bank definitely loses out. They have to spend all those man hours processing coins, money which they won't make back in interest as he'll clear out his savings/checking account rather quickly to pay the credit card fees.

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

EDIT: Per frisco's link:

 _The Mint says it costs, on average, about $3 to ship each 250-coin box. So $10,000 in coins would be 40 boxes, or $120 in shipping. As for credit-card costs to the government, a Treasury Department agency handles all government credit-card transactions and negotiates costs. No particular credit-card expense is charged to the Mint, a spokesman says._

So, $15,000 in coins would have been sold at a loss of $180 to the U.S. Mint. That doesn't take into a lot of other costs like manufacturing.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ok, so buying it and immediately putting it back into the bank is not nice... but what about people who pay cash for everything?

Would it be worth it instead of pulling the cash out of the ATM to instead buy coins every few weeks and spend those? You get the best of both worlds: you get the reward points, and you control your spending by only having a fixed amount on you at any time. Bonus is that you're not going to carry $100 around in $1 coins, so your spend is likely to drop more. (or you have to plan ahead)

I'm sure cashiers wouldn't like you (what, you want to pay for your new computer in 1000 $1 coins?)

<comment><USER21> Just charge everything and get the same rewards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> For reference, the program he is referring to can be found here. [http://catalog.usmint.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductD...](http://catalog.usmint.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10001&storeId=10001&productId=16063&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=27238)

I love how that in bold blue letters the page says:

"The immediate bank deposit of $1 coins ordered through this Program does not result in their introduction into circulation and, therefore, does not comply with the intended purpose of the Program."

</comment><comment><USER23> When you deposit your money in the bank, make sure it doesn't look like you're structuring:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring>

</comment><comment><USER24> Damn, I thought I stumbled on a way to cheaply convert foreign currency into US dollars, but their website only accepted US addresses, and now I realize, probably only US currency, too. :(

</comment><comment><USER25> > _that only left myself as the scam artist and I knew I wasn't trying to > cheat anyone_

what about the airlines?</comment>


Show HN: Articulo for Slack. Your reading lists, improved. - <AUTHOR> https://articulo.xyz <comment><AUTHOR> Hi I'm Drazen, developer of the Slack app "articulo".

I made articulo to address the problem I've had for quite some time. If your team shares a ton of useful links in Slack it gets hard to track and remember all the stuff that's been shared. Even with sharing in the first place, people are often reluctant to share useful content, not wanting to litter the channel with unimportant stuff.

articulo addresses the first problem by providing a personal Reading list, that you can use a bookmarking and read later list, all without leaving Slack.

articulo aims to nudge people to share more by providing a different method of sharing useful content with your teammates. Add links to Recommended lists (one per channel) and anyone can view all the links ever shared, upvote and contribute their own recommendations. All without sending messages to the channel.

articulo is currently in beta, and is 100% free.

Would love to hear any feedback you might have.</comment>


A decisionmaker's guide to buying security appliances and gateways - <AUTHOR> http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-decisionmakers-guide-to-buying.html <comment><USER2> I would add one question for the prospective customer of such an appliance: why do you need it?

Why do you need an appliance analyzing all your network traffic in real time? And if you truly do need such an appliance, why does it need to be connected to anything other than mirror ports (where it cannot transmit) and a dedicated console which is not connected to the rest of the network?

If some clever attacker ruins your pervasive-surveillance appliance, you will have lost nothing other than a bit of time if you did not connect it to a network it can use to exfiltrate your data. But if you installed all the plumbing, don't be surprised when someone flushes a giant turd down your tubes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are there security appliances which use virtualization for sandboxing of unsafe parsers, like Qubes does on endpoints?</comment>


Irish Supreme Court Dismisses Facebook's Complaint on NSA Surveillance [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://noyb.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SC_PA.pdf <comment><USER2> At the time of Max Schrems' first complaints, our Data Protection Commission was located in a small office in Portarlington above a convenience store. It is only due to the international embarrassment caused by Schrems' successful cases (which showed the DPC to be incompetent and unwilling to investigate complaints) that they have recently received more funding to expand operations.

There is a tendency in Irish state bodies to always err on the side of the establishment - Ombudsmen and oversight bodies such as the DPC will rarely rock the boat by making findings against the State. This leaves citizens with little option but to take a court case against the State to vindicate their rights (as Schrems was forced to do when the previous DPC decided his complaints were "frivolous and vexatious" [1]). The current DPC has yet to fine a single company under GDPR, something which truly beggars belief.

People like Schrems take a great personal risk in taking court cases in Ireland. If you lose, you end up paying yours and your opponent's legal fees, which are huge and essentially bankrupting for the non-wealthy [2] (there are some exceptions where the judge thinks your case was in the public interest, but that's decided afterwards). Often cases have to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and the ECJ to find justice. One case against the DPC regarding access to exam scripts has been in the Irish courts since 2009 and finally won in the ECJ in 2017 [3].

[1] [https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and- law/courts/court-t...](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and- law/courts/court-to-hear-challenge-to-decision-not-to-investigate- facebook-1.1776879)

[2] [https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/high- co...](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/high-court/woman- faces-500k-legal-bill-after-court-case-over-64k-fees-1.3692330)

[3] [https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/failed-exam- ca...](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/failed-exam-candidate- gets-right-to-written-paper-in-ecj-ruling-1.3334566)

<comment><USER3> Schrems is a citizen of Austria, in Austria you would have to pay the legal fees of your opponent, too, if you lose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The main parts of this judgement were very unsurprising. It is very well established in EU law that a higher national court can not order a lower court to withdraw a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union.

EU law normally override EU member state national law. The EU court is the final interpreter on EU law.

The thinking about lower courts unappealable ability to ask the EU court for what the EU law is, that a higher or highest national courts should never be able to suppress a question from reaching the EU court.

Hence, if the Supreme Court in a member state would give a final ruling on a topic, any lower court that thinks the Supreme Court were wrong on points of EU law, may always in a following case ask the EU court for final guidance on what EU law actually means (instead of just following the Supreme Court ruling). The Supreme Court would in that instance have no means of preventing that from happening.

<comment><USER4> Additional information if anyone is interested:

In general, I believe for example the US court system hierarchy (where you appeal instance by instance in serial order) is very different from the EU court system (when it comes to interpretation on EU law).

Lower courts MAY ask the EU court for guidance on what EU law means while the court of last instance for a type of case (the highest court) MUST ask the EU court on what the EU law means if it is not clear.

Here is the relevant text in the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU):

[https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...](https://eur- lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:12008E267:en:HTML)

If anyone is interested in more information of exceptions from referring to the EU court you can read up on the doctrine of acte clair and acte eclairé. This doctrine is now always followed (nd may sometimes be difficult to follow) by court of last instance so it is important that lower courts can ask if they think the higher court has made an error in relation to this.

<comment><USER5> Actually it is not _that_ different.

It is similar how you can move constitutional questions from state to federal court in the USA, with the main difference being that EU does not have federal circuits of courts like USA does, but effectively only a supreme court.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Instead of deciding over the complaint, the DPC has filed a lawsuit against Facebook and Mr Schrems at the Irish High Court in 2016, aimed at sending further questions to the CJEU.

Wait what? Why would they also sue Max Schrems over this?

<comment><USER7> So that they can refer the matters to the CJEU; although not in it's entirety, it is a procedural move to get all the parties (including Schrems) and their complaints / evidence in front of the CJEU to resolve matters that the Irish DPC feels they aren't in a position to or aren't willing to rule on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Question: If Facebook denies involvement in or knowledge of PRISM, why did they want to annul a case against them being in it?

<comment><USER9> From what I understand, the case by now is about "Is what companies use to justify processing of data in the US as safe acceptable?". The ECJ might very well find that the current agreements are not sufficient, that data transfer to the US likely means access by US agencies that is not acceptable, so Facebook has an interest in there not being a decision by the highest court about it.

<comment><USER10> Isn't this slightly related to GDPR?

GDPR, in a way, might also slow down the US from listening to EU members, for example when related to industrial espionage...

<comment><USER11> I wonder if we're heading to a world where any company who wants to run internationally needs to keep all US-citizen data on US servers, and EU- citizen data on EU servers?

<comment><USER12> Currently it doesn't look like holding US-citizen data on EU servers will be a problem anytime soon. But if the EU decides that the protections for their citizens provided by the "privacy-shield" agreement are not good enough then it would mean US companies could not hold or control EU-resident's data.

[https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/privacy- and-...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/privacy-and- security/privacy-shield)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's awesome. Go Ireland. They benefited somewhat from the tech investment yet they are not scared to stand up to the same. I like it. They're historically neutral so perhaps that sort of fits.

<comment><USER14> Why is NSA surveillance awesome? Even if you don't like tech companies.

<comment><USER9> I think you misunderstood the article. The case/result is not in favor of NSA surveillance.

<comment><USER15> I definitely didn't understand the article either. I wasn't sure what this ruling actually meant. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> next up. irish supreme court dismisses NSA's complaint on facebook surveillance

</comment><comment><USER17> There is definitely a joke waiting to be written about Facebook not wanting their user's data to be accessed (without payment, at least).</comment>


Quantopian hedge fund has lost about 3% since beginning of trading in June - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/steven-a-cohen-andreessen-backed-diy-quant-fund-struggles-1510095947 <comment><AUTHOR> > But in the four months since it began trading on June 1, Quantopian's > traders have lost about 3%, according to people close to the matter. The S&P > 500 rose 6.6% in that period.

It's still way to early to be worried about the fund but to be fair, its been a good time for most quantitative funds. And the space that I imagine Quantopian is competing in, factor based models for US Equities, is a very crowded space right now.

I'm sure having a flagship fund was an important project for the company I'm reminded of the Paul Graham story where he tells Jerry Yang his idea for selling ads and then realized when Jerry told him no that yahoo was already selling ads for more than they were worth.

I'm wondering if there is a parallel here with quantopian where they were better off letting people think that they could beat the market with a factor based model, rather than actually starting a fund and showing their users how tough it really is.

> Still, Quantopian manages about $50 million in a hedge fund, a tiny amount > in that world and well below the $250 million executives anticipated at the > end of this year

This might work in their favour.

The difference in the management fee doesn't translate into alot of money and its much easier to manage a sub $100 million fund than it is to run a $250 million dollar fund. Especially for one that is just starting out and doesn't appear to have found their secret sauce just yet.

<comment><USER2> The problem is that there is no other really scalable revenue play for a product like Quantopian other than starting a fund. They could try and charge people for the platform but that is pretty niche. That could be a good business - but I'm not sure it's a VC-funded business.

Still, I've been skeptical of Quantopian's business for a while. System writers are likely to opt-out if they have any success, and they need a track record of 5+ years in order to raise any substantial amount of money - particularly true with something so unproven like a crowdsourced algo fund.

<comment><USER3> They could (you know, theoretically) copy Robinhood's business model and its evolution - allow users to trade algorithmically with their own accounts, offer them up as sacrificial lambs to HFT, and then offer credit, and so on.

<comment><USER4> "offer them up as sacrificial lambs to HFT" what do you mean?!

<comment><USER5> All the orders placed are sent to HFT traders before confirmation so they can take advantage of the information.

There is even a commercial on Bloomberg for a broker that explicitly says they don't sell out your orders like others do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People who make money with algos would never share them with quantopian but people who couldn't, would. It's the nature of the beast in wallstreet, I've worked in wallstreet for over 29 years. The resources for discovering algos that are profitable are very expensive.

<comment><USER7> They make a lot of those resources available for free. I worked in algo/hft for about 11 years, then left and started building my own tools for building factor based algos using my interactive brokers' apis and my own toolkit. I was doing it on the side for about 3 months before I came across quantopian- and immediately felt like an idiot because they had done so much of the work for me- and it was available for free. It would have taken me probably 2 years to get anywhere close to their offering, and that's just for the pure trading/event processing side of it, let alone their backtesting, and risk measurement framework.

I have been using it for a factor and value based microcap strategy for the last 4 years and have been beating the market's total return by about 5% on average each year. I trade a relatively small universe, its not really scalable to a large fund.

I stopped applying for "quant" jobs in 2007- everyone wanted a PHD even though I was doing a lot of the same work- I got lucky and landed a job in Options AMM and for awhile was doing both dev work and what I later found out was considered quant work in most other places.

My point being though is they provide a lot of infrastructure that would normally only be available to a very small number of people in banks and the like and those tools are gate-kept to PHDs and those deemed worthy of even getting a look. I don't put my algos in the competition and actually trade them manually so they are likely completely under the radar from quantopian, and aside- they look for very specific characteristics in their algos that mine don't fit. There is opportunity out there though, especially if you are trading in small size (lets say under 5-10M),

<comment><USER8> Could you elaborate on quant jobs requiring PhDs? Do they look for a very specific PhD (i.e. statistics), or is it just a blanket requirement to get past the hiring screens?

<comment><USER7> This was all about 10 years ago, the market has moved since then, and now it seems you can slip under the PHD radar and do similar work if you classify yourself as a "data scientist." Some of the mythos around quants and technology has been uncovered, 10 years ago quantitative and electronic trading was still a newish thing and at a backseat to traditional traders and PMs. Many firms these days are technology first, though there are often still walls between those who write "models" and those who write "infrastructure."

Anyway, its still largely true that for "quant" roles you need a PHD. It doesn't need to be in anything particular, but Physics/Math/Statistics are strongly preferred. This is just a hiring screen thing. Its not impossible, but quant types tend to have a big head and be elitist, and I personally found them to just be real jerks in the hiring process, and there were plenty of opportunities opening up in the then lucrative algorithmic/HFT space so I went down that road. By jerks, there were just several opportunities where you could just tell they didn't like my lack of credentials and that I went to a state school (on a scholarship, but still they can't have non ivy leaguers stinking the place up), and it was also fairly easy for them to just throw advanced math problems at me and knock me out of the running- regardless if this was something that was ever used in their actual work.

I don't really regret it, but it would have been nice to be more heavily involved in pure finance stuff- I find the markets fascinating, I was very happy when I wrote some of the first TWAP and VWAP strategies out there, and then later (surprise!) started getting edged out of that space by "quants" with PHDs.

<comment><USER6> In the early 90s, I was lucky. I pitched on the phone, they called me in, and the following day I had a corner office overlooking the beautiful statue of liberty. We laughed, dined, and drank often after work, it was fun and not a snob in sight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get the point of these. Index funds win most of the time, and when they don't index funds still win once you count the amount of time and effort needed to marginally beat them.

Set it and forget it.

<comment><USER10> Nobody wins if everyone is winning.

<comment><USER11> Sure they do. If everyone increases their wealth then everyone wins. It's not a zero sum game.

<comment><USER12> Surely if everyone increases their wealth then the value of the trading currency must be proportionally lower?

Wealth is a marker of ones assets relative to others -- if everyone has the same wealth then no-one is wealthy.

What have I missed here?

<comment><USER13> Not quite - liquidity helps prevents recessions. When recessions happen, people (in the aggregate) work less than they otherwise would.

Our true source of wealth is our output, which is the product of (work * productivity).

See Krugman's story about the capitol hill baby-sitting coop:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...](http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1998/08/babysitting_the_economy.html)

<comment><USER14> Krugman misidentifies the problem with the co-op. Basically the whole thing is a failure in the exercise of price controls.

An arbitrary authority decides on a unit of a resource that shouldn't have fixed value should have fixed value, and his solution is to introduce inflation... I suppose when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b It's early to say but the top strategies on Quantopian were showing off sharpe ratios higher than 2.5, which should bring great profitability with very small downward moves. The fact that they have such a poor performance so far (while still having little AUM) is definitely a proof that something is wrong with the way they test their strategies...

<comment><USER3> accounting for liquidity is hard

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a ridiculously tiny amount of time to judge performance.

<comment><USER16> The market as a whole is up 7%, so really they're down 10%. They lost money in a bull market

<comment><USER17> Yes. You'd have to really try pretty hard to lose money in this market.

<comment><USER7> not really. Value based strategies tend to get hurt pretty bad during the tail end of bull markets when euphoria starts to set in, and increases tend to be due to P/E expansion and rosy predictions for the future rather than current performance, and tend to do very well after downturns and things get oversold.

<comment><USER17> Still, most value funds aren't losing money over the past 5 months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Very difficult to judge this performance given the time frame and the strategy - not sure that comparing it to the general market makes any sense.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's called overfitting.

</comment><comment><USER19> Cant read wsj, is there any other source? Thank you.

<comment><USER20> Protip, add this JS snippet to your browser's bookmark bar, then click when you're on WSJ's article. Works like a dream.

javascript:location.href='[http://facebook.com/l.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(location.hr...](http://facebook.com/l.php?u='+encodeURIComponent\(location.href\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Every investment I've ever bought has gone down within 6 months of the time I bought it. Unless you perfectly time a bottom that's what's gonna happen. The question is where it is in 6 years, not 6 months.

Plus, for a hedge fund there are a lot of initial costs and entering a position is where expenses happen generally.

<comment><USER22> Problem here is they are not purchasing and holding for 6 years or even 6 months. These are typically short term timescale strategies. They are turning capital over quickly so the gains or, in this case, losses are locked in quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> archived version [http://archive.is/CrtmX](http://archive.is/CrtmX)</comment>


Seeing Value in Ignorance, College Expects Its Physicists to Teach Poetry - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/education/17stjohn.html?pagewanted=all

<comment><AUTHOR> As per HN guidelines, I submitted the exact headline of the original story But be warned: there is no mention of physicists, poetry, or physicists teaching poetry. All the anecdotes center around liberal arts doctorates trying to teach math and Newton. Interesting, but I would've much rather read an anecdote about what was promised in the headline.</comment>


Apple acquires Lattice, an A.I company specializing in 'dark data' - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/13/apple-acquires-ai-company-lattice-data-a-specialist-in-unstructured-dark-data/ <comment><USER2> Lattice [1] originated as DeepDive [2][3], a statistical inference project led by Christopher Ré at Stanford.

[1]: [https://lattice.io/](https://lattice.io/)

[2]: [http://deepdive.stanford.edu/showcase/apps](http://deepdive.stanford.edu/showcase/apps)

[3]: [https://github.com/HazyResearch/deepdive](https://github.com/HazyResearch/deepdive)

DeepDive was discussed previously on Hacker News [4].

[4]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8736739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8736739)

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone have a nice specific example or application if dark data. Im not really understanding what the mean by unstructured data.</comment>


What are the most interested questions you come across in Twitter? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a side project and need your help! Comment on this thread with twitter's most interesting and valuable questions ever asked! <comment><AUTHOR> Here's one example, a question asked by Erik Torenberg.

[https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1074354184344891392](https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1074354184344891392)

</comment><comment><USER2> Questions Twitter may have asked itself like:

"What should be max tweet length?"

Questions Twitter users have asked about Twitter like:

"Why are you removing 3rd party API access?"

Questions that Twitter users have posed on the service to other users like:

"Ninjas Vs Pirates?"

Can you give us more context?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, here's what I meant. Questions that are relating to startups, habits, mental health, mindfulness etc.

Here's one for example: [https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1074354184344891392](https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1074354184344891392)

Hope this clarifies. Let me know your thoughts.</comment></comment>


LulzSec punishes wanted "snitches" with leaking their info to the FBI - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/MBEsm5XQ

<comment><USER2> Perhaps it'll be a group fall-out which will lead to the authorities finding out who these guys are.</comment>


Monsanto's Weed Killer, Dicamba, Divides Farmers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/business/monsanto-dicamba-weed-killer.html?module=WatchingPortal&region=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=12&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2017%2F09%2F21%2Fbusiness%2Fmonsanto-dicamba-weed-killer.html&eventName=Watching-article-click <comment><USER2> I've been recently enjoying a YouTube channel by a guy who turned his yard into a sustainable "food forest"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng- VskDFPpM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng-VskDFPpM)

That is the video that led me to it, but after I saw it I went back through his video history to see how he got the whole project started and to see his progress over the years. He has a video in there where he recommends a series of books that he learned from, like Albert Howard's "An Agricultural Testament," Sepp Holzer's "Permaculture," and Masanobu Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution." I've gotten started reading the first two and they're really great books.

<comment><USER3> His garden, is great for a snack or two, let's be serious about the rest. Grains, meat etc not gonna grow in a "forest" and one way or another we need those calories. Like or not we're gonna be 9 billion soon and they will need to eat.

<comment><USER4> I don't think this post is suggesting that all agriculture should take place in food forests. That's obviously not going to suit some species and would not be a balanced approach.

Folks definitely get yields of more than a snack or 2 out of food forests. Growing food from perennials in a multi-layered food forest is very efficient (minimum inputs), resilient (diverse layers designed to support each other, plants that are of age and established, healthy soil) and has many outputs (food, timber etc). Bill Mollison explains the birth of the idea here [0].

I am convinced that they are a key piece of the future if we are to feed the 9 billion people you speak of. I am also becoming convinced that industrial agriculture's tendency to plant vast amounts of monocultures does not have a place in that future.

Food forests are promoted through permaculture. The entirety of a permaculture farm wouldn't usually be dedicated to a forest like this. Grains have a place. So does meat.

There are plenty of permaculture farms out there producing meat, and it's not uncommon for this to take place in woodland. Within a forest you may find pigs and poultry[1]. As a part of a permaculture farm's systems there may be pastured cattle, poultry[2][3] and so on. Within this sphere you find farms like Mastodon Valley[4], where cattle are a key part of their regenerative agriculture. Then you have ponds designed for fish[5].

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrtJbk8_GY8&t=16m20s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrtJbk8_GY8&t=16m20s)

[1] [https://youtu.be/GVQ8TUpvnDY?t=3m28s](https://youtu.be/GVQ8TUpvnDY?t=3m28s) (woodland in this case, not a food forest)

[2] [https://youtu.be/3Knn7ZH4Tiw?t=39m28s](https://youtu.be/3Knn7ZH4Tiw?t=39m28s) (a system where chickens follow cows in pasture)

[3] [https://youtu.be/eFujalK2jHg?t=32m12s](https://youtu.be/eFujalK2jHg?t=32m12s) (using chickens to disturb an area in prep for establishing a new section of a food forest... continue watching for a few minutes to see an impressive chicken-pinning dog!)

[4] [https://mastodonvalleyfarm.com](https://mastodonvalleyfarm.com)

[5] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2B2Nyji7v0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2B2Nyji7v0) (establishing a fish pond and using cows from the farm as helpers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dicamba is horrible stuff. The drift is a serious issue and is only going to get worse. Obviously Monsanto is gonna cry fowl here and act like they aren't to blame – but the fact of the matter is that they are a giant in a small pool of seed and chemical companies. Farmers are stuck using this stuff if they want to keep their yields up. Unfortunately the surrounding ecosystem will suffer and the vicious cycle towards the mono crop continues.

All of this stems from our insane deep-rooted dependence on corn and soybeans.

<comment><USER6> Similar but different problems in India and around the world. The only way to keep yields up to feed their population is to continue to ramp the fertilizer which continues to destroy the soil requiring ever increasing fertilizer.

We need to fix this and soon but it is "someone else's problem".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How come when it comes to the environment/global warming, the predominant approach is "we believe in science", but when it comes to organic foods, GMOs, and vaccines the "science is questionable"?

<comment><USER8> The majority of anti-GMO people I know don't debate the science, they generally want to ban them for two reasons:

1\. Overuse of pesticides leads to tolerance which leads to an escalation which is some of what you see in this article.

2\. One or two large corporations controling the vast majority of food production for the US. Gains in farming are awesome, but they shouldn't be at the expense of autonomy of the farmers who bring us the food.

<comment><USER9> Genetic modifications are useful for more than pesticide resistance. We could have better, riper tomatoes in stores if the Flavr Savr hadn't been attacked by alarmists. Instead we get ethylene treated junk.

<comment><USER10> From Wikipedia:

"The Flavr Savr turned out to disappoint researchers ... as the antisensed PG gene had a positive effect on shelf life, but not on the fruit's firmness, so the tomatoes still had to be harvested like any other unmodified vine-ripe tomatoes. An improved flavor, later achieved through traditional breeding of Flavr Savr and better tasting varieties, would also contribute to selling Flavr Savr at a premium price at the supermarket.

...

The failure of the Flavr Savr has been attributed to Calgene's inexperience in the business of growing and shipping tomatoes."

Sounds like Flavr Savrs were just a failure. I don't see anything about alarmists.

<comment><USER9> It's been 20+ years. Any flaws could have been worked out by now.

<comment><USER11> I prefer this example:

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

The controversy section is very telling. While not directly quoted in the article, I've seen/heard people argue, "It hasn't been proven safe!" Well, yeah? Of course it hasn't. Nothing is ever proven safe, really. It'd be much easier to demonstrate the benefits if, you know, they actually let trials go forward.

Some trials have been started, but people keep protesting and doing stuff like burning the fields.

<comment><USER12> > Some trials have been started, but people keep protesting and doing stuff > like burning the fields.

That's not the reason why Golden Rice has been a failure[1]:

> While activists did destroy one Golden Rice test plot in a 2013 protest, it > is unlikely that this action had any significant impact on the approval of > Golden Rice.

> "Destroying test plots is a dubious way to express opposition, but this was > only one small plot out of many plots in multiple locations over many > years," he said.

Rather:

> As Stone and Glover note in the article, researchers continue to have > problems developing beta carotene-enriched strains that yield as well as > non-GMO strains already being grown by farmers.

[1] [https://source.wustl.edu/2016/06/genetically-modified- golden...](https://source.wustl.edu/2016/06/genetically-modified-golden-rice- falls-short-lifesaving-promises/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Monsanto is such scum. Selling the poison and the antidote... Forcing the antidote onto those that might come in contact with the poison; Unethical, cartel behavior that makes us all unhealthy.

<comment><USER14> There is a lot of evidence of Monsanto pushing their agenda behind the scenes: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/monsantos- sway-o...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/monsantos-sway-over- research-is-seen-in-disclosed-emails.html)

And it seems like their stuff is truly dangerous: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto- roundup...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup- safety-lawsuit.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am a small grape grower, and on various mailing lists on this topic.

People who grow grapes (or tomatoes, or anything but soy/corn for that matter) are really upset and angry about the growth in the use of Dicamba.

It's already very frustrating each year to find your plants damaged from drift from rampant glyphosate use. But the degree of damage from dicamba is just off the charts.

This article spends a lot of time talking about Dicamba's effects on other cash crop farmers. But it doesn't talk about those who choose to grow other things. The agriculture industry already acts like the only thing that matters is cash crop corn/soy rotation farmers. Drift reports basically amount to a shrug. That's very very frustrating.

<comment><USER16> Has anyone tried to sue for lost profits over Dicamba use?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Environmentalists and some weed scientists worry that making seeds resistant > to more weed killers will increase the use of pesticides.

The NYT has some strangely poor writing sometimes. This _whole article_ is about GMO seeds designed specifically to allow application of pesticides. Nobody disputes that it will increase the use of pesticides - that's the whole point, as explained the rest of this article other than this paragraph.

<comment><USER18> How is pointing out that fact poor writing? It's a fact. Environmentalists and weed scientists _are_ worried that it will increase the use of pesticides...

The article then goes on to do just as you say, which allows the reader to make the conclusion about whether those environmentalists concerns are valid. Since this is a newspaper article, it would be improper style to directly make the implication on the part of the author over whether those concerns are valid. It's simply their job to report such concerns exist.

Some people just love to criticize the NYT.

<comment><USER17> It gives the impression that only some people project that more pesticides will be the result. But that's not so - the ability to freely apply pesticides is _the whole point_ of this product. And it's also what makes the product sordid and controversial in the first place.

The sentence before the one I quoted is "But weeds are becoming more resistant to Roundup, so the industry is developing seeds that are tolerant to more herbicides."

Here's an example of a better and more professional way to follow that sentence in order to make reference to these concerns:

'This application of a larger volume of pesticides - including those designed to eliminate these newly Roundup-resistant plants, has caused concern among some environmentalists and weed scientists.'

So the difference? That structure follows directly from the rest of the article and doesn't leave any impression that there's controversy over whether there will be more pesticides.

<comment><USER15> The concern is more than from environmentalists and weed scientists.

It is from other farmers who are growing things other than the target crop. In some places it is in an urgent crisis for them.

<comment><USER17> Right - that too. That's another reason that this sentence is bizarre.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Speaking as a geneticist, these GM traits are the most important tool in our toolbox, and it needs to be rolled out as fast a possible.

It's a matter of evolution, and stopping resistance. Like HIV, cancer, antibiotics, or any other biologic system, there is a necessity for multiple modes of action.

Plants evolve very slowly. This is good. It means they adapt to things like roundup very slowly. It took decades to adapt to glyphosate, and even today it is still widely effective. However, since it is a single mode of action, resistance is inevitable.

The trick is that if you increase modes of action, you raise the cost of natural selection to the point that the species simply cannot adapt. Ever.

We need glyphosate, 2,4-D AND dicamba resistance, all together so that we can stop any one chemical from being resistant. Stopping resistance means having a full toolbox, and a full effective toolbox means less overall chemicals on fields.

<comment><USER20> Um, I distinctly remember reading about insects evolving to adapt to changes brought about by humanity in one generation and just quickly did a search and found a study that showed significant _plant_ adaptations within four generations to insect infestations (and immediate changes within one generation) [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121004141745.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121004141745.htm) So what is the difference between this reported study and what a geneticist means by plants evolve slowly?

<comment><USER19> >Um, I distinctly remember reading about insects evolving to adapt to changes brought about by humanity in one generation

Literally impossible. Mutations can't magically move to high frequency in one generation. The article you said this 'Plant populations began to diverge significantly in response to insect attack in as few as three to four generations'. Not one. Yes intense single mode-of-action selection can change allele frequencies in a short period of time, but that is much different than adapting to novel challenges.

The types of adaptations you are talking about are likely what we call "standing variation". Dormant mutations at intermediate frequency that become fit during intermittent circumstances. Like a stressful year, or a certain predator that comes every decade.

In the case of chemicals however, we are dealing with an entirely novel mechanism, with little to no standing variation to draw upon. Thus evolution in this circumstance is slow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> People are scared that AI will take us out, but in actuality it will probably be a company that has a monopoly that gets too boisterous and does us all in. That might be combined with AI sentient beings, but ultimately they will be doing it just for that monopolistic corporation's mission statement to eliminate all competitive threats.

<comment><USER22> How can a company's monopoly destroy humanity without the protection of an AI police force? Are you expecting the population to go along with it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _But weeds are becoming more resistant to Roundup, so the industry is developing seeds that are tolerant to more herbicides._

Isn't this a classic Red Queen's Race?

<comment><USER19> Yes.

The only way off the treadmill is to stack as many traits as possible so that evolution doesn't have time to adapt.

This was the key to effective treatment of HIV for example. Anti-retroviral cocktails of 3-5 drugs, each with a different mode of action.

We're lucky though, plants evolve slow, so we only need a few different traits to slow/stop evolution.

<comment><USER24> furthermore, farmers are forced to plant "refuge" plots - plots that do not get GMO seeds, nor get herbicide/pesticide treatments. This ensures that there is plenty of resistance-less plants/insects left in the gene pool to cross breed with any plants/insects that have developed a resistance - there by preventing the resistant plants/insects from taking over and becoming dominant. Quite brilliant when you think about it.

<comment><USER23> Given that the dispute that is the subject of the original article here is about dicamba drifting onto non-sprayed fields in the local area, some scepticism is warranted as to how well those refuge plots would work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Monsanto needs to do a 180 and develop & research low cost weeding robots. GMO engineering solutions are only a stopgap measure

<comment><USER26> Agreed. Plants can develop resistance to herbicides, but they can't really develop resistance to being dug up.

Although the dandelions and bindweed in my garden would be prominent counter- examples.

<comment><USER27> I suspect that 10 years from now the notion of carpet bombing a field with anti-weed chemicals will seem stupid as simple weed hunting robots deal with the problem automatically.

Dandelions need sunlight too. Assuming your weed bot keeps the plant reduced to a leafless stub the roots will die eventually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The problem in AR & MO essentially stems from Monsanto's new version of dicamba that's supposed to reduce a lot of this overspray damage not yet being approved by the EPA, so growers have decided to just spray the old stuff that's known to cause this kind of damage despite being told not to.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/01/487809643/cri...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/01/487809643/crime- in-the-fields-how-monsanto-and-scofflaw-farmers-hurt-soybeans-in-arkansas)

<comment><USER29> I believe that NPRs Planet Money did an episode on this a few months ago.

<comment><USER30> It was a great listen!

"The conflict was no longer farmer versus weed, but also farmer versus farmer. When his neighbors illegally sprayed the pesticide, Wallace reported it. After harvest, Wallace was shot and killed.

On today's show, a murder mystery – about how a weed divided neighbors and led to Mike Wallace's death."

Here's a link to the episode: [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/02/531272125/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/02/531272125/episode-775-the- pigweed-killer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Farmers need to decide if they want a future or not. Milking the earth for profit while poisoning the world is a crime against humanity.

<comment><USER32> Farmers decide if they want a future or not every time they pencil out the profits for the coming crop year. Its a commodity business. Grain farmers have zero pricing power. They can increase their top line by increasing yield. They can reduce costs to increase margins.

It's not a simple problem to solve. Moralizing about someone else's business without understanding the fundamental economics isn't going to solve it. It's a public policy question in the end.

I have skin in the game. I own row crop land in Iowa and Minnesota that is operated by local farmers. My leases require good land stewardship and I only lease to farmer/operators that are willing to meet the conditions. For the majority of farmers, good stewardship of the land and environment is part of their ethos. There are obvious exceptions. We should do something about the exceptions, and that is where it becomes a public policy question.

IMHO, herbacide drift is fundamentally a form of trespass when it drifts out of your own field. Let's start with treating drift as trespass. Cattle breaking the fence is treated that way, the maintainer of the fence is liable for damages. Keep your chemicals behind your own property line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It divides farmers and they wanna put it in our food? Jesus H!</comment>