Tinn: A tiny neural network library written in C99 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/glouw/tinn <comment><USER2> kann [0] is a similarly small neural network library written in pure C. It's quite fast for CPU-only, but only applicable for rather small problems.

[0] [https://github.com/attractivechaos/kann](https://github.com/attractivechaos/kann)

<comment><USER3> It is fair to say KANN "only applicable for rather small problems". However, KANN is not so "similar" to Tinn. Tinn only implements MLP with a single hidden layer. KANN supports a lot more features such as 1D/2D convolution, RNN/LSTM, weight sharing and mini-batching. It is also more optimized.

<comment><USER2> You're absolutely right that kann is more optimized and full-featured. I thought to mention your library because it is also a very portable neural network library written in C.

kann is a stunning piece of engineering, and your code is magnificent, and that is precisely why I mentioned it. I apologize, I did not clearly express my intent.

<comment><USER3> I just meant to add some clarification. I actually do appreciate that you mentioned it. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cranium is another alternative that uses BLAS for efficient matrix operations.

[https://github.com/100/Cranium](https://github.com/100/Cranium)

</comment><comment><USER5> Just curious, is there a reason for passing around the Tinn struct by-value? Will it get optimized?

<comment><USER6> I'm curious too. Even if it will be optimized isn't it still be better to pass-by-reference?

<comment><USER7> It might be easier to answer if you explained why you think it would be better.

There may be cases where by-reference (yes, that's an absolutely acceptable thing to say, even in C) is more efficient: If the struct is a kind of "this pointer" (as in object-oriented programming) that is passed to a bunch of functions but _relatively rarely used_ , then passing it by reference causes much less register pressure. Passing it by value would mean occupying a lot of registers with values that are probably not accessed.

On the other hand, if you expect the callee to do actual computation on all or most of the fields of the struct you pass in, passing it by value should probably be the way to go. This way, the values to be processed are already in registers and don't have to be stored to the stack by the caller and loaded back from the stack by the callee.

There is no general answer that is uniformly best, it depends on the characteristics of the actual program and their interactions with the compiler's optimizations. With inlining in particular, which should often allow the compiler to generate the same code for both versions.

<comment><USER8> > There may be cases where by-reference (yes, that's an absolutely acceptable > thing to say, even in C)

I don't want to be nit-picking. But I would like to know why "by-reference" is an acceptable thing to say.

When I learnt C, C++, Java, etc. I was repeatedly told that pass by reference exists only in C++. In C, a pointer is passed by value. In Java, a reference is passed by value.

Doesn't calling "pass pointer by value" as "pass by reference" lead to confusion and distortion of the true meaning of "by reference"?

<comment><USER9> What do you do when you want to find the value a pointer points to? You dereference it of course!

C++ and Java have their own specific language-lawyer definitions of the word reference, but outside of those languages, "reference" is a catch-all term that includes pointers, handles, and indexes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> genann is also a similar small neural network library written in C.

[https://github.com/codeplea/genann](https://github.com/codeplea/genann)

</comment><comment><USER11> Single core? No AVX? What's the point of writing it in C?

<comment><USER12> Minimal dependencies; people are starting to get fed up with having to bootstrap and/or compile the planet just to be able to run some software. The situation has gotten completely out of hand, especially if one is not on GNU/Linux.

<comment><USER13> This does nor preclude the use of threads or SIMD.

Essentially this library is a demo toy that will need a lot to work to make useful in real conditions.

<comment><USER14> > Essentially this library is a demo toy

It's 200 lines of C, what were you expecting?

<comment><USER15> Generally when I see links to github projects on HN I expect something useful or extraordinary and this looks like my Neural Networks 101 assignment, only far more polished. But people seem to like it(over 400 stars right now) so maybe I am missing something.

<comment><USER16> So... if its usefulness is equal to something you've made, AND it's available to the public, AND it's more polished... why exactly are you shitposting about it?

Let people enjoy things.

<comment><USER15> I just pointed out that this is a very basic code. It's definitely not something I would use in any real life scenario(see other posts itt). And if you want to learn about NN you'd be better off googling something like 'backpropagation example' as this project does is virtually not documented. I personally don't find it useful and it takes up the space that can be filled with more interesting content. How is that 'shitposting'?

<comment><USER17> It's a refreshingly clean, tiny library without dependencies that can do some cool stuff. Let people like things. Stop shitposting.

<comment><USER18> Thankyou for the kind words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What exactly is the output of the example in `test.c`? I.e. what do the numbers mean? The error in the prediction I guess, but the prediction of what? What is the first entry in the semion data set? a "0"?

<comment><USER20> The first row of output is the vector of numerals 0-9 where 1.0 indicates "it was this digit."

The second row is the probability of each given the input.

e.g. This output means it's 98.6% certain that the input represents the digit 7.

        0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000 0.000000 0.000000
        0.000009 0.000005 0.000000 0.000000 0.003899 0.012933 0.000436 0.986013 0.000005 0.000000

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> To the author: in your github topics, "propogation" -> "propagation".

<comment><USER18> Thankyou, my friend ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How about in 12 kilobytes of assembly? More featureful implementation here: [https://github.com/dfouhey/caffe64](https://github.com/dfouhey/caffe64)

<comment><USER12> "Installing a new neural network library is typically a tremendous pain because of onerous dependencies, python version hell, complicated Makefiles, and massive code bloat."

Finally people have started speaking up and doing something about it! May we see more of such mentality in the future, and computer industry will be a better place to work!

<comment><USER23> Developers still underestimate how much code bloat and dependency proliferation harm security and administration. Static linking encourages even more bloat by vendorizing dependencies.

Please make your applications modular. Optional dependencies are there for this reason.

Most good packaging tools support them.</comment></comment></comment>


How many of you have internet access on your phones? - <AUTHOR>

It's a heavily biased poll considering the ppl at hacker.news, and not indicative of the mainstream, but I was wondering if people use a lot of mobile web apps. <comment><USER2> Here is some current data on how the general population uses mobile web apps. This was posted by danw here on this forum:

[http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2007/08/partial- state-...](http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2007/08/partial-state-of- mobile-data-market.html)

To summarize: SMS is the dominant mobile app (by a wide margin), and the US is far behind most European countries in mobile app usage.

</comment><comment><USER3> In Finland, I've been using mobile internet since I got my current phone two years ago. Most of my friends don't use the feature at all although their phones have some GPRS applications too.</comment>


Ministry of Sound sues Spotify for copyright infringement - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/04/ministry-of-sound-sues-spotify

<comment><USER3> If there's no value to curation then people wouldn't bother copying the lists - they'd just make their own. There's a reason why "MoS Compilation X" is worth more than "Random User Compilation X" \- they're adding value to Spotify by expertly choosing songs that go together well presumably. And their business is selling that expertise.

Should they be able to protect that business through the use of copyright is an interesting problem. Is what they do valuable enough to warrant protection? Is it "art"? I don't think that's as straightforward a question as some people (on both sides of the argument) seem to think.

<comment><USER4> The reason a MoS Compilation is worth more than Joe Sixpack Compilation isn't necessarily the curation, but the skill at which the curation is mixed -- which cannot be reproduced with a simple Spotify playlist. These aren't just curated compilations; they're curated, edited/mixed, and mastered compilations.

<comment><USER5> I think the mixing is another topic, what they're suing over is simple playlists.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. Which makes about as much sense as one encyclopedia publisher suing another for having the same table of contents, except the defendant encyclopedia doesn't have anything but the table of contents and is given away for free with little signs next to each topic saying "hey, you can read about this topic over -> here."

In other words: not at all.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't "just happen" to have the same table of contents, but was directly copied and is therefore a copyright infringement.

<comment><USER7> Copyright is not just about copying it is centrally about controlling copies of _creative_ works. A table of contents is not creative, it is a simple listing of facts. Just like a phonebook or sports scores.

The question here is if a playlist is a creative work. I think it is - <USER2> and ordering songs to create a larger work designed to illicit a response from the listener seems to be more than the dry recording of facts.

I am fairly anti-copyright in general and I think that this case illustrates a problem with modern copyright. Most people won't feel that such a small thing as a playlist deserves copyright protection because it is small, not because it lacks creativity. As far as I know, the law does not make such exceptions for "small" infringements.

<comment><USER4> Hmm. Can an art gallery copyright the organization of art on their wall? What if it increases their revenue, and is an inherently creative act?

If someone bought a bunch of prints of the same art, tacked it to some dry wall in the same layout and sold it at a flea market -- would it be copyright infringement? If they blatantly copy the name of the gallery as well, I'd argue it as trademark infringement -- not copyright infringement. But again, this is the UK. I'm only lay-familiar with US copyright.

Some would argue the Java API took an immense amount of creativity to build. Doesn't mean it's copyrightable.

Some would argue that a cake is a cake is a cake, others that it takes a great amount of creativity to create a truly amazing cake recipe. Still doesn't mean you can copyright a recipe.

Just because creativity is involved doesn't make something inherently copyrightable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can actually see their point, curation is very valuable in world with this much accessible content.

But I'm getting tired of "old school" media companies trying to solve all their business problems by suing those who actually innovate the slightest.

Why not, for a change, try to embrace technology and see new opportunities? The music industry have been collaborating on their own grave since napster, and very much deserve to fall in it.

<comment><USER8> I think this suit is a bit silly (since the suit is about users replicating the playlists, not Spotify), but I feel the need to harp on your comment about "innovation" a bit.

At the end of the day, whatever "innovation" happens with companies like Youtube or Spotify, they make their money selling someone else's creative works. Spotify could have the most innovative, awesome platform ever, and nobody would use it without the library of content provided by the "old school media companies." Indeed, in a way the Viacom lawsuit was a great thing for Youtube, because it helped pave the way for companies using it as a platform to deliver quality content instead of just being a host for cat videos.

So while I think it's true that the old school media companies need to embrace new technology, at the same time I think new school media technology companies need to accept that their sole revenue source is derived not from their "innovation" but other peoples' hard work. Those people that are creating the actual product will be justifiably protective of how media technology companies use their work.

<comment><USER5> " _At the end of the day, whatever "innovation" happens with companies like Youtube or Spotify, they make their money selling someone else's creative works_"

Not that I necessarily disagree, but the exact same thing could be said about the media companies.

" _I think new school media technology companies need to accept that their sole revenue source is derived not from their "innovation" but other peoples' hard work_"

Again, it's the same with all media companies. Also, even if Spotify would be value-less without music it does not mean that they don't add any value.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but the media companies don't wax philosophical about how actors and directors are holding back innovation when they insist on getting paid lots of money for their hard work.

It's not the basic transaction that's the problem. Aggregating and distributing other peoples' products is a valuable function. But Amazon doesn't go around complaining that its vendors don't give it all their products for free (so they can turn around and make piles of money reselling them).

<comment><USER5> I haven't heard about Spotify doing that, or YouTube for that matter..

What I _have_ seen though are a lot of shade tactics from "old media" companies: suing, lobbying for censorship and generally lying about everything. Where I live they also have a habit of using the "poor artists" as meat-shield in public discussions and advertising. Of course that doesn't stop them from routinely fucking them over when it suits them.

Aanyway, it seems like Spotify is at least partly owned by "old media" so it's not so clear cut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" Everyone is talking about curation, but curation has been the cornerstone of our business for the last 20 years," said Presencer.

"If we don't step up and take some action against a service and users that are dismissing our curation skills as just a list, that opens up the floodgates to anybody who wants to copy what a curator is doing."_

This is amazing. Finally someone admitting, very clearly in plain english that their curation business has been disrupted. I don't see how this can hold up in court, otherwise this will set a legal precedent for an untold amount of businesses in similar content curation industries.

</comment><comment><USER10> Lets face it, Ministry of Sound compilations are merely CD's with the hottest club tracks of whatever year they're released in with scantily clad women on the album artwork. Anyone with an IQ who listens to the radio could pick the tracks on a MoS compilation, make no mistake.

I can see why they would see they have a case, but all they're doing is taking other artists songs, putting them on the CD and leveraging their well-known brand to sell copies. It's an old way of thinking, everyone is a content curator nowadays as this court case has proven.

Having said that a Ministry of Sound CD is usually always mixed. I doubt they have a case because you're not getting the tracks that have been mixed by MoS DJ's, they're suing based on track order and not so much the content which Spotify have legally paid for to stream.

<comment><USER11> Not related to the actual lawsuit..

There are some pretty good MoS compilations, even epic. They release also chillout, lounge and other electronica compilations, not only with club music.

The fact is that they are releasing a ton of compilations, so at the end of the day there's more quantity than quality, but I would't say that they are bad.

Plus I bet the artists get more royalties - in percentage - from MoS compilations they were featured on rather than from Spotify.

<comment><USER10> No doubt the mixing part of a MoS compilation is definitely the highlight. If they were tracks you could just listen to elsewhere then there would be no reason to buy one of their compilations. What I said was maybe a bit harsh as I used to religiously buy their CD's in my early teens. Some of their compilations are creative, but lets face it, you don't buy a Ministry of Sound CD for the sake of the track order. You get it for the wonderful expert mixing and complimenting choices of song.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I can't really see how you can copyright a list of tracks. It's been a while since I bought a Ministry of Sound compilation but aren't they normally mixed? I can see a mix having copyright protection but if they are then aren't they comparing apples to oranges?

<comment><USER12> They are nearly always mixed. It's a bit silly because usually I get a compilation for the fluid mixing and originality/bootlegs/mashups (Spotify almost always has full versions of songs at different BPMs and keys so it's not fluid when recreating in a playlist). It'll be interesting to see what comes out of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Let's see what MoS does: they explore which songs to choose for a compilation and their order. When that's done the result, the compilation, comes in a form of a mix CD. This curation needs talent and creates it's 'vibe'. Sometimes they have their guys to do this, and sometimes some famous DJ does it.

That's why I love 8tracks, you can find some really good playlists. But those playlists are not copies of some already made compilation (playlists shamelessly named the same as the ones from MoS). There's no artistic value in doing that.

And at the end of the day, a lot of people will be satisfied to listen to these compilations unmixed - instead of buying them from MoS.

</comment><comment><USER13> But they have all of their track lists here:

[http://www.ministryofsound.com/shop/product/music/41356/hed-...](http://www.ministryofsound.com/shop/product/music/41356/hed- kandi-fit-and-fabulous-summer/)

Are we supposed to forget anything about them as soon as we close the page?

<comment><USER14> Their argument is weak, but yours is weaker, since "I can see it online" was never a valid copyright defense.

<comment><USER15> Well surely it must be legal to create your own Spotify playlist with the same tracks? If you can see them online then all one of these playlists do is save you five minutes of searching...?

<comment><USER14> I'm not criticizing the conclusion, it's the argument I'm after.

The fact that the tracks are listed on a website doesn't anymore inform your right to replicated it than the fact that words are arranged into an article on a website does it. Copying the latter is clearly not any more or less legal because it's on the web (as opposed to printed), so why would that argument apply to listing of tracks?

<comment><USER13> Ok, so say you see the tracklist on that site, then listen to the tracks in that order. Is that copyright infringement?

<comment><USER14> No, just like reading an article isn't.

Look, I'm being pedantic. We don't appear to have any real difference of opinion. But the fact that something is published on a website doesn't give you any more copy-rights than if it was published in any other way (say, on the sleeve on a CD you bought). I don't see how that is a controversial observation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Surely this is more of a trademark / branding issue. They can't lay claim to non-mixed tracks in the same order. But they surely can protect their brand being used by someone else.

<comment><USER17> I am not a lawyer, but I suspect the same. After all, it has been established that you cannot copyright a recipe (a list of ingredients in a specific order), and I find this quite similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The funniest part is Spotify's home page: "Your music is everywhere. Not yet available in your country." I wish my country was somewhere!

<comment><USER19> If you register in one of the approved countries and then travel to a country where it's not officially available, it will still work. At least for two weeks or so[1]. It really is everywhere just not for everyone.

[1] [https://support.spotify.com/fi/learn- more/guides/#!/article/...](https://support.spotify.com/fi/learn- more/guides/#!/article/Travel-with-Spotify-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what their legal department was thinking when they decided to take this action. Something like: "Oh my god, we have fans! Quick, make their life miserable by suing the company that we uploaded our music to so our fans will be happy to buy the original album!"?

</comment><comment><USER21> What if someone has a list of tracks that's the same as a Ministry compilation CD, then adds one track - does that make it a different playlist?

I would add this track (silence) to the end of my playlist [https://play.spotify.com/track/3gCqAxfnSNxflYodkSOiFd](https://play.spotify.com/track/3gCqAxfnSNxflYodkSOiFd)

<comment><USER14> I think a judge (if they find merit in the MoS argument) would consider that to be equivalent to adding a blank page to the end of you book you copied.

It seems their main complaint is that the playlists are named "Ministry of Sound" and made searchable by Spotify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is absurd. When your value add is what order to play songs, you clearly deserve to be disrupted. Thanks for the great laugh MoS.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think we've got to decide whether everything that has value should be protectable. To me, this case just highlights the fact that we can't have our cake and eat it too, at least in all cases.

Personally, I land on the side of simply acknowledging that there are intellectual products that require plenty effort to produce and provide plenty of value but just simply shouldn't be protectable in every aspect. Sometimes, like it or not, the product of your hard work is a public good and the rest of us are just free riders. Accept it, be proud of what you did, enjoy your own opportunities to free ride, and find a different way to monetize. In this case, it's track listings, but I think the same should apply to software and UI paradigms.

I, for one, don't want to live in a Balkanized world where every conceivable idea and work is someone's property.

</comment><comment><USER4> Who is the performer in this situation, who is the recording artist, and who owns the copyright? This debate has been raging for over a century.

And this is UK law, so I'm not even going to speculate.

But this reeks of the Oracle v Google Java API copyright infringement suite.

<comment><USER24> You seem to have missed the part where Spotify has licenses to stream all the music in question.

MoS is suing over user-generated (and shared) playlists of these songs on Spotify, claiming copyright on the act of assembling a compilation.

<comment><USER4> I'm still not from the UK, have no experience (even reading) about UK copyright law (other than some historical tidbits in one of Lawrence Lessig's books).

I completely understand what they're suing over and what spotify has copyrighted vs. what MoS is claiming.

Of course, what they're claiming, the track listing on Wikipedia is probably infringing as well..

(ed. also: Spotify may have the permissions to stream the original, unmodified tracks - but when MoS puts together their compilations there is significant mixing and mastering that happens to modify the tracks from their original; so these aren't even the tracks from the MoS albums - just lists of the original tracks used to compile the MoS albums)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does this mean they would need to black list certain orders of songs from the random radio app?

<comment><USER26> Does this mean that at some point the calculation of pi digits is halted because they construe a form of copyright infringement?

<comment><USER23> Only if you carefully curated the digits you selected</comment></comment></comment>


Why hasn't functional programming taken over yet? - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20150519053755/http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2835801/why-hasnt-functional-programming-taken-over-yet/2835936 <comment><USER2> > _Stateless programs; No side effects_

Which is not all it's touted up to be.

> _Concurrency; Plays extremely nice with the rising multi-core technology_

Nice, but not that nice. Don't expect any significant speedup for the most common kinds of programs.

> _Programs are usually shorter and in some cases easier to read_

For some people they are harder to read. As for shorter, Python can be pretty terse too, as can lots of other languages.

> _Productivity goes up (example: Erlang)_

Anecdotal. In the real world, most systems in production (including at NASA and the most critical environments) are made with imperative/oo/etc programming, which must count for something. For every WhatsApp there are 10,000 stories of such programs.

> _Imperative programming is a very old paradigm (as far as I know)_

Functional programming is 5+ decades old too. And parts of math are even older, but we're still keeping them...

> _and possibly not suitable for the 21st century_

Citation needed.

<comment><USER3> There are not 10,000 other WhatsApps, FWIW. By any useful measure. User base, concurrent active sessions, both of those relative to size of dev team and/or infrastructure footprint, acquisition price, user growth rate, etc.

Though WhatsApp's success was predicated on dogged adherence to core principles of understanding their problem extremely well, selecting the right tools to solve that problem, and do as much as possible with as little as possible. Erlang was just one part of that. Choosing FreeBSD, not hiring craploads of engineers just for the sake of hiring, keeping as little intermediate state as possible, etc. we're all contributors to their success story.

But if you have a high-concurrency, small-packet, low-latency, supreme-uptime message processing shaped problem it's pretty dang hard to do better than Erlang as a foundational choice.

<comment><USER2> > _There are not 10,000 other WhatsApps, FWIW_

No 10,000 other WhatsApps. 10,000 success stories of programs doing what they need to do with a small team behind them and reliability.

It's about the technical/project success aspects, not about the monetary side of the equation -- not even about user count. After all Yahoo (back in the day) and Facebook had a much higher user count while being written in PHP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've noticed that programmers tend to become more interested in functional programming over the duration of their careers. I think this is because, as a paradigm, FP solves problems that only experienced programmers realize they have. I'm not sure what the age distribution of working programmers is, but I bet the median is in the low 30's at this point, which is when you start being interested in FP in a real way.

The other side of the coin is that there is tremendous "practical momentum" in software that is collected in the mass of code written in non-FP ways. Experienced programmers are usually expected to fix the symptoms, not cure the disease. Clever people might slip in some functional ideas here and there, but you're almost always better off learning the nuts-and-bolts of integrating Lucene with your Jetty app than you are learning Clojure.

<comment><USER5> > as a paradigm, FP solves problems that only experienced programmers realize > they have

This is exactly what I've been saying... and it's the essence of the "FP non- adoption problem." I came to FP because I became frustrated with classes of bugs that appeared over and over again in OO (Ruby, in my case) but which seem to plague FP code much less. In essence, I came to reduce labor/increase productivity; it's "laziness/impatience/hubris" all over again.

One indicator that I was "naturally" coming to FP is that I noticed I was writing Ruby code in a very functional style. I say "naturally" because 1) it made it easier to test 2) it reduced spaghetti code and dependencies 3) it made it more modular 4) it reduced side effects and bug generation. And all of these worked together to just make better code, period.

Then I came across Elixir ([http://elixir-lang.org/](http://elixir-lang.org/)) and lo and behold, now I can't wait to find work in this shiny new FP language.

If most people in a career came to prefer a certain paradigm after 10-20 years in that career, shouldn't everyone in that career be taking a serious look at it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not "taken over" but in many ways functional programming techniques have gotten big in front-end land, not only with JavaScript but also "real" functional languages like Elm or ClojureScript.

<comment><USER7> Good point, languages like JavaScript support both imperative AND declarative/functional styles. A language that lets you do both covers more use cases than a language that only does one. With a multi-paradigm language like JS, companies can choose what approach they want to use (and to what extent) and enforce it via a programming styleguide. With JavaScript, you could even run a linter over your code to strictly enforce your own FP rules.

There is no doubt that FP has taken over JavaScript - All new popular frameworks including Angular, Polymer and React are declarative/functional with the exception of a few minor (but very useful) imperative concepts (e.g. these frameworks do encourage you to keep 'state' inside models).

FP is awesome but 100% pure FP is just not practical - When building real-life systems, ultimately, you need to keep stack of state somewhere - Be in in the database or inside a model in your code.

<comment><USER8> > Good point, languages like JavaScript support both imperative AND > declarative/functional styles. A language that lets you do both covers more > use cases than a language that only does one.

For what's it worth, some people refer to Haskell as their favourite imperative language. And they are only semi-joking: while the library ecosystem is firmly in the camp of functional idioms, imperative programming is Haskell is pretty nice and straightforward---you'll just have to tag your code with eg IO or the State Monad.

<comment><USER9> If you use the ST monad instead of State, you get actual mutable variables. STArray lets you write typical imperative algorithms that work with mutable arrays, like sieve of Eratosthenes or dynamic programming.

Imperative sieve of Eratosthenes:

[https://gist.github.com/rik0/1171446#file- erat1-hs](https://gist.github.com/rik0/1171446#file-erat1-hs)

<comment><USER8> Yes. Though sieve of Eratosthenes really cries out for a sort-of-lazy infinite array.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It has! Almost all major languages today let you pass functions (and closures with captured bindings) as values.

<comment><USER11> That's not really what functional programming is about. Functional programming is more about avoiding state and referential transparency. Most programmers do not attempt to do this in mainstream programming languages.

<comment><USER12> It's what functional programming was about for the first twenty years.

That and everything being an expression that returns a value.

<comment><USER2> 20? More like 40. Until 2005 or so few considered this "pure" style essential to FP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why does this point to the Wayback archive of the page instead of the native page?

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2835801/why-hasnt- functio...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2835801/why-hasnt-functional- programming-taken-over-yet/2835936)

<comment><USER14> I was wondering that myself. Figured it must be because SO deleted the original, but like you, I checked and there it was, not even closed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Possibly because the way we learn math, and the math that most of us learn, is taught procedurally. It's the mindset that many of us grow up with.

I'm not in the valley, and I can't recall ever seeing an ad for functional anything, not even Erlang. I'm sure there's some around, around here, but not enough that I'll see it when I'm casually looking.

</comment><comment><USER16> Between Excel and SQL, I'd say collection-oriented programming has pretty much taken over the world.

<comment><USER17> One could make a case for a spreadsheet being a limited kind of pure functional programming language.

<comment><USER18> Not pure, because you have state at the top level.

<comment><USER17> Sure, but it isn't being modified by the expressions in the cells.

<comment><USER18> True, and that's a good way of putting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Because it doesn't have enough advantages to justify the added complexity.

<comment><USER20> extremely testable, easier to reason about, automatically dry, parallelizable, automatically reusable, memoizable, composable, can be analyzed with some theoretical systems, and most important- you get stuff that works better (in my experience)

<comment><USER21> That's great, but how do I write a functional version of [https://github.com/voltagex/junkcode/blob/master/CSharp/spot...](https://github.com/voltagex/junkcode/blob/master/CSharp/spotprices/spotprices/Program.cs)?

All this does is pull a list of "spot instance" prices from AWS EC2, sort them and filter them. I rewrote this from a python script that became too complex.

The last time I looked at Haskell, it needed ~700MB of dependencies before I could even get started.

Edit: Clojure looks like a good way to start, although [https://github.com/mrowe/clj-aws-ec2](https://github.com/mrowe/clj-aws-ec2) isn't really complete.

<comment><USER22> There are ways to write things that are similar with Haskell. Just like there are design patterns for functional techniques in imperative languages, there are design patterns for imperative techniques in functional language....

So for example, here you could make a nice little EC2 DSL that would get your stuff (for the actual Haskellers: Free Monad):

        spotPrices :: Region -> EC2 [SpotPrice]
        spotPrices = GetSpotPrice -- DSL Leaf, executed by runEC2

        spotPricesForAllRegions :: [Region] -> EC2 [SpotPrice]
        spotPricesForRegions regions =
            concat <$> MapM spotPrices regions

Your spot price update function becomes something even simpler now:

        runEC2 :: EC2 a -> EC2Config -> IO a
        runEC2 = stuff -- this is where you call whatever EC2
        -- lib is available

        updateSpotPriceFile :: [Region] -> IO [SpotPrice]
        updateSpotPriceFile regions = do
            spotPrices <- runEC2 (spotPricesForAllRegions regions)
                                 (myEC2Configuration)
            writeToFile (toJSON spotPrices) "spotprices.json"
            return spotPrices

I'm not going to port all of it, but with a more functional version you could avoid having to keep on making EC2 clients all over the place, and you could keep your config in one place.

The problem is that it's pretty obtuse if you don't know the right design patterns. There's a myth in FP circles that design patterns are for OOP only ("we have functions, we don't need observer patterns!"), but it's a myth. But if you get good, you can write some pretty concise code + get all the goodies.

Haskell has the whole GHC thing, and also the issue of lack of good library documentation (or lack of libraries on certain stuff)...

<comment><USER21> Thanks for this. The syntax is definitely taking a bit to get my head around, but it looks very tidy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Because programming is primarily a business and it's cheaper to hire dumb programmers for whom functional programming is too difficult.

</comment><comment><USER24> Because most people are not smart.

And because customers will pay more for software with bugs in it.

<comment><USER25> Careful, you may cut yourself on all that edge.</comment></comment>


Show HN: RIFT – A procedurally generated FPS game in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://team-duck.com/rift/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an example of a first-person shooter game written in JavaScript using WebGL. All of the (limited) art assets are generated procedurally. The game uses the team duck game engine (tedge.js) which handles things like loading shaders, buffering object meshes, and calculating collision using octrees. The input controls are slightly confusing, because it is not possible to capture the mouse in the browser without using some sort of plugin, but it shows generally what is possible.

This is part of a series of game prototypes I have been developing in the browser. Another one, shown here: [http://team-duck.com/space/](http://team- duck.com/space/) allows you to explore a small galaxy by piloting a spaceship. It is my intention to eventually complete these as games and tie them together with some form of overarching story.

This has actually been a goal of mine for almost ten years, having intended to make a more complete science fiction homebrew game for the Sony PSP. Now, with a concentration on randomly generated content, I have to settle for something less than contending with some of the bigger name projects out there, like the much hyped No Man's Sky.

I find one of the biggest problems in creating a super-massive procedural world is finding the proper ways to generate numbers randomly, and to predictably fill in noise in interpolation. I have a few PC demos of simulations of planets, cities, and other macro level phenomenon, but to have a player journey to a planet and see it stream in would be a real joy.

</comment><comment><USER2> Sorry, WebGL not supported. =(

<comment><AUTHOR> What browser/platform are you using?

<comment><USER2> Safari 8.0.6 on OS X 10.10.3</comment></comment></comment>


"Sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content" - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_the_perils_of/? <comment><USER2> It's interesting that PageRank's measure of quality is entirely dependent on there being a community that recognizes the quality of the content first, before the search engine. Without a community, you're not going to get incoming links.

In other words, work produced by lonely geniuses is quite likely to go unnoticed.

For all we know, the content that is being produced by companies like Demand Media has already been produced by thoughtful people, writing at length about subjects they love on obscure websites that no one ever links to. What a shame that would be!

<comment><AUTHOR> I've actually seen that happen to one of the lead engineers in search quality at Google. He'd written a great guide to ultralight backpacking that until I linked to it, wasn't indexed by any major search engines.

<http://eric-and-april.com/Ultralight/index.html>

<comment><USER3> Is this a meta-post ? Did you just link to it for the first time ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I work on search-quality at Google. This is my life.

<comment><USER4> Hi, I am the author of that. Would you say the depiction in the article is more-or-less accurate? I am asking as I wrote this purely from an outside/theoretical perspective.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very true for some things, and not for others. There's information asymmetry in both directions, things site owners know that Google doesn't, and things that Google knows that site owners don't.

The summary of the history seems pretty accurate to my perception of it, but I don't think it's hopeless from here. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fascinating essay, but I'm not quite sure whether it's a problem that sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content.

After all, Demand Media does produce real, editorially vetted content from real human writers. The payment system encourages what I'll call extreme efficiency of research and writing, but that simply optimizes it for the _handy-reference_ domain of search results (e.g. How to fillet a smallmouth bass), which may not be "high quality" as such but does provide direct, clearly written and reasonably valid responses to the search queries that elicit them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen a lot of pages where I couldn't tell if it was written by a markov- model or a human. Many of the people who get paid for $1 content don't speak English natively.

<comment><USER6> On that topic, I present Emily Chimpinson, a little project I've been playing with:

<http://twitter.com/chimpinson>

She's a Markov-based script inspired by the public domain works of a certain poet. All of her incantations are checked to make sure they don't repeat verbatim her model.

Every once in a while she comes up with something inspired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hah, I ranted a bit about this evolutionary arms race years ago, from a different angle.

[http://hamstermotor.motime.com/post/683104/the-future-of- spa...](http://hamstermotor.motime.com/post/683104/the-future-of-spam-an- information-theoretic-argument-%252Arestored%252A)

<comment><USER4> That was very interesting. I added a pointer to your article to the OP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Moultano - I have a strange request, but one I hope you'll take seriously.

I think this issue is very important - to Google, to web searchers, to businesses seeking to be found by Google and even to less scrupulous web operators. I'd love the opportunity to engage in 20-30 minute written chat with you and publish it (anywhere on the web you'd like).

As background, I've worked for years as an SEO consultant, founded a community and company in the space (SEOmoz.org), and have been spending the last few years developing and launching search marketing software.

I certainly respect your background and beliefs, but I think there's some flawed logic in your assumptions and arguments that I'd love to dig into, talk about and maybe even have some of my own perceptions changed. I would not ask you to disclose anything that's confidential - I'm much more interested in the theory and logic behind web spam, SEO and search relevancy.

You can reach me via email - firstname.lastname@example.com. Would love to hear from you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I'm not equipped for that sort of public discussion. Talk to Matt. ;)

<comment><USER8> It could be anonymous on your end?...

I like Matt a lot, too, but his opinions (at least, those he publicly offers) are well known and well publicized. It would be great to hear other voices.

If not, how about if/when you ever leave the team. Happy to be patient :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Haven't read it all, but I am just wondering: by now data dumps of people's connections are probably making the rounds in the dark channels? I think sending spam that appears to be from your friends could be a big "improvement", and should be child's play with the data that is already freely available.

Maybe that could become one of the first privacy disasters, when people realize they made their email unusable by publishing their connections.

</comment><comment><USER10> If we presume that any algorithmic, procedural, or structural system built by one party can be reverse-engineered and understood by another party, the concept of Optimization by Proxy, and the more general Goodhart's law, form a pretty compelling argument against designing optimized systems as solutions to problems in general.

Maybe in some cases keeping a system convoluted and inconsistent can actually help ensure stability and durability?

</comment><comment><USER11> Just ask Calacanis!

</comment><comment><USER12> _Internal Server Error_

And sufficiently advanced errors are indistinguishable from pages made for pure irony.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_the_perils_of/)

<comment><USER12> Thanks, but it's back again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> absolutely....sometimes i mark as "spam" conversations that i'm personally not interested in, even if the author is "legitimately" spamming me. (eg a mis- guided friend's mass email...or more likely the dozens of mis-guided reply- all's)

<comment><USER14> I think this is a valid use case of spam filters. I have trained more than one to detect my father's powerpoint emails and bad chain-mail jokes and separate them from his personal messages that I actually want to read.</comment></comment>


Farm Aid for the Big House - <AUTHOR> https://www.vera.org/in-our-backyards-stories/farm-aid-for-the-big-house <comment><USER2> So the feds are funding small unneeded jails, meanwhile the biggest jail in my state is an underfunded death house of carnage, with so few staff lawyers are often locked in for hours with the inmates until someone can be found to let them out, inmates die all the time for a plethora of reasons, the place floods, is full of mold, and a general hellhole.

A few months ago someone with a small warrant wouldn't pull over and went on a hour long run from the cops trying to get to another county so he wouldn't have to go to this jail.

Thanks Supreme Court for allowing this shit.

<comment><USER3> Author of this story here, thanks for reading!

Very curious about the small warrant story -- can you tell me more details?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. The US really loves jails and weapons.

<comment><USER5> Well you can't have freedom without jails or weapons.

<comment><USER4> Too much of that can also be an obstacle to freedom.</comment></comment></comment>


Risky Mortgage Bonds Are Back and Delinquencies Are Piling Up - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-04/risky-mortgage-bonds-are-back-and-delinquencies-are-piling-up <comment><USER2> Mortgage debt will probably not be a problem in this cycle. People have this bias to remember most recent event, but it's rarely the same thing twice in a row: [https://imgur.com/a/0dT7iHK](https://imgur.com/a/0dT7iHK)

Corporate debt may be: [https://imgur.com/a/b54hMSg](https://imgur.com/a/b54hMSg)

And frankly with the amount of outstanding US govt debt and underfunded pension & healthcare liabilities the USD may either get dethroned and devalued or sent into the negative interest rates purgatory like Japan is currently living in. Japan cannot possibly ever raise rates, at 2% rates 100% of their tax take will go towards paying the interest on their 250% national debt.

Add to that the history of Smoot-Hawley and the general outlook of the 1930s ...

<comment><USER3> So if the USD becomes weak, who out there could be in a position to become stronger? I don't see any candidate. Euro growth is weak. CN bookkeeping's suspect...

<comment><USER4> > CN bookkeeping's suspect...

IMO Americans are biased to overweight this. It doesn't matter as long as China can keep up appearances better than other countries for long enough. Investors will happily invest in a bubble believing that they are smart enough to get out before everyone else if things go south.

Bad bookkeeping doesn't keep the NBA and Activision from kowtowing to China, I don't see why it would keep people from investing there either.

<comment><USER5> 1\. Yeah plenty of non-Americans think this too, _maybe_ if you said "westerners" it'd be defensible, but it'd still be wrong.

2\. The nba & activision are selling goods to China, or maybe they put a little money into real assets to reach that audience. They're not investing in Chinese financial instruments which is what the entire thread is about

<comment><USER4> If China has enough real money to bend the NBA and Activision doesn't that imply that the bookkeeping isn't fake - CN's success is real, not imagined?

<comment><USER3> No, it's like a car dealership not extending credit to someone with bad credit but who will gladly take a bank check.

<comment><USER4> I don't see the distinction. If they have Activision, Apple, Tesla and Disney as customers why wouldn't banks, financial markets and investors trust them? I would argue they already do, I highly doubt China has trouble floating debt or attracting foreign investment right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FTA: "There are more than $27 billion of outstanding bonds backed by non- qualified mortgages now, a small fraction of the approximately $10 trillion mortgage-bond market. In 2007, there were around $1.8 trillion of bonds backed by loans to non-prime borrowers."

I'm gonna need to see a lot more than a tiny fraction of investors / loan makers dealing with non-QM bonds before I'd say that 2007-era silliness has come back.

This looks a lot more like some banks filling in the gaps in the QM market than anything else.

<comment><USER7> The crisis was caused by lying about the kind of risk hidden in collateralized bundles of debt. That doesn't seem to be an issue this time. It's just about the inherent dangers of lots of people moving in to homes they can't afford to pay for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a founder and have been getting spammed hard-core lately for small business loans. There are many companies offering 5-6 digit business loans and revolving lines of credit to basically anyone who can fog glass, and there are salespeople and spammers _pushing_ them. I'd say I average 2-3 e-mails or cold calls per day. Feels like they're trying to stuff loans down my throat.

I've spoken to other founders and small business owners and they say similar. I've also heard anyone who can fog glass can get a car loan.

It reminds me a lot of how people were being basically nagged and cajoled into taking out huge mortgages in the early 2000s. There seems to be a lot of demand again for debt mystery meat to make debt sausages.

<comment><USER9> Same experience here. Constant small business loan offers. Not as many as you, mostly we get mail offers. At least 1-2/week.

<comment><USER2> Many people are warning about the growth in corporate credit, even Jerome Powell admits that it's not rosy there. Fully 45% of BBB rated bonds (lowest and largest in investment grade spectrum) should be junk rated today if judged by leverage ratios alone:

Morgan Stanley, The Nature of the BBBeast [https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/fixed-income-advisory- committe...](https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/fixed-income-advisory- committee/morgan-stanley-nature-of-the-bbbeast.pdf)

And then you have non-systemic but ridiculous things like Brex which issues credit _on revenue data alone_. Revenue is meaningless, Moviepass had great revenue. And those robocalls you're mentioning. Try a Google search on "revenue based credit" on a mobile phone from the US and read what are the ads saying ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Fitch says such documentation may offer only partial verification, and these > borrowers could have unstable income because, for example, they own small > businesses.

This sounds more like "small business owners are underserved by QM products and more risk-tolerant investors are filling the void," much more so than the "it's 2007 all over again" tone of the headline and parts of the piece.

<comment><USER11> Correct. Non-QM volume isn't substantial enough to be systemic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Investors knowingly chasing risk with these junky bonds is perfectly fine. In 2008, investors were defrauded by ratings agencies and bond creators who masqueraded junk mortgages as gold plated, at massive scale.

</comment><comment><USER13> Chasing yields in the age of efficiency is going to lead to another global hangover that defies common finacial wisdom, guaranteed.

Business models that exploit consumers seem to be some of the only plays with any movement or staying power during the current innovation wave, but prosperity fueled by debt can only go so far.

We'll see how the "decade of sustainability" (2020-2030) pans out, but if greed turns to desperation, its definitely going to get messier/wreckless/more complicated.

</comment><comment><USER14> > The strength of the housing market has helped support the bonds for now. > Home-price appreciation has slowed over the past year, but the average U.S. > house value still rose more than 2% in August from a year earlier, according > to S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller data....

It's odd when articles like this don't specify whether the increase they're reporting was inflation-adjusted or not. It makes a big difference. If not inflation adjusted, then 2% represents almost no increase given the trailing 12 month CPI change of about 1.7%.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Lenders have bundled more than $18 billion worth of these loans into bonds > this year that they then sold to investors...

Compare this to the ~$17 trillion of mortgage backed securities that existed prior to the financial crisis. $18 billion is peanuts, and hardly a systemic concern.

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2019/10/fannie-mae- mortga...](https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2019/10/fannie-mae-mortgage- serious-delinquency.html) _" I expect the serious delinquency rate will probably decline to 0.4 to 0.6 percent or so to a cycle bottom."_

Real story: problem housing debt near normal, takes slight tack upward.

</comment><comment><USER17> Risky mortgages and delinquencies were only a problem because:

the lenders* themselves had borrowed too much

the lenders didn't know they had borrowed so much

the ratings agencies were not judging the merit of the investments that lenders had invested in

*by lender I mean the ultimate party reliant on payments from the mortgage borrower

much was done to add transparency and safeguards to that specific issue, so just because lending standards are loose again doesn't mean there is systemic incestuous exposure to losses and collateral calls to the world's most financially important institutions

happy trading

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://archive.is/gz8zK](http://archive.is/gz8zK)

</comment><comment><USER19> I bought some gold today. Unrelated to this but I have recently decided to have 10% of my portfolio in gold as a safe guard.

<comment><USER20> Gold/Silver also tanked with the 2008 recession though.

<comment><USER19> My bet is on 10k gold after next recession. I guess I'm a gold bug. But it's still only 10% of my portfolio so I'm well diversified imho

<comment><USER21> Why gold and not 22 LR or 556 NATO?

At least for me, there's not a huge gap between "all the other investments crater to the point that my 10% in gold is useful" and "oh boy looks like things are collapsing now", if that makes any sense.

<comment><USER19> It's a very risky bet for sure. But there is a very small possibility central banks will go back to gold standard to instil confidence during a Great Recession when markets fall by 50+% in a very short time.

<comment><USER21> Personally, I'd take central banks heading back to the gold standard as a massive signal that things were about to get worse, not better. It'd be like having your oncologist suggest enrollment in a phase-one study - they aren't doing that because the outlook of a patient in a phase-one study is _good_ , but because the alternative is _worse_ , and now they're reduced to trying for a hail mary.

<comment><USER19> Gold is able to support entire global GDP and also growth. It all depends on the price. With current gold price a return to gold standard would be a disaster and would bring on the greatest recession of our lifetimes.

But at about 10k price gold standard starts to make sense. The idea is that during the next big crises central banks will have no tools to use (we are close to 0 in the US and in negative rates across the world) to support a recovery so a radical move will be needed to bring back confidence in the financial system.

A return to gold standard at a much higher gold price (calculated based on the world GDP and GDP growth) would be a very drastic move central banks could go for if situation got very dire but it might be the only choice they will have since we haven't really normalised the financial system after the 2008 crises and during the next crises we will be at 0 interest rates.

And if there is a choice between 556 nato rounds and going back to gold standard and returning back to some sort of stability for the world economy, gold would be much preferred to the anarchy and shots being fired.

<comment><USER21> I'm not saying that a return to a gold standard _couldn 't_ work - just that I think it would be extremely unlikely to work. And I'd greatly prefer "move to gold standard" over "society collapses", too. It's just I don't think I _get_ to choose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Make riskier loans to people without strong collateral

\--- OR ---

Have safer investments with mortgages

(It's one or the other. Which is best?)

</comment><comment><USER23> So should I pull out on all my stocks and stuff everything into bonds then?

<comment><USER24> since jan 2 2019 S&P 500 is up from 2510 => 3074 so if you read a doom porn article and liquidated on 12/30 you missed out on insane growth spurt

this is no different. you have to factor in potential lost growth when you go risk averse mode; it's against our loss aversion bias but has to be done when thinking long term.

<comment><USER23> I think the general trend has been an increasingly healthy stock market since around 09 correct? That was 10 years ago, how much longer can this balloon rise? Currently I am about 70/30 stocks/bonds perhaps I should just stay put considering I really don't know.

<comment><USER24> don't take this personally, but you don't sound ready to invest in stocks.

losing huge amounts of money is going to happen. there's nothing you can do to avoid it, other than not invest in stocks. the tradeoff is that it always comes back higher.

being risk averse will actually cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long term. research cFIRESim and plug the numbers in yourself: the portfolios most likely to survive long retirements with money left are those with higher stock %s (i'm talking 90% plus).

you can't get enough growth with materially high bond %s to survive long periods of withdrawing. satisfying your risk averse reptile brain will actually generally lead to you drawing 100% of your savings down, which isn't great if you aren't earning via something else.

if you are interested in material long term growth, e.g. enough to outpace inflation, you have to accept the fact that you will lose enormous amounts of cash virtually overnight. your other options are to lose your wealth due to inflation/aversion to risk. it's regrettable, but that's the situation we are in with targeted 2%+ inflation.

best of luck!

<comment><USER23> So you just hope to god that nothing bad ever happens in your life that would require you to pull your money out? That sounds incredibly foolish to me considering the chances of something going terribly wrong in your life are incredibly high. People get diagnosed with brain cancer every single hour of every single day. Better hope it doesn't happen when the markets down I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yet again, an interest based economy is going to end up collapsing and ruining the lives of many.</comment>


Just make an image gray in all browsers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/karlhorky/gray

<comment><USER2> It's awesome! It even works for my beloved old Internet Explorer friends.</comment>


US Department of Defense launched internal site to develop open source software - <AUTHOR> http://fcw.com/articles/2009/01/30/dod-launches-site-to-develop-open-source-software.aspx

<comment><USER2> See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462697>

Still forbidden ... I guess they aren't going to let us look.</comment>


Megaupload Founder Kim Dotcom Released From Prison - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-founder-kim-dotcom-released-from-prison-120222/

<comment><USER3> The judge violated human right of Internet access. Regardless, they should be disbarred and mistrial called until a replacement judge with technical competence to preside can be found.

You'll understand that this right is inalienable if you can't pay your bills online, transfer money, etc. In fact, in article, he can't even communicate with his team overseas.

The order only serves to punish and discourage honest people from society due to the unenforceable nature of it.

Despicable judge.

<comment><USER4> internet access is not a human right. the crimes this guy is on trial for mostly took place on the internet...

he can talk to his lawyers on the phone.

he should be happy to be out of jail and go enjoy the outdoors!

<comment><USER3> So how is he going to pay online-only bills? Are the courts going to give him taxpayer money for late fees? Or it's his own fault for not predicting his arrest?

Can he read about politics as part of his duty as a voter? Due to Internet as a medium for accessing news, he's further restricted on being an informed voter.

How is he meant to send material to his lawyers? "Mail it" So instead of sending it virtually for free, he has to print it out, determine postage, go find a postal office and then ship it. Vice versa to receive it but it takes time. Not to mention the massive phone bill because VOIP is INTERNET.

How is he going to be monitored from accessing Internet that's everywhere? Anti-Satellite jammers? Anti-Wifi jammers?

How is it possible to prevent him from giving the password to someone to start a megaupload website? Better prevent phones, mail, etc, in that case.

Since I know he's technically proficient, he's probably using the Internet as we speak. So this order only serves to pad the ego of the prosecution team, show incompetence of judge and punish honest people for being honest.

<comment><USER5>
      "So how is he going to pay online-only bills?"

      "Can he read about politics as part of his duty as a voter?"

Paying bills online and reading about politics are not human rights either. There are alternatives available for any task he's expected to do as a member of society.

      "Since I know he's technically proficient, he's probably using the Internet as we speak."

That's a really bad argument, and I think you know it. He very well may be online as we speak, his neighbors probably have an unsecured network, but why is that a good reason to intentionally give the man internet access? He's shown time and time again that he uses the internet to commit criminal acts, there is no reason for him to have that access.

This is not a human rights violation.

<comment><USER3> > Paying bills online and reading about politics are not human rights either. > There are alternatives available for any task he's expected to do as a > member of society.

I'm sorry, but Internet access is the human right. You're putting human right implications in my mouth.

The alternatives available? Jeez, I wonder how he can find out as an Internet user. Hopefully he had heard about yellow pages? Yes, there actually young people who do NOT understand non-Internet alternatives.

> He's shown time and time again that he uses the internet to commit criminal > acts, there is no reason for him to have that access.

He used electricity too. So, cut off his electricity too? Remember, he needs electricity to run servers and not necessarily the Internet. Seize all electronics instead? He may have files embedded in the house alarm. Personally, I didn't want to respond because your rationale is asinine!

<comment><USER5> You could take that argument as far as you'd like. He used oxygen to help him commit the crimes, thus we should take away his oxygen.

No, the internet has directly helped him commit crimes. It is a tool he used. As it is non-essential, and we may disagree on that point but the courts are agreeing with me, then it is logical to remove his privilege.

I don't believe my rationale is asinine at all. I think you're equating this man's freedom with the protection of the internet itself, and are overstepping your position because of it.

<comment><USER3> The prosecution took it that far and the judge does not understand the implications of Internet as a necessity. I even highlighted that it restricts many needs to function as a member of society. The reality is that there are electronics that can easily tap into the World Wide Internet, which gives credence to my argument that his electricity should be shut off along with all electronics (may be battery powered) as part of the effort to prevent access to the Internet.

The Internet did not help him commit crimes, it's a neutral platform. They are merely carriers just like roads, servers, etc.

> I think you're equating this man's freedom with the protection of the > internet itself, and are overstepping your position because of it.

Nope, I'm talking specifically about the human right to the Internet due to the necessities, abundance of electronics with access to Internet, many potential outlets and most of all; unenforceable to prevent access. I think you're overstepping your position again by implicating me with other positions when I've been quite clear.

<comment><USER5> I don't think you have been that clear, but I don't want to see this discussion turn personal. I have nothing against you, and your opinion is just as valid as my own.

On the question of if the internet is a human right, I think it's quite obvious the answer is no. It has never been viewed as one in the past as far as I know, I've yet to see a judge rule that to be the case.

A better question is, should it be? I'd like to see that happen, though I think it will take time to get there.

<comment><USER3> I apologise. I was explaining that I did not like being misrepresented by others. I would have been less defensive to a request to clarify my posts.

As for it being a human right from precedent, it's already recognised in some European countries (some of it even includes minimal Internet transfer rates) and discussed at UN. Unfortunately for UN, I believe certain influences do not want it to happen, eg USA based on ACTA's proposal that had included demands for three strikes among other Internet access restrictions.

There's a lot of information from this article: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_access> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access>

No hard feelings, mate!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's hoping he stashed some cash and can make a clean getaway. 50 years is what they want to charge him with for copyright infringement, ludicrous. Rapists get a fraction of the time.

<comment><USER7> Rapists don't hurt (allegedly potential) corporate profits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wouldn't any traditional outlet use the phrase "released on bail" or similar? Released from prison is typically only used after a sentence has been served or overturned.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Dotcom had been held in custody since an anti-terrorist police squad raided his Coatesville mansion last month..."

Doesn't anyone find it odd that the entertainment industry can manipulate governments into sending these specialized teams (anti-terrorist in New Zealand, SWAT in the US)? What are they telling these people? Are you telling me that if the police had sent over one or two squad cars with a couple of cops that Dotcom would have escaped?

How much does an operation like this cost? I can't believe it's that cheap.

</comment><comment><USER10> And the US government's attempt to intimidate a foreign national in the name of piracy fails again. Maybe they'll eventually get the idea and stop worrying about file sharing and start spending money on schools again.

<comment><USER11> He's still facing extradition. He just gets the be under what amounts to 'house arrest' during the hearings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What kind of insane argument is that. You can't just start a new MegaUpload and have the big crime profits flow in instantaneously. It takes time to build a new user (and data) base.

<comment><USER13> I wonder how they shut it down in the first place. They obviously can take the .com domain, but MU should have been online on a different domain on the same day.

They were not prepared i assume, what is an argument against then doing something really illegal.

<comment><USER3> They're a centralised company, not a de-centralised group of people all over the world like The Pirate Bay among others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Restricting access to the Internet? I agree with the defense - in this day and age, that's absolutely ludicrous.

<comment><USER13> This reminds me of the first hacker suits, they were so scared of them, they thought they could launch an atomic bomb over the phone.

<comment><USER15> "Mitnick served five years in prison — four and a half years pre-trial and eight months in solitary confinement — because, according to Mitnick, law enforcement officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to "start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone".[12] He was released on January 21, 2000. During his supervised release, which ended on January 21, 2003, he was initially forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline telephone. Mitnick fought this decision in court, eventually winning a ruling in his favor, allowing him to access the Internet."

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

<comment><USER16> I don't know if it's an urban legend or not, but I heard that they put a special cover on the light in his retaining cell because they were afraid he would find some way to "hack" his way out with the wires.

<comment><USER17> That would be an entertaining plot device in a spy movie: spy gets captured, finds that power fluctuations occasionally flip a bit in the memory of the security system, uses the light in his/her cell to flip all the bits corresponding to the door locks...

<comment><USER18> _Real_ hackers use butterflies: <http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/real_programmers.png>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Odds that he will make it to the safe harbor of Germany?

<comment><USER20> Curious- why is Germany a safe harbor for DotCom?

<comment><USER21> IANAL but this is the text of the US-Germany extradition treaty. It seems to say that neither country has an obligation to extradite their own citizens.

"The article thus takes into account the law of the FRG prohibiting the extradition of its nationals but allowing for their prosecution in the FRG."

Article 7

EXTRADITION OF NATIONALS

(1) Neither of the Contracting Parties shall be bound to extradite its own nationals. The competent executive authority of the Requested State, however, shall have the power to grant the extradition of its own nationals if, in its discretion, this is deemed proper to do and provided the law of the Requested State does not so preclude.

(2) The Requested State shall undertake all available legal measures to suspend naturalization proceedings in respect of the person sought until a decision on the request for his extradition and, if that request is granted, until his surrender.

(3) If the Requested State does not extradite its own national, it shall, at the request of the Requesting State, submit the case to its competent authorities in order that proceedings may be taken if they are considered appropriate. If the Requested State requires additional documents or evidence, such documents or evidence shall be submitted without charge to that State. The Requesting State shall be informed of the result of its request.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What I found most interesting was that the judge said they found no financial means for him to be a flight risk, just empty bank accounts.

<comment><USER23> He probably has a pile of cash stored somewhere

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> And now he's in for a long, slow battle with an unforgiving, bloated system that will try to boil him alive. Man, seriously, having to spend years in legal battles with restrictions placed on what you can do is probably worse than immediate imprisonment... And no Internet? Just shoot me, please...

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder how they'd stop a helicopter from landing in his yard. Even if the place is locked down with police/surveillance, what are they going to do when they see that helicopter - shoot the damn thing down? If this guy wants to flee, he'll make it happen one way or another.

<comment><USER26> A helicopter from New Zealand to...?

<comment><USER27> Germany. It has an extradition law but not for it's own citizens. Thus Kim would face jurisdiction in Germany, but under their law. And in contrast to the US, it would far less worse. Maybe two years in jail, or even just a fine.

<comment><USER26> You guys know where New Zealand is, right?

You're going to need something to fly you over about 2000km of water - <USER2> gets you to Australia, which is the _last_ place you want to be if you're fighting extradition to the US.

[http://maps.google.co.nz/?ll=-43.197167,-177.539062&spn=...](http://maps.google.co.nz/?ll=-43.197167,-177.539062&spn=98.309359,158.027344&t=m&z=3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The guy's name is Dotcom... O WOW</comment>


Germany's self-driving car solution: Kill animals,damage property,protect humans - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/cars/2017/08/24/germanys-self-driving-car-solution-kill-animals-damage-property-protect-humans/#.tnw_gEstLoIw <comment><USER2> The translations are horrible. The original is at [http://www.bmvi.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/Presse/084-dobrindt-...](http://www.bmvi.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/Presse/084-dobrindt- bericht-der-ethik-kommission.pdf?__blob=publicationFile).

Some of the less obvious thoughts:

\- If it can be shown that self-driving systems will lead to fewer accidents, the government will have an obligation to allow them–even if some accidents may continue to happen.

\- The focus should be on avoiding those situations where technology has to make morally ambiguous decisions

\- Where such life-vs-life decisions do happen, it would be immoral to assign different values to the individual lives on the basis of sex, age or other characteristics.

\- In principle, it would be possible to allow decisions trying to minimise the lives lost/put at risk, i. e. sacrificing one life to save two.

\- But: they also deem it immoral to sacrifices the life of people who did not participate in the creation of the traffic risk themselves.(1) This means, for example, that system may not "sacrifice" one pedestrian for two (or even one) passengers of the car.

\- Liability will move from the owner/operator to the producers of cars

\- The technology, and the decisions it implements, must be communicated to the public

\- It's unclear if traffic should be directed by some central authority. Such centralisation would need to find a way to operate in a way that makes it impossible to create profiles of individuals' movements

\- The car's owner must always agree to the sharing and usage of their data. This requires not just the theoretically choice, but the real possibility to say no, and realistic options to do so without undue consequences.

\- It must be both obvious at the moment, as well as after the fact, if the car was being operated by its software or by the driver.

1: That's a possibly unintuitive offshoot of another principle in German law. Say you're a drunk pedestrian who stumbles into the street. A car swerves, hits a tree, and the car's passenger is killed. Who is at fault?

The somewhat unintuitive result is: the driver is at fault (meaning his insurance will have to pay for damages). The reasoning: Those travelling in cars derive all the value of car traffic. The pedestrian may have made a mistake–but they would never have been in a situation where it was possible to make that mistake, without others seeking the benefit of car traffic. Therefore, the pedestrian is never liable (unless, obviously, they act intentionally)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Automated driving is necessary if the systems cause fewer accidents than > human drivers.

True, but sounds like autonomous vehicles were a bitter pill to swallow for less accidents.

> In the case of unavoidable accidents, classification of drivers is > prohibited. This includes determining fault by age, sex, or physical and > mental constitution.

Does that the imply that we should only be in favour of auotonomous vehicles if they are always better than the worst drivers?

EDIT: I probably misunderstood this one. After reading the passage in the origal report I think it means that the computer is not allowed (for example) to prefer to save a child over an adult.

> We must be able to determine the responsible party in an accident at any > time: human or computer.

Desirable, but good luck with that one.

> Drivers must have proper documentation.

Not sure what that means.

> The driver should be able to decide who owns his vehicle data.

Why not simply demand that the driver owns the data. If we leave the decision to the driver we will know how it ends up. They will assign away all their rights for a free cookie.

Most importantly the article (didn't read the report) skips one of the most important and difficult ethical questions. How the balance the life of other with the physical integrity of those in the car, especially in the light of unavoidable false positives.

<comment><USER4> The "proper documentation" part is about hybrid systems where the driver can be given control/responsibility in some situations. These situations must be clearly documented and should also be internationally standardized. They also specifically warn and advise to prevent data collection practices currently used by Search Engine and Social Media Companies.

Original Report (German): [https://www.bmvi.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/Presse/084-dobrindt...](https://www.bmvi.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/Presse/084-dobrindt- bericht-der-ethik-kommission.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The driver should be able to decide who owns his vehicle data."

This. This is the most important statement in the findings. We know accidents are going to happen, judgements made. The rest makes obvious, human centric, sense. (As a human that is. ;) )

</comment><comment><USER6> All in all, if I may, something not entirely unlike the Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:

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

</comment><comment><USER7> click bait level- 100. anyways, these laws seems sensible!

<comment><USER8> What's clickbait about this?</comment></comment>


Gary Taubes responds to the AHA presidential advisory on dietary fats - <AUTHOR> http://www.cardiobrief.org/2017/06/16/guest-post-vegetable-oils-francis-bacon-bing-crosby-and-the-american-heart-association/#comments <comment><USER2> TL;DR

The AHA cherry-picked four poorly-conducted studies from the sixties to make their sweeping recommendation that PUFAs are substantially heart-healthier to eat versus saturated fats. Taubes goes into detail about some major biases within these four studies.

</comment><comment><USER3> The link should be fixed to not point at #comments.

</comment><comment><USER4> The "Fathead" movie was an informative albeit corny movie that mentioned Gary Taubes findings.

</comment><comment><USER5> An average US citizen eats about 3500kcal daily. Half of those calories are from fatty animal foods, half are from refined sugar.

Why is everyone demonizing fatty foods, or sugar, when that 3500 number is screaming at us from afar?!

US citizens eat way to much and move way too little. The side effect is diabetes T2, heart attacks and all sorts of issues.

US citizens also do not know how to eat, their capitalism has failed them, the whole food business is subsidized insanely. So they are "forced" to buy highly caloric foods that kills them (because that food is cheap), and foods with high nutrient to calories ratio are too expensive. Sodie pops and milk cheaper than water, meat cheaper than vegetables, insane.

<comment><USER6> You can't be forced to eat too much just because food is too cheap. Get some smaller plates.

(Milk is cheaper than water?)

<comment><USER7> A lot of this cheap stuff is high-margin "weaponized food" that's had thousands of man-hours thrown at it to make it addictive. Capitalism is optimizing for the wrong parameter, just like it does in just about every other situation related to human health.

<comment><USER8> These "weaponized food" exist and there is no turning back because people like them. McDonalds sells apple slices and french fries but I bet a vast majority of people choose french fries. But if people took things is moderation it would be much better. Maybe take a small serving of french fries and a glass of water with your burger.

<comment><USER9> And the funny thing is, their apple slice are likely even less healthy than the fries.

<comment><USER10> Yes, because foods can easily be ranked by their scientifically measured healthiness.

The only fruit I eat is strawberries because they are the healthiest.

<comment><USER2> Ur so dumb geez, you obviously should eat only kale.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Humans need not apply - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/14/08/humans-need-not-apply

<comment><USER2> _There is a terrifying amount of working automation in labs and wear houses that is proof of concept._

I'll be glad when sloppy grammar is automated away.</comment>


Introducing Increment subscriptions - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/gb/blog/increment-subscriptions <comment><USER2> People have been saying "print is dead" for almost a century now, and somehow it hasn't happened.

I read an article a couple of months ago which stated that magazine subscriptions are up, and so is printed catalog distribution and sales from those catalogs.

Anecdotally, subscribing to Apple News only whetted my wife's appetite for the printed versions of the magazines she sees on her iPhone. She's since subscribed to the print versions of three of them.

We were at the rodeo one day and one of the magazines had a booth. I mentioned to the people from the magazine that my wife subscribed to their publication because of Apple News, and they said they hear that a lot.

Of course, I've also read that some publishers are not happy with the revenue cut they get from Apple News, so perhaps its not right for every publisher.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Also anecdotally, but I feel the same way with photographs. While digital photos are amazing and I never want to go back, I also really, really enjoy printed albums. Especially for photos of a trip or special event. I find it way easier to capture, remember, and re-tell the story by flipping through a book.

<comment><USER4> That's something I often tell people a bit unmotivated with their photography: Go and get some of your images printed! It's surprising how much of a difference it can make.

<comment><USER5> But isn't that sending them towards pulping and effectively killing the very nature that inspires their photography in the first place?

<comment><USER3> Paper is not effectively killing nature. Especially in the US, which is home to one of the largest paper-producing regions in the world.

Nearly (if not actually) all of the pulp required for paper comes from managed forests grown and harvested specifically to produce wood products over time. These tree farms are stable, not shrinking.

<comment><USER5> well, that's not true.

"managed forests" produce high amounts of waste and take away arable land and natural habitat quite aggressively [1]. what you have said here is a common propaganda perpetrated by industry advocates on the web and is often passed on as gyan without any scientific basis or authentic study or source to back it up.

hell, even critical thinking is missing when people write comments like this!

kind of like lobsters were cheap prison food in 1800s story:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/emcx69/the_history...](https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/emcx69/the_history_of_lobster_canning_aka_lobsters_were/)

[1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_pape...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_paper)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unrelated: I do a digital magazine too, people can download the PDF. I'd love to give the people to opportunity to buy a printed copy if they want to (and maybe do some profit on the side). I think that's a good SaaS idea: upload your magazine in PDF and let the startup do everything, from pritning to shipping, and get a cut on that.

<comment><USER7> This is mostly what Blurb ([https://www.blurb.com](https://www.blurb.com)) does!

<comment><USER8> Blurb is amazing! They printed a photo book that I gave to my fiancée when I proposed. Top quality printing and an easy to use app to create the book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Please introduce core missing features to billing and payments first before print magazine subscriptions.

The most obvious one to me: allow people to test their applications in production. Allow them to generate a temporary fake card number, expiration, and cv2 that Stipe can authorize as if it is real.

Allow you to generate and expire it from the console and via the API.

We had people on stripe's support team for 6 months tell us we can't test in production on real cards. We didn't want to, but we do have to test production check out flows, and currently the only way to do it is with real cards.

Someone senior finally told us "of course everyone tests production, you have to. Just nobody likes it. "

I would put out a call for at least 10 to 100 customer requested features first before a print magazine.

I think it's been almost 5 years since stripe has introduced a feature we actually wanted. I'm not trying to be a troll, but this super obvious payment testing thing really bothers me because 100% of customers who build apps for payments should be using it. And it's not built.

<comment><USER10> Aside from Stripe not doing what customers are asking for, there are very good reasons why fake cards in production is a really bad idea:

* the fake cards can leak, and your customers can start using them on your site. I'm not sure how you want to handle this. If this is production your code shouldn't have to be checking for card number patterns, and since you don't get the full card number anyway, I'm not even sure how you would.

* Part of your bookkeeping is that all production transactions are reported as income, both to your CPA and to the IRS / tax authority of your country. You're going to have a major headache trying to explain what's going on to the auditors. These fake transactions will forever be part of your audit trail.

* It'll screw up your reporting - your analytics, revenue, churn rate etc will be artificial, and you'll have a hard time getting people to trust them the moment it's even possible to fake those numbers with test cards.

We have a ticketing system, and yes we do use our own cards to buy low value stuff on production. We then trigger the normal return / complaint flows to get actual refunds back (Stripe doesn't charge you anything for refunds), so it's really no skin off anyone's back, and it does properly test both your purchase and refund flows fully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think more companies should create zines. But maybe not be so corporate about it.. like this... be more authentic. Very powerful culture building tool tho IMO.

<comment><USER12> Could you elaborate on what makes these feel corporate? The design seems really modern and polished to me.

<comment><USER11> "really modern and polished" strikes my tastes as corporate in the world of zines. Just my opinion tho, not trying to gatekeep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Curious: Do people find value in reading increment? I've tried reading it a few times but have often found it to be too many words for too little deep insight. Would love to be convinced otherwise though.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone speak to the quality of the articles? Thinking about subscribing using my company's "education allowance".

<comment><USER14> You can see for yourself, the articles are free to read online: [https://increment.com/](https://increment.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how many great marketing opportunities/channels are written off because they seem to deviate from the values of focus or frugality? And inversely, how many distractions are hiding under the cover of unconventional marketing? I genuinely don't know.

</comment><comment><USER16> Airbnb did something like this back when I worked there. Not sure what came of it. I do remember seeing some copies of it sitting on coffee tables throughout the office.

<comment><USER17> It's still going, I see it on newsstands

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have seen so many of these magazines floating around I assumed there was a subscription already.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it just me or is it somewhat humorous that the checkout uses Shopify and not stripe?

<comment><USER20> I believe, Shopify ultimately uses Stripe for the payment gateway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Man I wish they had a Kindle edition. Would so subscribe.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yucks, more dead-tree printing. So much for the 'cradle of innovation' from Silicon Valley, lol.

<comment><USER22> Trees for paper are specifically grown to produce paper pulp. They're not cutting down virgin forest.

You could argue it's pretty monocultural but otherwise I don't see much of s problem with it.

<comment><USER23> The overall manufacturing process pollutes quite a bit, doesn't it?

<comment><USER24> (I work at Stripe.) We've made sure the process is carbon-neutral from forest to page. (And the paper itself is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.)

<comment><USER23> That's great, but paper's _pollution_ footprint is far larger than mere _carbon_ output. There's so much focus on climate change that people forget a bucket of mercury is carbon-neutral but still not great to pour in a lake.

Someone elsewhere in the discussion asks for a Kindle edition; that'd be a great way to keep unnecessary paper down.

<comment><USER2> Strip mine the land for more minerals for more never-decomposing plastic devices with chemical batteries?

I'd rather have the dead trees, thanks.

<comment><USER23> I read my Kindle content on the smartphone I already own.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>