Podcasting is getting huge - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2015/12/15/10126144/serial-podcast-huge-hit <comment><USER4> I've tried consuming podcasts on a number of occasions. I've utterly failed at finding a way to appreciate them, even on subjects that interest me. Reading faster than people speak is a factor (much faster) and being able to skim and dive in where I'm interested, ability to bookmark, to cut-and-paste bits for my notes files and so on. Besides reading is a lot easier for me to stay concentrated on the content rather than listening to someone talking. Podcasting just isn't for me, but I totally understand that there are people for who they are very useful. Any article can be turned into speech by using text-to-speech software, it would be nice if podcasts could be turned into transcripts with similar ease.

<comment><USER5> Have you tried listening at 2x speed? Takes a little bit of getting used to, but I've found it to be well worth it. This also makes it so I can watch lectures on youtube/coursera/etc (whereas I was never capable of paying any attention to lectures when I was in school, and found them almost unbearable to attend).

<comment><USER6> If you do this, make sure you're using something which can do tempo scaling. mpv can do it, PocketCasts can do it and it makes 1.5-2x speed workable.

<comment><USER5> Have you found things that _don 't_? I didn't think to mention it because it hasn't been an issue for me in years, it seems to be implemented everywhere, including the default app on iOS, at least if I understand what you're referring to correctly.

<comment><USER6> Regular mplayer doesn't have tempo scaling, nor did the shitty mp3 player I used to use for podcasts, it simply sped up the audio playback. It is pretty common now though I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I understand that a huge percentage of podcast listeners are based in the US but the number of hours I've spent listening to completely irrelevant adverts is insane.

Surely someone can make a service that takes a podcast feed and packages it with different adverts for different markets and then creates new feeds.

I'd make it but the scaling sales end is not something I know how to do.

I suppose it depends how Apple interprets the feed as I assume Apple devices are the most used for podcast consumption.

<comment><USER8> I like the idea.

I find the advertising inside podcasts also particularly annoying. You can't ignore them by looking away like you would on a screen.

Maybe we need an adblock for podcasts (even if it will be difficult to automize -> some manual stripping of the parts where they are promoting stuff)

<comment><USER9> > I find the advertising inside podcasts also particularly annoying.

Really? Most podcast apps replace the skip buttons with "jump forward/back 15/30 sec". Hitting a button twice is too much effort in exchange for getting content for free?

<comment><USER10> Yes I could FF through ads. The point (for me) is that I can leave my phone in my pocket and use two hands to do something, or keep them in my pockets when trudging home through snow. Which adds to the aggravation of ads - put stuff down, fish phone out of pocket, turn on phone, FF, stash phone. Or listen to the ad.

Thanks, but no sale.

<comment><USER11> We currently don't have the technology to automatically transcribe podcasts into text (good for the SEO on your podcast site) - But even if we did, how would it know that something is an advert as opposed to part of the show? Most of the podcasts I listen to have ads and in many cases the ads aren't just at the start or end, they're either a live read during the podcast or a cutaway somewhere towards the middle.

Maybe you're just not the target market for ad-funded podcasts.

<comment><USER12> Cut any segment of 10 seconds or more that is found in more than one podcast episode. (I think this is feasible considering Shazam)

It would remove pre-recorded/repeated ads in the middle (assuming that's what cutaway means), but wouldn't be able to remove live reads. It would also remove intros/exits.

<comment><USER11> That actually does sound feasible. I'm not sure how feasible when it comes to mobile devices but definitely _possible_ if things like YouTube's ContentID can work

<comment><USER13> As I understand it, ContentID is notoriously over-aggressive in matching and only "works" in the sense that YouTube's interest in having it isn't particularly harmed by that, since its mostly a tool to improve relations and avoid lawsuits from big media interests.

Without manual validation, it probably wouldn't be a good model for identifying and removing ads from podcasts, especially using a "repeated in multiple podcasts" model, which doesn't start with known ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This quote made me feel really old:

> Podcasting has been around for about a decade — the term is a reference to > the iPod, which older readers will remember as an iPhone that only played > music.

Now I'm in the category of "older readers." Lovely.

<comment><USER15> I'm sure/hope it was tongue in cheek, but I did find that pretty amusing.

My brother is 18 and he would probably be 'one of the last' to use a scroll- wheel iPod.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sorry for the shameless plug:

A friend and I have launched a podcast publishing platform, batteries included, called Podigee ([https://www.podigee.com](https://www.podigee.com)).

The backend runs on Rails + PostgreSQL, the frontend is a mix of Rails and AngularJS. Also, we run dedicated download / stream servers with some nice Lua scripts for caching the files and reducing overall costs for AWS S3 traffic.

The nicest feature is that once you upload an audio file, we will apply some good audio algorithms to it, encode it to different audio formats, and expose it automatically in your RSS feed.

<comment><USER17> If we're on the subject of plugs, I wrote Podcast Chart ([https://www.podcastchart.com](https://www.podcastchart.com))

Again in Rails, all running on AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised the article makes no mention of Adam Carola's podcast. Possibly due to some of the controversial remarks made by Carola on the show [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adam_Carolla_Show_%28podca...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adam_Carolla_Show_%28podcast%29#Controversies). I'm not a fan, but if you're mentioning Serial and WTF, Carola's podcast is right up there as far as numbers go, and was involved early on in monetising his podcast with adverts etc.

<comment><USER19> In case you missed, this article is on Vox. Carolla is worse than ISIS in their eyes.

<comment><USER20> Indeed. Always look at the URL before reading an article to understand the environment in which it was written. There's lots of websites out there with agendas - some more blatant than others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The problem with podcasting for me is I have no easy way to consume them that isn't already part of my entertainment workflow.

Literally, if it isn't something I can subscribe to in Youtube, or add it to my queue in Netflix, eventually it just gets lost and falls out of my entertainment workflow.

<comment><USER4> > entertainment workflow

That's a bit of a contradiction.

<comment><USER22> I was thinking the same thing. If you have an "entertainment workflow" then you are doing entertainment wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I remember podcasts being pretty big sometime around 2008 - a lot of podcasts have stopped publishing since then.

Is it ahead of where it was then?

<comment><USER24> The Serial podcast is huge, and in journalism, one of the few bright spots of success in indepth reporting...I would say that that alone has accounted for the majority of upswing in number of media reports proclaiming the new popularity of podcasts. So, despite the stats of increased downloads/awareness cited...which may not be impressive at all if we compare them against the overall uptick in phone adoption and mobile digital consumption since 2008...there's no guarantee that podcasting as an industry has real footing...particularly in what exists for creators to create and then get paid. At least, there's nothing on the scope of what Twitch and YouTube have done for gaming screen casters, AFAIK

<comment><USER25> Serial podcast was great. Tim Feriss is good, Dan Carlin is awesome. Any other podcast you'd recommend? Excluding the self promotional internet business types.

<comment><USER26> QOD. James Altutcher and Steven Dubner (freakonomics). They have one question each day they talk about. Both have GREAT perspectives. It's almost always a paradigm shifter.

<comment><USER27> I cant understand how James Altutcher has A list guests and horrible audio quality, so annoying.

<comment><USER26> Honestly I have never noticed! What are your favorite podcasts that have great production values BTW? I'm looking for a great production company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm surprised how little I've seen someone trying to sell pickaxes for the gold rush of podcasting.

I don't know whether that's an indicator of a trend, or whether the domain knowledge just makes such a venture unfeasible, but I'd imagine to see people renting out recording studios and selling bundled podcasting setups with training and the like, if this were such a huge trend.

Is anyone currently doing this?

<comment><USER29> Both Panoply and Gimlet (two popular podcasting companies) are getting into that business to various degrees. Panoply recently co-produced and co-promoted a podcast with GE while Gimlet seems to be more focused on doing pure "white- label" podcasts where they'll do all the production work, but their name doesn't appear on the final product.

Basically if you are company and want a podcast they'll make it for you (or work with you to make it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I used to have a serious podcast habit - one of which used to run adverts for Audible. Now I listen to audiobooks and hardly ever listen to podcasts and never listen to the podcast where I learned about Audible.

<comment><USER31> Rogan? So many ads for Audible.

<comment><USER32> Audible sponsors- or has sponsored- a LOT of podcasts. They're second only to Squarespace in that regard.

<comment><USER11> When it comes to Audible literally anyone can be 'sponsored' by them - I don't know if the big guys get an upfront or set amount but I was able to register as an Audible podcast affiliate before we even had a single episode out

<comment><USER32> I know that with Squarespace at least podcasts with a larger listenership have a completely different deal than the regular affiliate marketing channel- though I don't know any details. I kind of assumed it was the same across the board for podcasts on larger networks though I don't really know for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> For me podcasts fill a similar niche to TV: something I can passively enjoy without having to focus much while doing unrelated things. The two major differences are that I no longer watch TV and I can listen to podcasts wherever I am.

My biggest problems are that there's too many of them and it's easy to miss the one or two really interesting episodes in a sea of monthly/weekly content. Even more so if you listen to them at 2x speed and rarely have the time to stop and actively pay attention.

It's more of a form of pleasant background noise with the occasional glimpse of really interesting information. Like overhearing a conversation between colleagues.

</comment><comment><USER34> Podcasting was hard at the time of the iPod ? Seriously ? Isnt't that the other way around, it was hard until iTune made it easy to suscribe to thousands of podcast from a single, unified interface ?

Vox has short memory.

<comment><USER35> Listening to podcasts was "hard" until you could download over cellular and didn't have to sync up at your computer. So I do think there was friction at the time of the iPod. That's been one of the big changes--plus a greater range of good content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I listen to a huge assortment of retrocomputing related podcasts (partial list here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8544576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8544576)) using the podcast addict app.

tbh, I'm subscribed to far more than I can ever listen to, and I'm in my car for at least 2 hours a day. Right now, I'm addicted to the ANTIC podcast which features an almost impossible number of interviews with people from all over the early computer industry who experienced working for a fast growth startup, the bust that followed and the hand-off to an unexpected acquirer. It took a few episodes to get going, but it's very addictive now.

I'm pretty much convinced that there's a selection of podcasts for just about any interest. They act as an audio-only companion to my youtube subscriptions...and there's even a bit of overlap between the two communities.

Everything I listen to is _very_ amateur/hobbyist produced (like most youtube videos) and it often shows, but the enthusiasm is often enough to pull me through.

I had completely ignored podcasts until about 3 years ago and started seriously getting into them a couple years ago. I've even got my parents hooked on a couple.

<comment><USER37> >I listen to a huge assortment of retrocomputing related podcasts

Interesting. I like to dabble a bit in retrocomputing in my free time (mainly older languages, some of which I've used before, others not). Looked at that list of podcasts. A majority seem to be for games, which I'm not much into - <USER2> only play a few, sometimes. Only a few, like "retro computing roundtable", seem like they may be about more general computing topics. Do you know if any others are?

<comment><USER36> I'm not aware of too many. ANTIC is relatively holistic in terms of subject area, but focuses on Atari 8-bit computers.

I believe they've even had a couple episodes reviewing the different dialects of BASIC available for the Atari 8-bit computer platform.

AMICast is a relatively recent show with not many episodes, but it's about the Amiga from a very European perspective.

I'd love to know more as well.

<comment><USER37> Thanks. I'll check out the Amiga ones. Pretty interesting machine, and I'd read earlier, very advanced for its time. IIRC, one of the designers of either the hardware or OS of the Amiga, also later designed the REBOL language - <USER3> Sassenrath. I've tried out REBOL a bit, and it's interesting, with what seems to be a somewhat different approach from many other languages. It recently got open sourced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I don't have much time to read but I do have a lot of time to listen, usually while I'm doing housework or travelling, so I'm subscribed to a lot of podcasts and YouTube channels. When a YouTube channel has something new that looks interesting, I download the video, convert it to an MP3 and add it to my collection. When I come across a book I want to know more about, I look up the author's name on YouTube to see if there's an interview with them. That usually presents the main ideas of the book without having to read it. I download the video, convert it then subscribe to that channel if it has other videos I'm interested in too.

</comment><comment><USER39> I really enjoy podcasts at work, and they excel when I am doing boring repetitive work. I do however wish that there would be a better place for Podcast discovery than ITunes.

<comment><USER40> I paid for Overcast by Marco Arment on iOS and it's pretty good at recommendation (uses Twitter). He's since made it free (!) so you should check it out if you run an iDevice.</comment></comment>


Marko vs. React: An In-Depth Look - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@psteeleidem/marko-vs-react-an-in-depth-look-767de0a5f9a6#.nd35b7mt3 <comment><USER2> I'm the author of the article and one of the maintainers of Marko. We also recently published an article on the release of Marko 4.0 for context: [Marko 4.0 is here]([https://medium.com/@mlrawlings/marko-4-0-is- here-837884c5f60...](https://medium.com/@mlrawlings/marko-4-0-is- here-837884c5f60d)).

A lot of hard work has gone into making Marko one of the fastest and simplest JavaScript libraries for building web applications based on UI components. Many of the features of Marko were heavily inspired by React, but Marko is very different with a lot of unique features (async, streaming, concise syntax, etc.) and optimizations.

Feedback and questions welcome!</comment>


Communication networks inspired by slime mould - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8473316.stm

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a little bit light on detail, and the article it's referring to (in Science) is pay-walled, but here's the abstract:

<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/327/5964/439></comment>


Ask HN: How to create searchable/hireable profile on LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for ways to make my linkedin profile easily discoverable, attractive to potential recruiters or person of interest.
Like what to put in Headline, profile summary or if have any experience, how to write it in a way understandable to non technical people like recruiters etc.
Any help more geared towards Software developer about super helpful :) <comment><USER2> Fill out your profile as best as possible.

Be clear and consise in what you did in each role you had had.

Follow the relevant groups etc on linked in.

Add your skills etc.

Context with other people to help build your social graph.

I found it helpful to look at other people in senior positions as they often have a standout profile.</comment>


No Problem Is Ever 'Solved' - <AUTHOR> http://statspotting.com/no-problem-is-ever-solved/

<comment><USER2> There certainly are solved problems.

Is it possible to trisect an angle using a compass and straight-edge? Answer: No.

Can we put something into orbit? Answer: yes.

Precise problems can have precise answers. But open-ended problems - "are there better ways of communication?" \- have incomplete answers.</comment>


Microsoft can keep selling Windows and Xbox in Germany, US court rules - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/microsoft-can-keep-selling-windows-and-xbox-in-germany-us-court-rules.ars?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+Featured+Content%29 <comment><USER2> Let me see if I get how it works. Motorola asked a German court to rule accordingly to German law on something that happens in Germany and a US judge ruled that regardless of what the German court decides, Motorola cannot assert its right in Germany under German law...</comment>


Self-Criticism and the Academy - <AUTHOR> http://theprofessorisin.com/2016/03/29/self-criticism-and-the-academy-postac-post-by-jessica-langer/ <comment><USER2> The statements of affirmation at the end of this piece are noble and something I'm 100% behind, for everybody.

But it troubles me that this author does not see a connection between her work ("reading "against the grain" of dominant cultural or critical texts [...] and identifying problematic elements in texts") and this atmosphere of "extraordinarily harsh and total self-criticism" that she rightly identifies as toxic.

There is nothing wrong with analyzing cultural or critical texts and offering new perspective on them. And I can't speak to this specific author's work, because I haven't read any of it.

But in my experience of reading a _lot_ of this cultural criticism, it is rarely dispassionate analysis. It is usually passing harsh judgment on whatever it deems "problematic." This judgment is not always overt; it often takes the form of tying an entire history of slavery and wrong to the actions of anyone who is perceived as reinforcing any social pattern that can be tied to historical forms of oppression.

I have compassion for anyone who has gotten to the point that they can't recognize their own goodness and accomplishments. But how much of that result has come from subscribing to a system of thought where any misstep could mean that you too have become "problematic"?

These writers have constructed a new story of "original sin," but this time there is no Jesus to wash it all away. And their "Garden of Eden" \-- a world where nothing is "problematic" \-- is just as much of a fairy tale as Genesis.

</comment><comment><USER3> Academia has the most severe hierarchical system out there. There is also an insane amount of unjustified credentialism. Unjustified because so much depends on luck that things like " _swoon_ that researcher published in PNAS" are misguided. I actually heard someone doing basic science in an elite school say this, "That guy's research is garbage, he publishes in Nature Scientific Reports, which is a junk journal compared to Nature and Science where we publish."

Then there's basic science people shitting on engineering, which is probably one of the dumbest forms of elitism I've encountered.

And, there is the most significant hierarchy of all: which university you are affiliated with. Academics who hit it big in the tenure track job hunt quickly forget the role of luck in deciding which university hires them and shit on folks from lower ranked universities.

Frankly, the capitalist structure of industry discourages these kinds of hierarchies with egalitarian targets like revenue (and schmoozing) deciding your worth than other things.

<comment><USER4> I haven't found academia exceptionally hierarchical in computer science (though I'm not full-time in it at the moment). Even quite famous people tend to be pretty accessible, people take your talks at conferences seriously regardless of what university you come from, etc. There is definitely _some_ hierarchy, but if anything it's precisely because of the "capitalist structure" you mention, which big universities are definitely not immune to. There are some power differentials especially around money, with grad students needing to work for a well-funded lab to get paid, which gives power to professors who have lots of money (depending on the area, that usually comes from either grants or corporate funding).

In fact at AI conferences, the non-academics are _way_ more hierarchical about academia than the people actually in academia are. Journalists, investors, recruiters, and industry consultants who show up to a conference like AAAI or ICML seem to really care about people's pedigrees, especially impressed by names like MIT and Stanford. Professors are more likely to choose what talks to go to based on sub-area, talk title, or knowing a specific person, rather than going by institutional affiliation.

<comment><USER3> I have hovered in EE, CS, and math circles. I find CS and math to be made up of more genuinely curious folks than EE. But this comment and my parent comment are just a few points of observations, too few to generalize from.

But, once you get into the grants and peer review game, connections and credentials, unfortunately, matter a lot. It is not explicit in that no one says "hey you are from XYZ university, hence I am rejecting your paper." What happens commonly is that for peer-reviewers opinions are colored by your credentials. My hypothesis is this: if one were to control for quality of paper, a credentialed or pedigreed author's paper is likelier to get accepted than the non-credentialed ones.

There are many exceptions and there are deliberate programs like EPSCOR (for grants) to prevent such things from happening, but the inequality exists nonetheless. The inequality is sometimes justified, sometimes not.

<comment><USER5> I obviously can't speak for other fields, but at least in my field, "peer review" means that the people reviewing your papers are from all kinds of academic (and sometimes industry) settings; it's not like it's just a bunch of MIT professors criticizing all submissions and discriminating based on the authors' credentials. For instance, here is a program committee that I'm on right now for a top conference in my sub-field ... you can see for yourself which institutions people come from:

[http://www.educationaldatamining.org/EDM2016/committees.html](http://www.educationaldatamining.org/EDM2016/committees.html)

The chances of your paper being reviewed exclusively by "top credential" people (whatever that means) is astonishingly low; reviewers come from all sorts of institutions around the world. Even if someone exhibited an "elitist" opinion in discussions, they would be summarily shot down by the _majority_ of people on the committee, who are not from top-ranked institutions. Again, N=small personal anecdotes, but in paper/grant review meetings I've sat on, I've never seen this to be an issue simply because most members are not from top-ranked institutions.

The same is true for NSF grant reviewing in the U.S.. Again, different funding agencies have different models, but the NSF is a peer-based model just like papers.

<comment><USER3> I didn't claim anything about the peer reviewers' credentials! I said that if a person is from a big shot pedigree or from a top school, it certainly helps in a situation where a paper or proposal is as good. It is a common flaw in academia to pay too much attention to one's pedigree or affiliations. In my experience it is quite common to hear people say admiringly, "XYZ is Big_Shot's student" and so on. It is sometimes justified to attach importance to pedigree, sometimes it's not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I was a student (undergrad and postgrad) I liked the constant judgement and competition. It can be quite addictive if you're good at it. Even the subjective assessments where half the game is figuring out and playing to the lecturer's biases, which I imagine is quite a bit like the academic review process.

In the end though I do prefer working commercially, in a field where I can get intrinsic satisfaction from solving real-world problems instead of just having my name at the top of a list or being judged worthy by my peers.

(P.S. Not wanting to be too critical, but this page is almost impossible to read on mobile due to all of the pop-overs coming from different directions.)

<comment><USER7> > When I was a student (undergrad and postgrad) I liked the constant judgement > and competition. It can be quite addictive if you're good at it

The problem is that you're never good enough. Considering research is global competition, it's likely that there will be a bunch of people much better than you, in more prestigious institutions. They will be very critical of your work. Some will dismiss your work publicly in conferences or seminars and so on... not my idea of fun :)

> In the end though I do prefer working commercially, in a field where I can > get intrinsic satisfaction from solving real-world problems instead of just > having my name at the top of a list or being judged worthy by my peers.

It's possible to do both. Some researchers do try to solve real-world problems :)

<comment><USER6> I'm not trying to minimise the real-world impact of research! I guess I'm saying in some fields (e.g. IT, and startups in particular) there is much tighter feedback between ability+effort and real-world results.

I can imagine two situations as a researcher where constant criticism is damaging. (a) If you've built your self-image on being the best, and suddenly you're a small fish in a big pond, you're left with not much. (b) If you want to make a real difference but the culture of negativity/elitism holds you back, you end up frustrated.

But if you are actually making a difference then you can probably withstand any amount of sniping!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also, people inside academia have this strong tendency to say negative things about each other's work for the sake of supplying constructive criticism. As the article points out, this is all well, but we should also develop a habit of saying something positive every now and then.

<comment><USER9> My experience is that people are generally very positive towards their peers.

But, the professors are definitely too harsh on graduate students. We have to know that graduate students are the ones doing the actual research work most of time. And this probably is more important than what the article suggests.

<comment><USER10> It is even worse in some fields the major workforce is post docs, who basically can't find a job without be cheap labor for a few more years

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The peer review process of publishing academic papers is basically a process full of criticism. And this is the heart of academia

</comment><comment><USER11> One of the major flaws I find with academia these days is the almost obsessive focus on critical thinking rather than constructive thinking.

It is almost a given that you need to be able to dissect any intellectual claim but what I have found often is that academics are less good (in general) about making decisions. I.e. putting forward a proposition for others to critique.

This has created a whole breed of corporate academics who survive and often climb the corporate latters purely by pointing at the wholes in the cheese rather than fixing them or creating a cheese without any whole in it.

<comment><USER12> [the evil of the pessimist is]

not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises . . . [In being the so-called 'candid friend,' the pessimist is not really candid.] He is keeping something back—in his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. . . . He is using the ugly knowledge which was allowed him [in order] to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it.

\- G. K. Chesterton

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can totally relate to what is said in this article. I find this constant competition in academia very tiring and to me this is the worst part of the job.

Besides I noticed many researchers are very dismissive of their colleagues work. I often hear things like "this guy has been working exclusively on abstract interpretation, he should open himself to other ideas", coming from the guy that has been working exclusively on timed automatas.

</comment><comment><USER13> Despite all the news over 'safe spaces' and SJWs on campus, the academic process itself (including peer review, tenure, and other aspect) tends to be very illiberal. Capitalism tries to make everything fast, efficiently and easy (provided there is a market) but academia can be frustratingly bureaucratic in its effort to be 'above' money.

</comment><comment><USER14> "...so as to develop total devotion to the system on pain of failure that is not only professional but personal."

You can't publish these results, you can't publish shit, you ARE shit, hit the bricks because you are DONE.

<comment><USER15> The real favor is to deny tenure for your fuckin ass, cause a loser is a loser!

I drove here in a 2014 Subaru, you rode here on a bike, THAT'S my name!

EDIT: btw for everyone downvoting me- tech industry is bullshit, funding down, layoffs coming, and you are worried about DOWNVOTING quality comedic content??

You think this site still has a purpose?! LOL!

<comment><USER16> Bike? Luxurious. I have to walk.

<comment><USER14> Well, it _is_ fuck or walk...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't speak for liberal arts or engineering, but falsification is simply how science works. One just can't take it personally.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yeah lets talk about safe spaces and trigger warnings. This stinks of 2015.

<comment><USER20> "This stinks of <last year>." seems like a somewhat strange statement to me.

<comment><USER19> There was a lot of news about creating academic "safe spaces" last year. This article seems to want to ride on the same bandwagon. I found it onesided and useless

<comment><USER15> It's bleeding through to the corporate world too. What an amazing time to be alive!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Also Has Been Ordered to Help Unlock Phones, Records Show - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/article_email/google-has-also-been-ordered-to-help-unlock-phones-records-show-1459342847-lMyQjAxMTE2MDMxMDkzNjAwWj <comment><USER2> The feds have gone to ALL device makers and demanded access, using National Security Letters each time to force the manufacturers to enter into their clandestine plan, without any public awareness. And if anyone spills the beans they may just get disappeared into a special holding facility. The US Govt. is capable of pretty much ANYTHING when it operates under the guise of "Protecting America." We can thank the Patriot Act (ever version 2 of it) for all the loss of freedoms and jack-booted state.

<comment><USER3> Why was the San Bernardino FBI/Apple thing not done via NSL?

<comment><USER4> To set a precedent. They had the ability, but wanted to gain access to any phone for any case without having to dip into their budget. Even ones that don't threaten national security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Article simply counts when the All Writs Act has been used to make a request of Google and Apple, not focusing on what that help was, and thus, isn't terribly informative.

For example, when Apple turned over the iCloud data for the San Bernardino iPhone, I don't know if that was under the All Writs Act or not, but Apple claimed no problem with doing so. If Google did similar (or, in the one case this article details, reset a password), that's completely compatible with Apple's recent stance.

<comment><USER6> iCloud Data can be obtained with just a search warrant. The power of the All Writs Act is in making a company do _work_ to assist in decrypting or accessing data, rather than just handing it over.

From Apple's Legal Process Guidelines [0]:

"It is further ordered that, to the extent that data on the Device is encrypted, Apple may provide a copy of the encrypted data to law enforcement but Apple is not required to attempt to decrypt, or otherwise enable law enforcement's attempts to access any encrypted data."

[0] [http://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement- guideline...](http://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelines- us.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Correct but they would not have had access to the the iCloud data without Apple doing work (Resetting password or handing over a copy of the data)

The original comment is correct.

<comment><USER6> My understanding (and correct me if I'm wrong!) is that handing over a copy of the data does not fall under All Writs. If the map included warrants for iCloud data, etc, I'm pretty sure all 50 states would be colored.

<comment><USER8> You're correct. The All Writs Act is only of use if there are no alternative remedies. The best way to think of the Act is as a catch-all. It gets used when other remedies aren't applicable or don't exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This quote from "a Google spokesman" seems unambiguous and key:

"We've never received an All Writs Act order like the one Apple recently fought that demands we build new tools that actively compromise our products' security.... We would strongly object to such an order."

<comment><USER10> Devil's advocate, they might not have had to build a new tool.

<comment><USER11> Seems possible. Pretty much every Android device has disk encryption disabled by default for performance reasons.

<comment><USER12> Disk encryption is required to be enabled by default on any device shipped with Android 6 (Marshmallow). There is an exemption for very slow phones, but I'd guess that most new medium or high end phones have it enabled now.

<comment><USER13> Without hardware keystore for the key encryption key it's sort of pointless as you can extract and brute force with any PBKDF2 round count that will be acceptable for a mobile user.

<comment><USER14> Hasn't Android supported that since 2012?

[http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.3.html...](http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.3.html#HardwareKeyChain)

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure if / how that's integrated into encrypted disk nor how prevalent having a TPM like chip is. TrustZone has had a lot of vulnerabilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The ACLU post/map is pretty good. It's based on gov prosecutor report from October that Apple and Google had complied with All Writs orders scores of times before. More details at court orders linked to each case.

[https://www.aclu.org/map/all-writs-act-orders-assistance- tec...](https://www.aclu.org/map/all-writs-act-orders-assistance-tech- companies)

</comment><comment><USER16> What capability is unique to Google? Anyone can replace the rom if the bootloader is unlocked, and if it isn't, they need the manufacturer, not Google.</comment>


Venezuelan Bolivar to satoshi converter - <AUTHOR> https://dolarsatoshi.com <comment><USER2> I guess someone found how much 0 divided by 0 is worth :)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's still nuts that one satoshi is equal to 73 of any nation's currency, inflation or not.</comment></comment>


Sample workflow for LP digitization - <AUTHOR> http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/sample_workflow_for_lp_digitization.html <comment><USER2> As a club DJ who selects and plays in a digital format now, I like to leave clicks and pops in when digitizing my "white-labels" or vinyl-exclusive releases (some of the best or most coveted tunes are released on vinyl first in very small runs, months before they are available as downloads). I like to normalize then run the recording through Izotope's Ozone 7 on the "warm and transparent" preset to get it closer in loudness to digital releases I am mixing them with. There is a small community of us who share rips of this type of release from around the world, online, as the best place to pick a lot of this kind of record up is in smaller local genre-specific shops. Black Market soho in London was a Mecca of mine or Rooted Records in Bristol but I live in Cali now and have a hard time keeping up my share ratio but still get a rush when I get a great vinyl rip of a tune earlier than most. It is silly and matters very little to my livelihood but an old tradition in dj'ing that I am glad still survives (having tracks the next Dj doesn't, that is).

<comment><USER3> Why is this done? Tradition? Certainly it's an extra expense that releasing in pure digital format would not include -- and it's not like all the music is not mastered digitally now anyway -- nobody is mastering on tape and cutting and splicing....

<comment><USER4> White labels and dubplates in general hearken back to the sound system culture that originated in Jamaica [1]. Mostly a means of getting the newest songs fastest; record something in the morning, press your dubplate that afternoon, play it out that night. The unofficial nature of the recordings makes it easier to hop around copyright stuff and not clear samples, etc. The song Alicia by Mala jumps to mind [2], I don't think it's ever seen a proper release because of the heavy use of Alicia Keys samples.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_system_%28Jamaican%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_system_%28Jamaican%29) 2\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpV7radKuwo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpV7radKuwo)

<comment><USER3> Again, I don't see how pressing a physical recording is making anything faster. It's a step that's entirely unnecessary if you distribute digitally. It must be more of a tradition, or a desire to mix on turntables, or possibly a way to do a limited/controlled release that is not easy to redistribute widely as a digital media file would be?

<comment><USER5> He did say this, but maybe it wasn't clear. It's faster because you can skip the meaningless bureaucracy associated with obtaining copyright permission for a tiny run - a lot of dance music samples other music. If you try that with a digital release, it can bite you if it blows up.

<comment><USER6> No, he means like if you write the flac to a flash drive. Just write it to a digital medium, rather than go to the trouble of pressing discs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I didn't see it mentioned, but I wonder if Audacity inverts the RIAA equalization curve.

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

<comment><USER8> You are right, there is no mention of the turntable/stylus/preamplifier configuration at all.

I would _guess_ that the Audacity people assume that people would be using a turntable plugged into a preamplifier with RIAA equilisation built in.

[http://midimagic.sgc-hosting.com/mixphono.htm](http://midimagic.sgc- hosting.com/mixphono.htm)

History before the 1950s is complex. Audacity has provision for defining a frequency response curve and applying that curve to a project.

<comment> semi-extrinsic As bondaburrah points out in the sibling comment, there are probably no consumer sound cards in existence that would be able to record a non- preamplified vinyl recording. So the RIAA equalisation issue is moot.

<comment><USER9> Yes, there are. Any sound card that supports XLR connector mics will probably support phantom power and have a built-in mic amp, a vinyl pre-amp is not much different. I use an E-MU 1212m with a microdock, making it equivalent to a 1616m, which offers a "Turntable Input (w/ground lug and hardware RIAA preamp)".

[http://www.creative.com/emu/products/product.aspx?pid=19007](http://www.creative.com/emu/products/product.aspx?pid=19007)

<comment> semi-extrinsic Interesting. I had no idea how cheap what I would consider to be pro-grade sound cards are. I'd have thought an XLR input soundcard with phantom power support was close to $1000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I have no need of ripping vinyl, just wanted to say that Audacity is one of the best examples of indispensable FOSS (when it comes to working with sound) that I have ever come across in my life.

I remember I was using it well over 7 years ago, and was in awe of how much power it gave me for free, and how capable of a tool it was. Couldn't donate then, but definitely can now. While I know my time/PRs might be more valuable, regular money will have to do.

<comment><USER11> Word! I just like to add that it's especially indispensable for many community radios across the world. Maybe there are more powerful tools out there (FOSS or not), but I never saw an audio tool with such capabilities which people got used to so quickly like they do with Audacity. The absolutely perfect fit for those community radios where almost everything has to be self-taught.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Of course, the real way to do this is to optically scan the record and simulate a stylus tracking it. The Library of Congress does this.[1] They've even recovered records broken into pieces, by scanning the pieces and reassembling the 3D model.

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/how-a-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/how- a-machine-in-the-basement-of-the-library-of-congress-is-saving-the-history-of- recorded-sound/372723/)

<comment><USER13> There doesn't seem to be any free or commercial software that converts high res scans of vinyl records to high quality digital audio. I remember this post from 2002 [http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html](http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html) where a guy posts his results with this approach, but the quality is bad and he doesn't provide source code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A less technical, step-by-step way (also using Audacity) [http://transfermymusic.com/vinyl-to-cd-or- mp3/](http://transfermymusic.com/vinyl-to-cd-or-mp3/)

</comment><comment><USER15> When I rip vinyl I want as little processing as possible, so no messing around with high pass and pop removal. If it's new or decent condition vinyl the pops and hiss will be barely audible anyway.

Far more important to have a decent MC cartridge, and make sure it goes through a decent phono (RIAA) stage, which generally means an older hifi amp, or not-cheap hifi component.

Any phono stage of the last 20 years, or the "rip your old records" turntables generally use lowest quality crap going.

<comment><USER16> Eh, there are tons of EXCELLENT and not-very-expensive modern phono stages. Just avoid DJ stuff

<comment><USER15> I guess it depends where you place "not very expensive", £100-200 will get you a good hifi preamp phono stage with MC/MM. You can pay far more if you want silly esoterica. It's not very far removed from the quality that would typically come "free" with a decent mid-market older preamp.

<comment><USER16> Not just older amps can have good built-ins.

Perviously I was running a standalone phono stage (Can't remember the exact model offhand, but it was $250 or so - solid, well reviewed component.) I upgrade to a Rega Brio amp about 2 years ago which has a built in phono stage that was even better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To those who would ask "why rip vinyl instead of getting the CD?", there are lots and lots of records that never made it to CD.

<comment><USER18> There are also other relatively compelling reasons around quality.

And I'm not referring to the idea that vinyl is an inherently better quality format than CD, but rather that many[0] actual pressings have been mastered in higher quality in practice.

[0] [http://dr.loudness-war.info/](http://dr.loudness-war.info/)

<comment><USER19> I'm firmly in the camp that mourns the victims of the loudness war, but it's important to keep in mind that "quality" is not something that can objectively measured, and every generation has its own perception of it. In MP3: The Meaning of a Format by Jonathan Sterne, he cites research done on "The MP3 generation" \-- people who came of age when Napster was on the rise -- that found those listeners preferred the sound of 128kbps MP3 over any other format or bit rate. The technology of encoding created an aesthetic.

And then of course you have Brian Eno:

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."

<comment><USER20> Eno was dead wrong about that. Outside of a marginal Kickstarter project - probably for a Japanese fanbase - I don't think anyone is going to pay money for a high-jitter 12-bit resolution retro CD player.

Comparing that to the stylised imperfections of a human performer is unconvincing.

I do think there's an interesting effect where as soon as a first-to-market technology becomes good enough to avoid being hopelessly terrible, its characteristic flaws set standard expectations for a medium. Hence retro anything - guitars, synthesizers, cars, recording equipment, tapes, vinyl, paperback books, computers...

How likely is it that the early designers were so awesome they hit a technological bullseye with these things - apparently almost every single time anyone developed a new technology?

I can't quite believe that's how it works.

Personally I have no love at all for the sound of vinyl, even on stratospherically expensive hardware.

<comment><USER21> I've paid money for software which emulates a 12 bit ADAC, with a knob to adjust the jitter etc. I have several such items in fact:

[https://www.plogue.com/products/chipcrusher](https://www.plogue.com/products/chipcrusher)

[https://tal-software.com/products/tal-sampler](https://tal- software.com/products/tal-sampler)

That chipcrusher thing in particular does some crazy stuff.

<comment><USER22> Are they on the high or low end for pricing of plugins? I can imagine a full setup (excluding hardware) gets very, very expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Years ago my dad wanted me to listen to 'the classics'. So he handed me a stack of LPs and asked if I was able to convert them into CDs for him. Of course I had to listen to each one to do a good job.

I'm happy to see that the process has improved in Audacity over the years. When I used to do this there was not a good provision for adding labels to become tracks.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm sad that there's no scene standard for ripping vinyls (apart from a few mentions [http://scenenotice.org/details.php?id=2006](http://scenenotice.org/details.php?id=2006)). I'd like to think they'd use this guide.

</comment><comment><USER24> Are there any services which will do this for you, given crates?

</comment><comment><USER25> one needs to sample the original at at least double the final finished frequency, or the finished product will have a metallic tinge to it.

eg if 44,100hz rate is what you want to end up with, the sample rate needs to be at least 88,200hz.</comment>


Announcing compo: a pure Web Components JavaScript library - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/announcing-compo-3ba9e15890a7 <comment> takahiro-saeki This is a really good idea and activity! To draw on your past experience is so good investment for you. I'm getting assembling my thoughts of how web components should be used. Thanks awesome your project!</comment>


Nexus One now runs Windows 3.11 - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/17/nexus-one-runs-windows-3-11-possibly-the-saddest-thing-weve-se/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weblogsinc%2Fengadget+%28Engadget%29 <comment><USER2> Actually, this is dosbox running Windows 3.11, and the Android port of dosbox.

<http://www.dosbox.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> My N900 runs MVS 21.8 with the help of the s390 Hercules emulator. It's amusing to watch it IPL and run TSO sessions with about the same response time as a circa-1980 IBM mainframe. It's a data center in a handheld, 30 years out of time.

What's it good for? Spending a nostalgic evening, killing a beer or two... and that's about it. I imagine the same thing goes for that Windows 3.11 hack.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's a good example of having too much time but quite funny to watch.

In other news, windows 3.11 still looks better than Windows mobile ;p

<comment><USER5> Maybe Microsoft can leapfrog this, though. I hear Windows Mobile 7 will be as good as Windows 98. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome cool! After seeing the website made to look like 3.1 on here a while ago, I have been looking for some old install media to give it a spin.

<comment><USER7> If you have a Technet plus account you can still download both MS-DOS and Windows for Workgroups just for kicks.

I still have no idea what to use them for, but I just had to download them out of nostalgia. At less than 5MB it was the least I could do :)</comment></comment>


A self-fueled liquid metal motor - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27127-liquid-metal-brings-shapeshifting-robot-a-step-closer.html#.VQD16fmG-So

<comment><USER2> This was posted the other day, but surprisingly sank unnoticed. Here's a repost of the comment I left then:

O.o The micro pumping and capillary action are extremely interesting, but seeing how it deforms in response to an electrical current is just eye- popping. Naturally I want to see what happens if you send AC signals rather than static DC...at the least I would expect something similar to the behavior of ferrofluids on a speaker cone, eg [https://vimeo.com/65815077](https://vimeo.com/65815077) or even suspensions of cornstarch: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS9LNBQE2Jw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS9LNBQE2Jw) which has a handy how-to at the end. The supplementary material is available free even though the article is paywalled and is a great read. [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201405438/su...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201405438/su..). The alloy is described here: [https://gmwgroup.harvard.edu/pubs/pdf/1014.pdf](https://gmwgroup.harvard.edu/pubs/pdf/1014.pdf) According to the supplementary, the aluminum flake 'fuel' is not consumed but breaks up into tiny fragments and eventually diffuses to the surface, causing the reaction to tail off. This seems like fairly fundamental research.

<comment><USER3> The shape it makes when electricity passes through it reminds me more of Lichtenberg figures: [http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Lichtenberg_figure](http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Lichtenberg_figure)

<comment><USER2> Oh definitely, that's what I'd expect when you just pump electrons in it with DC. But alternating current should lead to interference patterns of some sort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen Music is Afrola by Bird Creek. To me, it made the video much more engaging.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. Visions of Feynman doing a record with Fela Kuti are passing through my mind right this instant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of those little soap-chip powered toy boats we made as kids.

</comment><comment><USER6> _When placed in a solution of sodium hydroxide, or even brine, and kept in contact with a flake of aluminium for "fuel", it moves around for about an hour._

So not quite self-powered.

<comment><USER7> We took "self-powered" out of the title.

<comment><USER8> Chemist here: I think that's overly editorial. If there were an air-burning engine made of aluminum, which consumed itself for motive force, we might describe that as self-fueled. In general the reducing agent is considered fuel and the oxidizer is assumed; a motor that oxidizes aluminum using hydroxide is not that different from one that oxidizes it using oxygen.

Edit: The flake of aluminum fuel physically gloms onto the motor, and aluminum will normally form an oxide that would prevent hydroxide (certainly brine) from reducing it. It's not a 'mere' fuel that's physically driving the droplet, there's a single reaction happening. My hunch is that's where the tin comes in.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the great comment! We put 'self-fueled' back in the title.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lavender: a browser add-on that makes gendered English pronouns gender-neutral - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hephaest0s/Lavender <comment><USER2> This doesn't look like it's doing any actual NLP. This just seems to be looking for a "conjunction" or a "prepositions" and replaces text.

This would have been a great application for something like nlp_compromise or some other NLP library.

The source code also needs a lot of work. If you run that through a linter it'll throw you against a wall.

That dev needs to watch "Javascript the Good Parts"

<comment><AUTHOR> > This doesn't look like it's doing any actual NLP. This just seems to be > looking for a "conjunction" or a "prepositions" and replaces text.

Although doing actual NLP would be better (though difficult in JS), using this method of looking at conjunctions and prepositions actually works correctly almost all of the time. However, I am also working on a Python implementation that would work even better by using POS tagging.

> The source code also needs a lot of work.

Yes! Please contibute and help me improve this project :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Shouldn't this project be deeply offensive? Some people consider pronouns deeply personal and it is disrespectful to use the wrong ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just like race or species can be deeply personal and an important part of one's identity, so is gender. However, I think we can agree that we don't need/want separate pronouns to identify our and others' race. So why gender?

It is true that pronouns can be deeply personal, and that is one reason you might want to make them gender neutral.

This proces does not strip anyone of (part of) their identity; it does liberate people who do not fall into the gender binary, or who think that gender--much like race--should not always have to be specified. People can of course still be ladies and gentlemen if that is how they wish to identify.

<comment><USER3> So it's not wrong to intentionally misgender people or erase their gender?</comment></comment></comment>


Machine Learning - Introduction - <AUTHOR> http://jeremykun.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/machine-learning-introduction/

<comment><USER2> "It is this author's personal belief that the most important part of machine learning is the mathematical foundation, followed closely by efficiency in implementation details."

An introductory ML material in my opinion can be less mathematically rigorous. Emphasis can be on intuitive understanding of principles of various techniques, the strengths and weaknesses of each and the application of ML techniques to various simplified problems for practice. It is easy to get lost in too much Math and loose sight of real world problem solving.

<comment><USER3> I've interviewed several people for machine learning/data science positions and I've found when people don't get the math behind machine learning they don't get the machine learning. Math, specifically linear algebra, is the language that lets you move from our 2/3 dimensional thinking to a more abstract high-dimensional space: the one machine learning lives in. It's easy to draw a bunch of points on a piece of paper and then draw a line between it and say "this is linear regression!" It's much harder to argue why regularization is important and why/how you would want to use/tweak it. The math is essential to getting important aspects of machine learning like this.

<comment><USER4> Although I think there are degrees of mathematical understanding in ML, and I've noticed people often mean very different things when they make statements like "less mathematically rigorous". Understanding how/why regularization works is pretty trivial mathematics and if you don't understand how that works I'd agree that ML is a bit too 'black box'. But look at something like the Kernel trick in SVMs. I'd argue it's important to understand the idea of mapping points in one dimensionality to another in order to understand why you would use a linear vs Gaussian kernel. However the mathematics required to create your own kernel functions is much less trivial. If you're going to be doing original research is SVMs I would say this is required math, but for practical ML knowledge of 'how' a kernel behaves without a deep understanding of 'why' would be adequate. I would consider an understanding of how but not why to be 'less mathematically rigorous'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool, I'm excited to read this series.

Was a little disappointed to see neural networks noted as "classical" with SVMs designated "modern". And nothing about deep learning? Autoencoders? How about different optimization methods--Truncated newton vs gradient descent?

Some of the most interesting recent developments in ML seem to be left out, even if it is just an introduction.</comment>


As Cape Town water crisis deepens, scientists prepare for 'Day Zero' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01134-x <comment><USER2> I live in Cape Town and I can tell you now people are freaked out and panicking. Every supermarket is sold out of water by lunch time. Driving around Cape Town you are accompanied by fleets of vehicles delivering large water tanks, and some people are straight up selling their houses, pulling their kids out of school and moving.

One of the borehole companies actually now runs a weekly auction for their services and the highest bidder gets a borehole! Pretty crazy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Scary. Phoenix and So Cal aren't doing super great in this area as well.

<comment><USER4> They only have two long-term options:

1) depopulate those regions by causing folks to leave (e.g. no longer providing water services)

or

2) deploy costly (and energy-intensive) mechanisms to continue to provide water (desalination, or piping in water from some other place that will likely dry up next)

<comment><USER5> Desalination has high capital costs, but the energy usage isn't really a problem at all.

A modern plant uses 2.5-3.5 kWh/m^3 [1]. My household uses something like 9 m^3 per month, so that would be about 27 kWh per month. At PG&E's rather high peak rates, that's $10/month, which is less than the marginal cost of that water. Of course, to the extent that energy costs matter, desalination plants will not use retail power at peak times.

[1] [https://www.amtaorg.com/wp- content/uploads/7_MembraneDesalin...](https://www.amtaorg.com/wp- content/uploads/7_MembraneDesalinationPowerUsagePutInPerspective.pdf)

<comment><USER6> are there any consumer desalination units available that one can buy and setup in their home?

<comment><USER7> But where do you get the salt water?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-apple-iowa-welfare-20170829-story.html <comment><USER3> These are property tax abatements. I don't see the big deal. Apple has to pay the property tax equal to the farmland for the next 20 years instead of the much higher tax on the datacenter property. Who cares? Unless someone is arguing the datacenter is going to use a lot of tax funded city services (police? fire? ... ?), Waukee isn't giving Apple anything. On top of that Apple is pledging to give them $100M for various things. Seems more like instead of paying property taxes, Apple is donating money to the city which will probably get it an income tax deduction. It's a scam I don't really care about.

If you do care about it, maybe you should be complaining much more about all of the corporations that are "Delaware" corporations to avoid state taxes instead of being corporations where they're actually located.

<comment><USER4> Companies are supposed to pay taxes so we can have schools, healthcare, basic income etc. When they bid countries or states against each other to get tax breaks and governments play the game, citizens lose.

Yes, it happens in other cases too, and citizens should also protest against those other cases.

<comment><USER5> > When they bid countries or states against each other

I have nothing to say specific to this case, but there _is_ a market for governments (very distorted since options are very practically limited for most people, although corporations have an advantage here), and we should encourage competition in this market, as well as political markets. Competition results in better products. Washington already won me over [partially] due to not having a state income tax and yet having infrastructure comparable to my previous high-tax state, although Seattle is working hard to change that. I think the US being a federation of states that compete at some level (since it's relatively easy to move between states) is a large reason that the country has been so successful.

<comment><USER6> Competition between governments is harmful to citizens because in general, labour is never going to be as mobile as capital. And this is not just limited by regulations and laws (which it is). People just aren't going to move across borders because of politics, unless things get really bad. It just costs too much to move.

<comment> murph-almighty >People just aren't going to move across borders because of politics

But they'll move across borders because of the effects of politics. My parents are looking to move from NJ after they retire due to the high tax obligation- not just income, but gasoline, tolls and property taxes as well. It's more tolerable when you're working but a little less so when your income stream isn't as high.

<comment><USER7> I feel like you made the parent's point for them. Your parents are moving, yes, but only after they're no longer part of the labor force.

<comment><USER8> I live in PA on the border of NJ and I worked in NJ while I was looking to buy my house. Buying in NJ would of cut my commute at the time by 45 minutes each way but the property taxes were nearly $600 a month compared to under $1300 a year in PA for a similar home (the PA home is in a better neighborhood and isn't a townhouse as well). I made the choice to buy in PA then after a year or so found a PA job. NJ just does not provide much value for your tax dollar and I imagine many other people make the choice I made every day.

<comment><USER7> Not everyone lives close enough to a state line to relocate without changing jobs though. I personally live in a different state than my job, though not for tax purposes. It's possible to do this in the Northeast, but in few other places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a programmer. Every time I go home to Iowa, people try to tell me that Iowa is now a booming tech hub, with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple "offices", and that I should get a job there. I try to explain why I probably won't end up there, but the point is that they are extremely proud of all of these data centers.

<comment><USER10> Yup. This is about half of the conversations I have with my family whenever I visit for the holidays.

<comment><USER11> Probably the same conversations happening in "booming" industrial cities in China. Cheap land, low cost of living...eventually the race to zero gets you and the big players move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Luckily Wisconsin figured out the solution to this problem... Make the corporate welfare deals an order of magnitude larger and give 3 billion to Foxconn instead of a piddly tenth of that.

Even in the best case for "jobs created" (10,000) pushed by our politicians the state might as well just give 10,000 people $30,000 a year for 10 years.

Realistic estimates are saying the new jobs might be more in the range of 3,000, which is an astonishing cost of $1,000,000 per job.

<comment><USER13> Nobody is giving anyone money, they are just not charging them tax. It's an important distinction I don't understand how people keep glossing over it.

If it creates 10,000 local jobs, those 10,000 jobs are still going to get taxed. So the locale is going to get money, just not from the corporate tax.

So it's not a great deal but it's not a horrible deal. I'd prefer nobody made them but once on place does they all have to in order to compete. But if they built overseas they'd get no corporate tax either... so some slice of the pie is better than none.

<comment><USER14> Some estimates show that to cover the generous incentives Wisconsin will most likely need to pay Foxconn cash from the treasury for the foreseeable future:

[http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2017/07/28/foxco...](http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2017/07/28/foxconn- could-get-up-200-million-cash-year-state-residents-up-15-years/519687001/)

The "local jobs" argument is eroded further for Wisconsin when you consider that the proposed sites are all well within commute range for a large population of Illinois residents - something that didn't seem to occur to WI legislators until far too late in this "deal":

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-wisconsin- illinoi...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-wisconsin-illinois- idUSKCN1B42DZ)

As a Wisconsin resident who's town (near the proposed sites) is overrun with Illinois license plates this was an obvious issue from the beginning (on top of everything else).

My (somewhat cynical) belief is that Foxconn has been several steps ahead of our local politicians (who are desperate to put up healthy job numbers). This "realization" of the proximity to Illinois is likely (and unfortunately) the first of many ways Wisconsin is going to get schooled by Foxconn here.

<comment><USER13> Nowhere in that article does it state how they'll just get checks. Maybe I'm not understanding tax credits because that article says the same thing, they will get up to 200 million a year in tax credits. If you have no tax, you get no credit. Better than a deduction, but not writing a check. Anything past that is all "some estimates" which really are just people making things up.

Also, people commute, you can't stop them all. That's the nature for all business and it's part of the game you play with these deals.

<comment><USER14> The article states:

"... because Wisconsin already waives almost all taxes on manufacturing profits in the state, these incentives represent not a lost opportunity at collecting revenue but an obligation to pay cash to Foxconn out of the state treasury for up to 15 years."

Put another way:

[http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/foxconn-wisconsin-plant-tax- br...](http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/foxconn-wisconsin-plant-tax-breaks/)

"Although the state measures to attract Foxconn are labeled tax incentives, they largely would be paid in cash since the effective Wisconsin state tax rate is 0.4% on manufacturers."

Of course people commute (and they should)! However, for a state negotiating an incentive package they should have been aware of this basic fact, especially given the extremely close proximity to another state that (amazingly) isn't contributing to the incentive package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just for all the inevitable comments about "the government should have just given X people Y dollars instead..."

Iowa isn't "giving money." It does not have the additional revenue before Apple arrives, thus, it can't give anyone those revenues. All it can do is tell Apple you have to give us, Iowa, less than the state next door... now whether this is a good economic plan I disagree. I'd rather have a thousand small businesses be guaranteed no regulatory or other fees for the first five years than a corporate overlord be granted no requirement to pass on the enormous amount of wealth they extract from the land and environment but that's another discussion...

<comment><USER16> So Iowa doesn't have to deal with providing services to the site? Land management services, emergency services, water, sewerage, etc?

<comment><USER17> Why would Iowa agree to an amount of revenue that doesn't even cover the cost of additional services?

<comment><USER18> because the decision makers on this deal are not those who have to manage the costs down the row? Pretty classic principle-agent problem

<comment><USER17> I mean, that applies to all local government actions. And in any case, we don't need to speculate. You can just total up these costs.

<comment><USER19> Totaling up the public infrastructure costs of one specific user of resources is non-trivial. What are the additional road repair costs? How much extra money and time do local firefighters spend to be trained on how to deal with data centers?

<comment><USER17> There is lots and lots of data on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Saw this happen a few times. One instance was when NCR (National Cash Register) headquartered in Dayton, OH decided to move to Georgia because it had gotten $60M worth (in 2009 dollars) of tax breaks and other incentives there.

It followed the incentives sure, so from that point can't blame it, but it had cost Dayton, an already struggling city, even more pain.

Another motive behind forced moves is to shed experienced (and thus expensive) / senior people who had been there longer. They are more likely to have families, kids in schools, homes, etc and so might not move.

<comment><USER21> Interesting podcast talking about companies moving from one side of Kansas City to another:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/05/04/476799218/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/05/04/476799218/episode-699-why- did-the-job-cross-the-road)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Apple's deal with Iowa, which includes about $20 million in a state investment tax credit and a 20-year tax abatement from the city of Waukee worth nearly $190 million, underscores all these elements.

Dumb question: how do these deals not violate the Equal Protection Clause?

Other businesses in Waukee obviously aren't privy to the same state tax credits from Iowa and the same tax abatement from the city of Waukee. Doesn't that mean that the tax code is effectively discriminating against all these non-Apple businesses?

<comment><USER23> > Other businesses in Waukee obviously aren't privy to the same state tax > credits from Iowa and the same tax abatement from the city of Waukee.

Sure they are - they can request it, just like Apple does, and be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. It's no more an equal protection violation than city government hiring one person over another is.

<comment><USER24> Just like petitioning a king for favorable treatment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's odd to see so many comments defending Apple on the basis of their $100 million pledge. I guess you all just skimmed the article and didn't really read it? They pledged _up to_ $100 million. In other words, they're not spending $100 million.

<comment><USER26> The minimum initial payment from Apple is $20M.

However since we have no data on the cost to Iowa or Waukee we can't say whether or not this is cash positive to the state or county.

My guess is because the payment is variable and a function of the size of the facility Apple is basically paying for its hookup to streets, water, electricity, etc. with a park thrown in on the side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> As an Iowa resident, I think it's worth mentioning that all this is happening at a period in time when state government has been experiencing multiple years of unexpected revenue shortfalls.

The governor may have to call the legislature back into special legislative session again next month because revenue is again coming in less than expected.

The three state universities will be increasing tuition 7% per year for each of the next five years because of budget cutbacks caused by these revenue shortfalls.

Part of the decline in revenue is due to the decline in the ag economy, but some have also attributed it to the increasing amount of tax breaks like these that Iowa has been giving out.

Furthermore, this is not just farmland. Waukee is a west Des Moines suburb, the fastest growing part of the state and supposedly one of the fastest growing parts of the US. If Apple hadn't purchased that land, it likely would have been purchased and developed by someone else soon.

</comment><comment><USER28> Pretty much unrelated, but that columnist's piece on price-gouging[0] is so analytically atrophied and emotionally charged that I can't help but imagine him as Tom Jumbo-Grumbo, the whale-news announcer from _Bojack Horseman_ [1]

[0] [http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik- price-...](http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-price- gouging-harvey-20170828-story.html)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMePJM86Ueo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMePJM86Ueo)

</comment><comment><USER29> These things feel to me like when cities pay tons of money to get a sports team.

It's always sold as an investment that will pay off, but in reality it's - <USER2> My Cynical Opinion - about local pride.

With an NFL team, Shelbyville becomes a _major_ city, and with an Apple data center Iowa becomes a _high tech_ state. Expensive, sure, but the good things in life aren't free!

<comment><USER30> The state isn't paying for the data center, they are lowering the tax burden.

<comment><USER31> Forgone income is forgone income no matter what you call it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So $208M for 50 jobs. Wouldn't they be better off just giving those 50 lucky folks $4M each? Or giving 800 people $250K ? At least those 800 people would likely spend the money locally and stimulate the state economy.

<comment><USER33> They aren't handing Apple $208m. They are giving them tax breaks. If Apple didn't build a data center in Iowa they would also collect $0 in taxes from them. The cost/benefit calculation is no where as simple as this article or comments make it out to be.

It could still be a bad deal, but there is not really an honest attempt to figure that out here.

<comment><USER34> Exactly - states competing on incentives obviously doesn't increase gross tax collection on a _national_ level, but the article makes much bolder claims that it doesn't help anywhere.

Specifically this claim: "There is virtually no association between economic development incentives and any measure of economic performance."

The article states that the 1.3 billion dollar data center will get $39 million tax break up front on hardware, and another $190 million abatement over 20 years from the city. They will invest at a minimum $20 million into Waukee, a city of 20k people, and expect 50 permanent employees + ancillary services.

Waukee will see a construction boom, higher employment, and more tax revenue. The state will see a reduction in the data center decline + additional tax revenue.

Unless they were sure Apple had no other option but Iowa for this project, the state and community were better off making a deal than not.

<comment><USER16> > _Waukee will see a construction boom, higher employment, and more tax > revenue._

The city will also now have a major corporation throwing its weight around to get its way; one with no loyalty to the residents or their concerns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Maybe they're working on the "your first one is free" hook.

The 50 jobs at the data center will attract a McDonalds across the street and then Waukee can hit those McGuys with a Burger Tax.

Let's see. $208M at 5 cents per burger is only, uh, ...

Well, the company slogan is "Billions and Billions Served."

<comment><USER36> You know, I think you said this facetiously.. but you might be on to something.

The Facebook data center in Altoona is on building 4, after all: [http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/develo...](http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/development/2017/05/09/facebook- breaks-ground-biggest-altoona-data-center-yet/314322001/)

It's a much easier choice to expand an existing facility than to create an entirely new one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Basically it's, would you like to have $0 in taxes paid by Apple (by assuming they won't come to Iowa if they aren't given a discount), or would you like $76 million in taxes and $100 million in public improvement funds that will mainly benefit Apple?

But it proves the asymmetric negotiation power Apple has compared to constituents. Apple is in a position to say, take it or leave it. And the constituents can't really do that, for them to move elsewhere is much more expensive, for possibly not much of a gain. So basically Apple gets a significant advantage because local officials are looking at money rather than fairness. Why doesn't everyone get the same discount? Oh well, that wouldn't work would it?

It also shows that at scale the property taxes are possibly too high. Which means the property taxes in general are probably too high. But now, because of this "deal", the constituents have even less negotiating power to get their taxes lowered, because the local government sold them out, and now depends on their taxes even more seeing as they can't raise Apple's property taxes for 20 years per this deal.

"This puts Iowa on the world stage," Gov. Kim Reynolds

Debi Durham, director of the Iowa Economic Development Authority, "All eyes are on Iowa for building this technology ecosystem," she said

The handful of eyes that give a crap about this story, will see how far Iowa has debased themselves. Iowa just got its 15 minutes of fame, it's already over, you're not getting anymore out of this deal than what's already happened. Unless of course, you whore yourselves out yet again to another company. That's what you've just advertised, Iowa.

Two perspectives from inside Iowa:

[http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2017/08/25/7-thi...](http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2017/08/25/7-things- know-apple-data-center-waukee/599347001/)

[http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/readers/2017/...](http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/readers/2017/08/29/apples- waukee-data-center-deal-win-win-iowa/610288001/)

<comment><USER38> If nobody cut deals like this, apple would be forced to pay taxes somewhere, so no matter what _somewhere_ is losing a huge amount of tax.

Its a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER37> Fairness and consistency is not a race to the bottom. It's what builds trust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It isn't folly. Apple bought their politician and received a good payoff for it. It was textbook business. Because this is becoming again a nation where corruption is the norm, this "folly" will be the new norm.

</comment><comment><USER40> The math isn't as simple as $280M for 50 jobs and it's unfair to frame it from that perspective. The facility itself will cost $1.3B. That's a direct injection of capital into the surrounding community. Even without the jobs; Apple is improving once (~)worthless land.

Some property tax revenues or no property tax revenues?

A silly race to the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER41> > We were highly skeptical of this deal when it was announced Aug. 24. In the > fullness of time, we've subjected it to closer scrutiny. And now it looks > even worse.

Oh great, so you carefully gathered data and put it into some sort of spreadsheet or something? Where's the spreadsheet? Where's the decision tree that shows this is a bad deal for Iowa? Oh, you don't have any of that actual diligence? You started with a conclusion and then wrote a bunch of B.S. with cherry picking and misleading statements throughout? This is why I flagged it.

<comment><USER42> > You started with a conclusion and then wrote a bunch of B.S. with cherry > picking and misleading statements throughout? This is why I flagged it.

Can you expand on this and point to some of the misleading statements and why you think they're misleading?

<comment><USER43> I think it is misleading to say everything was in return for only 50 jobs. Data centers require huge investments in development, connectivity, energy supply. All of these things take people to make happen.

<comment><USER44> This is true...the union halls will be busy with "travelers" to make up for the lack of local IBEW journeyman. There will be a flurry of economic activity during the construction phase but it will taper off eventually as the site completes construction. There will be continual economic activity for the contractors (electricians, pipe fitters, fire protection system technicians, etc.) that will service the data center.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Glad to see that Iowa is diversifying its economy. Known primarily for growing corn and soybeans, the state is now going whole hog into pork.

</comment><comment><USER46> Iowa is a very short sighted state.

On one hand they're trying to be this tech savvy state by bringing in Apple and Google data centers, on the other hand getting decent broad band is terrible in all the rural parts of the state.

So they did what any conservative state would do and relied upon the free market to get them high speed bandwidth. And that's not been real successful. So they had to subsidize it.

From this article in 2015 [1]:

"Four communications providers have received more than $53 million in federal funds to expand high-speed Internet service to nearly 90,000 rural Iowa homes and businesses."

That's roughly 3% of the population.

Okay, so one might say that's just the cost of doing business. The thing is that Iowa already has a $200 million dollar fiber optic network that connects all 99 counties with over 8000 miles of fiber called the Iowa Communications Network. So why don't they use that to extend broad band to rural areas?

From the Iowa Communications Network home page [2]:

"The ICN provides high-speed flexible broadband Internet, data, video conferencing, and voice (phone) services to authorized users, under Code of Iowa, which includes: K-12 schools, higher education, hospitals and clinics, state and federal government, National Guard armories, and libraries"

That's awesome if you're an authorized user. But the sad part is there is more than just those users that could use broadband, and it seems like Iowa decided to leave them out in the cold.

[1] [http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/business/rural- iowa-g...](http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/business/rural-iowa-getting- more-broadband-as-gov-branstad-lauds-infrastructure-spending-20150831)

[2] [http://icn.iowa.gov](http://icn.iowa.gov)

<comment><USER47> I'm glad we're not a tech savvy state.

A huge portion of the people I've met in tech are class-A douche bags. They are obsessed with salary, or the fact that they work for X instead of Y. They are extremely elitist.

 _All_ of my friends who went to high school in the Bay Area have classmates who killed themselves over (lack of) prestige.

You won't see any of that in Iowa. It is a much more honest place. People work hard but aren't obsessed with where you want to college or how much money you make.

I would be genuinely sad if Apple or Google opened a SWE location in Iowa. The culture is basically the antithesis of the old Midwest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I would think this deal would give any large Iowa employer the idea that taxes are negotiable, especially if a move to another state is threatened. This will begin eating the existing revenue.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's stuff like this that severely damages the little credibility the govt has with respect to using taxpayer money. So few politicians are incentivized to save money, those who are cut costs in 'unneeded areas' like education and healthcare, and others go out of their way to burn money like in this article.

Edit: That said, and reading other comments here, I am curious just how bad of a deal this really comes out to overall. Perhaps the article is really just cherry picking arguments but it does paint a very grim picture.

</comment><comment><USER50> If there were a law that states could not make deals with individual entities, it is likely both states and citizens would be better off, and companies would be unharmed.

</comment><comment><USER51> $208M is around 27 years of salary for 50 employees on $150k.

<comment><USER52> Data center grunts and security guards are NOT making 150k.

<comment><USER44> ...depends on what you mean by "data center grunts"

As a former "data center grunt" for Google, I can tell you that total comp was around $140k, which was great for Iowa. The fix-it roles made less and the security guards made just a tad bit over min wage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Why does farmland get a preferential tax rate in the first place?

<comment><USER46> You know this is Iowa, right? The farmers are a powerful political force there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> As someone who grew up in the era of floppy disks that were actually floppy, this is so mindblowing.

</comment><comment><USER55> Oh those horrible shareholders Vanguard, Blackrock, FMR etc. oh wait it's our pension funds how evil

</comment><comment><USER56> cool, does YC's general counsel teach us how to do this when our company gets into the growth phase?

role model</comment>


SQL interface for Elasticsearch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NLPchina/elasticsearch-sql/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> If you use Spark SQL to query ElasticSearch as a data source, it already has better SQL support with joins and you can push predicates down into ES.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want real SQL on top of Elasticsearch have a look at [https://crate.io/](https://crate.io/) ([https://crate.io/blog/sql-for- elasticsearch/](https://crate.io/blog/sql-for-elasticsearch/)).

P.S.: I'm not affiliated with that company.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't get the point of this. Do people not want to learn ES so bad that they will use something like this without understanding how to build an ES query object? All this plugin does is convert sql to an ES query...

<comment><USER5> Not having to learn a different query language for every product is exactly the point of SQL, and naturally also the point of pretty much every "SQL interface for _X_ ".

<comment><USER6> If only this was the case. Except that every database has their own flavour of SQL with plenty of proprietary extensions. Not to mention each database will support a different subset of SQL.

<comment><USER5> > Except that every database has their own flavour of SQL with plenty of > proprietary extensions. Not to mention each database will support a > different subset of SQL.

Its a lot easier to become familiar with a new SQL dialect than a new query language, especially since a lot of basic querying will be the same between different dialects.

<comment><USER6> Learning the basics is easy with any query language eg. MongoDB/ES JSON. It's when you start writing more advanced queries that you realise that SQLs "write once, run anywhere" premise is an illusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No joins.

I wonder why you wouldn't use PrestoDB to connect to Elastic Search. It provides you with an SQL engine and you just need to write a connector that knows how to get data.

Similar thing has been done in Crate.io.

<comment><USER8> It does have joins.

[https://github.com/NLPchina/elasticsearch- sql/blob/5cd6ab639...](https://github.com/NLPchina/elasticsearch- sql/blob/5cd6ab63919bd4f366fc721638b31a54e3555b5c/src/test/java/org/nlpcn/es4sql/JoinTests.java)

<comment><USER9> Interesting — looks like the join isn't pipelined. The entire right-hand side evaluates synchronously. So it has to wait for the entire right-hand result set before it can evaluate the join operator, instead of streaming it concurrently. I'm surprised anyone would do it this way in Java, which has good support for concurrency.

Edit: Actually the file you linked to was a test file. Hash join code is here [1], and it uses ES' scrolling feature to incrementally join, though it's not pipelined. Not sure scrolling is entirely appropriate for this; it will potentially hold an unpredictable amount of memory on the server end.

[1] [https://github.com/NLPchina/elasticsearch- sql/blob/5cd6ab639...](https://github.com/NLPchina/elasticsearch- sql/blob/5cd6ab63919bd4f366fc721638b31a54e3555b5c/src/main/java/org/elasticsearch/plugin/nlpcn/HashJoinElasticExecutor.java)</comment></comment></comment>


"Buzz In Motion" - Youtube & Twitter Mashup - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzinmotion.com

<comment><USER2> So it shows videos corresponding to Twitter's trending topics eh??? Hmmmm, I didnt strike me as something I'd use. I can't exactly pin point why, but I think it's because it's going to be very rare that trending topics have any appropriate related videos. Also, a lot of twitter trending topics at a lot of times are memes or spam.

And about the design, I really think you should stick to using a single colour for the entire text (on the about page), as opposed to using a different colour for each word.</comment>


Show HN: (1KB) JavaScript library for building fast and feature-rich web apps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hyperapp/hyperapp#hyperapp <comment><USER2> Not much to add here, other than I'm super happy with ultralight "frameworks" like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> simple and elegant! handles state simply, handles JSX and seems quite vanilla. What's more to want?

</comment><comment><USER4> Does it perform fast?

<comment><USER2> If nothing else, I bet it loads fast!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Krisp Rooms – remove Noise and Echo in meeting rooms with DNN - <AUTHOR> https://krisp.ai/krisp-rooms/ <comment><AUTHOR> We have built a DNN which does 2 things on real-time audio:

a) remove background noise b) remove room echo

We've then embedded it in a virtual microphone which can be integrated into ZoomRooms or similar products.

Demo with video here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnoWG1JBe8A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnoWG1JBe8A)

<comment><USER2> It definitely removes the background noise and increases legibility.

However the voices sound "pinched" to me. It is a lot like one of those head related transfer functions that is supposed to make you think the sound comes from above, but it sounds like multiple band reject filters were applied and makes me feel some kind of pressure in my head.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Strictly-typed C Implementations? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a C compiler that does strict type-checking? For example, casting `char`s to `int`s is a compiler error or casting pointers of one type to another? Would this kind of compiler be as useful as I think it would for a certain class of errors? <comment><USER2> It shouldn't be hard to hack one from clang. You want to adjust usages of [http://clang.llvm.org/doxygen/classclang_1_1CastExpr.html](http://clang.llvm.org/doxygen/classclang_1_1CastExpr.html).

I would keep the main code as is, and add code to generate an error after every call that creates a cast (hacking that code into the constructors should work, too, but given the constructor for an empty cast and the subclasses, that will lead to lower quality error messages).

I expect you will want to allow some/all implicit casts, explicit ones from and to void pointers, and downcasts from 'pointer to struct with first field of type t' to 'pointer to t'.

But most importantly: what class of programming errors are you thinking of? That class of error, IMO, either requires a daft programmer or horrendous source code that is full of casts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not really trying to be a pedantic jerk, but...

Kind of by definition, what you would have would not be C, so there can't be any strictly-typed C implementations. I presume what you want is "just like C, except". And in fact, it's fine to want that. Just be aware that it really isn't C any more.

<comment><USER4> It would be a subset of C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This sounds like something that static code analysis would handle. That said there would be corner cases where this would be a problem, for example a character literal is of type int, not of type char.</comment>


5 Steps to Finding the Perfect Cultural "Fit" - <AUTHOR> http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/5-Steps-to-Finding-the-Perfect-Cultural-Fit/ba-p/6420 <comment><USER2> Having worked in several organizations which didn't have a fit, this is good advice.</comment>


Neil DeGrasse Tyson makes an excellent point, but Larry Summers is still right - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2014/04/22/neil-degrasse-tyson-has-a-point-but-larry-summers-is-still-right/ <comment><USER2> The linked article tries to equate two unequal kinds of science:

> Instead, let us limit ourselves to the sciences, which encompass both > natural sciences and social sciences.

The problem with this approach is that one of those categories is science as science is defined (i.e. rigorous, objective, deterministic, falsifiable), the other isn't.

The author goes on to show that the overwhelming gender disparity in the "hard" sciences is balanced by an opposite and equally overwhelming gender disparity in the social sciences --

                          (Men:Women)

       Physics:           1694: 448
       Computer Science:  1465: 380
       Chemistry:         1520: 897
       Psychology:        1047:2566

\-- therefore (the author implies but never actually says this) maybe the much discussed STEM issue is overblown.

But it overlooks the fact that social science is not rigorous science, and (in a classic case of self-reference) a perfect example is the linked article, which makes its argument by comparing non-comparable things.

The STEM problem is not that there aren't enough women in all sciences including the social sciences -- the linked article proves this isn't so -- the problem is that there are too few women in the sciences that actually matter to society.

Another comment:

> Men, on average, are superior at mathematical reasoning.

That depends on how one defines "mathematical reasoning". According to surveys, women are better at mathematical calculating, men are better at abstract mathematical thinking.

To summarize, to students reading this post, students who might not have decades of life experience to season one's outlook, I must say that from a perspective in college, physics and psychology may appear to be equal in rank, but they aren't:

[http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/majors- th...](http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/majors-that-pay-you- back)

       Majors by Salary Potential – Full List

       ...

       9.  Physics    mid-career salary: $101,000
       ...
       85. Psychology mid-career salary: $60,700

This apart from the fact that physics is the gold standard by which other sciences are measured (i.e. unfavorably compared).</comment>


Ask HN: What annoys you about law firms? - <AUTHOR> As a former lawyer and now a coder, I'm interested to see an outside perspective of what law firms are doing wrong.<p>Surely there are many things that we, as coders, could implement to make legal services better. <comment> Kepler-431c Are you in the SF Bay Area? Interested in meeting up for a coffee to discuss (many startups in this area).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Kepler, afraid not. Could always do a Skype though!</comment></comment>


How do Colors Affect Purchases? - <AUTHOR> http://www.colourlovers.com/business/blog/2010/12/16/how-do-colors-affect-purchases-infographic?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Colourlovers+%28COLOURlovers+%3A%3A+Color+Trends+%26+Inspiration%29 <comment><USER2> The color of the percentage numbers could have been chosen a little better. The yellow on light blue background is hard on the eyes.</comment>