Siri creator shows off first public demo of Viv - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-first-public-demo-of-viv-the-intelligent-interface-for-everything/ <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm not the exact target market, but I always carefully pick my search parameters and research my decision making. For showing up, this is impressive to send flowers, but there's always some minor details that break the experience, like the shop is closed, I can't pay via X service. The Hotels.com booking is great, but not everybody is that rich to book a villa :)

As I see it, Viv aims to be the Google of service providers which is a pretty neat goal, nobody did that successfully, so I'm rooting for them. The platform approach is also a good marketing strategy that they want to allow it to embedable. For example letting people say ask basic things about a monument in a remote national park. The applications are really limitless if it fits on a Raspberry PI like card.

As someone who like to break things, please Viv process this for me:

"VIV, please find me a cheap flight to Vienna, check Ryanair and Wizzair on the 21st of may for two adults" "order the results by price" "show details for the second one" "show the previous one" "are luggage included in the price?" "book it, but skip all marketing offers from the company" "find AirBnB apartments for that day that has wireless internet" "order results by price" "ok, then search in the range of 10 to 50€ per night" "select the first place" "message host: looking forward to meet you" "book it." "Viv, bring me a beer"

<comment><USER3> Viv is being presented as a platform for other developers to build on top of, and these 3rd party developers will be the ones responsible for fleshing out the specifics of how the queries will work given the domain they are implementing for. They will be the ones who will need to anticipate all of the different ways a user can request for something in particular and include all of the edge-cases that might trip-up the API.

In the end I think queries for certain types of well-established services like asking about the weather are probably going to yield better results than more obscure/complex things like placing an order for building custom furniture from a small workshop.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but _who_ is in control of whether "find me a hotel" searches hotels.com, or Kayak, or Expedia, ...

<comment><USER2> I think 80% of commands will be handled by Viv's core app, then the third party apps take control seamlessly. It will also learn that you always prefer AirBnb over Hotels.com.

<comment><USER3> Whatever the default search target for travel stay is, if there is one, will probably determine a large percent of what users will simply stick to using without bothering to change it to another preference, since they may not know better. This default does leave an opportunity for some companies to have an edge over others, and potentially pay to make it so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Impressive demo, but yet i can't help thinking that the "big" question still remain largely unsolved for those services.

Two points :

1/ viv keeps mentioning a "breakthrough" in computer science because they managed to create a program that will scan a network of services and fill the parameters from the query. Now, those guys aren't jokers, so i presume there is definitely something fantastic behind, yet i can't help thinking that once you've "understood" the intent, it sounds quite close to a sql / graphql query planner.

2/ Which leads to the big question : guessing the intent. Every time i hear people mention "intelligence" or "understanding", i show them this : "hey siri, please do NOT set a timer for 4 minutes, i beg you". The fact is, it's just a trick. It recognize words, but it doesn't understand anything, it doesn't have concepts, knowledge or any experience. It's a dumb program that never had any life or sense to understand anything.

If i say "find me a good ticket for Chicago tonight". How will it know that i'm talking about the rock band that's playing tonight in Paris, France, since there's absolutely not a chance that a human being asks for a plane ticket for such a big trip just a few hours in advance ?

This is, to me, _the_ big and interesting question that online assistants makers needs to solve. Now of course, viv is aiming for a product release this year, so they're building an intermediate solution, where developers will manually associate keywords to services, in an "easy" way. And it will sort of work.

Yet i'm still waiting for the real "big" advance.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, if you asked me for a good ticket for Chicago tonight, I'd be looking up first-class airfare, and asking if you had a funeral to attend. It's possible to expect too much even from humans, let alone AI.

<comment><USER7> ...it will know your location and it will know that many people got tickets for it already.

I think the key here is 1) evolution - as he said it will get better with time. Just like wikipedia was discarded by many intelligent people in its infancy, similarly now it may feel not so much revolutionary - but it will become something big. And 2) modularity/good design so it's easy to add "improvement" layers.

Some nodes/areas can be backed with deep AI, some don't need to. At the end you just wrap the whole thing in AI at the top to improve itself and we can slowly start calling Viv 21st century's god.

...or evil as some people will probably do. As granpa you'll tell your grandchildren how cool it was when you had to go to the market to pick flowers for your gf, now it's all automated ordering from robots growing flowers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's pretty impressive!

Maybe this isn't as big a concern as I think, but the ease of these commercial demos relies on a crucial assumption: that I am nearly completely price insensitive. I'm not a cheapskate, but I don't usually purchase the first product a vendor puts up because there's usually something better and slightly less expensive if you put in an additional minute or two into the search. But with the demos given (ordering flowers, booking hotels, etc.) it's usually a sample of 2-3 different options, and from what I've seen, usually higher end items.

Will such assistants still maintain their usefulness when I don't have the monetary pleasure and freedom of just saying "Yes" to the first option offered?

<comment><USER9> Given the open decision process (with a visual representation of the exact information and logic that went into a decision) it seems like someone could fairly easily add a "reverse sort by price" or other more complex model. Of course that is assuming a single "price-sort" function could be applied across multiple domains. If each price-sort algorithm has to be implemented and delivered as a separate model it would take a lot longer and be a lot more tedious for both developers and users.

I think the real question is -- how easy is this development process? A gui representation of the program is great, but a lot of times it is easier to deal with text if you have a well designed library. They mentioned it being like an app store, so what is in it for the developers? Selling apps, directing through your own store / affiliate links?

It does look pretty cool, but when there are at least 5 established competitors implementation is everything.

EDIT: I would like to add that this looks like a great combination of the logical analysis of soundhound, the mobility of siri, the ability to extend of facebook and alexa. It could definitely be a breakthrough. Still -- implementation.

EDIT2: Follow-up questions starting at 16 min. Launching at the end of the year, working with select developer partners toward the end of the year. "What makes it something that makes our lives better rather than makes us talk to things we don't want to talk to." A: "Developers motivated by self interest to make things work smoothly". What is that self-interested motivation? They get to sell you stuff? What do they want to sell you? The most expensive thing that fits your query -- or maybe the thing that's $5 more expensive that should sell for $20 but that will sell for $25, or $30... I agree, based on that response, it sounds like even with developer interest in the platform it won't be developer interest to give you the best product, but developer interest to give them the most money.

<comment><USER10> yeah but things can be more complex than that. If ordering flowers for my girlfriend I will never buy the cheapest one or the most expensive. Hotels are even more complex. Location matters as well as the specific room type and a lot of other things. No one wants to stay at a crummy motel. How do you handle, "I am willing to pay up to 30 a night more if I'm closer to the beach... etc"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> EDIT: added intent in the conversation

I think one thing missing from these interactions is the idea of conversation. Let me elaborate. Distilling complex tasks into a single query yields complex queries. Drill down with simple initial query requires manual input from provided results. If there was some short term memory as part of the conversation we could potentially arrive at a much clearer intent.

e.g. "Viv I want to go to San Diego this weekend. Find me some cheap flights." (Travel, San Diego, Saturday, air fare)

"No problem. How long are you planning to stay?" (return trip)

"I want to come back on Sunday night" (return trip Sunday night)

"Will you be requiring accommodations?" (air fare, hotel combo lookup)

"Yes I want to stay near the waterfront" (area for hotel, duration 1 night based on previous reply)

"Sure no problem. Will you require a car rental?" (air fare, hotel, car combo lookup)

"No that's fine" (air fare, hotel lookup only)

"Ok here are some good deals for flights and hotels on the waterfront for Saturday"

"What are my options for a morning flight?" (Morning flight on Saturday)

"These flights are in the morning" (Subset of the flights found earlier)

"How about late Friday flights?" (Friday evening flights to San Diego)

"Here are your options for a late Friday departure with the same hotel options" (new departure schedule but same hotel options, new duration of 2 nights of hotel stay)

"Show me just the flights for Friday"

"Here are just the flight options for Friday"

"Nah let's see the Saturday options again" (go back to previous criteria)

"Here are the Saturday flight and hotel options"

<comment><USER12> It's easier and faster to type all of this into expedia, without actually having to talk out loud. I don't understand the point of these systems.

<comment><USER11> Agreed if Expedia is your only source for travel plans. Rinse and repeat the process above for Travelocity, Kayak, Orbitz, Bookit, etc. Compare that to specifying it once and saying "Viv lets try to find this on Orbitz" if Viv's default choice does not have what you want and Viv just remembered the whole conversation and issued the refined intent in Orbitz.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "This is software writing itself". Welcome to the 70's.

The speaker comes across as poor in my opinion.

He's doing marketing, not informing the audience, and he's not even that interesting.

He's saying a ton of stuff which is completely unsupported by reality.

Assistants are the next paradigm shift? Have you tried to use Siri in a car? Or at all? It's a joke.

Weather examples? Show me something I use more than once a week.

Show me something actually _hard_ that requires intelligence. Show me a recommendation service which does not suck. Show me an assistant that figures out something nice to do this weekend, based on location inferred by my plane tickets, weather, my taste, and what's available.

Show me an assistant that _shops for the cheapest flowers_ , not force me to use the service of the app maker's choice.

Please, let's stop the "wow I can speak to my telephone, and it tells me the weather" bore. Please.

</comment><comment><USER14> So, is this an island parser on top of a Bayes net?

Haven't read the papers for a few decades, but I wonder how the auto generated code differs from General Problem Solver: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Problem_Solver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Problem_Solver)

Hope the above doesn't sound dismissive. Was working at company incubated at SRI. We were hand coding similar workflows. My guess is that VIV is a 10x improvement in workflow.

Be that as it may, it still seems to be constrained by Humans creating ontologies. So, may suffer scaling issues. Somewhat akin to Yahoo's Human curated websites vs Google's auto generated backrub.

<comment><USER15> Yes but they let third parties create the ontologies. If they're smart they'll do auto query optimization.

<comment><USER14> Fair point about UGC; Viv has as good a chance as all the other competitors to make it work. What do you mean by "auto query optimization"?

[EDIT] removed idle speculation

<comment><USER15> Like search engines, see a failed query followed by a successful one and map the first to the second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sort of concerned about this:

Who decides which service to use for what thing? What if I don't want to use uber for my cab but a new uber like service that my friend just started? If my friend adds an experience to viv for his service, how does viv decide which one to use? what about neutrality etc.?

<comment><USER17> I suspect that will get flushed out during their "wait and see" period of how developers use Viv. There are a couple of scenarios

1\. Viv's "experience" is integrated into existing apps. So it knows you like your friends new service because that's the App you're in. (Unlikely based on the goals discussed in the video)

2\. There are Viv "add-ons" that let you preference one over another. This sounds like the most-likely scenario if Viv is to stay neutral.

3\. It's commerce-driven. Viv decides which services are prefered based on who pays the highest for "cab/car service" searches. Basically, the current search advertising model.

#3 seems the most likely to me, because it also opens up a host of other interesting scenarios related to existing current SEO business. However, I'd love to be wrong and that it stays neutral (#2).

<comment><USER18> Viv's model of seller interaction seems to be the same as for the pre-Apple version of Siri. Viv cuts a deal with sellers to get an API so they can talk to the seller in some coherent way. They don't try to work through apps intended for humans.

<comment><USER15> Viv tries to get partners to register their API, domain specific verbs and NL training terms in Viv's back end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You can make your own "PowerShiri" in Powershell, by tapping into the .NET Speech Recognition library [0].

Having built out a novel bot this weekend [1], this became an obvious next step. The PowerShiri demo linked lets you set up a key/value table, and when Speech Recognition matches a key, it executes the Powershell command held in the value. In this way, you can issue the same command, e.g. "What is the time?" \- and receive a dynamic response. The voice output is generated by the ubiquitous Out-Speech function.

Dynamic program generation, more like dynamic query generation, is the obvious next step. Instead of generating a massive key/value table for every possible combination of commands, you treat each word as a key, then have each value generate the next set of keys.

It's both annoying and gratifying to learn a weekend project is facing the same technical challenges as a well-funded corporation.

[0] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9361594/powershell-can- sp...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9361594/powershell-can-speak-but- can-it-write-if-i-speak)

[1] [https://github.com/Gilgamech/PowerShiri/](https://github.com/Gilgamech/PowerShiri/)

</comment><comment><USER20> >The live demo went off without any major glitches

At 3:54 - "The other thing I want to note is that Siri... err ummm Viv's audible voice is something we're still working on."

<comment><USER9> Whoever owns the number 201-844-9120 would probably also disagree that there were no major glitches. Although that glitch is more with techcrunch video distribution team. These are really minor glitches for a product demonstration. Major glitches are when something with the product fails, like this one during a Windows 98 demonstration:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGLhuF3L48U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGLhuF3L48U)

<comment><USER17> I'd bet it's the Uber driver trying to get in touch for the pick-up.

Great to see a "live" demonstration of a new technology, but there are some things that should be scripted to avoid this kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Who decides what "app" answers when I want to get flowers? I bet there are tens of apps doing it currently, and users have their own preferences. Same for anything weather-related. What would be my chances as a developer to compete with the more mainstream providers? While it isn't huge now, it seems impossible with this future, where the user practically doesn't even chooses the tools she wants to use.

(sorry if the question was answered in the video and I missed it)

<comment><USER22> We're tackling a similar problem at Playa. I think it's a matter of collating services, and letting the user pick from what is important. It's half training and half availability.

I think it's great that services like Playa and Viv are working to allow smaller services both physical and digital to compete and become more discoverable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds similar to IBM Watson that generates Prolog code on-the-fly. I wonder if Viv is using Prolog behind the scenes too (behind the visual AST representation).

<comment><USER24> I was a bit pissed at the shiny marketing talk about dynamically generated programs. I wonder how new this is really or if it's just a way to appear fancy by hiding behind USPTO curtains.

<comment><USER25> I don't know much about the process of getting a patent, but at least once you have it, the whole idea is that they can't hide behind curtains. In exchange for time-limited exclusivity you have to publish how your invention works.

<comment><USER24> You do have to describe your thing but it's not that precise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well, booking hotels _their_ way has always been easy. Just open the website, see the first three search results and book one which 'looks' the best in photo (assuming you have all the money of the world). In reality, it's not that easy, there are so many parameters to consider which they haven't. Price, smoking preference, number and size of beds, cleanliness, wi-fi and its availability and speed, other amenities, parking and so much more you have to consider before deciding to get into a hotel. This personal assistant doesn't seem to do any of that. The problem is, I don't even know how can we automate or predict that because these are very personal preferences and change with each trip.

</comment><comment><USER27> Great to see they finally unveiled Viv. They've been working in stealth for a few years. Six months ago, I met the team for interview & offered a position as Mobile Architect. I declined the job for reasons unrelated to Viv. I met the technical cofounders, Adam Cheyer & Chris Brigham. It was just awesome to talking bunch of guys who made original Siri, and personally worked with Steve Jobs. You can read up on Adam, not only he's an AI God, but he's a super nice guy. If I were to bet on one AI company, they would be it. Like Kittaus eluded to, it's going to take some time to see what use cases ordinary people use for but it will be exciting. Best of luck to them.

</comment><comment><USER28> I can't help but feel bearish on any company like this that tries to exist outside of either the android or iOS integration. It's a desert without OK Google/Siri

<comment><USER29> The end of the article talks about probable acquisition by Google or Facebook. So this is probably not going to be in the desert very long.

<comment><USER30> I feel like this would be a major blow and failure on Apple's part if this team that they already acquired was bought by a competitor. I wonder what happened that led to this not being a new version of Siri.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is interesting to me because it really pulls together a number of disparate technologies to get towards the goal of being "the AI". There's nothing he talks about that's overly complicated on it's own, but integrating them all together is the key.

Once you have the voice to text (ASR) from Nuance (or any of the other companies in this space), then it's a question of properly recognizing the contextual intent. Not a trivial task, but certainly getting easier with technology available. I think the visual models displayed in the demo are fairly telling as to how they handle this. Keywords for a domain (e.g. weather) become useful to determining the intent of the speech, as well as variables used in queries, or the data returned for display to the user.

For example, if I ask a question that mentions temperature, and a time, but not a length of time, it's fairly obvious I'm asking for something in a weather domain rather than a recipe domain (and vice versa).

I'd guess the developer integrations he mentions then become a matter of defining those data points/variables for the different data source so the "AI" can build the application to execute.

It's like an enhanced API integration model. You need to know all of the input/output parameters to integrate with an API. The intent/contextual piece also uses the individual data points for the contextual intent recognition in the voice-to-text area.

The other interesting aspect is actually storing the preferences for the commerce side of things. Airlines do this already for saving preference of aisle vs window seats. They're taking things a step further to remember those types of "qualifying data" for interactions you have so they can be saved across areas (read: API calls).

I suspect there will be a ton of work on behalf of the APIs too handle data in this way too, that's what he says when it will take some time to see the direction things go in. If I opened up my existing airline travel APIs to this today, it's unlikely anyone could correctly interact in a way that would provide all of the information needed to actually book a ticket. So, there will need to be some back-and-forth communication of those missing items. If someone finds a ticket they want to book and says "order it", then viv will need a way for the API to communicate "That's great, but you also need to provide your TSA known traveler ID number". Then, because it's something an API has asked for, Viv will know it's a data point it should save for later.

Let's hope Viv has un-breakable encryption and security with all of those "personal preferences"...

</comment><comment><USER22> I pitched a very early similar idea of Playa ([http://getplaya.com/](http://getplaya.com/)) at Launch IoT Conference in front of the audience and was literally met with Jason and the panel of judges who had no idea what I was talking about.

After the pitch, I had representatives from NTT Docomo, Cisco, GE, and a few others come up to me and were interested to chat about ambient intelligence and stay in touch.

This is telling of how things are now changing and moving towards the Ambient Intelligent future.

We're still building towards this future, and would like to meet up with anyone in SF that wants to help out.

We want to put souls inside your devices. :)

[EDIT] Luckily, Robert Scoble was kind enough to give us some outstanding attention on his feed, and also hook us up with RackSpace's startup partnership program. Huge thank you to him for that.

[EDIT] We just set-up a baqqer account to be as transparent as possible as we build out the product. [https://baqqer.com/projects/playa](https://baqqer.com/projects/playa)

</comment><comment><USER31> Am I missing something, or was the demo on the Mac just a pre-recorded QuickTime video? The menu title bar said "QuickTime Player" and the title of the window was "Movie Recording".

I don't doubt it works for real, but isn't it a bit weird he didn't acknowledge the "live demo" was actually pre-recorded?

<comment><USER32> You're missing something: The way to project an iPhone onto your Mac screen with OSX is to use Quicktime movie recording mode and select your iPhone.

<comment><USER31> Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The developer experience looks interesting, looks like some kind of flow based, quite restricted coding environment? Getting that ecosystem and incentives for devs right will be the key to their success.

I've been using Amazon Alexa for a month and really struggling to find 3rd party apps or "skills" for it that I would want to use. Also, namespace pollution quickly becomes an issue when you start having thousands of apps that you didn't install but are there to use.

I think Google will dominate the voice assistant space soon as they have so many crucial services already there.

Good to have competition though!

</comment><comment><USER34> This sounds a lot like SoundHound.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, Hound has been doing interesting stuff like this for some time now. Not exactly the same, but they both get me super excited about our future devices. I can't wait for the movie HER to be real

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Any ideas on what is used to power the graph demo used about 9 minutes in ([https://youtu.be/MI07aeZqeco?t=539](https://youtu.be/MI07aeZqeco?t=539))? I haven't seen something so fast and seamless in a browser.

<comment><USER37> +1 This. Keen to know too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Live demo starts at 9:00. I am very very impressed.

One of my top complaints with Siri is inability to chain commands. If you want to modify a command you have to start over from scratch. Which often results in it misunderstanding another word. It's very, very frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER39> I always cringe when someone says 'software writing itself'. Looks to me more like software constructing a query, much like an SQL query. Not sure that is a 'computer science breakthrough' Still, the whole thing is pretty neat.

</comment><comment><USER40> I live by myself so the idea of talking when another human is not around or hearing my voice is sort of offputting. So cool to see this technology evolve, but I hardly can put Siri (an amazing technology) to good use!

<comment><USER41> Siri is often powerless. It's impossible to make Siri open a certain video on Youtube. It doesn't even know about the existence of YT, and if you don't have the music locally on your device, it says it didn't find it.

That's why I am excited for more services integrated into personal assistants. I think both Apple and Google have been stagnating. How many years have passed and Siri only just knows how to send a SMS, make a phone call, set an alarm and look up trivia. And all that with very simple phrases, that don't combine multiple requests into one or ask a more nuanced search question and filtering criteria.

Even a regular person knows it should be able to perform such tasks (as opening an app with a specific request), they are not AI, just basic integration.

Another example: go to Google Now and say "Search Beatles on Youtube". Ok, it searches for Beatles in the YT app, but doesn't start playing. Then I say "Play the first result". It goes to web search and displays pages containing "play the first result" text in them. Stupid! I was already in the YT app, asking it to "play".

So what is this? Laziness on the part of Google and Apple, that's what it is, not a difficult AI problem that can't be solved. And the API is closed so I can't add any new behavior in it. I hope Viv kicks their butts and launches them into action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What is their business model ? What about privacy for such an app that has to know everything in order to provide a smooth experience ?

</comment><comment><USER43> But will it be open source?

<comment><USER44> Given that it's a VC backed company, no.</comment></comment>


Indian firm makes carbon capture breakthrough (CO2 into baking soda) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/03/indian-firm-carbon-capture-breakthrough-carbonclean <comment><USER2> How much does this cost compared to carbon capture technologies that don't yield an industrially useful product? Isn't it possible that the latter are dramatically cheaper per kg of carbon?

<comment><USER3> And what do they do when the resale value of their baking soda falls below the cost of transporting it?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Ah – a better history - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/9seconds/ah

<comment><USER2> I often find myself remembering commands or parts of commands before or after the command I need. Now I can write a one off awk or perl script to parse history output, but I haven't gotten around to making a general tool.</comment>


Computers Faster Only for 75 More Years  - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidescience.org/research/computers_faster_only_for_75_more_years

<comment><USER2> That doesn't mean computers won't get faster, just that the features of CPUs won't be getting smaller.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is the RiceDropbox article penalized in the ranking? - <AUTHOR>

It has 1200+ upvotes in 3 hours and surely should be #1 on the page right now.. <comment><USER2> If I remember rightly, discussions that are hostile and contain lots of flaming are penalised.

<comment><USER3> This must be "comments", not "stories" I believe?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> seems like right now even this question is already penalized and doesn't make it to the frontpage... feeling sad about HN :(

<comment><USER4> If this question is penalized, it's rightly so:

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

>Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to firstname.lastname@example.com.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Monoculture and speech patterns - <AUTHOR> Ever since my first encounter with low hanging fruit, it's been clear to me that there is a certain way that people speak that they use to signal that they are part of the monoculture:
- Using verbs as nouns (ask, spend)
- Referring to the "story" of things (they have a good color story)
- Using 'sort of' and 'kind of' to avoid ownership of firm ideas while still speaking with some level of authority (We see this sort of trend)
- Using British terms (flat, tube, naff). Naff, in particular, is catching on really well now
- Vocal fry and a flat affect or sing-song cadence
So:
- do you agree that there is such a trend?
- do you participate?
- is it necessary to participate to work at startups?
- what is your perception of people who don't participate?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> When sailors refer to a rope as a line, are they also signaling that they're part of a monoculture? Or do they just need more specific terms than regular English (there are several words for various kinds of ropes: sheet, hawser, painter, ...).

It seems natural for professions to develop some specialized language. It's obviously a liability to not understand it, because you won't know what people mean. But it's not much of a liability not to use it if there is an equally precise non-jargon term.

<comment><USER3> It's probably more about signaling subordination in a dominance hierarchy than practicality.

Last time I worked in a software company was 13 years ago, and I _still_ remember what the OP is writing about. It was absolutely cringe-worthy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes. Particularly important is gesticulation, if you don't gesticulate at exactly the right silicon valley cadence you may as well not even be talking.

<comment><USER5> It's interesting that you assume the OP was talking about Silicon Valley. Many people assume that HN is centered in SV, but HN became an international community years ago. The vast majority of community members aren't headquartered in SV and don't identify with it or even particularly like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The term monoculture is an oxymoron, since if it existed we'd all share it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would argue that monocultures exist because of it's relation to other existing cultures. See:

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

That said, you are right and monoculturalism is not the right term. It is a political term at best and a charged cultural term in today's racial and cultural environment. It's too late to change the title. Sadly, the rest of my post doesn't mention the term, but the responses don't seem to address anything but the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> monoculture?

<comment><USER7> Yea, I was wondering the same thing. Best I can figure it out from context and google is that there is a silicon valley monoculture and the OP is pointing out that in addition to similar ideas they have similar speech patterns</comment></comment>


Coronavirus: Some scientists say UK virus strategy is 'risking lives' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51892402 <comment><USER3> A few ways viruses can cause long term issues:

\- You don't get immune due to strains and changes (flu)

\- You get it forever latently and it comes back from time to time (HSV)

\- malignant tissue abnormalities, Cancer, organ failure over time (some HSV strains, HEP)

\- You get immunity but if another strain hits you you bleed from all orifices and may die (dengue)

\- It stays with you forever and makes you more vulnerable to tons of other virii (Eppstein-Barr - I know, killer combo, HSV, HEP)

\- Chronic fatigue syndrome (Epstein-Barr)

\- It depletes your immune system leaving you vulnerable for life (HIV)

\- Permanent lung, liver, kidney or heart damage (SARS)

\- chronic joint and muscle pain, vision and hearing loss, abdominal pain, bleeding, malaise, and psychological problems (Ebola)

\- birth defects, chronic joint pain and inflammation (Zika)

We have NO IDEA right now if this one has such effects or interactions ... it's too early. But we have indication for several side effects from Wuhan that are being studied like permanent lung scarring and T-cell exhaustion.

So this "strategy" (They would all speak German if they used this to save the economy in 1940) is beyond madness.

Please please please do not take this lightly with a I'll get it anyway attitude. More time buys understanding, treatment, lower severity and better survival chances.

(Same reason to be cautious with rushed vaccines (well tested ones are just fine) - especially if they show up unseasonably early for election time. Read up on the Philippines dengue vaccine for the gory details)

<comment><USER4> Link to the evidence of long term issues please, or is this just scaremongering.

<comment><USER3> Long term dear, it takes months to years after recovery for 'evidence' (I assume you mean scientific studies) because that's what long term means. The Ebola studies took 2 years to conclusively determine long term effects.

There is several studies in pre-read discussing permanent lung scarring (not exactly surprising from what we know about serious cases spending weeks incubated) and two discussing t-cell exhaustion but they are not peer reviewed yet but you should have no problem locating them.

For SARS we saw significant long term ling damage and, in a statistically significant number of people, terminal, worsening lung scarring over 4 years, so given the strong similarities in the genome of Cov-SARS-2 it's a concern too... we will only know in a few years time.

Humans have the ability to learn from patterns. Many viruses have long term effects, especially if the initial infection was rough - I listed a few examples.

Now we can call this fearmongering and ignore the possibility, but that seems more like a reflexive reaction to dismiss a realistic, potentially dangerous threat than a serious addition to this conversation.

<comment><USER4> No that is the definition of scaremongering, "the spreading of frightening or ominous reports or rumours".

<comment><USER3> Isn't that exactly how the west ended up in this clusterfuck. Dismissing what happened in China as scaremongering and failing to prepare for the likelihood of global spread?

Ignoring risks we cannot personally control is a human staple and we found many ways over the years do deal with that, chiefly religion - but it does not remove the risk, it just makes us feel better about it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm really surprised at the public reaction in the UK. Many of my friends are still going to pubs and concerts like nothing is going on. Life is just continuing as normal. Feels a bit like they're being used a cannon fodder in this huge "herd immunity" gamble, because some of them will get it, and some of them will die. Personally I'm staying as isolated as I can until the worst of this is over, regardless of the official advice.

<comment> mike-cardwell "like nothing is going on" \- Most people assume they'll be fine. And they're right. Even those that get it, the vast majority will survive it, like they survive most illnesses. It's just not that scary unless you're in an at-risk category. I say this as a British male in my 30's.

I'm not changing anything unless I get ill. And then, it will only be to stay away from at-risk people and large gatherings. If I worked in an office, I'd work from home, but I work from home already. I'm certainly not going to barracade myself in my house for weeks/months.

That's just my perspective, and one which may explain why you're seeing this behaviour from other Brits.

[edit] Yeah, I thought this comment might be controversial. General response seems to be that I should be more scared than I am, and that I should do more than I am to stop the spread of the disease. I'm still not scared, and I still feel my response is proprotionate at this time.

<comment><USER6> Even young people end up in ICU like this 16 year old:

[https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/5056536/se...](https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/5056536/sehraz- breda-coronavirus-16-intensive-care-besmet-covid19)

As the classic asks: Do you feel lucky, punk?

<comment><USER7> They probably would have ended up there after catching the flu.

<comment><USER8> but they're no where nearly as likely to catch the flu as they are this virus, which no one is immune to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It will be one of the deadliest A/B tests this year.

Or, as I saw in one conversation among my friends:

\- I thought that the UK is a rational and science-driven country.

\- Yes. And it is why they've offered themselves to serve as a control group.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, was thinking the same. Even if it doesn't work as expected for UK, it would at least be a good lesson for the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I live in the UK and volunteer on the front line; current events won't stop me doing so irregardless of the risk to myself or my family. The comments here on the UK's response are disappointing to say the least and just the product of modern day hysteria. No one knows how this is going to play out, so stop pretending to have some great insight - just focus on protecting yourself, instead of spreading fear, if you are that way inclined and let the rest of us get on with handling the situation.

<comment><USER12> > No one knows how this is going to play out

It's entirely predictable how this is going to play out. Sadly, not for the best, if the current trajectory is not adjusted.

<comment><USER11> Can you cite your experience in these matters and the data from which you have come to this conclusion.. or is this just your feelings from consuming to much main stream media?

But really, I'd love to hear your opinion on how the trajectory shoud be shifted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _In an open letter, the 229 specialists in disciplines ranging from mathematics to genetics - though no leading experts in the science of the spread of diseases_

It's not clear to me why we should listen to these people over the likes of Chris Whitty. Especially as they seem to have mischaracterised comments around herd immunity, which I've only seen stated as an aspect that may help rather than the strategy (to reduce the peak).

<comment><USER14> > which I've only seen stated as

Government started talking about herd immunity as a strategy, and there's video of Boris saying this.

They've stopped saying it, and they've changed their comms, because it's such an unpalatable message and they were getting (still are getting) considerable push-back from the public.

<comment><USER15> Herd immunity isn't the strategy, it's more like an inevitable consequence that there's probably no way for European countries to avoid hitting at this point. The strategy is about how to try and minimize the deaths and destruction caused in the process of getting there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I commented on one of the other threads that I personally think this strategy is nuts. I compared it to Dr Strangelove, but really I was thinking of the beginning of "Fail Safe" when the Kissinger-like figure argues that nuclear war could be winnable for the United States.

Making a decision like this without releasing all of the data and assumptions behind the model feels unbelievably cavalier. It affects the whole world.

A couple of months into this, my lowly opinion is: give us the South Korean response, please. What I'd like to see is massive global cooperation to manufacture a billion masks, and an absurd number of tests — combined with aggressive social distancing, public education, hand sanitizer stations, etc.

It's interesting that the UK government rode to power on a wave of populism — yet are proposing a solution that requires full faith in elites, with little transparency into the data and assumptions. A very precarious time.

[edit: obviously the South Korean model requires faith in institutions as well — but to me they've been fully transparent from the start.]

<comment><USER17> >when the Kissinger-like figure argues that nuclear war could be winnable for the United States.

Minor nit: It was at least widely assumed that Groeteschele in Fail Safe (as well as Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove) was deliberately modeled on RAND Corporation military strategist Herman Kahn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't get this narrative, everybody on the planet earth is currently relying on "heard immunity".

What they don't agree on is about measures to take, which is two-dimentional slider (time, social distancing) that outputs multidimentional output of - time, age group death rate/absolute count, nhs capacity, economic impact, heard immunity, retransmission etc.

On one side I'm impressed by the world's rapid response.

On the other hand I'm surprised how poor published scientific modeling/decision making is. We know pretty much all of parameters we need to know by now. Making an online model should be as easy as interview task for data scientist. And we have greatest minds focusing/ready to dedicate time to it. Why are we doing fruitless political arguments? Just share the model and data on github. Refine it every day with new data.

I'd start with real estimated infection counts (they can be derived from official confirmed infection counts by mapping on age weighted symptoms that require hospitalisation - those people are tested only plus incubation period estimated population - those people will not be tested but they are infected).

Any current estimate I've seen seems to lag in time if you take under account incubation period (4d) and real estimated infection count vs confimed cases (5x+).

We need plots for next 3 years or so with breakthrough placeholders - ie. it is highly unlikely that we won't have cure at some level to deal with it in 3 years from now.

It is highly speculative game if you estimate further in the future, yes, but medium term there should be obvious optimal decision.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm guessing that the UK has decided this can't be practically contained, that even total shutdown will only push it back a couple of months with huge cost. As such they are just going to accept mass casualties.

See figure 4 at the bottom of this preprint from one of the UK research groups about the tactics in Wuhan:

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033050v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033050v1.full.pdf+html)

they appear to be modeling here that even a total shutdown for a month, or for two months, will still lead to a similar epidemic.

I think that similar thinking is driving the UK policy but that's just a guess.

I wrote a blog post trying to predict the impact of this virus on Ireland. The fatality rates look grim:

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com/predicting-the-impact-of- cor...](https://email@example.com/predicting-the-impact-of-coronovirus- on-ireland-bff1b6d00d6a)

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/andrew-sullivan- real...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/andrew-sullivan-reality- arrives-to-the-trump-era.html)

This is a really insightful article from Andrew Sullivan where he compares the initial reaction to the Coronavirus to the initial reactions to AIDS. For too long the homosexual community was in denial about the level of risk. The wanted to think that it would blow over, and no dramatic changes were needed.

Sullivan sees the echos now. A lot of people are still determined to downplay it, as though it proves some sort of moral victory over the people stocking up on toilet paper. The reality is that things may not go back to 'normal' for a long time.

</comment><comment> m-i-l The bottom line is that every virus strategy is going to be "risking lives". From the "do nothing and hope it goes away" strategy to the "shut everything down and hope it goes away" strategy, through all the "flattening the curve" strategies in between, they're all going to be risking lives, given no-one really knows how this is going to work out.

But one thing I do know is that now is not the time for political grandstanding or international conflict. We're all in this together as a planet, and our best chance of getting through it is by working together.

And I also know I would prefer to listen to a group of people who have spent their careers specialising in studying how infectious diseases spread. As the original article says, this list has "no leading experts in the science of the spread of diseases", and if anyone has taken the time to look at the list it is largely maths PhD students and the like. Which I guess is still better than the Silicon Valley charlatans and wannabe social media influencers who seem to be getting a disturbingly uncharacteristic amount of airtime on HN at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER21> > 229 specialists in disciplines ranging from mathematics to genetics - <USER2> > _no leading experts in the science of the spread of diseases_

<comment><USER22> Here's what you are asking for though USA, [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/epidem...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/epidemiologist- britain-herd-immunity-coronavirus-covid-19)

<comment><USER21> > Nobody should be under the illusion that this is something that can be > dodged through somehow manipulating a virus that we are only beginning to > understand. This will not pass you by; this is not a tornado, it is a > hurricane.

Isn't this exactly what the UK strategy amounts to? An acknowledgement that the pandemic can only mitigated at this point? It seems to me that those who are in the "shut down everything" camp are under the illusion that the virus can be stopped.

<comment><USER23> Not stopped, no. Slowed. Give the healthcare system a chance to deal with those that are coming in, without being overwhelmed. Give the researchers a chance to come up with an immunity shot. Time is our friend in this situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I live in Mexico where the government has been heavily criticized for not making more tests even to people with symptoms. They are taking very tepid measures. Schools will close by the end of next week and there will be recommended social distancing measures starting in about 10 days.

This weekend there is a huge festival in Mexico City with about 70k assistants every day (Vive Latino). Monday is a national holiday so millions of Mexicans are traveling all over the country.

Mexico City has +20M people and a very fragile public health system. Every month only the underground moves 130M passengers. I hope I'm wrong on this but I fear this will be one of the worse impacted cities on Earth. Thankfully we do not live there but we've been on self imposed lockdown for about a week anyway.

</comment><comment><USER25> They probably just ran the numbers and discovered they'd be risking fewer lives if they did what they are doing instead of shutting down their economy indefinitely. The latter, at a large enough scale, can be quite deadly too.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have been wondering about this. If health experts are saying it's inevitable that a large portion of the population is going to be infected with the virus then why not limit isolation to those most at risk.

<comment><USER27> I think I'm with you. I don't think it can be contained anymore.

Even if it seems gone, it can pop up and we go on lockdown again?

I wonder if the lockdown people are anti-math.

<comment><USER12> It's the anti-lockdown people that are anti-math. Any reasonable person can see that the lethality of the virus is much worse when the healthcare system is saturated. If you accept this, then the only solution is to reduce the transmission rate to reduce saturation of the healthcare system, i.e. "flatten the curve".

<comment><USER28> I think the point of the UK strategy is doing such a thing early doesn't help much: if you bring in such measures while the number of cases is small, you'll delay the peak but it won't reduce it much unless you can sustain it all the way through, and by increasing the time you're trying to sustain it you run the risk it won't be sustainable.

<comment><USER29> That's dubious, and why many people have been calling on the UK to expose their analysis to peer review.

Since early contagion is an exponential process the rate of growth (and all higher derivatives) also grows exponentially along with the number of infected. As a result, "as early as possible" also ends up being the correct time to maximally spread out the peak with the least intrusive countermeasures.

In order to conclude that delaying mitigations will do a better job of reducing the peak they must be making some highly novel assumptions. ... or just not actually reasoning about it formally at all and instead depending on intuition which is often not particularly accurate for exponential processes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The problem is more than pure health issues.

By choosing these strategies, the UK assures that no other country will allow UK citizens into its borders a long time after the first wave of the virus passed.

</comment><comment><USER31> Taleb opinion about this:

UK Policy is a speculative lunacy.

Playing with the toy standard epidemiological SIR model. We have no idea how model parameters cause a yuuuge variation in ourcomes. We don't even know the central parameters/whether stochastic. Try to add perturbations for "herd immunity".

[https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1239171413342289921?s=19](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1239171413342289921?s=19)

</comment><comment><USER32> Years ago I got the flu very bad when I was healthy. I thought I was going to die.

Most of the time your body will fight the flu, but when you get it bad it is very serious.

I cannot imagine why you would do this to your citizens. Depending on how bad they get it even young healthy people will die.

<comment><USER33> Everyone is going to get coronavirus regardless (the isolation measures just slow it down, not stop it). The UK calculated it is better for its citizens to go through that now, outside normal flu season when hospitals get more busy.

And as others pointed out, the economic impact is minimized. Crashing the economy also has bad health effects.

<comment><USER34> Depending on the rate of infection, there might be time for 20-80% of the population to be vaccinated before being infected.

Whatever the number, it would be nice to save as many lives and as much potential long-term damage to people as possible.

<comment><USER33> There is no vaccine, and won't be for many years (if at all).

<comment><USER34> There is no vaccine. No one in the world knows when, or if, there will be one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The bigger problem is people coming from the UK are testing positive... They're imposing this "plan" on everyone else without a care.

</comment><comment><USER36> There's one way this strategy would work:

If you could hermetically seal all of your above 60 population for 4 months.

I guess that's what they'll attempt.

<comment><USER3> 60% would be wishful thinking given the R0 we are seeing. More like 80-90%

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Sweden is also taking similar measures

</comment><comment><USER38> From what I gathered from actual epidemiologists, the main issue isn't who takes the grandest of stands on this the day of reckoning, but rather, who takes what LONG-TERM action? Can you really shut down your economy, realistically, for more than a few weeks? The virus is sure to survive whatever countermeasures you put in its path.

Flattening the curve is the idea, so that health services can deal with the critically ill. That means EVERYONE HAS TO LIMIT THEIR CONTACT, as much as possible.

If you thought capitalist society was good at distributing goods, just look at what happened to hand sanitizer. Everybody needs it now, yet it has been bought up by the few that got to it.

<comment><USER39> As far as I understand, the UK's strategy is essentially steepening the curve into one huge but thin peak, in order to minimize the time countermeasures have to be in place - which is the exact opposite of what "flattening the curve" is about.

<comment><USER28> That doesn't seem like what they were proposing. From what I saw the idea was to flatten the curve at the point it is steepest, instead of trying to flatten it while it's still pretty flat, which just increases the time you need to keep countermeasures in place (because delaying only helps a little: it's very unlikely you can delay until a vaccine is developed, the main benefit of a few months delay is the NHS has less of its regular winter workload to deal with, which is higher than in summer).

<comment><USER40> Ouch. Good luck trying to get the timing right.

The earlier you start with countermeasures, the longer you can try them and see how they affect the spread rate. If you wait to impose them at the last minute, you will have to choose erring on too expensive measures or on letting your people die.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> (edit: removed my comment because it was unnecessary)

<comment><USER42> typo: I think you meant: some "scientists" :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Whether you think this is crazy or not depends on whether you share the premise this strategy is based on: namely that there is no solution which prevents widespread infection and that all quarantine measures are no more than temporary and might be damaging if they push a second peak into the winter.

The plan is to lockdown the vulnerable and let the virus run its course through the rest of society. In this scenario you think(/hope) that the people not locked down only get mild versions of the disease and so don't require hospitalisation. You come out the other side with herd immunity which (again you hope) stops the disease from gaining a foothold again.

Lots of unknowns, of course, but if your starting point is complete infection of the population is inevitable then it doesn't seem necessarily any riskier than other methods and has the merit of being quicker if nothing else. If you think complete infection is preventable then it looks reckless at best, and a borderline genocide at worst.

</comment><comment> globular-toast Mathematics professors know as much about the spread of disease as anyone else here.

The UK is taking measures. The public has been educated and told to stay at home if they show symptoms. If people were uneducated they'd be at work with a slight cough spreading it around. There's a strong social stigma in the UK to not take absence due to a cold. So this is a big deal.

At the end of the day, there's no evidence that the measures other countries are taking will work either. There is a strong argument that closing schools will impact the NHS, even though children aren't very at risk. Other countries are essentially on lockdown indefinitely right now because none of the isolated people have been exposed.

<comment><USER44> > There is a strong argument that closing schools will impact the NHS, even > though children aren't very at risk.

This is a complete moot point. Other countries have implemented free childcare for healthcare workers when schools are shut. There is no reason why the UK cannot do this for NHS staff.

And because children are not at risk of developing serious symptoms, they can be a huge reservoir for the virus, which then infects the middle-aged and elderly.

<comment> globular-toast > Other countries have implemented free childcare for healthcare workers when > schools are shut. There is no reason why the UK cannot do this for NHS > staff.

Other countries haven't shown evidence that their approach is more effective. The UK solution is to not close schools.

<comment><USER29> What has been shown however, is that for sars-cov-2 that young people are asymptomatic carriers at much higher rates than for other infections. And what has also been shown is that the R0 for other respiratory infections is tremendously higher in schools than in the general population.

Though it has not been proven that schools are a hotbed of contagion for sars- cov-2, there is a lot of reason to expect them to be and little reason to expect that they aren't.

<comment><USER4> An argument against closing the schools is that they will be looked after by their grandparents.

<comment><USER44> There's already some data regarding this point, because we have countries that have done this early like Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea and none of them have reported this as a major factor in the known cases.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Eve Online and Dust 514's Groundbreaking Cross-Platform Interactivity - <AUTHOR> http://www.thetibcoblog.com/2013/03/30/eve-online-and-dust-514s-groundbreaking-cross-platform-interactivity/

<comment><USER2> CCP is a remarkably innovative game company. Eve Online is now pretty much unique in being an MMO where the fun content comes from interacting with other players, not running through content designed by the game company. The game has uniquely good crafting and economics systems. The technology is amazing, from the massive single cluster server to the application of Stackless Python.

And the Dust 514 integration is interesting too. The actual interaction between the two games is pretty thin; some occasional big events delivered asynchronously. But it's all set in the same environment and in theory player actions in one game could affect the other. I'd love to see more of this kind of innovation in online game design.

</comment><comment><USER3> Title is attractive, but the article itself isn't saying much, unfortunately. CCP's own developer blog is a more interesting read. Also not sure what TIBCO is trying to get out of this.

Also, writing a blog about you going to write a blog isn't a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER4> While it's an amazing concept and I really want to like it, it's actually a terrible game. There's literally no assurance against spawncamping and the UI is extremely cluttered, among other things.

<comment><USER5> That's how you tell it's in the eve universe!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd play Dust if it came to another platform but I don't own a PS3 so I'm out of luck...and I can't lose my life to EVE Online again.

CCP has done amazing work with their game and proven over and over again they're willing to take risks and innovate the genre.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Unwittingly, CCP has created a shining example of how integration powers IT innovation, connects platforms and users, as well as increases real-time decision-making and goal execution."

That's a bit of a stretch. IT trying to find meaning.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you've not played 514, I'd recommend giving it a go. It's definitely in beta, and there's plenty of glitches and bugs but once you get past those it's a fantastically interesting game.

Sometimes you forget you're playing in the Eve universe until someone calls in a strike from a vessel being controlled either inside the game (interesting, but boring) or by someone playing the actual Eve Online MMO.</comment>


Graphs and Geometry (2010) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.cs.elte.hu/~lovasz/bookxx/geomgraphbook/geombook2019.01.11.pdf <comment><USER2> There's some really interesting research going on in the deep learning world where they are trying to find the best way to represent graphs in vector space.

For example hyperbolic embeddings for trees: [https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/2018/03/19/hyperbolics/](https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/2018/03/19/hyperbolics/)

I wonder if this book will be useful for that purpose? (the term "vector labeling" came up a few hundred times but I am not sure if that's the same thing)

</comment><comment><USER3> Once I saw the author's name I saved, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem i have with graph databases in geometry is that you have to keep track of all of the angles. Especially for stuff like chemistry where part of the shape can rotate independently from the rest of the shape.

<comment><USER5> The pdf is about representing graphs with geometry, not representing geometry with graphs.

<comment><USER6> RocketSyntax is talking about representing graphs with geometry too, right?</comment></comment></comment>


All that You Would Want to know About FB Graph Search - <AUTHOR> http://lurnq.com/lesson/all-that-you-would-want-to-know-about-fb-graph-search/ An exhaustive article on the Facebook Graph Search covering all aspects including dating, advertising, entertainment, recommendations, recruiting, the war with Google, privacy concerns, drawbacks and more. <comment><USER2> As far as I can tell this is just a link to a discussion page. Why not have the discussion on HN?

This is the second LurnQ link I've seen on HN in a few days. I'm not quite sure what LurnQ is. It claims to be an educational tool but the things I've seen it's just a cross between StackExchange and a blog. And their facebook and twitter pages appear to have nothing to do with the product or anything educational.

<comment><USER3> Hey.Thanks for noticing our product. Sorry about our FBpage and Twitterpage. Our social media intern went berserk :)

LurnQ is a community of learners and teachers. Users can create lessons on topics they have understanding of for the benefit of other learners.

Its still early days at LurnQ and it still a work in progress. We will be competing with initiatives like learni.st but we r still experimenting in a way.

<comment><USER4> The site looks more like a tech blog (like techcrunch etc. but still in its nascent stages) than an online learning platform. The content does not match up to the standards of what you will call education. It has a long way to go before it justifies being an online learning platform...

<comment><USER3> True. We are currently focussing on getting good teachers on board. Therefore the look. And yes we are not yet what you would call a platform. Any changes in design that you suggest?

<comment><USER2> If you really want feedback, then I think the name 'LurnQ' is a very bad name for an educational website. I assume you are mis-spelling "learn", which just feels wrong for education (assuming you are trying to increase education!). If this is not what the name means, I apologise.

I understand that the twitter and facebook feeds may be full of content that you did not want, but you have not deleted it.

And all the content I have seen on there just does not belong on an education site at all: maybe I have a different idea of what 'education' means, but all of the content I have seen just doesn't match, in my opinion.

As for the format, it looks like a blog entry followed by blog-style replies. Which is mean to be the teacher? The format itself is confusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The data is simply too dirty to be useful for anything other than novelty searches, and possibly searches involving the 1%(?) of people that actually put their life graph on FB.

Maybe next step is FB adds user web surfing data (aggregated?, permission- based?) but hard to see how FB could pull that off?

<comment><USER4> I guess they are counting on the premise that in future people who have their info public on facebook will increase... Given the things they have accomplished so far and the amount of investment that has gone into facebook, It will not be surprising if someday FB does add user web surfing data... (permission-based of course)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, your comments intrigued me and I did a little research about the same. I've added another section to the article and tried to answer these questions. Please let me know what you think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Technicaly i think that's a bright idea instead of searching websites like google you search directly real people's data , now for the privacy part if you are concerned about it , quit facebook asap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I do realize that quitting Facebook is always an option. However there are other concerns. In theory, searching real people's data, as you put it, seems quite useful, however the reliability of the data is in question here.</comment></comment>


Two Huge Companies Betting On Firefox OS - <AUTHOR> http://fastcolabs.com/3024539/screw-android-here-are-two-huge-companies-betting-on-firefox-os

<comment><USER3> I have used G1 and have ZTE Firefox OS phone. G1 performed better 5 years back compared to ZTE Firefox OS phone today.

As much as everyone of us want Firefox OS win, It has long way to go in a market that is already dominated by Big Players with great talent and motivation to win it.

<comment><USER4> _everyone of us want Firefox OS (to) win_

We do?

I'm not sure that I care one way or another. Does the device work as expected? Does it do useful things? Does it do the fun things that I actually want it to do?

Then I don't care much one way or another.

On a related but possibly tangential digression, I'm showing my age, yes, but I want my TV to be a TV - a device for showing for moving pictures provided via a suitably optimized device of another ilk (I'm quite happy to accept the second function of OTA tuning, just 'coz it's pretty much always there and saves me buying another device - what with having cancelled cable about 18 months ago).

So I neither want nor need it to have an OS.

There's an AppleTV sitting below my TV. It has an OS. I don't give a damn - <USER2> works pretty darned well, thanks.

I don't know what's inside my receiver to give it Internet capabilities, and don't care - I use them very little, when my 20 year old receiver died, I bought the best value receiver that had the features I wanted: 7.1, AM, FM, CD in, Aux in.... Yeah, that was about it. AirPlay is nice, glad to have it, use it occasionally, didn't want or need it, but its presence was no deal breaker. Internet radio? Don't use it at all. DLNA? Didn't even know what it was when I bought the thing. Don't use it at all right now (don't have a media server, why would I want one? I have Netflix and AppleTV and all of our Airs can stream to AppleTV directly).

I never want to buy or receive media again, they take up space, gather dust. I'll read books when they are given to me, or when they are the best form for the content, e.g., books that are image-heavy, but otherwise Google Play Books serves me quite well, thank you.

Did I mention OS in any of that? Hmm, nope.

Don't know. Don't care.

And the OS won't prevent any of the ills that come with any of the above, e.g., DRM-enabled-yank-back, unless you the user are going to pirate to get around the DRM.

Technology cannot solve that problem, only the law and the market can, and they need us - all of us - to realize that technology is not the solution and to get out there in front of the issue and agitate for changes in the law and market.

Why sure I care which OS wins? I'm pretty sure I don't. But I am willing to entertain serious answers to a serious question. Fire away.

<comment><USER5>
        Does the device work as expected? Does it do useful
        things? Does it do the fun things that I actually want
        it to do?

Those aren't the only questions that people can ask about a phone or a mobile OS. I particularly would like a mobile OS that isn't tied to an advertising company (Google) and isn't a black box (iPhone). I don't even have full comfort over everything running on my Android device. I have no way of knowing which companies can access the data on that device and the ways with which they can access it.

If those are things you don't care about then yea, you certainly shouldn't care if FirefoxOS "wins". However, them "winning" shouldn't be looked at as them gaining dominant market share in mobile OSes, but rather (a) the open web prevailing and gaining development resources, (b) having a legitimate option for people who DO care about what software is running on their devices.

<comment><USER6> > I particularly would like a mobile OS that isn't tied to an advertising > company (Google) and isn't a black box (iPhone).

[http://source.android.com/](http://source.android.com/) [http://www.cyanogenmod.org/](http://www.cyanogenmod.org/)

Plenty of choices of Android builds that have no closed-source Google code whatsoever.

> I don't even have full comfort over everything running on my Android device. > I have no way of knowing which companies can access the data on that device > and the ways with which they can access it.

That has nothing whatsoever to do with the OS. You think just because it's Firefox OS suddenly OEMs are going to open source their drivers, ship unlocked bootloaders, etc...? If so, I've got a bridge to sell you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mozilla vs Google competition is always a lot better than Google monopoly on open-source OS market.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would just like to say that getting paid to work on Firefox OS all day long is my dream job.

If there are any Firefox OS devs reading, I would love to chat about what I should be doing now to improve my chances of joining the team towards the end of the year.

</comment><comment><USER9> As a current owner of a Panasonic "smart" TV, replacing the current OS with literally ANYTHING would be an improvement.

When it's not being annoyingly convoluted to operate, it's being horribly _slow_ to operate. The Youtube app looks like what happens when management signs off on the design as static mockups - it's gorgeous on screen, but scrolling is a laggy mess. Using the search function (complete with a "keyboard" that is 1D) is so clunky that even the app encourages you to pair your smartphone to avoid it.

</comment><comment> V-2 The underdogs are sort of in the same boat: Firefox, Ubuntu and Tizen... if apps developed with HTML5 are cross-platform (well, easily portable between the three), it would certainly be a good booster.

On the other hand if there's no talks carried out behind the scenes adressing this aspect, it's not a good portent.

</comment><comment><USER10> Submission title originally matched the linked article's headline. De- editorialization?

</comment><comment><USER11> > Developing an app for Firefox OS really is as simple as building an HTML5 > web app.

Building a high quality HTML5 web app is hard and complicated.

> Despite its many benefits, there still just isn't a whole lot of excitement > for the Firefox OS. That may change though if LG, ZTE, or especially > Panasonic can create compelling hardware to show off the open source > software.

Despite what benefits? What does Firefox OS do better than everybody else? If Mozilla wants consumers to adopt it's OS, it should focus on features that actually matter to users, otherwise, it will be just a platform for vendor/carrier crapware.

</comment><comment><USER12> The ZTE Open is noticeably better/faster/more responsive after manually installing the FFOS 1.1 update.

Not keeping me from giving it to a friend, though - I was not as impressed with FFOS as I thought I would be.

</comment><comment><USER13> > On the phone front, LG showed off its entry level phone, the Fireweb

Interesting, given that LG just announced WebOs on their TVs: [http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-01-06/lg-unveils- inter...](http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-01-06/lg-unveils-internet- connected-tv-running-webos-acquired-from-hp)

<comment><USER14> I have to wonder if there's any level of compatibility between Firefox OS and webOS. The app development process for both would be pretty similar, I'd imagine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Despite its many benefits, there still just isn't a whole lot of excitement > for the Firefox OS.

What are its benefits other than not being controlled by Apple, Google, or Microsoft?

The only benefit the author cites is HTML5 apps which can be built for any OS using a variety of different platforms.

<comment><USER16> You can't really use HTML5 and feel like a native app on iOS at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As someone has written before, Microsoft caught the last train with its WP. It's too late for non-revolutionary mobile OS to win a reasonable share of market (and no, crappy ubiquitous script language is not a revolution).

</comment><comment><USER18> Any hope of using this phone in America with Sprint?</comment>


The Use of Name Spaces in Plan 9 (1993) - vezzy-fnord http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~mint/Library/Plan9/names.html <comment><AUTHOR> I've been reading about Plan 9 lately but I am still missing why exactly (or more-or-less) Plan 9 (and Research Unix, similarly) fell out? From what I've read it seems like the lack of ubiquity forced the Plan 9 guys out of Plan 9 and back into Ubuntu or OpenBSD. From their discussions of rc, etc it seemed like the lack of users caused them to move away from it until it just completely fell apart... But I'm not sure?

And where is Plan 9 now? If I want to get involved should I look into 9front? Inferno? Or this guys github mirror [0] because the Plan 9 website is down?

I understand these are some smart guys, but the cat-v website makes a ton of divisive statements and "leaves it as an exercise to the reader" to figure out why they hold these views. The trolling isn't awful, but in general, I'm having a really tough time fighting my way into the Plan 9 circle.

How have you dealt with this? Aside from my initial (more historical) question, any suggestions for getting started? Is it even worth getting familiar with Plan 9 or rc or acme or sam or the plethora of ported tools? Or should I just wait until Russ Cox and Rob Pike come up with a production-ready OS?

No disrespect meant, just have a lot of questions.

[0] - [https://github.com/0intro/plan9](https://github.com/0intro/plan9)

<comment><USER2> Plan 9 didn't catch on for a lot of reasons -- bad licensing, bad marketing, being too different from unix which was "good enough", etc. The fact that your average _nix sysadmin, who can manage pretty well between BSDs, Linux, AIX, HPUX, etc, would be utterly puzzled when given the task of managing a plan 9 system, probably discouraged a lot of businesses from adopting it.

If you are not married to your current editor of choice, give Acme a try -- it's quite different, but I've been using it as my primary for about 5 years (I write mostly write C, Bash, Python, Go, Puppet. Hesitant to use it for more editor-dependent languages like Java and C#), and I've been very happy with it. It's available for Linux, _BSD, and OS X as part of plan9port. For me, secret to being productive in Acme was learning to write my own plumbing rules, which let you turn plain text into hyperlinks based on pattern matching.

Plan 9 does not have to be a purely historical endeavor; If you manage to write a 9P file server, you can actually mount it on other OSes, either through the native 9P support in the Linux kernel, or through a wrapper program like 9pfuse. For example, I recently saw a 9P file server that turned jira into a file tree of tickets that you could edit with a text editor.

<comment><USER3> With the garbage ticketing systems I am used to, JIRA as a file tree, 9p or FUSE on Linux/OSX, has me almost aroused.

People wonder why I cannot do things fast in their GUI world, and then I show them a bash script that obviates 10x per page operation filing a ticket, and then they do not understand, but respect my annoyance at the "user-friendly" way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Imagine what might happen if HN spent as much time maintaining Plan 9 as we spend talking about it.

<comment><USER5> Funny, I was thinking the same thing. I think that's because there were two mentions of Plan 9 in one day. Otherwise, we only see it every few days or so.

<comment> vezzy-fnord I was inspired by one of the users' puzzlement over Plan 9 over at the Scheme 9 interpreter thread to post this paper, since it explains the core concept of per-process namespaces.

And since no one else had done so before, bafflingly.

Also keep in mind that Plan 9 has involved significantly since the publication date. 8 1/2 and WORM have been superseded by rio and Venti, the 9P protocol is a bit more extensive, ndb and /net plus the auth subsystem have become more prominent since then, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> this paper still reads revolutionary now, but imagine how it felt to read it in 1993 and compare it with your average "system" either at home or at work.

windows for workgroups was released the same year, while we were struggling to set up IPX networks to play doom between two machines at home...

<comment><USER7> The early 90s had a lot of interesting OS theory work going on. Andrew S Tanenbaum, of Minix fame, was working on Amoeba at the same time, which also was designed to present network transparency to the end user. Sprite was another, which also offered things like seamless process migration.

But, it all stopped. Research budgets dried up, the computer got bigger than any one OS team could handle, and some OS out of Finland came in and scooped up all the mindshare. Since then, we've been stumbling in the dark, using scant shards of the tools they made, like python, with overall systems not much better than what they have. Lispers talk of the AI Winter, but the ongoing OS Winter is far, far worse in terms of the absolute stagnation of an entire force of society. We really do deserve better than what we have now.

<comment><USER8> My exact sentiment.

Earlier this week there was a thread on HN about Taos, another very interesting OS from that time.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607)

Today, with multicore, heterogeneous cores, a huge range of communication types, IoT and the physical world becoming connected from the tiniest of pieces up to the largest structures, there should be ample areas where OS research could find interesting challenges and solve problems.

The most interesting I've seen in a few years is the library OS work from MSR. But coming from Oberon, the most interesting feat was doing it to Windows and get it to work. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to become part of Windows.

To be fair though, the amount of virtualization tech developed the last decade could be perceived as OS related.

One professor I met once claimed that the Mach OS, micro kernels was the bane of OS research. Suddenly there was an OS easy enough to work on for a Phd to test implement a feature and get a degree.

<comment><USER9> The library OS work from MSR has fed into Windows Nano, so will be a shipping product soon.

The revivial in systems work has already started, and there is a lot going on eg see some of the talks in [1]. Projects like CHERI show you can do research on a real production OS (FreeBSD) not a toy one, while SeL4 shows you can even do correctness proofs on a small OS. Unikernels and other library OS projects and performance oriented projects are putting what was system code into userspace where it can be iterated faster, and moving to high level and scripting languages. Comtainers and microservices are causing a huge rethink of the monolithic architectures too.

[1] [http://operatingsystems.io/](http://operatingsystems.io/)

<comment> vezzy-fnord seL4 is great, but it's still an incremental evolution. L4 has been a research interest for a couple of decades now (some Japanese students even ported Plan 9 on top of L4), so something like a formally verified microkernel was long coming.

CheriBSD is more of a hardware research platform. We've had capability-based hardware and similar protection schemes for decades, but they never caught on.

Containers are an absolute disappointment the way they were popularized with Docker, and I think it's naive to assume that "microservices" are anything but a buzzword. The microservice architecture itself is exceptionally old and basically a reapplication of OO principles to high-level software components.

Unikernels and libOS are kind of interesting, though.

<comment><USER10> seL4 isn't supposed to be innovative: it's supposed to be verified correct to a higher level than EAL7. It seems to have succeeded. Go to Genode.org to see innovation in L4 space, theirs and others'.

I agree on containers and microservices. IT rarely learns the good lessons of the past but often repeats its failures. The first good containers were Burrough's apps where they compiled source against a good API with checks at interface level (compile-time & runtime) with full reuse of code in memory to avoid duplication. Hardware-enforced, optional isolation & duplication if you wanted a brick wall. _That_ has both an efficiency and security argument. This new shit might be an improvement on typical Windows or UNIX/Linux deployment but seems to be improving in wrong direction.

Best example is still them standardizing on complicated HTTP- and XML-based middleware instead of simpler formats (eg s-expressions) with a grammar I can auto-generate w/ validation checks on TCP/UDP-based middleware which I can also auto-generate w/ validation checks. Designing robust, efficient solutions with mainstream stuff is like walking through a friggin' minefield of problems.... where it can even be done! Starting to think they're all closet masochists...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone that likes Plan 9 should also look at Amoeba [1] and Globe [2]. Amoeba did a lot of interesting work that could be considered when doing a modern, Plan9-like effort. Globe did for WAN's what Amoeba tried to do for LAN's. I had hoped solutions like Globe would get more traction given Globe applications would be _way better_ than upcoming Web applications. Globe team even proved it by doing Web on top of their own stuff: doing Web better than Web lol. Unfortunately, the mainstream led us down a path resulting in trying to accelerate Web applications powered by protocols from time-sharing days on monolithic UNIX and Windows OS's. A little less fun...

[1] [http://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/amoeba/amoeba.html](http://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/amoeba/amoeba.html)

[2] [http://www.cs.vu.nl/~philip/globe/](http://www.cs.vu.nl/~philip/globe/)

<comment> vezzy-fnord Amoeba indeed had cool ideas, like most things A.S. Tanenbaum has worked on, but I always thought Sprite was more novel.

I haven't looked into Amoeba too deeply, I must admit, but other than its support for network transparency and single system imaging from heterogenous machines, I don't think it's very Plan 9-ish at all.

<comment><USER10> I'm glad you brought Sprite up. Been meaning to look at it closely. Far as Amboeba vs Plan 9, that was intentional on my part: get HN readers seeing something a bit different that happened in the same field. Probably just phrased the comment badly again (sigh).

Sprite homepage for HN readers following along:

[http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/sprite/spr...](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/sprite/sprite.html)

Edit to add: The retrospective is definitely worth reading. I think most administrators, to this day, have it harder in some ways than people running Sprite due to their clever design choices in networking, storage, and single- system-image.</comment></comment></comment>