A Chrome feature is creating load on global root DNS servers - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/a-chrome-feature-is-creating-enormous-load-on-global-root-dns-servers/ <comment><USER3> This issue only exists because without chrome's work here virtually every ISP / Wifi provider etc started hijacking DNS inquiries to pump trash ads down your throat.

THANK you google for stopping this total abuse of internet standards (very annoying for some cases where no UI as well).

The irony of Verisign complaining about this is incredible actually - <USER2> were the no 1 abusers of this in the past! They go on about interception being the exception these days. That's actually because chrome put a stake right through the heart of Verisgns efforts to intercept.

<comment><USER3> Separate question - if google did what mozilla did and wrapped DNS in HTTPS and ran it to 184.108.40.206 (allowing user to pick other resolvers) - would that be better?

It feels like folks complain - you are sending too much traffic. If google said - we can handle it directly (they obviously can - the bandwidth youtube alone uses has got to be magnitudes larger) people would complain - no no - send us the traffic.

Google already runs 184.108.40.206 and encourages adoption of it I think - maybe it can handle the billion requests per day? Or maybe they can help verisign scale their infra?

<comment><USER4> Google running the DNS resolver wouldn't fix this problem; due to the nature of the requests that Chrome is making, the lookups would have to hit the root server because they wouldn't be cached anywhere else.

<comment><USER3> I'm suggesting let google run some root resolvers.

Not to rain on the sob story, but netflix, amazon and google probably pump out orders of magniture more bytes then these requests.

It's axiomatic. If my session makes 3 512 byte requests when I start browsing, and then I watch 10 youtube videos at 2K, then a netflix movie at 4K, how in the WORLD is the bandwidth from the 3 512 byte requests crushing infrastructure?

And if it is, let google or amazon or someone with a clue run the infra. Seriously - this makes no sense that THIS is the bandwidth killer out there. Apple updates - sure, those are monsters and a ton of people get them. DNS packets are pretty small by contrast.

<comment><USER5> Bandwidth isn't the issue, it's the dynamic nature of the content and the global consistency needed between DNS servers. Videos are static content; they don't get updated so you don't need any schemes to check for updates.

It's certainly possible to design DNS to scale, it's just that they may be overwhelmed by QPS right now because they made different trade-offs.

<comment><USER3> We are talking 15k qps. A single AMD machine should be able to much higher rates - millions. Yes, there is overhead, but my point was, if verisign or whoever is in charge can't run these root servers to handle 15k qps for the entire global internet then let google do it.

These are ridiculously low numbers, and dns is EASIER not harder than video. Google is doing full live streaming, multi res / format delivery with chat across a ton of platforms.

And no - root DNS does not change at a high rate of speed. It's a 2MB file you can download yourself. .com stays .com for a LONG time and the TTLs are going to be in hours and days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In a previous YCNews discussion of this topic, I worked out based on public Root DNS statistics that this traffic amounts to at most a few gigabits spread across _hundreds_ of DNS servers, each of which has at least a gigabit connection.

Notice that all of the breathless articles going on about how evil Google is are using percentages, not absolute numbers?

This is because journalists don't do journalism any more, they just put their name on corporate PR that is intended as a weapon in a war for control.

<comment><USER7> You know, that actually makes sense to me. You'd want a lot of margin. If they were running the root DNS servers and were hitting like 80% of their bandwidth on a normal day, I'd be worried.

<comment><USER8> We're not talking about 80%. We're talking about 8%. The size of the traffic they are talking about is low enough that I, personally, would consider paying for it. It is a couple thousands of dollars a month to run this "abused" infrastructure. If they were doing it as a thankless task for free, it would make sense to be upset about it; but they're not. They're doing it for a cut of every single .com purchase on the whole web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ironic that this is Verisign complaining considering the very idea to capture nonexistant domains and replace with spam was a Verisign concept from 2003 called Site Finder. All of .com and .net were wildcarded at the root level.

The ISP just took it as a great idea. Now we have to make countermeasures for it.

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

</comment><comment><USER10> So half of the traffic is Chrome requests, but how much _capacity_ is all of the traffic actually using?

Are the root servers 90% idle or are they overloaded? That changes everything. Also servers are fast, bandwidth is cheap, and DNS is lightweight. How is this really a major resource issue?

</comment><comment><USER11> This topic has been posted several times in the last few days

<comment><USER12> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231857) (4 days ago, 207 comments)

Anything else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What does Firefox do to prevent the problem chromium is trying to solve?

<comment><USER14> They turned on DNS over HTTPs by default and send your queries to Cloudflare:

[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/02/25/firefox- continues-p...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/02/25/firefox-continues- push-to-bring-dns-over-https-by-default-for-us-users/)

<comment><USER15> You're seemingly pushing you own agenda here?

As the article itself says:

> Are other approaches feasible? For example, Firefox's captive portal test > uses delegated namespace probe queries, directing them away from the root > servers towards the browser's infrastructure.

<comment><USER14> In your agenda to expose my agenda in linking a Firefox blog post, you have missed that this isn't even about captive portal detection. Captive portals are easily detected by trying to load a known response page; captive portals don't fake that because they want to be detected so that the browser redirects you to their portal.

This is about malicious DNS resolvers that don't return NXDOMAIN for non- existent domains but instead send you to an ISP advertisement page. This messes with the omnibox. For all other domains, they resolve just fine. These resolvers are inclined to evade detection, e.g. if browsers checked a static list of domains, they would just return NXDOMAIN for only those.

<comment><USER16> I can't even remember last i got an advertisement page. Must've been about 10 years ago, though the last 5 I've been using third party DNS. I don't know any Swedish ISP that does this. I'm using ISP DNS on my phone.

<comment><USER14> I assume at some point the calculus flipped for ISPs to not annoy you with low-quality ads and make customers cut them out, but instead operate a real DNS resolver so you can still sell their real-time browsing history to advertisers. Part of that is the Google and Cloudflare marketing campaigns for their public resolvers, so people had a ready alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is the root zone AXFR able? Maybe recursive servers should just periodically do that, and then they don't need to forward these queries.

<comment><USER18> Yes, it is, and that's in fact one popular way to set up a private root content DNS server for a resolving proxy DNS server to consult. I do it on my machines.

* [https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/9a113ec2c2e58679bab8d8b34...](https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/9a113ec2c2e58679bab8d8b34413de4acab377f2/source/convert/tinydns.do#L77)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The root servers may have to delay NXDOMAIN replies. Those are rare for legit requests.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand why it has to randomly generate new domains each time. Surely all that matters is that it's testing for domains that are statistically unlikely to exist, right? Why not seed the RNG with something like the current date, such that the domains are still random, but all instances of Chrome generate the same domains every day? That way the NXDOMAIN results should be able to be cached by upstream resolvers, thus significantly reducing the load on the root servers.

<comment><USER21> If they were in any way predictable, people would register them, or the broken DNS servers would handle those domains properly while still giving broken results for others.

<comment><USER22> That shouldn't be a problem: I don't think it's possible to make qwajuixk resolve to anything on the public internet. I bet they could hardcode a list of domains, change it up every couple releases, and that'd stop 80% of the rogue sysadmins who are doing this.

<comment><USER23> I've mostly seen DNS hijacking from large ISPs. Probably hardly any sysadmin anywhere wants to implement DNS hijacking, but have corporate overlords that tell them to do it. The first big ISP would get it working pretty quickly no matter what Google did, then other big companies would see it and tell their sysadmins to figure it out, the other company is already doing it.

I bet there's a decent amount of cash in DNS hijacking for big players, so you should probably think of it like the hypothetical cryptography attacker. You should assume they will know everything about your method but still can't beat it. If you can tell them what you're doing and they can beat it, they will. They wouldn't have done it in the first place without motivation.

<comment><USER24> Send one request to such a random domain over DoH or DoT to some DNS server you control for the purpose (Google can easily set such a thing up). Ensure the response is NXDOMAIN. If it's not, generate a new random domain and retry.

Send a second request of the same domain via the system DNS. If it's not NXDOMAIN, it's hijacking unknown DNS requests.

One request that might hit the root instead of 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been using google DNS, and cloudflare DNS (as of late) since I found out about this ISP behavior.

It's unacceptable, it's unhelpful, and I see it as a vector for getting untrustworthy software on less savy users hardware.

</comment><comment><USER26> Previous discussion (5 days prior)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231857)

</comment><comment> t-writescode What does this do to users of PiHole?

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting problem

</comment><comment><USER28> Just require HTTPS already.

<comment><USER29> HTTPS doesn't protect against DNS or SNI interception

<comment><USER28> If there's no valid cert for the domain, you can't 301/302 redirect over https connection. SNI just lets the middleman peak at the host name, it doesn't allow you to redirect. DNS interception allows the attackers to change IP but https still needs a valid cert for the host.

<comment><USER30> Incidentally, this affects how my ISP implements its domain blocks. Non-HTTPS sites are 307 redirected to [https://assets.virginmedia.com/site- blocked.html](https://assets.virginmedia.com/site-blocked.html), whereas connections to HTTPS sites are just halted (IIRC, it sends a TCP reset, but it's a while since I looked into it).

<comment> amiga-workbench That reminds me, I turned this off the other day and it still hasn't taken effect yet. [https://my.virginmedia.com/advancederrorsearch/](https://my.virginmedia.com/advancederrorsearch/)

Its a good thing DoH is now in the stable version of RouterOS, I've just switched it on.

<comment><USER18> You don't need DoH to avoid that. Just set up and use your own resolving proxy DNS servers and don't use the Virgin Media ones at 220.127.116.11 and 18.104.22.168 either directly or indirectly. (This means not forwarding to those servers, and not letting your DHCP client, in any of your machines, configure your system to use them when it gets a lease.)

Here is the difference between using Virgin Media's resolving proxy DNS servers and using your own:

        % # http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/djbwares/guide/commands/dnsqrx.xml
        %
        % dnsqrx a z398nvfsd0098u3qwtltnk. 184.108.40.206
        1 z398nvfsd0098u3qwtltnk:
        56 bytes, 1+1+0+0 records, response, noerror
        query: 1 z398nvfsd0098u3qwtltnk
        answer: z398nvfsd0098u3qwtltnk 0 A 18.104.22.168
        %
        %
        % dnsqr a z398nvfsd0098u3qwtltnk.
        1 z398nvfsd0098u3qwtltnk:
        40 bytes, 1+0+0+0 records, response, authoritative, nxdomain
        query: 1 z398nvfsd0098u3qwtltnk
        %

That last query didn't even escape the machine in my case. I run a private root content DNS server on every machine if possible. The query here got answered by a tinydns instance listening on 127.53.0.1:

        % tail -n 1 /var/log/sv/tinydns/current | tai64nlocal
        2020-08-26 09:37:44.305619726 7f000001:cfd9:f163 + 0001 z398nvfsd0098u3qwtltnk
        %

No-one gets to complain about (minuscule) extra load on the root content DNS server except me. It's my server on my machine. (-:

<comment> amiga-workbench I've just realised my mistake, I needed to turn "use-peer-dns" off.

I did have my router setup to cache DNS requests to google and updated the DHCP config so everything would use my router for resolution, but virgin's DNS servers were still being pulled through as a "dynamic server" according to the RouterOS panel.

I thought Virgin was fiddling with my DNS requests even though I was sending them to a different provider.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft's Zune HD launches. No firmware? - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/mobile-amp-wireless/77723/microsofts-zune-hd-launches <comment><USER2> You can't start using a brand new iPod Touch (or an iPhone) right away, either. First, you have to connect it to a PC with iTunes installed.</comment>


The invisible helmet - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/43038579#at=70

<comment><USER2> The submissions with discussions were:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828134) (3 years ago)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388056) (1 year ago)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6685798](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6685798) (a few days ago)

Here are a few other submissions of this story, none with any discussion of significance.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977212)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4382338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4382338)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4392310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4392310)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467171)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6271073](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6271073)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6442570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6442570)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6691432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6691432)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6700690](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6700690)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that, Colin! I did a simple search for the Vimeo and YouTube URL; I should've searched the keywords, instead :)</comment></comment>


West German spies secretly monitored jokes to assess public mood  - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,655123,00.html <comment><USER2> I forget the name of the book (maybe 'stasiland'?) given to me by a German coworker but the level of surveillance the east Germans lived under sounds incredible.</comment>


Most popular human cell in science (HeLa) gets sequenced - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/most-popular-human-cell-in-science-gets-sequenced-1.12609

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article -"The research world's most famous human cell has had its genome decoded, and it's a mess. German researchers this week report the genome sequence of the HeLa cell line, which originates from a deadly cervical tumour taken from a patient named Henrietta Lacks.

Established after Lacks died in 1951, HeLa cells were the first human cells to grow well in the laboratory. The cells have contributed to more than 60,000 research papers, the development of a polio vaccine in the 1950s and, most recently, an international effort to characterize the genome, known as ENCODE."</comment>


MP3s of web articles - <AUTHOR> http://soundgecko.com

<comment><USER2> Very cool idea! Been wondering if something like this exists.

You say "Professional features coming soon"... a feature that I would pay for is turning an RSS feed (or a group of RSS feeds!) into a podcast. Great way to receive your news every morning.

<comment><USER3> To ensure this gets the attention it deserves, I'd love to have this feature as well and would be happy to pay for a service like that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

I am one of the people behind SoundGecko, and we've recently launched in Sydney last week at a conference, and have received some coverage today by The Verge at [http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/17/3164861/soundgecko- convert...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/17/3164861/soundgecko-convert- article-into-mp3-launch)

We use a mixture of API services, Windows Azure for hosting, native iOS development for the mobile app, and e-mail gateways such as Postmarkapp.com for e-mail routing.

<comment><USER4> Make a private RSS feed so I can subscribe to it in my podcatcher and I am sold!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey, guys -

This is ridiculously cool. It hits something I've toyed around with doing myself for a few years, and I will definitely give you a try tomorrow. The fact that you're from Sydney and I'm aiming to move down under makes things that much sweeter.

That said, I'm curious: I'd love to see a service that turns larger blobs of text into audio format (e.g. audiobooks). Do you have any plans for doing that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

We're from Melbourne actually (not that far!) but were in Sydney for Microsoft's Imagine Cup/BizSpark APAC Summit.

Australia is pretty cool.

We're just getting started; and hope to improve the service, among other new products, very soon.

Let me know if you spot any sweet spots you'd like to see improved (andrew at 121cast dot com) if you like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Driving is one of the few times I stop mindlessly reading mediocre content [1] on whatever screen happens to be in front of me and actually start thinking. It's a wonderful website and I'm sure some will gain great value from the product - just consider whether you really need another avenue of endless information, or a moment of peace instead.

[1] hyperbole

</comment><comment><USER7> ...or you could take public transit with your smartphone tethered to your netbook.

<comment><USER8> Upvote for public transit. The service is still useful for bus/train riders. Especially during busy commute hours, when you are often forced to stand, having something you don't have to look at would be pretty cool.

Still waiting on my mp3 to get a feel for the quality, especially when it comes to technical stuff, but I dig the idea!

<comment><USER9> Sorry about the delay. Our email outbound provider dropped the ball and there's a big backlog of emails. Trying to get it sorted now.

(part of SoundGecko team)

<comment><AUTHOR> The queue has been fixed, e-mails were delivered recently. Apologies for the delay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> if you dig soundgecko, check out aurality. It's real time, open to RSS feeds or individual articles and also reads out your "Pocket" a.k.a ReadItLater list.

Disclaimer: I am a co-founder at Aurality

</comment><comment><USER11> "multi-task... while you drive" sounds like a terrible pitch for any product.

</comment><comment><USER12> Amazing.</comment>


Geologists Found a Rock That's 'Older Than Earth' - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/geologists-found-a-rock-thats-older-than-earth-in-the-a-1751594778 <comment><USER2> Most meteorites date from around the same time as this one. Its not the age that was noteworthy. Its the tracking system and search process that found a football-sized object somewhere in the Australian Outback that is remarkable.</comment>


Alibaba neural network defeats human in global reading test - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/alibaba-neural-network-defeats-human-in-global-reading-test/ <comment><USER2> This is not quite human-level question-answering in the everyday sense of those words. The ZDNet headline is too clickbaity for my taste.

The answer to every question in the test is a preexisting snippet of text, or "span," from a corresponding reading passage shown to the model. The model has only to select which span in the reading passage gives the best answer -- i.e., which sequence of words already in the text best answers the question.[a]

Actual current results:

[https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD- explorer/](https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/)

Paper describing the dataset and test:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05250](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05250)

[a] If this explanation isn't entirely clear to you, it might help to think of the problem as a challenging classification task in which the number of possible classes for each question is equal to the number of possible spans in the corresponding reading passage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, but it was the least clickbaity headline I saw about this result.

Compare: "ROBOTS CAN NOW READ BETTER THAN HUMANS, PUTTING MILLIONS OF JOBS AT RISK" [http://www.newsweek.com/robots-can-now-read-better-humans- pu...](http://www.newsweek.com/robots-can-now-read-better-humans-putting- millions-jobs-risk-781393)

<comment><USER2> Jeez...

Before you blink an eye there will be some MBA-types working on PowerPoint proposals with detailed cost-benefit analyses for using those new AI machines they heard about that can read better than human beings. Needless to say, the technology will fall far short of expectations.

This is why there have been two AI winters already.

<comment><USER3> I think it's incumbent on people like you to get the word out that ML isn't going to put everyone's jobs at risk. Between this and self-driving cars, local governments are beginning to weigh spending tax dollars on these boondoggles, for example, self-driving cars, instead of on proven modes of transit like public transport.

The futurist writers peddling this stuff need to take a moment to chill and learn about the actual state of the underlying technology.

<comment><USER4> It's not in their interest to chill and learn. It's in their interest to hype and sell.

<comment><USER5> There's very few people in the whole ecosystem who take home a bigger paycheck if they chill and learn. Earth gets what Earth pays for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great result. At my job I manage a machine learning team and so I am fairly much all-in for deep learning to solve practical problems.

That said, I think the path to 'real' AGI lies in some combination of DL, probabilistic graph models, symbolic systems, and something we have not even imagined yet. BTW, a good paper just released on the limitations of DL by Judea Pearl [https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04016](https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04016)

<comment><USER7> > That said, I think the path to 'real' AGI lies in some combination of DL, > probabilistic graph models, symbolic systems, and something we have not even > imagined yet.

Well, that really made it much clearer to me ;)

<comment><USER8> He just means all the things that we already know don't work + something that we don't know about yet that will. (emphasis on the part we have no fucking clue about).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be interesting to know how well some of the entries on the Squad page do for the Winograd Schema challenge ([https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/WinogradSchemas/WS....](https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/WinogradSchemas/WS.html)). Does anyone know if any of the systems have been tested on that as well?

</comment><comment><USER10> I am always annoyed at claims in supervised learning that a machine predictor is better than humans. Humans obviously are the ones that scored the dataset to begin with. If you read the paper, it goes on to say, in regards to human evaluation:

> Mismatch occurs mostly due to inclusion/exclusion of non-essential phrases > (e.g., monsoon trough versus movement of the monsoon trough) rather than > fundamental disagreements about the answer.

I don't think I would call that "error," rather than ambiguity. In other words, there's more than one possible answer to the questions under these criteria -- English isn't a formal grammar where there's always one and only one answer. For instance, here's one of the questions from the ABC Wikipedia page:

> What kind of network was ABC when it first began?

> Ground Truth Answers: radio network radio radio network

> Prediction: October 12, 1943

Because the second human said "radio" instead of "radio network," I believe this would count as a human miss. But the answer is factually correct. Meanwhile, the prediction from the Stanford logistic regression (not the more sophisticated Alibaba model in the article, where I don't think results are published at this detail) is completely wrong. No human could make that mistake. And yet these are treated as equally flawed answers by the EM metric.

And yet this gets headlined as "defeats humans," not "learns to mimic human responses well."

<comment><USER11> > I am always annoyed at claims in supervised learning that a machine > predictor is better than humans. Humans obviously are the ones that scored > the dataset to begin with

For some problems, sure. For prediction tasks on the other hand, you have an actual ground truth that can be compared to human a priori prediction.

Neural net NLP results are rarely about actual intelligence or clever use of latent variables that it figured out, and more "pattern matching" that explains why its errors are so different from human errors. It doesn't actually understand the problem, it's finding tricks to solve the questions that happen to be regularities in the dataset that us humans can't really see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How well do these do on Winograd challenges?

[https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-18/aaai18winograd/](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-18/aaai18winograd/)

<comment><USER13> This is extractive question answering rather than reasoning, so this will be challenging for it.

Nevertheless, most extractive systems learn some degree of co-reference resolution.

I have a less advanced system than the Alibaba one, and it got both example questions correct:

 _The trophy would not fit in the brown suitcase because it was too big._ What was too big?

and

 _The town councilors refused to give the demonstrators a permit because they feared violence._ Who feared violence?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is clickbait. Unless models are invariant to adversarial examples in SQuAD such as those described here: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07328](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07328), models doing really well on SQuAD doesn't mean a ton.

<comment><USER15> Can't they simply include adversarial examples in the unreleased test set?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> At NIPS 2017 there was a system which beat humans in a college QuizBowl competition. In many ways I think that was more impressive than excellent performance on SQuAD.

</comment><comment><USER16> Kudos to my colleagues. The iDST team is based in Bellevue, WA and hiring more people. Let me know if you're interested.

Also, the Alibaba Cloud is looking for engineers. Pls check [https://careers.alibaba.com/positionDetail.htm?positionId=b7...](https://careers.alibaba.com/positionDetail.htm?positionId=b7kSeJ8J2XQ3ynkotvAhPw%3D%3D)

</comment><comment><USER17> @syllogism, have you thought about a demo combining spaCy + ____ to tackle SQuAD ([https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD- explorer/](https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/))?

<comment><USER13> DrQA can use Spacy as a tokenizer and scores about a 2 points less on SQuAD. [https://github.com/facebookresearch/DrQA#tokenizers](https://github.com/facebookresearch/DrQA#tokenizers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A counterpoint from Yoav Goldberg:

[http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~yogo/squad-vs- human.pdf](http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~yogo/squad-vs-human.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> is this still impressive in 2018? I honestly don't know

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I don't think it is. Year 2017 brought out some really bad humans, and it turns out, you don't really need better algorithms to beat them in linguistics. See for yourself in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0eY5TGEK2I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0eY5TGEK2I)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cool. An AMP page. Makes it look like Google published this article.

<comment><USER22> Seeing (google.com) in the title definitely influenced my click.

<comment><USER23> People who think AMP is a solution and not just another problem need to take this effect into account. Google isn't just acting like a CDN here, they're being intentionally misleading.

<comment><USER24> Normally I'd agree, but I just got a redirect to the ZDNet page.

Did someone change the link?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Real link:

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/alibaba-neural-network- defeats-...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/alibaba-neural-network-defeats- human-in-global-reading-test/)

<comment><USER26> Flagged and voted this up. HN should scan for AMP links and ask the submitter to fix the link.

<comment><AUTHOR> I realized my mistake after posting, but couldn't edit the URL. Sorry about that.</comment></comment></comment>


Welcome to Auroville - <AUTHOR> https://www.auroville.org/ <comment><USER4> This is literally the last thing I expected on the front page!

My family are all based in Pondicherry and have very strong historical links with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Mother. And are also involved in the Auroville administration and management. I've been there a lot, I've stayed there, met many people who live there and work there.

And it's an unusual place. Some of the folks in Pondy call it "Horrorvile" because of the reputation of seediness that some residents are alleged to have (sex abuse of local children, if you want to know). There is also a unusual "un-Indian" feeling about the place because of the nationality of its residents (global).

However, I have met only nice people there, doing wonderful projects (solar bike sheds, environmentally-suitable architecture) and it is well worth a few visits.

On the other hand, there is quite a difference between the mission statement and the practice of its values. Money isn't really supposed to change hands for work and housing. This is bullshit; many people have commercial sidelines and housing does get bought and sold. Rules are there to be bent and of course, they are.

Some of the security staff can be real jobsworths and exceedingly officious, which can irritate people. And it feels a bit lawless in some regards, hovering uneasily between spirituality, cultishness and the Indian democracy.

It's a peculiar place. But you probably got that already.

<comment><USER5> J. Krishnamurti said it the best: "Belief has no place where truth is concerned."

I always view these types of movements with a lot of suspicion. Mainly because of the falsehoods they present. Self-realization is not something that can be taught by following someone else. You can spend your entire life looking for it in other people. But you have to experience it, to truly understand. You shouldn't even listen to what I'm writing here, as this entire comment could be a similar falsehood that detracts you in your search.

<comment><USER6> "You shouldn't even listen to what I'm writing here"

If you believe that, why are you writing it then?

I think, because you do believe, that text can help others understand something. Not always, though.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't matter what I believe. For all you know, I could be a finite state machine. Or a similar automaton.

<comment><USER7> Allow me to reiterate for hutzlibu...

If you believe that, why are you writing it then?

<comment><USER8> The point is to think for yourself, I think.

"Question reality", as they say.

<comment><USER6> Sure. And writing it down, can help others reach that conclusion ..

<comment><USER5> Language itself is a distortion of your thoughts.

<comment><USER9> Well at least your thoughts seem very distorted because you seem to claim that using the tool of language is useless and no one should do it, and then still keep using it and even try to defend using it.

"Language itself is a distortion of your thoughts" is just one of those truths, one of the first things any growing human being sees when they start on a journey of spiritual growth. The point of it is not to stop using or stop trusting the language, stop communicating. The point is to see how it works and how it relates to the rest of the self, so that it can fulfill its great potential as a tool for spiritual growth and learning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _" Auroville was born on 28 February 1968. Its founder, the Mother, created > the Auroville Charter consisting of four main ideas which underpinned her > vision for Auroville. When Auroville came into being, All India Radio (AIR) > broadcast the Charter, live, in 16 languages. Aurovilians apply the ideas of > the Auroville Charter in their daily life, in policy-development, and > decisions, big and small. The Charter thus forms an omnipresent referent > that silently guides the people who choose to live and work for Auroville.

The Auroville Charter Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But, to live in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity."_

Well that sounds completely normal /s

I've seen Midsommar, no thanks

<comment><USER11> Thought the same thing. The second I saw a reference to someone titled "The Mother", all my "cult!" alarms went off.

<comment><USER8> I was blessed by The Mother, during one of her US tours. She seemed to be a very sweet old woman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I stayed at the compound in Pondicherry.

I remember there being some slightly strange rules you had to agree to in order to stay there (e.g. no sex) but the "staff" (don't know if they were employees or devotees?) were welcoming and the accommodations were great. The compound is right on the Bay of Bengal and sleeping in that room with the windows open and the waves crashing was an experience I'll never forget.

<comment><USER13> When I was there, I learnt that Auroville share a lot with Sri Aurobindo and the Holy Mother, but the ashram/compounds in Pondicherry doesn't have as much to do with Auroville itself these days as it did back in the 60s-70s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You'd think there was some seedy truth to the place but an ex of mine had family involved in the administration of the place and I've been there (both before I knew her and after). Quite a charming place in reality.

Though I'm told everything almost fell apart after a founder or big leader died and the government had to step in. It's the Indian government so usually that's a disaster but this one seems to have turned out okay.

Anyway, it's unlikely the website can handle an average company let alone HN so mirrors:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200427170816/https://www.aurov...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200427170816/https://www.auroville.org/)

[http://archive.is/BjdIk](http://archive.is/BjdIk)

</comment><comment><USER15> Funny I read about this place in r/india a few times and they seem to regard it as a racist hippie colony.

<comment><USER16> I've been there twice. I'd say it is very hippy, and there's a lot of bunk floating around - I saw a water cooler that dispensed "smart water enhanced with classical music" \- but that's a given for any place that has to do with spiritual enlightenment. I wouldn't say it was racist, though, but from personal experience most of the foreigners I saw were white and seemed well off. IMO it's neither as bad as /r/india makes it out to be nor as good as some of the commenters here are saying it is.

<comment><USER17> > but that's a given for any place that has to do with spiritual > enlightenment.

Please don't say it unless you visited all of them. I've been to places where this is not true.

<comment><USER18> Agreed. There are plenty of places where the people engage in spiritual inquiry & meditation while still having a very solid base rooted in reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have met many people from Auroville (or maybe Aurovillians as some would say).

I have a mixed feeling about Auroville too like some other comments here. I have visited couple times. But never actually got what they are trying to do. This is another part.

But I want to mention, TBH: It is like ANY OTHER ASHRAMS or communal living, I would say. Even to the one I visit often. People are different, sometimes they are nice and sometimes they behave downright silly and rude.

That said, it could be a practice if you take it that way :)

They are much more precious for you in the long run if you are into spiritual practice.

It's like Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo puts it "Instead of seeing other people as an obstacle to our path, we recognize that they are the path. That learning on how to deal skillfully especially with unskilfuled people is how we learn, how we grow and how to begin to mature."

</comment><comment><USER20> I grew up in Pondicherry, went to Pondicherry Engineering College (class of 99). I used to bike up from college to Matrimandir a lot of weekends for meditation. There are several communities within Auroville and they each operate kind of independently. Some of them welcome guests to stay with them, and I have stayed with a number of communities. So, what accusation may be true for one community may not be true for other communities.

In the middle of all of that, I found Sadhana forest to be a wonderful community in Auroville that is far away from the madness of Matrimandir both physically and spiritually. Aviram and his family, along with volunteers, are doing a fantastic job of reforesting the area west of the Tindivanam highway. If you are going, once we are past this global Covid19 pandemic that is, I would highly recommend a volunteering stay at Sadhana forest.

</comment><comment><USER21> I went there, it's pretty weird if I'm honest. I felt as if I was living in an Indian Hitchcock film. It felt as though there were people who were tourists and people who lived there and they were very separate. I have this feeling the whole place is a riddle, I'd like to go back and try to understand it again...

<comment><USER22> > _I'd like to go back and try to understand it again_

There's a book called "Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness" by a guy named Satprem, which pretty much gives you the founding story of the place.

Caveat - Satprem was a disciple, so this is not a view from the outside.

<comment><USER21> Seems the PDF is available freely here: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9DdtF_uMk05NUhyM09MOXdTS1U...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9DdtF_uMk05NUhyM09MOXdTS1U/edit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is it just me or does their icon look like the Death Star?

BTW, their course offering looks very good: [https://edu.auroville.org/courses](https://edu.auroville.org/courses)

\- Construction & application of Ferrocement

\- Production of & construction using CSEB

\- Arches, Vaults & Domes - <USER2>

I kind of would have expected Yoga and spiritual things, but it appears they are genuinely interested in the technical skills required for hands-on self- sufficiency.

</comment><comment><USER24> In a case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (or frequency illusion), I've been learning Elixir/Phoenix and started off with [https://github.com/shankardevy/mango](https://github.com/shankardevy/mango) which explicitly mentions Auroville and is the first I had heard of it. It gave me a strange vibe.

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks like the page is down, here's the Wikipedia page. Apparently it's an experimental city created in the 1960s in India.

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

</comment><comment><USER26> Went to Auroville, really nice place along with Pondicherry.

There is an element of cult to the place but their message is good

<comment><USER27> I went there, too. A lot, and only, black people working for 'illuminated' white (rich) ones: I was pretty shocked.

Nothing new, really: and this is pretty sad.

<comment><USER28> If you have a principle of nondiscrimination and people self-select into different roles, what can you do? Discriminate or accept their differences?

<comment><USER29> Rich people coming in and living easy, and other, very poor people moving in because maybe they need a job is not 'self-selection' it's 'a priori selection' based upon the economic systems they are coming in from, not the one they are in.

These places make great sets for fun movies though ...

<comment><USER28> Whatever you call it, people are choosing their roles. Should they work against that, such as by denying employment to darker skinned people and denying membership to lighter skinned people? Or not.

<comment><USER29> ... perhaps the most false choice ever presented in a social argument.

'Kids born it poverty can't go to University so factory work is their 'choice', why should we deny them work at the factory?'

Seriously?

If it were just 'some place' then it would be more of a rhetorical question, but the _entire point_ of the villages is to create a place where people are equal irrespective of clour or creed, so the hypocrisy looms large. Maybe they can take their free time to ponder such questions because though answers are never obvious, there are opportunities for improvement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Tbh this may sound cultist to others, but it's really not. You'll need to understand the philosophies of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo first for it to make sense. It's sets the example of a Utopian society. One shouldnt simply look at it from that angle and discard it without understanding the history and vision behind it.

<comment><USER22> I agree - as far as spiritual movements go, this is one of the least cult-ish I've ever seen.

Even the stuff they say - I can at least sit down and consider it without freaking out instantly.

In some ways they resemble the very modern panpsychist school of thought (Giulio Tononi, Sam Harris). Consciousness is a basic ingredient of matter. Both matter and consciousness are real. Evolution is real. There is no biblical god. Cosmology - they defer to science when it comes to that, but having consciousness as a major ingredient does shift the perspective a bit (everything becomes "evolutionary" in a sense).

The way they think of the future reminds you of the Singularity theories. If Ray Kurzweil and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote a book together, it wouldn't be far from this.

The one thing that's a bit far out is the claim that consciousness could, in theory, interact with matter directly, not just through regular mechanisms (brain, nerves, muscles, etc). They do insist it's super-hard to do in practice. They do shun the miraculous stuff, they insist that the change of consciousness is all that really matters here and now in a spiritual endeavor. In this regard they're not very far from, say, your run of the mill buddhist school of meditation.

As long as Aurobindo and Mirra were alive, they kept the place as non-cult-ish as humanly possible. I would say they even had a remarkable amount of skepticism, aside from the claims mentioned above. I'd like to visit Auroville one day, to see how things have changed in the decades since Mirra's passing.

Hard to explain. I've seen plenty of crazy places (adventurous youth + interest for spirituality, yadda-yadda), but the stuff that Aurobindo + Mirra started strikes me as remarkably... rational, I guess?

Read and draw your own conclusions.

<comment><USER6> "The one thing that's a bit far out is the claim that consciousness could, in theory, interact with matter directly"

I think that claim like this alone, is not so far stretched, when you assume consciousness comes from brain activity, ~ electricity - and with classical physics, magnetic/electric fields or even quantum physics, everything is connected and interacts - consciousness do influences matter. So when you have a different thought, a different magnetic field is the result, etc. that does influence matter directly.

The far stretch claim is, that conscious can have a directed, focused effect and not just be random.

Anyway, the idea that mind can influence matter directly(magic thinking), is a very old one and I think the majority of the world population is still holding to it. Allmost every religious person does (in a different way). And in nonreligious, educated, western people I have seen it quite a lot, too. Most are not really conscious about it, though.

<comment><USER22> The thing is, once you accept the premise of panpsychism, you sort of have to at least sit and think about whether a direct action might be possible somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroville)

</comment><comment><USER32> So it seems that they do handle the Visa situation for you (it appears that you enter India on an Entry Visa; which I understand you don't have the right to stay in India just the right of passage). There are still two other things: Taxes and Healthcare. Are you supposed to be paying taxes on your activities (if you are doing Online/Offshore work since there are no private companies in Auroville). How is healthcare handled since it can get very expensive for old people.

</comment><comment><USER33> As I was staying in Pondicherry for a month so I a visited Auroville a few times in 2018. It's hard to describe. On the one hand it seems like a cause for good, on the other you occasionally discover some out-of-place clearly expensive and wealthy buildings for residents dotted around the jungle which forms the site. Seems to have some strange contradictions.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm pleasantly surprised to see Auroville on the front page of HN. This brings back memories from 2 decades ago. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER35> I lived at Auroville for 3 months for a college study aborad. Wild experience. The Matramandir (the big gold dome) was a very remarkable and weird building. Definitely cult-ish, but also so truly different and innovative.

</comment><comment><USER36> Was reading about the "galaxy" concept [https://www.auroville.org/contents/691](https://www.auroville.org/contents/691)

> Radiating out beyond the Matrimandir Gardens are four Zones, each focusing > on an important aspect of the township's life:

> Industrial (north). Cultural (north east), Residential (south/south west) > and. International (west).

Feels so weird and dystopian when places try to enforce some sort of segregation

</comment><comment><USER37> [https://auroville.com](https://auroville.com) works if .org is down. I've come across it in the past because they build and sell pretty nice (just intonation) musical instruments. The instruments are cool but the place comes across a bit cultish

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG9QfEMd_GU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG9QfEMd_GU)

</comment><comment><USER38> Are atheists welcome there?

<comment><USER39> Auroville is open to everyone, but there are rules. In the visitor centre you can read that they claim to be religion-less. For example, religious cult (e.g. monotheist prayer) is forbidden in the Matrimandir, the central monument dedicated for the practice of yoga and meditation. However, the spiritual movement behind Auroville is a kind of cult of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. But I found Auroville habitants much less proselyte than religious communities in general. Actually it is easier to be kicked out of the community than to become one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> [https://i.imgur.com/BPioTnL.png](https://i.imgur.com/BPioTnL.png)

this picture is bit aspirational compared to satellite pictures of the area: [https://goo.gl/maps/4xqCoBVwbbqy51Z29](https://goo.gl/maps/4xqCoBVwbbqy51Z29)

</comment><comment><USER41> Auroville is mentioned in the Apple TV+ series "Home", episode 6 "India". Anupama Kundoo's Wall House is just outside the Auroville city limits, in an area designated for experimentation. I saw the episode recently so was surprised to see Auroville pop up here.

</comment><comment><USER42> Somewhat related: Sri Aurobindo studied in England and also contributed to India's freedom struggle.

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

</comment><comment><USER43> So wild. I was there with some friends back in 2006. We didn't go into the big orb because they were charging and we were cheap.

What a random memory to relive. Lovely :)

</comment><comment><USER44> I visited Auroville in 2008, stayed two weeks, and found it an odd place indeed. Tourists could read about the huge expansion plans for the site which were set down back in the 1960s and 1970s, but all that growth seems to have stalled many years ago already. There was definitely a feeling of decay around the place, like an old socialist-era concrete monument that was supposed to represent the future but is now a sad cracked and stained relic.

Many of the younger people I met were only living in Auroville because they were born there, and they had little to no interest in spirituality, the Mother, Sri Aurobindo, etc.

</comment><comment><USER45> How's the Internet access there?

<comment><USER46> Please don't go there to turn it into another "digital nomad" place.

<comment><USER47> Please don't gatekeep.

<comment><USER46> What's wrong with that?

<comment><USER45> For starters, if you don't live there, why do you want to decide for them? So that you personally could travel there and check it out without nomads?

P.S. not a nomad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> "Money is not meant to generate money." \- Central banks across the world, moments before lowering interest rates below zero.

<comment><USER49> Submitted title was "Money is not meant to generate money. Welcome to Auroville". Submitters: please don't do that - <USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Down for me..

<comment><USER51> same :( rough thing to happen on launch day

<comment><USER52> It's not being launched, and it's not a product to begin with. The Wikipedia pages that another commenter posted are helpful, in any case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> So it's Jonestown?</comment>


Sixteen, Alone, 23 Hours a Day, in a Six-by-Eight-Foot Box - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/editors-picks/26ab1e09632d <comment><USER2> I am a lifelong liberal but I did work for a year as a correction officer on Riker's Island (a decade ago, at ARDC which is the jail discussed). The "box" was referred to by everyone as the "bing".

This isn't an AMA, but I will say that many like much of law enforcement, there is a discretionary aspect. That is, though inmates can be thrown in the bing for minor offences, almost all were there because of an accumulation of violent activities. In other words, they really were "bad guys" (once again a lot could have changed in a decade).

I would say a bigger problem were the "schools" that the inmates went to in the jail - they were among the most violent places on earth. The teachers obviously could not control the classes and there weren't enough COs to help enough either.

But for the most part things things self-leveled. Inmates had an assigned classification which tended to bunch them together. Kids who honestly were good kids, would usually wind up in a camp-like environments called the "sprungs". And bad kids would wind up with other bad kids, and wind up doing bad things.

Another thing about that jail, was it was about 50% adolescents and 50% adults. The adults were usually sentenced but waiting for a bed available in a state facility.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok, here's a solution: Private prisons are corporations. To ensure that they act in good faith towards the goal of a better society, instead of motivated by sheer profit, let us make a laws that compensate private prisons, not by the number of bodies they house, but instead on the recidivism rates. We should not be paying these entities to house humans indefinitely. Instead, motivate them to rehabilitate and return these people to society.

<comment> jack-r-abbit The only (well not the _only_ ) problem with that is then they would have an incentive to just get people out as quickly as possible to get paid. We would have to set up some sort of standards for what it meant to be "rehabilitated" and that would be pretty difficult.

<comment><USER3> If the person re-commits a crime, then the prison must re-pay the government back. Perhaps we can do away with mandatory sentencing as well! Let the prison decide when a person has paid their debt to society.

<comment><USER4> Then you are going to get a lot of "accidental" prison deaths. Because the prisons won't house an inmate that they don't think they can make money off of.

<comment><USER3> Prisons could choose which inmates they take in. That is, prisons wouldn't be forced to house inmates who they don't believe have rehabilitation potential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" Only the U.S., Somalia and South Sudan have declined to ratify the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits juvenile solitary confinement as a matter of international law."_

Nice.

<comment><USER6> Did you bother checking what else it says and what the U.S.'s stated reason for not signing is? Or do you prefer to post ignorant sarcastic criticism?

<comment><USER7> For cultural context, i live in germany.

Are you american and really think this is a sane path of action: "The Convention is unlikely to be ratified in the near future because it forbids both the death penalty and life imprisonment for children [...] threatening national control over domestic policy"

To be honest, to me this sounds exactly like immigrants to germany claiming a right to honor slayings because it's part of their culture.

If that's not the statement you tried to make, please clarify what exactly you think is the US' stated reason for not signing it.

<comment><USER8> _Since 2005 Supreme Court decisions found juvenile executions unconstitutional as "cruel and unusual punishment"[50][51][52] and that mandatory sentences of life without the possibility of parole are unconstitutional for juvenile offenders._

So the US already can't execute or imprison children. So that's not the reason for not signing it.

<comment><USER9> Note that the US can still given juvenile offenders life sentences, it just cannot be a _mandatory_ punishment for a crime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"You're giving all of these young people to us, and we have to determine what's wrong with them," he says. "You can't do it. It's impossible."

...Of the teenagers in solitary, almost three-quarters had diagnosed mental health problems.

"We don't have the experience to deal with a person with psychological problems," Seabrook says. "We're not doing enough because they shouldn't be brought to us."_

<comment><USER11> I wonder how much this has to do with the involuntary commitment legal developments of the 1970s.

<comment><USER12> Or the process of releasing those in need of treatment during the 80's. Its amazing how we're capable of so much as a society but can't get it together to help those most in need.

(Interesting piece from the time on how it came about that the mental hospitals started being emptied: [http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of- men...](http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-mental- patients-began.html))

<comment><USER11> Well as I understand it there has been a pendulum swinging problem. Some people were getting locked up in the loony bin merely for being eccentric. Obviously we've gone too far in the other direction and psychotics are roaming the streets homeless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Jeez, how much longer until we can codify into law that solitary confinement is cruel and unusual?

<comment><USER13> Disclaimer: partially just playing devil's advocate here.

There are circumstances where you need to keep someone in solitary, whether it's for their own safety or for the safety of others. You can't well put a hated prisoner in with the general population without expecting that they'll be murdered. On the other hand, you have prisoners who have made a living out of murdering prison guards.

What do you do with Thomas Silverstein[1]? Terry Nichols? Members of the mafia? Caught spies? They'd likely either kill or be killed. I don't really see a better option than isolating them. These aren't people who are there to be rehabilitated.

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

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. But this article is about children being encaged en masse by a bloated bureaucracy, not a judicious selection of individuals that must be protected for their, or our own, safety.

<comment><USER14> No, it's not about 'children'. It's about 16-year-olds. Teenagers. The actions in the article are not applied to people below 16. Absolutely no-one calls 16-year-olds 'children' unless they're trying to load their language to make a political argument.

The one exception is parents comparing offspring, where 'children' applies to your offspring regardless of age - ask an 80-year-old about his children, and he'll talk about 60-year-old people.

This doesn't mean the actions aren't inhumane or don't need evaluation or correction, but please avoid the inflammatory language.

<comment><USER9> If they are not children, why do we give them no say in the laws they are incarcerated for violating?

<comment><USER14> I was unaware that the general public's working definition of "children" was "unable to vote". I guess that means that the severely mentally disabled, felons, and visiting foreigners are all children?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On a slight tangent, that was an amazingly well-written article, with very professional illustrations, photos, good research, no typos I could see, etc.

How come this is on Medium rather than on, say, the NY Times?

<comment><USER16> Who runs this Medium site? Does it use its own engine? My Wappalyzer only recognizes Typekit.

I've heard of this site only recently and I would like to use a design like that for my writing prompt site.

<comment><USER15> Medium was founded by Evan Williams (who also founded Twitter and Blogger.com): [https://medium.com/about/9e53ca408c48](https://medium.com/about/9e53ca408c48)

<comment><USER16> Oh, so I guess its' design might be not exactly up for grabs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not to diminish the content of the article in any way, but I couldn't help but be amused when I read the headline and thought "Oh god, stuck on a two dimensional plane, how horrible!"

</comment><comment><USER18> Jeez, junior programmers should get better work conditions. Oh ..

</comment><comment><USER19> Surely there can be some middle ground between giving people who murder 70+ people their preferred gaming system and putting troublemakers in solitary.

<comment><USER14> If you want a middle ground, you can start by not arguing from outliers. Out of the several million people imprisoned in the US, how many of them in total "murdered 70+ people"? How many of them murdered even 10?

Why base your argument for moderation around such an extreme outlier?

<comment><USER20> > "How many of them murdered even 10?"

Even that is extreme. How many committed acts of violence at all? How many are "three strikes" or prohibition victims?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find it hilarious that those people are old enough to be locked into box, but can not legally drink or have a sex.</comment>


Ask HN: Tips on good source code? - <AUTHOR>

I got some free time before my next semester, and I got a couple of ideas I want to try out. But most of them includes multiple users and databases. That aint my strongest side, so I'm looking for some good source code I can read and learn from. Can you guys recommend something? Source code or just a good read!<p>My skills: Python > Java > C > * I recently downloaded, installed and used my first database with MongoDB (beside MS Access about 5 years ago). So I guess that a project that uses mongodb and django would be awsome.<p>-Kristian <comment><USER2> If you want to see how it's done in Ruby on Rails, here's an example app with authentication and user management and MongoDB for data. With a tutorial. <https://github.com/fortuity/rails3-mongoid-devise>

</comment><comment><USER3> for C code: Anything by djb. <http://cr.yp.to> Unconventional, but top quality. for C or Python code: Anything by Avery Pennarun (<http://apenwarr.ca> \- his stuff is on GitHub) for C or Lua code: Anything by Mike Pall (<http://luajit.org>)

The Python interpreter is mostly a joy to read.

FLTK is a great example of C++ code from the days before template worms ate everyone's brains.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you both! :)</comment>


Be Yourself for a Living - <AUTHOR> http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/be-yourself-for-a-living-the-vision/

<comment><USER2> Endless curiosity is important to avoid stagnation. However, there is still a difficult decision surrounding focus to be made when the "snowflake" is discovered. How do you decide when to turn off the exploration noise for a few months and build something awesome?

<comment><AUTHOR> When one snowflake sticks to another!</comment></comment>


The Future of UI - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6YTQJVzwlI <comment><USER2> These new UI concepts are always awe inspiring, but what is really the benefit of using them?

One of the most popular demonstrations is browsing through a bunch of photos on a huge screen with large gestures. While this looks quite impressive it's inaccurate when performing specific tasks (e.g. the color-selection planes in the video), the gestures are limited and you have to learn somewhat unintuitive ones apart from the more obvious "select", "move left" and "zoom" gestures. His more real world example (the table and the globe) didn't quite work, but what he could show us wasn't a step up from using a mouse.

An other favorite is the "physical elements on a table" example. This works reasonable well but his examples again were not convincing. Using it as a wind tunnel without being able to rotate it in three dimensions? Calculating the shadows of buildings?

But what's holding us back? Processing power? Cost? Hardware requirements? Or a general lack of use cases, of areas where this really makes sense?

<comment><USER3> Their incentive is to make it look cool, wow an audience, and bring more grant money to the MIT Media Lab. Contrast this with a company that puts the pieces together and ships a useful product - like the iPad UI...

I always thought crazy concept cars were a waste of time and resources for car companies. If they instead focused on massive in-house iteration (like Apple's 10-3-1 prototyping process), better cars would be brought to market.

<comment><USER4> _like the iPad UI_

Imagine a 60 inch iPad hanging on the wall of your kitchen. Imagine being able to point and gesture instead of touching. Want to watch a movie while cooking? Switch back to the cook-"book" app when it's time to add the next ingredient, then go back to your film.

<comment><USER5> A 60 inch iPad I could see. But multitasking? Thats just crazy talk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Everybody seems to be stuck on hand gestures and arm movement for the future, but while this looks cool I wonder just how comfortable it is to keep you arms waving about like that for hours on end. Also, it's hard to argue that 3D is always superior to 2D when presenting information. In some cases 2D is more than sufficient.

I also wonder why there isn't more talk about _Brain–computer interfaces_. It seems to me that the most natural UI is one that can be navigated just by thinking. It might be little Borg-like but I can't imagine HCI going in any other direction long-term.

*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interfac...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface)

<comment><USER7> Physical inactivity (sitting at your desk all day moving only your fingertips) is implicated in many of the health problems most hackers are likely to suffer from and eventually die from. I think many of us would welcome the opportunity to stand up and move around a bit while still getting our work accomplished, even if it wasn't the only interface we used.

BCIs, on the other hand, would mean you can potentially finish that software module, or at least read your email, while simultaneously going for a run ...as long as you don't run into a tree or the road.

<comment><USER8> I'm going to vote for no on that; at least for me, running takes a lot of focus, to the point where ditching the iPod helped me become a stronger runner. I had always run with music before, but I found that if I focused on the run itself, I could push myself harder.

Weightlifting and climbing work the same way, in my experience, and I can't imagine that my limited martial arts training would have been any better if I had something else to focus on other than not getting punched in the face.

Our society is obsessed with trying to do everything at once, rather than giving full focus to each activity in turn. Personally, I'd rather that technology reduce the busy work, so that we can focus more directly on each activity, rather than trying to amalgamate them together all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sure, it looks cool, but it appears to require a lot of slow and inefficient physical movement to accomplish the most basic of tasks. Imagine a bunch of cubical works sitting at their desktops waving their arms around trying to navigate their computer's file system :-)

<comment><USER10> Here's a video demo of Project Natal in use that looks exhausting.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm0KKa6wACQ>

<comment><USER11> Holy Christ. The game seems designed to make people look like spastic dorks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The moving physical objects makes sense, touch makes sense. Learning a series of gestures to manipulate data on a screen makes less sense to me than a mouse.

The mouse is movement and control, the gestures need you to hold your hands in strange positions and move within a field of view (what the camera can see). An improved design will need to be intuitive.

<comment><USER13> The brain is able to make itself think that external tools are mere extensions of the body, so it's no surprise that the mouse has been successful. I wonder if the lack of any tactile response in these interfaces hinders them somewhat or if it's all the same for the brain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "It has to be for every human being...It's been 25 years. Can there really be only one interface? There can't."

I love that, and I totally agree. I think what we're going to see in the future is applications that primarily use the interfaces they're best suited for with fallbacks to other less well-suited interfaces.

Is this going to be the future for every application? No way. The same way touch-based interfaces aren't the future for every application. But (as with any demo) he's only scratching the surface here and I believe that a UI which matches the way we _already think about things_ has some huge implications.

</comment><comment><USER15> At the end he mentions "[In 5 years time,] when you buy a computer, you'll get this."

I think that's about 5 years too soon on that one. Incredible demonstrations though... awesome to see science fiction become reality.

<comment><USER16> All you need is a large display and a webcam. Isn't Microsoft already doing this for gaming? The enhanced resolution Wii controller with a large flatscreen already has most of this capability.

<comment><USER17> Yes Microsoft is releasing Project Natal (rumored to b renamed Wave)for the Xbox this September. It uses a similar array of cameras to track multiple users for gaming and it can be used to navigate the 360's Ui.

Should be interesting for gaming, but just as in general computing application this type of control mechanism isn't suited as a complete replacement for a mouse or a joystick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I find the conclusion of the talk hard to swallow: that these sort of interfaces will be common in the computer you buy 5 years from now.

Why? This goes against the current major trend in the industry: mobilisation / pocket-isation. It is inconceivable that our built environments will have the required sensors, projectors, etc. to enable these interfaces. Even more than that, our computing is becoming ever more mobile. Computing has to fit our environment, not the other way round.

Maybe this stuff is the future, but it's certainly not the near future and I didn't really see much value in the interfaces demoed.

Then again, the point of R&D is to discover what doesn't work as much as what does and you can't do that without realising your ideas.

</comment><comment><USER19> I saw similar demo from Microsoft Surface and MIT Sixth Sense

<comment><USER20> The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology: [http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/pranav_mistry_the_thrillin...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html)

I haven't seen the one by Microsoft. I really recommend watching this, it's pretty intense.

<comment><USER21> The potential is, that these applications react to the world you are in. For example the knowledge that there are products on the shelf and I want the cheapest and the best. The other thing, that I don't need to carry a camera, a phone, a book, a laptop, an ipod or like paper, pencil, wallet, puppy, drum, guitar, tv, different looking shirt, shoe, wallpaper... So many things could be virtual. (I mean augmented with the real world.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is still 2d. You can't interact in 3d if it is just projected in 2d. He is just pointing and flying. You don't have to fly between documents if you have a real 3d augmented reality. Apps would be like real 3d objects, you can touch them, manipulate their shapes like you do it with your keyboard or a door-knob, the only difference is that they won't be from real material. So they won't have phisical boundaries, if not programmed that way. (It just depends on the needs.) I want to make a demo on it, is there somebody who want to join?

<comment><USER18> It's quite a scary thought that with a truly 3D/AR computing experience, we might not be able to tell which elements of our environment are Real World and which are virtual.

Imagine a virus that injects fake flooring into your vision where instead there is a 40ft fall!

<comment><USER21> wow, how cool crime sci-fi would that be.. But there are always good and bad things in a new technology. Imagine all that junk that can be saved with virtual stuff when people buy the new and throw away the old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not so sure about all'a'dat (although I do remember thinking the stuff in Minority Report was awesome, years ago) but I can see a need for 3D/depth augmentation of standard desktop interfaces. I want to be able to tuck windows away 'in the distance' or twist them round to a slanted pane (so they take up a fraction of the space but are still more or less visible/legible). I also want to step in and out of '3D mode' when making ER diagrams or UML diagrams and such, for when there's too many criss-crossing lines.

Undoubtedly these things have already been tried (I saw a nice Linux demo somewhere, years ago, with 3D windows) but I'd like them standardized, and touch-operated. It'd make a big difference IMO.

Periodically when using a cluttered interface I mutter 'this is why the need for 3D is so great' and my colleagues laugh at me. But I'm only half joking.

</comment><comment><USER23> "We didn't have networks at all at the time of the MacIntosh's introduction." Seriously? Seems like that estimation might be about fifteen years off to me.

Edit to say: In fact, he's an intelligent and well-versed enough guy that I'm sort of puzzled by this remark. Does anyone know what Mr Underkoffler means when he says that networks weren't around then? I think he must have something different in mind than I do.

<comment><USER7> I presume "we" there means the general market to which the Mac was introduced. Ubiquitous Internet access was years away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> He kind of fumbles on the question of "what is the killer app?" You'd think it would be on the tip of his tongue considering how long hes been working on this...

That said, there really needs to be more open source software to enable this front. I think we will really see some innovation once a hacker can take a $10 webcam and and open source lib and start creating software with these types of user interfaces.

<comment><USER25> A lot of this has been done with openFrameworks (<http://openframeworks.cc/>). It ties together a plethora of open source frameworks including OpenCV with easy to use bindings to indirectly create a somewhat simplified version of C++. If you YouTube openFrameworks, you'll get a lot of demos demonstrating this technology using free libs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> What i really hate about operating systems is that they the same as they were in the beginning. THe only thing that changed was the visual appearance. We still have a taskbar, a desktop,etc. Can't someone reinvent how operating systems work?

<comment><USER27> <http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I respect the chops of those creating these things but I just don't feel like I'd want to use them daily. Perhaps I'm already locked in to a legacy mindset by my mid 20s!

</comment><comment><USER29> This talk seems like a whole bunch of 3-D snake oil.

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice first effort, but after watching all I can think is:

arms = tired

looks like a clumsy, highly particular and low volume way to sift through data

</comment><comment><USER31> 5 years seems way too optimistic for this stuff to appear in consumer products. I'm betting no.

</comment><comment><USER32> The gestures presented in the video look like a creative way to replace the tendinitis in my wrists with a variety of shoulder, neck, and hip issues.

I think the most compelling UI development in recent years is the Wii remote. Motion sensitivity _and_ IR pointing in one device, and it's in the hands of consumers, conditioning them to expect a new level of interaction. Like everything we thought the PowerGlove would be, but without the fanfare or bad movie.

I anticipate laptops with multiple cameras built-in for better sensing of gestures and eye movements. In fact, I think I'm going to pick up an extra webcam or two and play around with just that...</comment>


Frequency Counting Algorithms Over Data Streams - <AUTHOR> http://micvog.com/2015/07/18/frequency-counting-algorithms-over-data-streams/

<comment><USER2> This area of CS (one pass analysis over data streams with tight memory bounds) is pretty well-studied. They are known as "data stream algorithms."

This 2002 paper describes a data structure for this that I suspect is superior to what is described in the article: [https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~farach/pubs/FrequentStream.pdf](https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~farach/pubs/FrequentStream.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Count-Min and Count Sketches" section at [http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs166/](http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs166/) provides good explanations of this topic as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> > "Which pages are getting an unusual hit in the last 30 minutes?"

A good statistic for this is an exponentially weighted moving average, which can be computed online by a leaky integrator using a single accumulator register per counted entity.

It's not so much as counting, as estimating a rate.

<comment><USER2> > a single accumulator register per counted entity.

That requires O(n) memory space, where n is the number of counted entities. If you're willing to spend this much memory, the problem is easy. Algorithms like the one in the article (or the paper I mentioned) are for when you want to use far less memory than that.

<comment><USER5> Count-min sketches can be adapted to use exponential decay. Presumably any sort of recurrent decay could be used to get approximately rectangular windows as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why not store the items in a random order? This can be achieved by performing a sort using a random key. Sorting can be done as a background job, so that the list is always "reasonably" random.

<comment><AUTHOR> The items are stored in a map in random order (Red -> 45, Blue -> 23 etc). The picture makes it easier to read by showing many red boxes but the actual implementation just stores a number for each item label.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does HyperLogLog fit in here?

[http://antirez.com/news/75](http://antirez.com/news/75)

<comment><USER8> My understanding is that HyperLogLog will estimate the cardinality e.g., the number of different types of events in the stream. The frequency counting algorithms in the article can be used to estimate the number of occurrences of each of the most frequently occurring types.

E.g., Where the frequency counting algorithms might estimate the following counts for a given stream: A: 2, B: 5, C:1 ...HyperLogLog would estimate that you have three types of events (A, B and C but you only get the count: 3) in it. Presumably, HyperLogLog requires fewer time and space resources to achieve this more summarized perspective.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Mac OS X High Sierra Problem - sahin-boydas I am getting the following error while installing
http://imgur.com/a/n0VoX
"MacOS could not be installed on your computer"
An error occurred while verifying firmware..."
is anything having the same problem? <comment><AUTHOR> Do you have a 3rd party bootloader installed? OR non-apple hardware?

You get that error if you are not using the official apple firmware/UEFI bootloader - I saw it a few releases ago when trying to do an install on a machine with an opensource bootloader

You will also get it on hackintoshes (OSX on x86 PCs)</comment>


Ask HN: Best monitor for software development? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
I am buying a new computer that I will use in the next few years for work. That means mostly for software development. I am considering what monitor to buy, but it is not my area of expertise. What would you recommend? What kind of backlight?
My priorities:
1. Easy on the eyes.
2. Good for reading/writing text.
I am considering Dell UltraSharp 27" or 30" but I am open to any suggestions and experiences. <comment><USER2> I switched to HP ZR30w (30" IPS panel) not long ago from an old 20" Dell. The text is super clear and the space is huge.

Some people say that they use a 24" panel in the portrait mode for coding. I haven't tried it myself but one thing that I am curious about is whether their neck starts hurting. You see, if you have a text editor occupying all of the vertical space in such a setup, you cannot just move your eyes to be able to see the top and botton text. You actually have to move your head. I already feel this a bit on my 30" in the ladscape mode. That's why my emacs is not running at full-vertical-screen.

<comment><USER3> I use the Dell 24" panel in portrait for coding. It's awesome -- top is browser or music listener, whichever is necessary, middle is IDE, and bottom is console. If you were to stretch all the code over the whole screen, I agree, it might be a bit much -- at most, 60% of the height of the screen is a single window/code at any time.

EDIT: Why am I posting to something 11 days old?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use a 15.4" laptop for my development. It's a decent little machine (although it's HP, so it has it's share of problems) but I wouldn't recommend such a small screen.

I'm actually trying to decide whether I want to get a MacBook Pro or a new desktop. I'd love a new desktop, but MacBooks look sexy.

As far as the monitor, I've looked around and it looks like I'm attracted to a 24" or so. I'm sure 27" and 30" monitors have their place, but they are too big for me.

Have you considered multiple, smaller monitors? You'd probably save money getting 2 24" as opposed to a single 27".

</comment><comment><USER5> I have 2 x 22" monitors. For Development that is ideal, as you can split your work easily there.

No as for the screen it is hard to say which one. I have the Philipps 244E [http://www.all- monitors.com/monitors/manufacturers/pos/phili...](http://www.all- monitors.com/monitors/manufacturers/pos/philips_244e1sb) At work and i am very happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER6> For straight up development work, I actually prefer my dual 24" monitors which I have at my office. At home I have the dell Ultrasharp 27" (which is the exact same panel as the apple cinema 27"). I like the 27" for the versatility. It's really great for movies, games, etc... when I need some distraction. It is hands down the most beautiful screen I've ever owned.

</comment><comment><USER7> Whatever you consider, look into using something like F.lux (<http://stereopsis.com/flux/>)

I've found it great for reducing eye-strain on those late night missions :)

</comment><comment><USER8> If price isn't an issue my 27" Apple Cinema Display is by far the best monitor I've ever owned for designing and developing.

Some think 27" is too big, which it is for some folks, but I love the screen real estate.

</comment><comment><USER9> I use two Dell Ultrasharp, one 24 and one 22. The 24 landscape on a shelf and I swivel the 22 between landscape and portrait.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am happy with the Dell u2410 (connected to a 15.4" laptop). I also run spaces (on a mac), so I have a total of 8 screens.

</comment><comment><USER11> Two 24" on portrait, one 27" Cinema Display. For coding, portrait is awesome, yay for less scrolling!

</comment><comment><USER12> If 24" is enough for you, the HP LP2475w is a fine (S-IPS panel) monitor.

</comment><comment><USER13> Dell UltraSharp (3008WFP) -- most real estate possible in a single panel</comment>


Facebook's Hacker Cup Called A Failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.allfacebook.com/facebooks-hacker-cup-called-a-failure-2011-01 <comment><USER2> Most of the details are from this Quora post: [http://www.quora.com/Andrew- Brown-2/Facebook-Hacker-Cup-Reso...](http://www.quora.com/Andrew- Brown-2/Facebook-Hacker-Cup-Resounding-Failure)

Am I the only one who thinks Quora should only host questions and answers? I hope this isn't part of a growing trend to have what are essentially blog posts on Quora.

<comment><USER3> It looks like both the linked post and the quora post are complaining about problems with the qualification round. There is no mention of the fact that the following round was in fact suspended entirely after the submission server fell over. There were still confusing problem descriptions, incorrect examples and buggy submission pages.

It's a shame because it really had the potential to be a fun competition if it had just been pulled off more smoothly. The questions were interesting and the competition format allowed for the use of pretty much any method of solving problems. The 6 minute limit was annoying at first but I came to see it as part of the competition. It creates an interesting tradeoff between development speed and correctness and allows people to solve the problem in any way they like whilst still enforcing efficient solutions. The bounds on all the variables in the problem are given so it is possible to test your solution on the worst case scenario before downloading the input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah ... they had major issues. First off, the submit system was flaky (didn't work with common browser configs ... e.g. on my macbook pro with Safari). They had a 6 minute time limit, which caused a lot of problems. By the time someone realized their browser config didn't work, it was too late to try another combo. The questions were not worded precisely in some cases. And some people were cheating like crazy ... putting up their code/test cases for other people to use.

<comment><USER4> I didn't quite get the 6 minute time limit. For instance, I coded up one of their problems using a bruteforce algorithm. It worked perfectly with the sample test case they provided. But when I tried it on the their time-limited test case, lo-and-behold, it took a long time. So ... what the heck was the point of that? Since we had 6 minutes to upload the answer, I can't really convert my solution to something much faster in that time period. Should I have coded a faster solution from the get-go? Well .. that isn't clear cut as we had 3 hours to code 3 problems. Oh well. I had fun coding and I have a lot more respect for non-us programmers. Some of the kids coding on the contest were absolutely amazing and far better coders than me.

<comment><USER5> I am glad you enjoyed it but I don't think you should stop. Try facebook.com/puzzlemaster instead. The questions are slightly similar. The community there is quite helpful and they have been doing it for 2 years. The Puzzle Master (whoever that maybe in Facebook) is quite responsive when it comes to telling the users of errors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of,

 _Facebook is more like undergrad. Something needs to be done, and people do it. Most of the time they don't read the literature on the subject, or consult experts about the "right way" to do it, they just sit down, write the code, and make things work. Sometimes the way they do it is naive, and a lot of time it may cause bugs or break as it goes into production. And when that happens, they fix their problems, replace bottlenecks with scalable components, and (in most cases) move on to the next thing._

[http://www.quora.com/Which-is-better-to-work-for-Google- or-F...](http://www.quora.com/Which-is-better-to-work-for-Google-or- Facebook/answer/David-Braginsky)

</comment><comment><USER7> The article is just about the _qualification_ round.

The first post-qualification round was even worse (I was a competitor).

I won't go through all the details, but problems included mis-specified questions.

The second question - a 2 variable optimisation problem, set as a Starcraft game problem, in which shield generators cost X and warriors cost Y, and you had some rules about the cost/benefits of each - asked you to report the number of _warriors_ to build, to maximise damage done.

Writing code to solve this, it quickly became clear that the sample answers provided were wrong.

Mid way through the competition, they changed the question to require you to output the number of _shields_ to build - which, of course, made the sample output make sense. While they put up a post mid competition saying they suspected a bug in the question, they did not subsequently make any communication that they had changed the question, or confirm the error. No text was added to the question page notifying competitors it had changed. No confirmation of the change was officially made, afterwards. (You can verify this independent of my comment by reading the competition walls, or googling - the question was called 'power overwhelming').

Another issue - while they were technically correct - was where they said input to the first question would be _whitespace_ separated, and give training examples showing it _space_ separated, but then the test problems were _Newline_ separated. While its debatable whether Newline is whitespace (I'd say it is, but it typically doesn't match \s) this change from the training examples to the test confused a lot of people - and its bad programming competition form, to trip people up in the input specification.

Finally, due to the slew of problems in the round, they closed the round early, without warning. This upset competitors who came to submit their solutions, to find that the round had already closed.

AFAIK, they still have not clarified whether competitors from that round that answered questions will progress, or will all have to redo it.

Communication - including on topics such as rules - has been sporadic, and either via e-mail, or through posts left on the wall - sometimes in comments on the competition wall, rather than in organised FAQs, or using the facebook notification system.

Answer upload has also been temperamental for certain browsers.

But posing a programming competition question to 1000s of competitors, where the actual question is mis-specified - that's a very big error.

Rescheduling the succeeding sub-rounds at the last minute also inconvenienced a lot of programmers who had taken time out of their schedules to do it.

Its a programming competition, and its just for fun - but I'd like to think they'd do a better job considering the volume of contestants, and the wide external audience.

<comment><USER8> The qualification round actually had at least one incorrect test case[1] as well, and I got 0 feedback on that one. I asked on the qualification page for clarification, and as far as I could tell, no questions were being answered, and mine was ignored along with the rest.

[1] The Peg problem stated that there would be no ties, while the second example clearly had a tie. Again, they updated the tests, but only in the last 24 hours of the competition I believe, and with no notification to any of the competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yeah FB Hacker Cup surely had a lot of issues as pointed out. The thing which happened to me was even more surprising. I participated in Qualification Round, and received confirmations mails(2) as well. Later, I was able to see myself in Qualification Scoreboard. But on the day of round 1A it stopped showing me as qualified to round 1A.

</comment><comment><USER10> Certainly wasn't a simple hackercup. I participated in both rounds so far, the first one was a mess, I tripped off the 6 minute timer reviewing the questions on my iPad in the morning, without even downloading the input files! Maybe I should have read the enourmos set of instructions before, but I did it for the fun, and reading long t&cs isnt my idea of weekend fun.

The next round was even worse, thankfully I spotted pretty quickly no one was solving the starcraft problem, an obvious problem to attract starcraft fans, and there are enough of those in the programming community. So gave that a miss and moved onto the others. Looks like most people got caught out on that problem, which was a real shame. They need to reset this round and start again to be fair, but I'm sure given how upset a lot of competitors were the server load won't be the same next time.

</comment><comment><USER11> Lol ... am I the only one that remembers a test back in 1st grade that said the same thing and everyone in the room failed.

Rule 1: Read all the directions first. Rule 2: Jump up and down on your head Rule 3: Generate a proof which demonstrates that [insert random equation here] ... ... ... Rule 50: See rule #1 ... hand this paper in to complete the assignment within the first X minutes and you get an A. (or something to that extent)

While I gotta agree that the communication wasn't clear, part of me wants to be the grouchy teacher which says "the lesson is this: read the dang directions". This guy just forgot the 1st part which was: read the directions first!

<comment><USER8> While I agree that a lot of the confusion could've been avoided by reading more carefully, part of the problem was the dissemination of information. Facebook did a really poor job of this unfortunately, as all of the information was in multiple locations, and was not at all redundant. For example, the initial rules were in the FAQs, some updates were posted in the main group (Hacker Cup), and then other updates were posted in the Hacker Cup Qualification event page. So if you wanted a complete picture, you needed to check all three. And if the answer wasn't there, you weren't going to get one, as they weren't responding to questions at all as far as I could tell (and for fairly good reason - if you didn't filter out the non-official posts, the page was nigh unreadable).

The bigger problem in my book, however, was the issues with the submission system. I tried both Firefox and Chrome, and couldn't get the "download input" link to function properly (I tried, left clicking, "save as"-ing, opening in a new tab, etc.). Add the 6-minute time limit to this, and it was pretty bad. Six minutes to get the download to work, run your code on it, and then get back to the page, paste your output, and upload. Oh, and good luck eyeballing your output to make sure you pasted it correctly -- the window you paste into wasn't resize-able, and every line wrapped, so it looked like an utter mess.

Don't get me wrong, I sound rather negative in this post, but I love the idea, and look forward to the next attempt at it. I was just somewhat disappointed to see how the process went. And to be honest, I really wish they'd do away with the 6 minute time limit, and add a time limit for how long your code is allowed to take during execution. Though I suppose they have to restrict the languages then. Perhaps a "can you finish the problem within the 3 hour time limit" is sufficient for this competition then. As it is, knowing when to optimize, and when not to takes too long to figure out in the 3 hour time limit, so you end up taking a shot in the dark as to when you should be submitting your code.

Hopefully Facebook learns from these mistakes, and comes back with a competition that is just that much better. Also, if you're interested in the problem solving for this competition, check out the Puzzle Master. It's great fun as well.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Leave a good startup because of bad management - <AUTHOR> Hello, I am a software engineer in a startup company and I have 3 years' experience. Recently a UX designer and a developer who has over 10 years of experience quit the job. I know managers have reasons or my colleagues. I love the company but I am not sure if the direction or decision they are making is good. I am confused so I am looking for advice, comments. Thanks <comment><USER2> Its hard to tell, is the situation of the company bad ? What were the reasons behind there departure ? It could be a red flag, but there will always be bad managers. Are you impacted directly by this bad management ? Are you stressed because of it ? If not, maybe you should wait a bit more to see the situation.

I am in a startup too, the management was bad when the startup situation was good, now that we are in trouble, the management approach improved. It can change, but I think most of the times, depending of the people in charge, it will not.

So don't be full of hope for big change and think what is more relevant to you ?</comment>


Show HN: Open Review – Scientific peer review is broken. We want to fix it - <AUTHOR> https://news.researchgate.net/index.php?/archives/187-Peer-review-isnt-working-Introducing-Open-Review.html

<comment><AUTHOR> For those of you who want to jump right in and see some actual results:

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259984904_Stimulus-...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259984904_Stimulus- triggered_fate_conversion_of_somatic_cells_into_pluripotency/reviews/103)

And a bit more information about the feature itself:

[https://www.researchgate.net/publicliterature.OpenReviewInfo...](https://www.researchgate.net/publicliterature.OpenReviewInfo.html)

I'm a front-end engineer / designer at ResearchGate, and we've been working our butts off to get this out. I really think this could turn the scientific community and the peer review system on its head.

Of course, I'd love to hear your feedback!

</comment><comment><USER2> Actually, I'd like to see what happens when you apply Google's antispam measures to research papers. There are some researchers who constantly reference one another, like a link farm, in order to boost their credentials.

<comment><USER3> If only it were that simple. PageRank is no panacea and not all cross- citations are incestuous, as you seem to be implying.

<comment><USER2> No they do not imply wrong doing. There are a lot of good reasons why cross citation occurs. Having an alternate score gives you another sense of what kind of work this person is doing. You have to remember - using cross citation to inflate rankings have a social cost as well. It prevents other more promising research from gaining the right attention.</comment></comment></comment>