The Legend of Nintendo - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-21/how-nintendo-s-switch-helped-the-japanese-gaming-giant-win-again <comment><USER2> >When it was Furukawa's turn to speak, he noted that Nintendo makes "playthings, not necessities" and that if consumers stop finding its products compelling, the company could be swiftly forgotten.

Never. Never. A thousand times never.

Some experiences are just fond memories. Others are formative. For me, getting 120 stars, defeating Ganondorf, unlocking Mewtwo, throwing green polka-dotted eggs-- those moments rank among the most defining times of my youth. More than Disney, Youtube, TV or any other entertainment company, Nintendo was there for me, and there for my friends.

Happy or sad, when I was alone, I'd adventure in the rolling slopes of the Mushroom Kingdom. When I was with friends, we'd obliviate one another in a final destination. And when we were nowhere near our consoles, we'd argue about our escapades and the "strats".

Starcraft, Half Life, Age of Empires, and the like are all great, amazing games, and I love them so. But Nintendo has my childhood. Through-and-through.

It would be unfortunate if they go down the path of Sega and and ruin their franchises.

But I will cherish the memories they gave me. And I will never forget them.

<comment><USER3> For a 128-year-old company, it could take two generations passing away for them to be forgotten and it'd still be swift by their measure.

<comment><USER4> The best old movies will live forever thanks to the lists from AFI, BFI, etc.

Eventually we'll likely have better versions of things like this: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_consider...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered_the_best)

(Right now it's still missing NetHack and a bunch of other basic stuff.)

<comment><USER5> Notice the number of games considered the best per year. Late 1990s and early 2000s have a bunch. Are people making lesser games nowadays? Or the stakes have increased?

<comment><USER6> Look at the sources. Only 2 are from earlier than 2003. This list is driven primarily by nostalgia (and perhaps, cynically, secondarily by marketing budgets).

It's rare that something will be declared "best ever" while it is still contemporary. It usually takes a little time to figure that out.

<comment><USER7> It's a lot harder to stand out from the crowd these days. You can have a mechanic that does something perfect that makes your game the best among a sea of 20 clones, but rarely in this era are you going to find a game on an island alone that makes it shine like a Mario 64 or Grand Theft Auto III. Studios are (and to no fault of their one) making incremental improvements to previous titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find it amazing that, to detect hand and leg movement, the Vive and Oculus teams had to do so much on coming up with expensive sensors and configurations. These systems require the need for a dedicated room, which has been setup basically by experts.

Nintendo delivers 80% of the experience and 100% of the fun with an IR camera (already in the switch) and some $4 cardboard they sell for $80. And it is portable!

While the better sensors will definitely win in the long run, this is one of the best instances of engineering simplicity and "perfect being the enemy of good enough". It's hard to be anything but speechless.

<comment><USER9> It looks like almost everyone that replied to your comment completely missed the point, but understanding the difference between technology and fun is exactly why Nintendo can be both the most acclaimed game developer and a money-making business.

And it's not like they even try to keep quiet about their philosophy; Gunpei Yokoi called it "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology" (枯れた技術の水平思考) and wrote a book about it.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_with_Withered_Technology)

<comment><USER10> I don't think anyone missed the point, it's just a nonsensical comparison. The implication is that Vive and Oculus foolhardily over complicated their solution to the controller tracking problem, and Nintendo did the same thing much simpler. (The space pen vs Russian pencil)

But they are doing entirely different things. Labo is cool, but is entirely unrelated to VR tracking technology.

<comment><USER11> > The implication is that Vive and Oculus foolhardily over complicated their > solution to the controller tracking problem, and Nintendo did the same thing > much simpler.

You just missed the point again. That's not the implication at all. The implication is not that they did the same thing, it's that they did a _different_ thing, which is simpler, but is still a good solution for the metric they are optimizing: fun.

<comment><USER12> There's no implication here to interpret here, the commentator did directly compare the two systems. Here's a quote from the comment:

> Nintendo delivers 80% of the experience

<comment><USER8> The goal of all gaming systems, VR, Labo or console, is to be a fun experience.

I agree they are all targeting a different fidelity for emmersion, but they are all targeting the same fidelity for fun.

Why can't I compare two very different implementations trying to achieve a similar core goal?

<comment><USER10> ... a Yo-Yo is fun too and is 1% of the cost of the Labo, is that a fair comparison?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing not mentioned, that I think will be adding to their legend toward the end of the year is the release of Smash Bros. Ultimate. Smash has always occupied an interested space, Nintendo intended it as fun-for-the-whole-family type of game. Which it didn't necessarily fail as, but it accidentally succeeded as one premier competitive esports titles. There's always been tension between Nintendo's original vision and the competitive scene, with the 3rd game in the series, Brawl being summarily rejected in competitive circles. As esports has gone mainstream over the past 5 years though, other companies have figured out how to embrace and profit from the competitive scenes surrounding their games. With Ultimate, Nintendo seems to have finally started thinking of Smash as primarily a competitive game. Everyone I know who's played Smash at all seriously is incredibly excited for the new Smash. I personally will be buying a Switch just to play it, which is nothing new to me, I often joke that I should just hot glue Smash into my Nintendo consoles when I get them, I literally never take it out, I don't even own other games for them.

<comment><USER14> I'm not so sure that "smush" is going to be the capstone you're describing. Of course, details are slim and hype is high right now, but I think there are a few factors to keep in mind. As a competitive melee player, Nintendo has proven themselves to be incredibly slow and remains out of date with regard to supporting a competitive community for any game they have. They do seem to be trying to turn a new leaf with Ultimate, but Nintendo Japan has a lot of internal inertia (Sakurai's personal opinions) and regulatory restrictions (gambling laws making it hard to host tournaments with meaningful prize money) that make me skeptical that they're going to go as far to support their game as Valve, Riot, Blizzard, etc, which is what's really necessary to become a tier 1 e-sport. These leading e-sport companies are all American, in contrast to Nintendo which has to work overseas to support smash competitively (the Japanese competitive smash community is tiny compared to the U.S., in part due to culture).

In addition, I don't think Nintendo's going to be able to kill melee and convert all of us to ultimate without also turning off lots of casuals. But without the full support of both casuals and the entire existing competitive community for smash (over half of which is for melee), ultimate is just going to be another profitable and fun game, like smash 4, but not lastingly legendary like melee happened to be.

<comment><USER13> I am definitely suffering from smush hype delirium, I won't even try to deny it. And I think your skepticism is well placed. I would be surprised (pleasantly) to see Nintendo offering anything close to Riot, Valve, Blizzard levels of support within this decade. Still it feels like they've gone from actively hostile toward the competitive scene in Brawl, to throwing us a few bones in Sm4sh (omega modes, new run of Gamecube controllers, albeit slightly funky ones) to finally at least considering the pro scene as first class citizens in Smush.

That being said I don't really say a way that it could kill Melee either... although I bet melee players are going to buy a lot of controllers. The only thing I could imagine killing Melee is maybe if Smush had a Melee compatibility mode that implemented its mechanics exactly faithful to the original, but I don't see them doing that, and even then people probably still wouldn't leave Melee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What I find interesting is the Nintendo is sitting on a billion+ worth of IP that they haven't even scratched the surface of unlocking. The Zelda universe alone could generate millions with movies, novels, merchandising, and other content, but instead it remains on lockdown, with just the flagship game title releasing every 5-6 years with limited toys or figures (basically just Amiibos and some collectibles). The best we've gotten is a rumor of a GoT-style Zelda series headed to Netflix, a rumor quickly shot down by Nintendo.

Had the Switch failed, I believe this could have been their next play. Even if they exited the console market their IP could sustain the company for decades.

<comment><USER16> I think they're quite sensitive to how the brand is perceived in terms of merchandising.

<comment><USER15> In the long-term it's to their detriment. If the company finds itself on the decline, they may look back on it as a missed opportunity.

<comment><USER16> I think the opposite, actually. It strikes me that Nintendo is aware that the value that comes from a video game is very different than something like a comic book or film. I think a video game is something that you express yourself into, and in turn receive a response. It's why the higher-ups felt confident about _Breath of the Wild_ once they felt that the interaction of tree-climbing felt good.[1]

A big-budget television series would push something like _The Legend of Zelda_ into something that it's not, and likely cheapen the brand. By investing and shipping something fresh and well-crafted at a slower clip, Nintendo can ensure that its IP keeps its strength over time.

[1] [https://kotaku.com/when-miyamoto-first-played-zelda- breath-o...](https://kotaku.com/when-miyamoto-first-played-zelda-breath-of- the-wild-h-1793017234)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would love to know more about the inner workings of Nintendo corporate culture. For the company to have survived for so long means they clearly know something most games studios and tech companies don't. That their offices don't seem to include any of the flashy bullshit populating the offices of most tech companies seems telling.

<comment><USER18> Something I vaguely remember from years ago in an interview: Rather like this comment [0] I just read on another submission, it's along the lines of: Don't listen to what people say, throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

Two things that stuck crazy-well were the touchscreen on the NDS in 2004 and the motion controls on the Wii in 2006. In either case, they were the first to market with both ideas, but before that people would've said the idea was crazy.

Two other examples that didn't stick at all, off the top of my head: Virtual Boy and the Power Glove.

(Small aside: It's long enough ago that plenty of people seem to have forgotten, but the touchscreen on the NDS was a crazy idea at the time because that was nearly 3 years _before_ the iPhone was released, let alone smartphones becoming common/popular. The got-to-have phone at the time was the Motorola RAZR.)

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387468](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387468)

<comment><USER19> Just a gamer here, but there's something to be said about the success and failure of the 3DS and PS Vita.

The 3DS, based on hardware/system alone, should have failed. It was tremendously underpowered, and it forced a terrible 3D technology on all its users, which never really took off or became anything other than a novelty while raising the cost of manufacturing.

The Vita was a truly next-generation portable gaming device, with a beautiful screen, incredible graphics, properly analog sticks, an extremely modern interface, and great connectivity and human-interface (camera, capacitative touch) features. Even incorporating the cost of a proprietary Sony memory card, for the amount of power you got, I think it was very reasonably priced. Comparing the 3DS and Vita was like night and day in terms of a modern gaming device. Even today, I think it can stand head-to-head with the Switch in terms of portable gaming.

But Nintendo continued to pour resources into developing top-tier games for the 3DS, slashing its price to bolster adoption, and sticking to its still unorthodox 3D screen/touch screen combo. Whereas for the Vita, Sony quickly got spooked that the Vita didn't perform as well as the PSP, pulled first- party support and general marketing support, and major 3rd party developers (particularly outside Japan) fled the device.

The 3DS is now seen as a major success for Nintendo, while the Vita died (or is still dying) a slow and unceremonious death.

Sometimes sticking to your crazy guns works.

<comment><USER20> > _it forced a terrible 3D technology on all its users_

That's a little strong, considering there's a switch to turn it off or even the option to get a 2DS.

I usually turned it off (except for Bravely Default which has gorgeous 3D art in the towns).

<comment><USER19> I guess I was a little unclear in what I meant. I meant that everyone (prior to the much later 2DS) had to pay for the 3D tech that most people didn't really want. I absolutely turned my 3D off about a week in and never really used it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For those who have a switch: [https://www.switchbru.com/dns/](https://www.switchbru.com/dns/) is a simple hosted DNS server that lets you browse the web. And the web browser runs webkit!

[https://i.imgur.com/0h803Ux.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/0h803Ux.jpg) shows a Chart.JS demo running in a canvas.

Unfortunately the File API does not work: [https://i.imgur.com/GA5kNGp.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/GA5kNGp.jpg)

<comment><USER22> annddddd.... patched.

Seriously, though, it's gonna be very easy for Nintendo to patch this particular DNS out. While running a browser doesn't really hurt their bottomline, a browser is typically the weakest link in any console and thus is often used to find an exploit and run homebrew. The Switch as of now doesn't have a non-intrusive exploit, but allowing arbitrary javascript could result in one.

<comment><USER23> This is a minor abuse of the captive portal resolution function, that opens the web browser to let the user log in to any captive portal.

There's no real way to "patch" this.

<comment><USER22> > There's no real way to "patch" this.

Just disable custom DNS. Only allow a few whitelisted DNS that 99.9% of people are going to use anyway.

<comment><USER24> What does that gain? It prevents people from browsing the web, what's the issue with that?

For exploits/jailbreaks/... it'd be easy to use a local fake captive portal, so it doesn't protect against that unless they kill that feature completely, making the device unuseable with many networks.

<comment><USER25> It would also prevent people with jailbroken devices from blocking *.nintendo.com so there's that.

<comment><USER26> If you own the network it's not super hard to just filter all traffic doing DNS. If you have a properly owned phone, you can probably run this over your phone hotspot and do the packet inspection that way. Then you can block all nintendo traffic, while still not having a "custom" DNS. If you really tried, you could still even have your custom DNS except it would be spoofing another server.

The point is that if you own the network (and you do), then the clients are nominally at your mercy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Whoa! "More radically to that end, in April, Nintendo began selling a toy line called Labo, which consists of cardboard assembly kits that gamers can use to transform the Switch's detachable controllers into rudimentary motion- sensitive objects such as fishing rods or mini pianos. The contraptions can then be used to play accompanying games on the TV screen, by catching sharks with the rod, say. _The games' code is somewhat customizable, so precocious kids can program new uses for each of the accessories._ "

<comment><USER28> Labo is super cool, but my kids' attention has waned. It doesn't sound like it's been much of a success. On the flip side, we've cleared Mario Odyssey 4 times already. And when we get tired of it, we fire up Lego Star Wars on the Wii.

<comment><USER29> I considered buying labo for my kids but I thought the cardboard would be destroyed in a week max.

How does it hold up? I have two, one is three and the other is seven.

We've cleared odyssey at least two times as well, and I catch the older one looking for moons from time to time. Kirby seems to be the current attraction though :)

<comment><USER30> Nintendo released all the labo parts as PDFs.

Granted, turning those files into parts might be more work than most people want to do, but at least it's an option.

[https://www.nintendo.co.jp/labo/parts/](https://www.nintendo.co.jp/labo/parts/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nintendo is awesome - they're absolutely obsessed with making games as fun as possible, which is shockingly rare.

<comment><USER32> Nintendo, unlike most companies are focused on making games with gameplay. Most companies are making movies with gameplay segments in between.

<comment><USER33> Try Nioh or Dark Souls, you'll have gameplay coming out of your ears. If you want cutscenes and dialogue with balance, try Persona 5, which is balanced by very tight gameplay; likewise with Yakuza 0. Avoid anything from Ubisoft like it was carrying plague.

<comment><USER32> Speaking of Ubisoft, is it just me or do they repackage the same game with different skins over and over gain? I swear Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Ghost Recon and Watch Dogs are the same game with different skins.

<comment><USER33> It is _not_ just you. It reminds me of Taco Bell. They're only working with a dozen or so ingredients, sometimes fried, sometimes grilled, in various combinations. After a while though, you start to realize it's just a "new" arrangement of the same "meat" and it gets ooooold.

<comment><USER32> It's a shame, they used to be good. I really like the idea behind Assassin's Creed. And Sands of Time is a god tier A++ game.

<comment><USER33> I couldn't agree more, I think they just got lost in the easy money. If we're lucky they might fall on some hard times that fall short of killing them, and rememember that making really great games was how they became huge the first time. Otherwise, it's hard to see a way forward the way they are now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Hiroshi Yamauchi was a very harsh man in some regards (at least most would agree that he was blunt) but the way he built Nintendo is admirable. He knew what many managers don't, that you need to find talented people that you can trust and have a hands off approach to their work if you want to scale and that there is probably not a single person or division in your company that deserves all the credit. He had by all accounts equal respect for Gunpei Yokoi who built a lot of good hardware, Satoru Iwata who built a lot of good software and Shigeru Myamoto who created a lot of good content.

I know that Iwata took the company to great heights after Yamauchi stepped down but sometimes I worry that as time goes by Nintendo will lose what made it great, which is their big picture thinking. They're not a console company, or a game studio or a game publisher; they're a game company and to create the best experience they sometimes need to reimagine how games are played while not looking too gimmicky. It takes a special kind of philosophy to pull that off and over time I'm afraid it'll go away.

</comment><comment><USER35> I remember after the GameCube was short on games and thrid party support. I was done with Nintendo.

Nintendo then said their next console wouldn't compete with MS or Sony directly. I was sure they were just going to be a handheld gaming company after that as they were sure to die in the console market.

Nope, the Wii sold like hot cakes and I bought one and had a ton of fun.

They just keep doing it...

<comment><USER36> The Switch is the first console that has me excited about gaming in nearly a decade. A relative brought it over during a vacation and we had tons of fun playing Mario Kart.

The last time I was excited for a game was Age of Mythology back in 2002.

Nintendo solves the biggest complaint I have with modern games: they just take themselves way too seriously. So many are just trying to become wish fulfillment vehicles instead of actually being fun.

I don't care about story or sitting through 10 minute cut scenes. I don't have that kind of time or patience. If I wanted story, I'd watch HBO and get far better stuff.

I just want to launch and have fun for 30 minutes.

Nintendo gets that.

<comment><USER35> Nintendo has somehow managed to pull off a great system where they have arcade like pickup and play fun... and yet still depth to some extent so it doesn't feel repetitive.

There is some serious skill in that.

<comment><USER36> Exactly. The only games - that I've played - that have the same arcade "pick up and play" level of fun are the GTA series (especially San Andreas) and racing games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone else find the overwhelmingly positive coverage of Switch and its games a little puzzling?

From a consumer's perspective I just don't get it. The Switch costs more than a vastly more powerful PS4 or Xbox One S. It (particularly) versus a PS4 has a tiny library of games. And the PS4 has actual VR. But even more remarkable is comparing the prices of games on the systems: often you will pay 2-3x as much for a (probably inferior) version of a game (compared to PS4/Xbox/iOS/Android).

I bought a Switch a few months ago. Played (and loved) the nostalgia of Mario. Played and dropped (as it seemed frustrating/grind-y) Zelda. And as far as I can tell that is basically the two games worth getting it for it. So I sold it. As I have a dozen great games ready to go on my PS4, and seems like more excellent stuff on the way, I just don't get the point of the Switch. If I want to play games on the move I can use my iPhone.

<comment><USER38> > that is basically the two games worth getting it for it

Splatoon 2, Bayonetta 2, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, ARMS.

Also homebrew and Linux :)

<comment><USER39> It's just so sad that they aren't exactly friendly towards homebrew. It would be a perfect gaming device I would buy with no hesitation - instead, I have no idea now if they'll ban me from using their services for using GNU/Linux if I decide to buy it.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, as a developer I do find iOS and Android compelling: there are such low barriers to entry I can (and have) released games for both.

<comment><USER39> As a developer, I believe it's a mixed bag.

I've made plenty of small, silly games that I could release on Android, iOS and recently also on Steam. That's great, I wouldn't be able to do so on Switch.

However, I'm now also working on a bigger game that takes two years to make, and when releasing on Android, iOS and Steam it will just drown in the sea of crap, which means I will have to rely only on my own marketing efforts. It might also get a Switch port, and it's more than likely that it will be much easier to sell there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> No mention of the 3DS, which sold 75 million units?

<comment><USER41> "Nintendo's existing handheld platform, the 3DS, kicked in an additional $1.7 billion"

<comment><USER40> That's after the Switch was released. The article makes it seem like Nintendo was about to go bankrupt because Wii U did not do well, and seems to conveniently ignore the fact that the 3DS did relatively well–two thirds as well as Wii did. So while Nintendo wasn't doing great, they weren't about to fail either.

<comment><USER42> A second failure of the flagship console might have ended Nintendo's run as a hardware maker. Nintendo pulled another rabbit out of its hat. That's the narrative being presented - not a particularly controversial or contrarian one.

<comment><USER43> This seems to be true of any hardware-based business. Hardware is expensive, has long development cycles, and can't always be fixed with a patch. Maybe they're pulling rabbits out of their hats, but they seem to have an inexhaustible supply. People have predicted Nintendo's demise at least since the GameCube. Somehow, they keep surprising cynics every other hardware cycle.

<comment><USER44> I am always excited to hear about their consoles because they always do something interesting with the human to computer interface. It also always seems just a bit childlike in its attempts at innovation which I love, and by which I mean "Imagine if you had TWO screens" is something an 8 year old would say with unwavering glee.

It's a sentiment other manufacturers miss out on entirely and that's fine, but I am super glad Nintendo is still around to fill the gap.

<comment><USER45> Other manufacturers just seem obsessed with raw specs and power, rather than actual gameplay experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> >The notion of abandoning a core craft was anathema to Nintendo's culture, though—the company was, after all, still selling packs of hanafuda, the flower-adorned playing cards that it set out with in 1889.

Anybody have experience with hanafuda cards from Nintendo? I'm thinking of buying the Tengu pack. I've been learning Koi Koi (ever since watching Summer Wars.)

</comment><comment><USER47> One thing that I would really like to see is how Nintendo's Japanese hardware development organization really looks like, because at least since Wii all of their hardware design is quite obviously outsourced to the US.

</comment><comment><USER48> Don't get me wrong, I love Nintendo, own a Switch, and will happily shell out hundreds of dollars each generation just to get the chance to play 2 or 3 new Mario/Yoshi titles. But from the Wii era on, their hardware and success seems largely based off of gimmicks. Maybe that is what is needed to stand out in an age of increasingly homogenized games and gaming platforms, but for me what makes Nintendo stand out is their 1st party titles that consistently combine nostalgia, excellent gameplay/mechanics, charming visuals, minimal (if any) storytelling, great music, and recently multiplayer co-op (bring your wife and kids!). Ok, I'm a sucker for Mario-type games and have not much been into Zelda since Ocarina, but I struggle to find games with those qualities and quality on any other platform, if at all.

It has nothing to do with the hardware and their gimmicks. I can count on one hand the number of times I've used the Switch outside the house, or seriously played a Wii motion-control game, or a WiiU game that effectively used the dual/touchscreen features (does Mario Maker count?). If Nintendo released Mario Odyssey for PC I'd never even think of purchasing the Switch and very happily play the game at 4k 60fps on my puter. Being able to remap "shake your controller like an idiot" to spin-jump to a button in Dolphin made various Mario New's tolerable.

But yea, that'll never happen. So as long as Nintendo keeps producing on the games front, I'll happily keep biting. Plz take my money.

But how could I go on this rant without diverging into lionizing the glory of the SNES days, when Nintendo and videogames themselves were at a peak which shall never again be reached. The SNES was inarguably (though not at the time, Blast Processing and all) superior in graphics, audio, and control compared to other popular consoles at the time (that being Sega Genesis of course). And developers took advantage of all this power in spades. I'm still impressed by Mode 7 (what, you don't pause SMW when Bowser's clown-ship is zoomed to the max?), and many SNES game music are still among the best examples of VGM, before compressed digital audio removed all constraints on composers (with all due respect to the glorious SOTN and Mario Galaxy compositions).

Many people have stated that early 2d games have aged better than early 3d ones, and I think that is true. The SNES shows this well, with vibrant, colorful, glitzy graphics, and excellent music. But what I think has been lost with the new generation of consoles is unique character. One could tell at a glance whether a game was was produced for the NES, Genesis, or SNES, and even the PS1 and N64. Now that characterness is left up to the developer, and the consoles/PC mostly interchangeable. That's fine I suppose. But there is something impressive, especially as a programmer, about taking these limited machines to their absolute limits, and eking every bit of unexpected power out of them.

I remember once my friend messaged me, he just had to play FF3 (or FF6) like RIGHT NOW. So I sent him the ROM. We then both marveled at how it was only _4 megabytes_ in size. Kefka is truly rolling in his grave, laughing maniacally.

<comment><USER49> > I can count on one hand the number of times I've used the Switch outside the > house

Do you live in the US and in a non-urban area (e.g. not NYC)? If so, you probably have no reason to use the Switch outside the house. You may have a car commute and live in country where playing handheld games outside isn't normal.

I say this because growing up in a suburb, not many people played their GBA/DS/3DS outside. We all just brought them to each other's houses or played them in cars.

Now that I live in NYC, you might see me playing on my 3DS or Vita during my subway commute (I'm too scared to take the Switch out since it costs $300). In Japan, handheld games and consoles are becoming the norm, so it's very common.

I will say the ability to go from couch/TV/projector to bed and still be playing the same game is awesome.

And yes, FFVI is the best JRPG of all time.

<comment><USER50> You're afraid to take out your switch? I am assuming you don't own a $300 phone either. Unless you're in a shady neighbourhood at weird hours of the night waiting for the train no one care about your switch. I see a few people using them on the subway but surprisingly handhelds never seemed super popular on the train because I dont even see many people on the cheaper Nintendo DS's either. I see lots of people gaming on their phones though.

<comment><USER49> Yeah it's a little weird but I just don't feel good about taking it outside yet... maybe that will change.

As for the second part of your comment, it's simple. Playing handheld video games in public is not typical or socially normal in the US... unless it's on your phone.

<comment><USER26> Why does it matter whether or not it's typical or socially normal? Are people going to beat you if you stand out as a minor nerd?

<comment><USER49> No. I play games during my commute all the time. I'm explaining why it is not more common in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I was about to go with a different console to stop my 10yr old bugging me about Fortnite. Him and his friends short attention span and deserve to be messaging with friends means be still spends much of his time on mobile or laptop.

<comment><USER51> I've read this about 4 times and I still can't quite figure out what this comment is trying to communicate.

<comment><USER52> s/deserve/desire

s/be/he</comment></comment></comment>


Don Draper: Think Different. - <AUTHOR> http://behindcompanies.com/2012/04/don-draper-think-different/

<comment><USER2> Trying to post an article?</comment>


iOS 14 supports system-wide or per-app encrypted DNS - <AUTHOR> https://www.wwdcnotes.com/notes/wwdc20/10047 <comment><AUTHOR> Right now apps such as Cloudflare 22.214.171.124 or NextDNS offer encrypted DNS but a VPN profile is required, annoying if you use VPNs regularly.

Example of NextDNS native encrypted DNS on iOS14 [https://imgur.com/71LGfCz](https://imgur.com/71LGfCz)</comment>


Reasons Not to Study Life Science - <AUTHOR> https://leimao.github.io/blog/Do-Not-Study-Life-Science/ <comment><USER2> There is a lot of painting with incredibly broad brushes in this article. Even making a generalization about the life sciences is such an over broad scope that it's ridiculous. Most life sciences people I know are different sorts of macrobiology researchers doing really interesting research and field work - they have their complaints, but very different ones than what's expressed in the article.

<comment><USER3> There is, but his description of the research process seems accurate at least for my partner (currently also in a structural biology lab for his PhD) whom I showed the blog to. In particular this depressing paragraph:

>Doing experiments is extremely tedious and usually trivial. Once you become familiar with some experiments, you do those experiments routinely and hardly learn anything new. Doing life science experiments requires extremely high concentration. If you made an error during experiment, say preparing a bottle of solution with incorrect concentration of some components, it could hardly be traced back. Your experiment results will thus be wrong and irreproducible. Some experiments cannot be fully automated by advanced instruments, and they require good hands to do fine operations. If you don't have good hands, usually your experiment results would be inconsistent and untrustworthy. Experiments would usually take extremely long time to conduct. Unlike computer programs, they usually could not be "saved" in halfway. Many experiment materials and samples are fragile, sensitive to environments, such as temperature and light, and they have their "life cycles" as well. This means that the fresh experiment materials and samples should be used as soon as possible to ensure their quality. The same experiment material or sample is likely different to what it was two hours ago. If somehow you realize that anything went wrong in the experiments, usually you would have to start from scratch again, whereas for computer programs you could always start from somewhere in the middle as long as you saved it. This further means that your life will be managed by experiments and you will no longer have control over your own life. For example, once you started a scheduled 24-hour experiment, you would have to follow exactly to the experiment plan. If you scheduled to do something for the experiment, even if it was at 2:00 AM and there was storm outside, you would still need to show up in the lab and start to do experiment on time. Otherwise, the whole experiment might screw up, and you would need to restart the whole experiment on another day.

highlights a lot of the inefficiencies in doing lab research. The current setup of labs with PIs who own the resources and decide what experiments get done, seems to waste a lot of intellectual potential of grad students and postdocs. And also holding up this edifice is many, many undergrads and research technicians who exchange cheap labor for resume-building on their way to medical school and grad school applications.

Obviously there are advances happening in the field, but it clearly wasn't right for the author, or anyone who's not willing to play the game.

<comment><USER4> Note thought that nothing in that complaint was specific to life sciences.

It could apply to chemistry, or physics, or any other lab-centric field.

Furthermore, not all of the life sciences are lab based. Population genetics, for example, was "[t]raditionally a highly mathematical discipline" quoting Wikipedia, and a lot of bioinformatics is computer based.

Which means that quoted text doesn't really support the thesis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the third time in two weeks that keyboardman has posted this under this title.

In addition, keyboardman has twice posted it with a different title. [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Do%20Not%20Study%20Biological%...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Do%20Not%20Study%20Biological%20Science%20or%20Anything%20Related&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

In one of the earlier threads I commented, at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21987596](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21987596) , that "It reads like it was written by a disgruntled and undereducated undergraduate frustrated with biology classes and venting."

The author does not understand what science is, and makes statements which are outright wrong.

See my comment for details of some of those wrong statements.

</comment><comment><USER5> ,, Please remove life science or any interdisciplinary majors related to life science from college''

This is crazy. Finally with Illumina output data sets life science gets much closer to machine learning, and I see more and more open articles with open downloadable data sets, so the fun for us with data mining background is just getting started.

The field is changing fast, and maybe the more important message should be to have a good understanding of statistics (and using R), but throwing away a successful field is not a solution.

<comment><USER6> While I agree that collecting more data opens up the possibility for more complex, exciting analysis, gene expression data is no magic bullet. It is often noisy and still prone to experimental error because biological systems are so heterogeneous. Also, for a lot of investigations, there are only a handful of samples which means that the number of distinct data points for a specific transcript are very low. You typically end up with many columns but few rows in your dataset which makes modeling biological systems quite challenging.

<comment><USER5> As far as I see the current solution to the ,,few rows'' problem and the read errors is to have even more data and to make sure that each read is treated as what it is: a sample from a different cell.

This way for example a bone marrow sample can be used to model the whole dynamic that's going on in the human system, and the evolution of cells / RNA expressions between cells. Of course this means that more probabilistic hidden models have to be used, instead of putting together the reads to form a genome.

Have you seen this video? I think it's amazing:

[https://youtu.be/G_Rhp9LWDUM](https://youtu.be/G_Rhp9LWDUM)

The way cancer is studied is also changed by this method, though you 'll need the new Illumina machine with 30x number of reads that was announced a few days ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Glorious

</comment><comment><USER8> This is loony.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this satire?

<comment><USER10> It might be. Wonder if "Lei Mao" is a play on "lmao"

<comment><USER9> They have a fairly complete online presence under that name, though…</comment></comment></comment>


Tiny, cheap, and dangerous: Inside a (fake) iPhone charger - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcfn.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why-you.html

<comment><USER2> I purchased a cheap car charger for a Nokia phone. After a while it started regularly blowing the fuse. After going through a package of six fuses from RadioShack, I bought a better charger.

<comment><USER3> You're probably lucky the charger blew out the fuses and not your phone. After looking inside a cheap charger, I think their motto is "do the cheapest thing that could possibly work".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Ken. Thank you very much for writing such awesome posts. I have very little knowledge about EE, so your posts on power supplies (including this one) were very instructive and fascinating. I really like how you referenced everything.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I learned a lot about power supplies writing these articles. By the way, I liked the title you submitted better, so I changed the article to match :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thank you for voting (aufond.me update) - <AUTHOR> http://aufond.me/thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi again guys,

For those interested in the technical aspects of this feature. I'm using phantomjs to create the exports. I tried two other alternatives before committing to it, and both proven less featureful: wkhtmltopdf and [http://weasyprint.org/](http://weasyprint.org/)

weasyprint seemed like an awesome project, up to date and with an author ready to respond to issues. But with a default config it failed to render many of the CSS3 attributes used and had to take a safe route.

wkhtmltopdf was a strong competitor, it did some things better than phantomjs even, like the support for page-break- properties. But phantomjs stood out because of its JS api, being able to load a page, change a few classes and attributes in on the spot, and then render it altered.

There are a few things that I couldn't to with any, though. Like rendering a single page for the entire timeline. The page size properties are build for printing, so even though they support px values they don't amount to what you'd expect and they are too unpredictable to render a single page containing exactly to contents of the html document.

Let me know if you have any more questions, about this or the app. Thanks!</comment>


Simple iPhone Interface for Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://dalampati.com/ihacker/

<comment><USER2> I have iPhone interface almost ready for any HN-like site that's written in Arc. Supports voting, comments etc. I'll release it at some point as beta on newmogul.com and then as source. If you run a site based on Arc codebase, let me know if you want it early.

<comment><USER3> Is there any other tool with a similar focus?

I'd love to have an iPhone/mobile specific social news site. I like the slinkset, HN and reddit type engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice. I also enjoy this one a lot

<http://www.icombinator.net/>

<comment><AUTHOR> oh nice, didn't know about that. i think i'll use it instead :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one who thinks HN works really well on the iPhone? I've never had any problems using it, but as there's like 2-3 of these iPhone versions I guess I'm in the minority.

<comment><USER6> It works, but there's too much scrolling/zooming required to read comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The main thing I dislike about this is that the domain isn't shown. But neither this nor iCombinator does as good a job as the main HN site at displaying a lot of information in a small amount of space. There is no need for iCombinator to have three lines per entry, and I think that your one needs to display more information.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would really love to have an iPhone app that allows me to read and comment on HN (as opposed to just browsing with Safari). Something similar to the SFNetNews app for reading Slashdot, etc. I was thinking of writing one for HN since I haven't been able to find one and I figure it will be a good first- iPhone-app for me. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Definitely needs comments. I visit HN for the comments more than the links. icombinator.net does a great job with that.

<comment><USER9> I just got a server error trying to load a comments page with > 100 comments ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Still wish there was a way to make safari open a link without loading any images. When I have poor reception or know I will only have, say, another 5 seconds of reception (subway leaving the station) it helps to know a page can load nearly instantly.

</comment><comment><USER11> Comments and a favicon please!

<comment><AUTHOR> donezo!</comment></comment>


Popular apps share data with Facebook without user consent - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/62f74704-0abf-11e9-9fe8-acdb36967cfc <comment><USER2> Facebook purchases a lot of data from other companies. I'm not really sure what your link is but I'm assuming this is what it's referring to.</comment>


How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how-a-group-of-neighbors-created-their-own-internet-service/ <comment><USER2> > "We monitor all the connections and if someone is using a lot of bandwidth > for a long period of time, we talk to them and figure out what they are > doing," Sutton said. "Often times it's people watching Netflix and then > falling asleep and then it keep auto-playing things all night long."

This is the kind of statement that makes me long for a faceless, impersonal ISP. As much as I'm impressed by a neighborhood banding together and coming up with a solution, the idea of a neighbor trying to "figure out" usage or "talk to" customers about it is horrifying.

Hopefully they have a mechanism in place to allow everyone to burst to available bandwidth, but to throttle people to a sustainable proportion otherwise. Such a mechanism seems both necessary and sufficient, and given the professional equipment they're using, it seems quite likely to be available.

When Comcast sends bandwidth usage nastygrams, people get up in arms about it; we talk about "network neutrality", and that ISPs should remain "dumb pipes".

While the ability to introspect traffic at all is a bug that needs fixing in client and server software, to combat surveillance, at least with an ISP I'm reasonably confident that only 1) a trusted subset of ISP staff and 2) the government (hopefully with a warrant) have access.

By contrast, would you want your neighborhood association looking at your ISP logs? Or _anyone_ you know personally? And making it their business how much bandwidth you use and for what purpose?

(On a separate note, I wonder how much Netflix's and YouTube's CDN boxes cost, given that Netflix and YouTube tend to subsidize them.)

<comment><USER3> In addition to the Big Brother stuff, I wonder why they even care how much bandwidth their users use.

As long as the links aren't congested, why care at all? Bandwidth is cheap and it's not like they are charged by the GB in any case.

Their upstream either charges a flat fee or by the 95th percentile. The Netflix example is really wierd, as usage is at it's lowest during the night.

<comment><USER4> Probably because their wireless equipment is the bottleneck and they are utilizing a mesh network topography which means bottlenecks impact other customers. The article stated that their backhaul uplink was on 70Mbps for the whole island.

Seeing as they're using Ubiquiti equipment, I'm not sure why they are not using of their Gbps setups for the backhaul at least.

<comment><USER3> Probably because they can't afford the backhaul. They pay $900 for 100M.

According to the network diagram in the article they do not appear to run a mesh topology. They run a hub and spoke topology. Each repeater has multiple radios.

Even so, they have serious problems if they can't sustain their 30 Mbps peak usage with their wireless equipment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI: most businesses in the tourist areas of Bali, Indonesia rely on wireless Internet by a small comapny owned by the Mega Internet cafe.

The national telco, Telkom, offers Speedy DSL, but it's not speedy or reliable, and Biznet offers FTTH only to dense commercial areas. (which is still more than Silicon Valley has!)

I had a tour of Mega a decade ago, and they have a tower pointed at Singapore. At the time they were using Linux LEAF distro for mgmt. and Soekris boards, but likely that has changed. Torrential rains do affect reception, but that also affects the Speedy landlines.

Also, outside North America, GSM rules. Which means you can go to the Borneo jungle and get 5 bars, which often doesn't happen in say, Sunnyvale. And 5 bars means adequate EGPRS data communications - everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER6> I guess the residents of the San Juan Islands must be quite a different demographic from the Canadian islands just across the border. This would never happen on one of the Canadian Gulf Islands, because too many residents are worried about the "wireless radiation" causing headaches or cancer. (This is also where 1 in 6 residents refused a smart power meter [1], mostly out of supposed safety concerns.)

[1] "Gulf Islanders 15 times more likely to oppose BC Hydro smart meters than Vancouverites" [http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Gulf+Islanders+times+...](http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Gulf+Islanders+times+more+likely+oppose+Hydro+smart+meters+than+Vancouverites/8780345/story.html)

<comment><USER7> Beautiful place, I was there last summer. AFAIK suspicions about wireless radiation having adverse health effects have not been substantiated.

The subject comes up in places distant from BC. Considering the upcoming election year, here in Portland we usually have a few "fringe" candidates for local office asserting WiFi in public schools is "damaging" children, causing them to misbehave, etc.

Obviously most of the population is unconcerned about such risk. I suppose if it turned out that wireless signals really do cause some obscure deleterious effects, the "tinfoil hat" crowd will say they told us so. I'd go with the odds that's even less likely than winning the Megabucks lottery 3 times in a row.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the only "proof" that people tend to cite is that the WHO has classified EM radiation in a class that basically means "we have no idea if it causes cancer or not, but it might", along with just about everything [1].

I lived in Victoria for a few years. My landlords there had refused a smart meter - yet they had WiFi, and both had cell phones.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_carcinog...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_carcinogens)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is one equipment from Ubiquity that you can use to built speedy point to point connection. 1.2Gbps on 100km link.

[https://www.ubnt.com/airfiber/airfiber5/](https://www.ubnt.com/airfiber/airfiber5/)

<comment><USER9> How do you aim it at the other end? It's 100km away?

<comment><USER3> GPS.

<comment><USER10> Not sufficient. Civilian NavStar/ GPS has a 95th percentile accuracy of 7.5 metres and a best-case of around 2 metres.

That's more than enough to miss by several dozen dish diameters at 100km.

<comment><USER3> Main alignment with GPS and then finetune to get maximum performance. At 100km the main signal lobe is quite large, so being off by a few dozen dish diameters isn't large enough of an error to not to be able to get started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty awesome, but I wonder if it could have been done had there not been a network guy in the group? I've done a lot of network code/config over the years, and I wouldn't say it was particularly easy. The guy seems to say it was easy.

Unbelievably fiddly is more like it. Just the nature of it makes it annoying: before you have a connection through, you have a chain of links that doesn't work. You have to fix every single link before Eureka.

<comment> martin-adams > but I wonder if it could have been done had there not been a network guy in > the group?

More to the point, what happens if he moves away or is unable to support it.

I do wonder if there is a business model to implement and support this type of network for small towns.

<comment><USER3> > I do wonder if there is a business model to implement and support this type > of network for small towns.

Well, you can outsource the NOC, but no amount of remote handwaving is going to help when you need hands on-site. In the end you get what you pay for.

<comment><USER11> >In the end you get what you pay for.

Well, they were paying for CenturyLink and got a 10 day outage.

<comment><USER3> In all fairness that outage was due to a subsea cable break and those require both specialized equipment and time to get the equipment on-site.

... and it's a really good example of getting what you pay for. I really do not think the islanders are paying Centurylink enough to be able to fix subsea cable faults with a 4 hour lead time.

That being said Centrylink's lack of redundancy and fallover links is another matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The rural Orcas Island has a lot of hills and obstacles that could disrupt > the wireless signals, and it would have been "prohibitively expensive" for > DBIUA to install its own towers. As such, many of the radios had to be > installed in trees.

Presumably there will be movement of antennae as trees grow. One could monitor the alignment by periodically checking the signal strength between links. I wonder how often things will need to be realigned because the "tower" on which the radios sit changes with time.

<comment><USER13> Depends on now close to the top of the tree the antennae is placed. Trees grow from the top, so anything below that won't move as the tree grows.

<comment><USER14> As the tree grows, the weight distribution changes, and things move. Trees grow from the leaves. Leaves are not just at "the top".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Once they pay off their loan, they could end up with the cheapest and faster internet services in the area.

The irony.

<comment><USER16> Well, a business would take the free cash flow and invest in expansion. Then again, a business would be paying the island's network operator and there would likely be no free cash flow.

<comment><USER15> I think what may happen is a big operator will invest a lot of money to make service there incredibly cheap and fast, killing the service.

As a lesson to all you out there who'd dare challenge a communication company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is really cool!! I always wish to setup such network amongst peers and get everybody connected with good b/w, especially in India. This kinda stuff can create marvels in emerging economies whose existing infrastructure is heavily loaded.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is really cool. Honestly I'm surprised they still get 20Mbps after the data goes through multiple relays and a microwave connection. Are microwave links in widespread use for internet communication?

<comment><USER19> There's a whole group of companies called "Wireless ISPs" [1] that make extensive use of microwave products from companies like Ubiqti and Mimosa. Depending on the backhaul, you can get gigabit speeds over unlicensed microwave spectrum in many locations. There's a WISP in San Francisco called Monkey Brains that is a really good alternative to Comcast if you have the space for a microwave antenna on your house. [2]

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_prov...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_provider)

[2] - [https://www.monkeybrains.net/wireless.html](https://www.monkeybrains.net/wireless.html)

<comment><USER20> In SF, I'd also recommend Webpass [1], which uses point-to-point microwave to get to apartment buildings and then piggybacks on phone data lines within the building. They're cheap (by American standards - $500/yr), fast (from 100/100 to 500/500 depending on the building, usually 5ms ping), and have great service (no installation fee, tech was on time to the minute and extremely knowledgeable).

[1] [https://www.webpass.net](https://www.webpass.net)

<comment><USER21> I'm also super happy with WebPass. My current building gets about 400 Mbps up/down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would like to be able to share my home network with my car within a 15+ km radius of my home... Maybe using a servo-controlled directional antenna on my car that would always point to my home using some sensors, or an unidirectional would be even better but I don't know if that is possible using open-spectrums.

<comment><USER23> Considering the investment you'll need to make in antenas, equipments and such, unless you live in a poor coverage area, you'll be better with a 4G.

<comment><USER22> That remains to be seen but I have a feeling that savings could be seen in the medium term, or maybe just a few years... 4G is too expensive and data caps are ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hope it works out well for them. I had a horrid time with a local wireless provider in my area. It was based on the motorola canopy (now cambium networks) configuration. They had main antennas on every single water tower in probably a 20-30 mile radius. I live on the edge of the county and there is not much out here. The water tower antenna that I was pointed to was probably servicing a ton of people.

When I first got set up, I was told I would get 8mbs down and 2mbs up for $70 a month. It was unlimited, unmonitored, and a "straight static IP into the internet". For the first 3 months, it was great. I got 8mbs and pings were 80ms. However after those first 3 months things, started to slow down. My antenna was in front of a tree and since it was now spring, the tree was covered in thick leaves. I thought that was the reason for my slow down and I didn't complain. Once winter came again, and all the leaves fell off, there was no difference. My speed was 8mbs, then it was 7mbs, and now it was hanging around 6mbs and I could no longer use my VOIP office phone. I could hear fine, but no one would hear me. And also during the evenings, things were getting worse, with speeds dipping down in the the 4mbs range, even netflix was starting to slow way down. Another year goes by and I am looking at a max speed of 5mbs, but normally it dips down to 1mbs. Another year goes by, and it was even worse, but now pings are up to 100-200 range.

I then noticed after these three years, ATT u-verse DSL was available. I managed to get the business class 6mbs for $50 a month (but I get 7mbs down). I've never been so happy....

In hindsight, I probably should have complained to the customer support, but I really had no faith in them, it felt too much like an over subscription issue and I was afraid that their "fix" would be to just install a 50 foot pool in my yard to put their antenna on which I didn't want.

Other than that, I have always wanted to build my own ISP. But now I don't know if I would do it wireless or not (but that is pretty much the only way...)

</comment><comment><USER25> _CenturyLink has gone so far as to tell customers who cancel their DSL service that they will not be able to start it up again, Brems said._

That seems awfully abusive.

<comment><USER26> The costumer doesn't want them because the service constantly fails and they don't want the customer because he constantly complains. What's abusive about that? A perfectly healthy non-relation. The only abusive thing would be gov. getting in the way of it and forcing them to accept the customers or the costumers to accept the ISP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Now that ARIN's run dry, it's gotten more difficult to start a proper ISP. Does their network support IPv6?

<comment><USER2> > Now that ARIN's run dry, it's gotten more difficult to start a proper ISP.

Only if you want _static_ IPv4 addresses. And even then, they aren't impossible to come by.

<comment><USER27> Dynamic addressing only helps if the maximum number of simultaneous users is significantly less than the total number of subscribers. When you're connecting houses, that's generally not the case.

<comment><USER2> You don't need to hand out routable IPs at all. NAT should support roughly 64k simultaneous connections (not users) per IP.

<comment><USER27> The Web is not the Internet. If customers have no means to receive unsolicited packets, then you're not really an Internet service provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is that guy using ubuntu on his laptop ?

<comment><USER29> It does look like a unity interface, so yes I think so. But why would this surprise you? The guy is a software engineer after all...

<comment><USER30> I'd expect Arch...

<comment><USER31> Why? Lots of us "techies" don't like Arch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder how they set this up w.r.t regulations. I was under the impression the process to setup an ISP involved a mountain of red tape. Did they get away with it because they are a non profit?

<comment><USER33> There's very little red tape involved in _starting_ as ISP in the US. The red tape starts up to 6 months in when you hit the bi-yearly FCC Form 477 filing, though I'd say the majority of (w)ISPs are flying under the radar by simply never filing.

If you even think about offering voice services (even VoIP), then you get buried in paperwork.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I see the a headline "It wasn't that hard", Then immediately below a picture with the caption "Sutton holds a drone he used to analyze potential radio location"...

</comment><comment><USER35> They should register here: [http://db.ffdn.org/](http://db.ffdn.org/) !

</comment><comment><USER36> Is 3.65 GHz (mentioned in the article as a way to get away from crowded 2.4 GHz) allowed for unlicensed use in the US now?

</comment><comment><USER37> looks good but i believe they can take more learnings from [http://battlemesh.org/](http://battlemesh.org/) for creating these kind of adhoc networks</comment>


Go 1.1.1 is released - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/d/topic/golang-nuts/iJFhI8K5a2Y/discussion

<comment><USER2> While this update is pretty small it is important as it fixes some garbage collection corruption issues.

Issue list: [https://code.google.com/p/go/source/list?name=release- branch...](https://code.google.com/p/go/source/list?name=release- branch.go1.1&r=43c4a41d24382a56a90e924800c681e435d9e399)

</comment><comment><USER3> Dupe. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872550](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872550)

<comment><USER4> And, BTW, do we _really_ need to have a new HN submission for each dotdot Go release (and beta, and RC)?

<comment><USER2> Perhaps not, but what is the harm? I'm sure there are people who are running 1.1 that found out sooner that 1.1.1 is out then they would have?

I think its worth keeping in mind there is always going to be a lot of stuff on HN that we personally we consider noise. For example, I could care less about 90% of the JS libraries that are posted; but I realize the there is a legitimate interest that that kind of things from the front-end segment of the HN populace. Consider that as for a backend/systems dev like myself, that discussing new Go versions, fixes, features or libraries might be highly interesting. In any case, ignoring a little bit a "noise" is pretty trivial and is just part of living is a diverse society.</comment></comment></comment>


ISIS terror fanatics invade Diaspora after Twitter ban - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/22/isis_terrorists_iaspora_social_network/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like someone discovering the internet. Diaspora just runs as a web app, and no one is complaining that nginx enables terrorists and there's nothing the nginx team can do to stop them.</comment>


What service/product that doesn't exist yet would you pay $10 a month for? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> privatized unlimited postal (snailmail) service that doesn't deliver junkmail. Use self-driving google cars or hoverbots to replace postmen.

<comment><USER3> What if the self-driving cars delivered hookers and blow?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting way to do market research; Not.</comment>


230 IQ: Terrence Tao Is the Smartest Person in the World - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-smartest-person-in-the-world-2/answer/Arman-Siani?share=1 <comment><USER2> This is just a brief Quora answer that makes the unevidenced assertion of Tao having a 230 IQ and then quotes from Wikipedia a bunch. I don't think IQ tests can even measure above 200.

<comment><USER3> An IQ of 230 would be 8.66 standard deviations above the mean. Off the top of my head, that should be rarer than one in a trillion.

I'm not a hard IQ skeptic, but there's nothing predictive or meaningful about any IQ over 150 or so, even in a strictly statistical sense. It's a tool built and validated against the bulk of the population, not extreme outliers.

<comment><USER4> >that should be rarer than one in a trillion.

You're assuming that the tail of the statistics behaves like in normal distribution. In practice this is incorrect (see "black swan theory").

Various sports that employ statistics (cricket, baseball, etc.) sometimes have a single player who strays from bell curve in a ridiculous way. For example Don Bradman's batting average in cricket [1].

[1] [https://www.statslife.org.uk/sports/1989-did-don-bradman- s-c...](https://www.statslife.org.uk/sports/1989-did-don-bradman-s-cricketing- genius-make-him-a-statistical-outlier)

<comment><USER3> IQ is a synthetic measure that follows a normal distribution by construction. To the extent that measurements of IQ in a population via test deviate from a normal distribution (with, say, fat tails), that's a reason to doubt the validity of that particular test in that domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fire up Excel and enter these: A2 enter the IQ score you are interested in B2 =NORM.DIST(A2, 100,15,1) C2 =1/(1-B2) C2 will show the group size you are the top "1" of 195 IQ is the top IQ for a group of 8 billion people 197 (Walter O'Brien's supposed IQ on "Scorpion") = top IQ for 19 billion people 230 IQ is impossible.

</comment><comment><USER5> Reference for this [https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/827371/description-...](https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/827371/description-of-the-normdist-function-in-excel)

</comment><comment><USER6> No. Negative. Nope. Absolutely no. I say unto thee, "nuh-uh".

230 is not the highest IQ that I have heard of.

IQ is not a good measure of "smartest". It is racially biased, gender biased, and geographically biased.

<comment><USER7> An IQ test may not measure "smartest" since there are many definitions of that word, but I don't see how the test itself is biased.

It simply measures a number we call general intelligence which happens to strongly correlate with academic/career achievement, income, and a variety of social outcomes.

IQ may have different distributions across genders and races, but on an individual level a white person and a black person with similar IQs will have similar life outcomes, so where does the bias come in?

<comment><USER8> > on an individual level a white person and a black person with similar IQs > will have similar life outcomes

Do you have any evidence to back up that claim?

<comment><USER7> Alright, I could not find the exact study I had in mind, but did come across a summary of the history of research in this area, which touches on what I was talking about:

THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.186...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.186.102&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

See around pages 240-243, Section 3: Mean Race–IQ Differences: A Global Perspective

> Many critics claim that Western-developed IQ tests are not valid for groups > as culturally different as sub-Saharan Africans (e.g., Nell, 2000). The main > evidence to support a claim of external bias would be if the test failed to > predict performance for Africans. Even if tests only underpredicted > performance for Africans compared with non-Africans, it would suggest that > their test scores underestimated their "true" IQ scores. However, a review > by Kendall, Verster, and von Mollendorf (1988) showed that test scores for > Africans have about equal predictive validity as those for non-Africans > (e.g., 0.20 to 0.50 for students' school grades and for employees' job > performance). The review also showed that many of the factors that influence > scores in Africans are the same as those for Whites (e.g., coming from an > urban vs. a rural environment; being a science rather than an arts student; > having had practice on the tests; and the well-documented curvilinear > relationship with age). Similarly, Sternberg et al.'s (2001) study of Kenyan > 12- to 15-year-olds found that IQ scores predicted school grades, with a > mean r .40 (p .001; after controlling for age and socioeconomic status > [SES], r .28, p .01). In Rushton et al.'s (2003) study of African and non- > African engineering students at the University of the Witwatersrand, scores > on the Advanced Progressive Matrices correlated with scores on the Standard > Progressive Matrices measured 3 months earlier (.60 for Africans; .70 for > non-Africans) and with end-of-year exam marks measured 3 months later (.34 > for Africans; .28 for non-Africans). Figure 1 shows the regression of exam > marks on test scores for these university students.

<comment><USER8> > will have similar life outcomes

I think my argument with you rests probably rests in the wording. I'm not willing to delve into each paper listed to check the controlled variables and selection biases, but a number are biased towards students already in universities, and one explicitly controls for socio-economic status. Even then I would like to see whether life outcomes in term of income, health, incarceration rates were measured in countries where Africans are the minority.

But it's my guess that you weren't so much interested in the similar life outcomes, but the correlates of IQ to competence being similar between African and non-African people.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What will happen if social networks start selling things? - <AUTHOR>

I think social networks selling things is a good idea. Maybe someone has posted topics like this before. Do you guys have any idea about that or know something about that? <comment><USER2> They do. It's called your privacy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, they sell our privacy. But I just want to know if the social networks can combine with the B2C websites, like amazon. Can it works? What will happen?</comment></comment>


Storybook may change your life as a front-end developer, don't miss that chance - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@pacdiv/dear-front-end-friend-storybook-changed-my-life-at-work-heres-how-it-can-change-yours-too-6ad9fa434406 <comment><USER2> oh yeeeah</comment>


Scientists claim to crack brain memory code - <AUTHOR> http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=262191

<comment><USER3> The paper itself can be found here: [http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...](http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002421)

First reaction was a serious, audible "Ughhh". I'm skimming the paper now but this looks a lot like "we played with some _in-silico_ models and came up with a nifty thing"

Edit: Christ, I don't even know where to begin. Seriously.

First of all, there is no mention of the fact that microtubles don't innervate dendritic spine heads. Actin is the primary cytoskeletal support for synapses. I can think of several plausible explanations to get around this fact, but they don't offer any which immediately put me on edge for the whole paper.

Second, there is zero in-vitro experimentation. It is extremely possible that none of this happens anywhere, let alone in the brain. Granted, in-silico experiments are often used to guide future benchwork...but I would have liked to see some preliminary wet-bench tests.

Here is a gem from the paper:

 _MTs appear to have intrinsic electro-mechanical vibrations, e.g. coherent oscillations in the low megahertz range. [...] Signal propagation will be influenced by, and depend on MT lattice vibrations and related effects._

 _In LTP, high frequency inputs (e.g. 50 to 100 Hz) are required for prolonged post-synaptic response. Kumar et al [58] showed that memory formation in dendrites depends on synchronized inputs, with an optimal frequency near 50 Hz. Density and patterns of CaMKII-induced tubulin phosphorylation in post- synaptic MT lattices would depend on frequency and synchrony of inputs._

Wait, what? They are correlating electro-mechanical oscilations (MT vibrations) with electro-chemical oscilations (synaptic firing)?

 _'Scale-free' implies self-similar information patterns repeating at different spatial and temporal scales (following 1/frequency power laws). Similar to 'fractals' and holograms, scale-free structures and processes arise commonly in nature and technology, and are inherently robust and resistant to disruption. In the brain, evidence suggests neuronal network structure, temporal dynamics, and representation of mental states are all 'scale-free', with self-similar patterns repeating at various temporal and spatial scales and locations [68]–[71]. Interference patterns of periodic, coherent reaction- diffusion waves in cytoplasm and larger spatial scales could account for scale-free information patterns regulating biological systems including the brain. Microtubules can generate three-dimensional reaction-diffusion patterns [70], and we suggest such patterns operate at multiple time scales to regulate biological systems._

Translation: There are fractals in the world and we see the brain structured in certain ways, so those patterns must apply to smaller things, right? We showed some dubious computer modeling of microtubules vibrating and a kinase phosphorylating. Therefore, the vibrations are encoding brain information. QED.

There's more, but I need to get to work. Let me just put it this way: there is a very good reason this paper is not in Nature Neuroscience.

<comment><USER4> Rightly said (there's more indeed). When people talk about the dangers of open publishing this will be their canonical example.

<comment><USER5> On the contrary, this is a excellent example of the benefits of open publishing. A very dubious paper is hyped in the press and the actually published work is available to all to be read and critiqued as thoroughly as it deserves. This, in my opinion, is completely independent from issues with the benefits and problems of peer review.

<comment><USER4> PLoS articles are peer reviewed as well. I was commenting about the standards PLoS sets for itself by allowing this article with this title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's a load of hogwash. They found that some molecules match and the press is going all "brain code cracked". The authors, of course, provoked all this by linkbaiting the article (talk about modesty; also, WTF PLoS?). Nobody believes these things but these people. We have optogenetic tools to probe memory functions much more efficiently and people do that already. This came up a some time ago btw: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3688953>

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't connect to www.jpost.com and had to use a proxy to read it.

The original article seems to be [http://www.newswise.com/articles/scientists- claim-brain-memo...](http://www.newswise.com/articles/scientists-claim-brain- memory-code-cracked)

</comment><comment><USER7> Hameroff, the author, also subscribed to the quantum brain hypothesis, along with Roger Penrose; an idea which was widely dismissed as wildly implausible, if I recall correctly. The topic itself is fascinating though.

<comment><USER8> It is still widely dismissed. And while coherence seems to be relevant for a particular stage of energy conversion in photosynthesis and also in allowing sensitivity to magnetic fields, the mechanisms for leveraging these are incidental. They are used passively to achieve an effect and not actively to perform computations as would be required for Penrose's hypotheses.

To claim the brain leverages quantum effects at biological scales is going far but still plausible. But to say that quantum computations are going on in the brain and are expressed at the level of thinking we acheive (evinced by claiming that we are not Turing machines), that is something that would require a lot of data to support (something that this theory sorely lacks). Much of what we know about quantum mechanics and neurobiology would have to be redressed. Indeed if such were true there would be indirect evidence - <USER2> expect we would find quantum mechanics, heck ordinary probability theory, more intuitive for example .

Far more interesting are the epigenetic like effects that occur in memory formation.

<comment><USER7> > claiming that we are not Turing machines

There are independent arguments for that position, namely that it's quite likely that the brain does not everywhere operate digitally, with well-defined discrete states. And even if it did in a trivial sense because the whole of physics operated that way it wouldn't really help with describing how the brain works (wrong level of abstraction).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If it turns out to be true that the brain encodes in 6-bit bytes, isn't our 8-bits for a byte extravagant?

I'm reminded that "nature is lazy" and always goes for the easiest and quickest route for efficiency.

<comment><USER10> Information is defined in terms of bits, not bytes. You can define a byte to be any number of bits, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#History> But the amount of information is determined by the number of bits, not the number of bytes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Regardless of the speculation about the number of bits, what basis do they have for the idea that memory is digital & discrete? I thought analog would be more plausible.

</comment><comment><USER11> Pure speculation, until we understand how the brain works we can't know for sure what is what and if that stuff is used for information encoding.

<comment><USER12> So don't read anything about it until some one mysteriously pops up with the complete brain specification?

It is not speculation, its a hypothesis and theory which has some evidence to support it. Now they and others will go off and try to build on it, or disprove it.

I don't understand why anyone would be scornful and dismissive of this?

<comment><USER13> Saying that CaMKII probably associates with microtubles to form memories is discovery, a reasonable extrapolation.

Calling the molecule's arms _is_ the purest and most unwarranted speculation.

<comment><USER14> I believe you accidentally the _byte_?

<comment><USER13> Yes. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think there may be something to this. I write pattern/word generation software for use in password cracking and some of the most common English consonant vowel patterns are six characters long. For example, the CV pattern cvccvc matches these proper words and slang words (batman, defcon, summer, winter, bigboy, number, fatdad, hotmom, badguy, soccer, etc). This is just one example of a popular six character pattern, there are more.

<comment><USER14> It's not six bytes patterns but six bit bytes, that can store 2^6 == 64 different values.

Computers nowadays standardized on eight bit bytes, synonymous with _octet_ , but the definition of a byte is actually hardware-dependent.

<comment><USER15> The point is segmenting things by six. No need to think of the 'things' in terms of bits or bytes (of which I'm very familiar). In my example, it is popular English word patterns. In the article, it's bits in memory. Both of which are 'things' of six.

<comment><USER7> That's called numerology and it's nonsense. Six is just a conveniently small number, nothing special about it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there API centric frameworks that have the same traction as Rails? - <AUTHOR> For those of you who have used Rails, it does a pretty good job of exercising best practises at your finger tips. Over the years I have been waiting for a dominant winner in the API space.
I know of many attempts from across many different languages but none seem to cater for A->B development when taking into account versioning, rate-limiting and other API centric ideas.
In my mind, problems like the lack of consensus on how to even semantically create resource/routes have delayed the process. <comment><USER2> Flask for python. It's so bare-bones that it's great for API's even though it's mostly used for full sites/apps.

<comment><USER3> Flask is brilliant for building small apps/services.

It makes setting up a new Django project feel like a complete PITA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Grape by Intridea [https://github.com/ruby- grape/grape](https://github.com/ruby-grape/grape) is a nifty choice. It is somewhat opinionated, but lightweight enough to have most of the features you'll need in writing an API

Docs over at [http://intridea.github.io/grape/](http://intridea.github.io/grape/)

<comment><USER5> Grape + ROAR + Swagger is a good combo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Take a look at Laravel in PHP and also Lumen. I have been working with it for API work for past 2-3 months and I am amazed at how good this framework has been. yes it is PHP but Laravel has redefined the php framework space.

If you like Python, then Flask framework is the way to go. Another great framework that I have worked with and love.

<comment><USER7> The Laravel documentation is an example of the worst documentation ever. It reminds me of the Fox News channel. I can't recommend using it on anything serious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They don't have the level of adoption but if your concern is automating best practices then you may be interested in Webmachine[0] (Erlang) or one of it's descendants like Liberator[1] (Clojure).

[0]: [https://github.com/Webmachine/webmachine](https://github.com/Webmachine/webmachine)

[1]: [https://github.com/clojure- liberator/liberator](https://github.com/clojure-liberator/liberator)

</comment><comment><USER9> Ramses is trying to solve that by using a RAML file as source of truth. Regardless of the level of restfulness of your API, what you spec is what you get. Well, that's the ultimate goal, right now it has limitations and opinions but we're trying to solve them. I'm a core dev btw.

[http://ramses.tech](http://ramses.tech) [https://ramses.readthedocs.org](https://ramses.readthedocs.org)

Let me know you thoughts!

</comment><comment> jon-wood Its still early days for me, but I'm really enjoying working with Pliny[0], which is a Ruby based framework that came out of Heroku's experience building APIs. It makes the very good move of just being an opinionated Sinatra stack, and a set of patterns for things like API representations.

[0] [https://github.com/interagent/pliny](https://github.com/interagent/pliny)

</comment><comment><USER10> Not a framework but we're working on something called APIPlug ([http://apiplug.com](http://apiplug.com)) that will enable you to get source code in your desired language. We support versioning and working on oAuth and rate limiting right now. Drop us a message if we can add some feature that will make your life easier.

</comment><comment><USER11> Django rest framework

[http://www.django-rest-framework.org/](http://www.django-rest-framework.org/)

</comment><comment><USER12> WebApi2? It's pretty good. Also, MVC6 (it bundles WebApi2 inside of it, soon to be RC1)

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't think I've seen anything that has the same traction as rails, but strongloop's loopback framework for nodejs was pretty good for best practices (I think their enterprise version has some api extras as well)

</comment><comment><USER14> Restify is pretty popular (for node.js), slim (for php), or Sinatra (for ruby) but I think a lot of developers just don't need much from an API framework, so they pick the most minimal framework available, or none at all.

</comment><comment><USER15> What about Grails? Its the Groovy(ie Java) version of Rails. I think its gaining traction in enterprise software shops. [https://grails.org/](https://grails.org/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Cocoa and Foundation run nearly all Apple technologies and are pretty replete in their capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER17> flask</comment>


The candy weighing demonstration, or, the unwisdom of crowds - <AUTHOR> http://andrewgelman.com/2008/05/08/doing_the_candy/ <comment><USER2> > Now call out to the students who are sitting near where you hid the > envelope: "Um, uh, what's that over there . . . is it an envelope??? Really? > What's inside? Could you open it up?" A student opens it and reads out > what's written on the sheet inside: "Your guesses are all too high!"

Maybe it's because I recently did some reading about magicians, but if I were one of the students I would be thinking that he could have any number of hidden envelopes with different predictions, and he just chose the one that ended up being correct. Of course, I'm deliberately missing the point of the story.

<comment><USER3> The point is that they all guessed low. The weight of the bag never changes, and there's no pretense that the teacher didn't know how much the bag weighed all along. You don't even need the envelope - you could just weigh the bag at the end. Same effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "wisdom of crowds" part of the title is a bit unfortunate. While there can be systemic problems with that type of approach, this does not really demonstrate them.

What is demonstrated is when you give the students an algorithm for a biased estimator, the estimate they get is biased. This is good; empirical demonstration is useful... but it isn't the wisdom/unwisdom of crowds, really.

edit: good responses! Unfortunately I don't have enough time right now to properly clarify how/why I'm looking at it this way.

<comment><USER5> Seems fair to me. Note that he published all the estimates and then had people make predictions as a group, which is pretty much the way to extract wisdom- of-crowds effects.

I agree the estimator is biased, but in good part because of how people pick 5 from 100.

We are all biased in some ways. If a group shares the same biases, then a wisdom-of-crowds approach will yield a wrong answer in which everybody is confident. I think it's a fine lesson for people trying to work in this fashion.

<comment><USER3> He didn't have them estimate anything. They weighed things with a scale, then multiplied by 20.

<comment><USER4> But they shouldn't all be doing the "same" thing!

<comment><USER3> Hm... So what was the point of writing all those steps on the board?

<comment><USER5> To constrain variation to how they picked the candy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In this day and age nobody is going to hand the scale to the next group with the bag sitting on top of it? Its a bit cynical but I would expect that some pairs estimate to be really really close if not spot on as an effect of they just weighed the bag directly.

<comment><USER7> Not even that.

As you pass the 1.5 kg bag to the next group, it's easy to see that that it's _not_ 3-4 kilos as you have just guessed.

<comment><USER8> People routinely overestimate weights. Speaking from experience, it's possible to routinely win bets with an unmarked 2kg dumbbell (which weights "at least 5!")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People forget that Galton's original example was with a group of people with good domain knowledge. It would be interesting to try the experiment on a group of old-school sweet sellers.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if he just asked the students how much the bag weighed without giving a scale if you'd get a better answer.

[http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/31/the- real-...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/31/the-real-wisdom- of-the-crowds/)

This post is more "ask a bad question, get a bad answer".

<comment><USER11> This post is also from a teacher of statistics. Sure, you can weigh the whole bag to get the total (or average) weight; how do you propose to measure an aspect of an entire population, say one as large as a country? Sampling has its uses, when done properly. Besides, as others have pointed out, most people are notoriously bad at estimating weight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When you shake the bag, smaller candies settle down to the bottom, the larger ones get to the top. So even if someone tries to shake the bag to get a 'random' sample, they will be getting a biased sample if they pick all 5 candies from the same layer (usually the top).

<comment><USER13> There's a name for that.

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

<comment><USER14> Yup.

That's how you increase fruit content in your müsli - shake the bag, scoop from the top and leave oats to others :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Neat example.

So nobody in the class just waits until you're not looking and weighs the whole bag with the scale?

<comment><USER16> You could make that strategy difficult by using a big, floppy bag and a scale with a small platform.

Or simply a scale incapable of measuring a weight much larger than the heaviest piece of candy.

<comment><USER17> Making the bag itself heavy would also help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A wonderful demonstration of statistics.

On similar ground, this reminds me of Deming's red bead demonstration, relating statistics to corporations and management practices. Best explained dynamically: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeWTD-0BRS4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeWTD-0BRS4) (delightfully, this is posted by the Mayo Clinic).

<comment><USER19> Thanks for sharing this. Initially I found the video to be a bit dull but on reflection I think it's a brilliant demonstration on how companies tend to be managed in practise.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. Look into more of Deming if you liked that; he was brilliant all around and accurately evaluated and solved many management problems on a grand scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The real reason for the bias is that everyone thought they could sneak a piece.

</comment><comment><USER21> Kind of surprised that kids don't realize this.... What grade is it in?

The first reaction I think any class I was in would have to this demonstration would be to figure out how we're being cheated.

Given a bag with a random sampling of candy and being told to 'pick 5 pieces' I doubt I would choose 5 of the same large candy bars.

It seems highly surprising that 100% of the time this is done you don't have a single pair of students reaching just a bit further into that bag.

It doesn't even seem to be a particularly impressive demonstration.

<comment><USER22> By that logic, shouldn't they be guessing too low? I think the point is they realise there are different sizes, but consistently overcompensate for this effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would really have expected atleast a small number of people to have carefully looked to workout the distribution and whether there were a higher density of one type (e.g. small) at one position.

I imagine the use of a bag rather than a Jar as per the usual school fair game could make spotting these harder though (unless they're allowed to pick up the bag).

</comment><comment><USER24> this isnt the unwisdom of crowds, its the difficulty of noticing sampling bias

<comment><USER25> Correlations between participants (such as due to a systematic bias such as a selection bias) is one of the most common ways for 'wisdom of crowds' to fail. So I'm not sure what your point is.

<comment><USER24> My point is this accidental selection bias doesn't depend on the crowd- you could just as easily make this mistake if you are 1 person in a room by yourself. Some examples of what I would call unwisdom of crowds might be the biasing feedback effect a prediction market's current price has on people's judgement, or how those with the most money (or the with the smallest marginal value of a dollar) exert a larger influence on a prediction market's predictions, if they are implemented that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought 'aftermath' was a great pun (HN must be Americanising me because of course it should be 'aftermaths')

</comment><comment><USER27> Maybe it just weighs less because some of the students are secretly eating the candy.</comment>


Blockchain: the revolution we're not ready for - <AUTHOR> http://haseebq.com/blockchain-the-revolution-were-not-ready-for/ <comment><USER2> > Imagine you didn't need to trust a stranger to make a deal with them.

You mean, if I could deal with a _specific_ stranger by trusting a much much larger group of strangers to ensure fairness for the individual case?

... Starts sounding like a government that enforces contracts, so that's not entirely new :)

> The second category are the profiteers who trying to make a quick buck off > the unaware and the optimistic. Unfortunately, this second category is > getting most of the attention.

True, it's the nano-socialnetwork-gene-plasatics du jour in some circles.

<comment><USER3> > Starts sounding like a government that enforces contracts, so that's not > entirely new :)

The difference is that you can cryptographically verify the correctness of the enforced contract. You don't "Trust", you "Trust, but verify".</comment></comment>


A Deeply Provincial View of Free Speech - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/harpers-letter-free-speech/614080/ <comment><USER2> > That the signatories of a letter denouncing a perceived constriction of > public speech are among their industries' highest-paid and most widely > published figures is a large and obvious irony.

Yes, how ironic that they are not blind to experiences other than their own.</comment>


Infinite is easier than big - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/09/09/infinite-is-easier-than-big/ <comment><USER2> As an infinite set atheist, I think it's important to distinguish people who say "infinite" when they want to talk about the limit of unbounded finite behaviors ("a Turing machine has an infinitely long tape") and people who say "infinite" when they want to talk about big collections ("the cardinality of the collection of real points between 0 and 1"). A smarter language would have different words for these.

</comment><comment><USER3> What he's saying is that by "infinite," people usually mean "arbitrarily large". I've found that if you just say "arbitrarily large" when that's what you mean, it eliminates a lot of these misunderstandings.

Of course, I talk to a lot of engineers and mathematicians. You run the risk of sounding unnecessarily pedantic.

<comment><USER4> No he's not, he's saying that infinity is a useful abstraction for dealing with "arbitrarily large". That often the tools we have for dealing with infinity can give us a better idea of how things behave in arbitrary large cases than the tools we have for dealing with smaller, more manageable cases.

His point is that infinity and the tools we have for dealing with it are useful, not pointless abstractions.

<comment><USER3> I understand that point and I agree. What I'm saying is that upon reading the article closely, I noticed he was primarily promoting the "view infinite as arbitrarily large" technique for dealing with the appearance of infinity.

Example quote from article: "Interpret the problem as saying that the width of the capacitor is so large relative to its thickness that you don't have to worry about edge effects."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There was a great post and a slightly crazy discussion about infinity and the Hilbert Hotel here a few months ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333424>

The penultimate paragraph of the present post sounds like a conversation you might hear in one of the infinitely long infinitely many bars at the Hilbert Hotel:

Nervous Dude: When I went to grad school, my intention was to study functional analysis. Essentially this means infinite dimensional vector spaces.

Unimpressed Girl: That sounds terribly abstract and useless.

Nervous Dude: But it can be quite practical. My background in functional analysis served me well when I went on to study partial differential equations and numerical analysis.

Seriously Unimpressed Girl: Gotcha.</comment>


A New Chapter for Glassdoor - <AUTHOR> https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/new-chapter/ <comment><USER2> Wow - just learned Recruit Holdings also owns Indeed - [https://recruit- holdings.com/what/network/](https://recruit-holdings.com/what/network/) \- that's a pretty big hold on the jobs market joining those two, although I know there's tons of competition.

Maybe they'll go head to head with LinkedIn in some capacity, I think many of us would love an alternative to LinkedIn.</comment>