Take the Greplin Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://challenge.greplin.com/

<comment><USER2> This was posted a while back:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772650>

Something seems off with the duplicate link checker. Several times in the past week, I've submitted links only to find out later on that they were already previously submitted.

<comment><AUTHOR> you are right! we found out a bug with HN.

<comment><USER2> Any idea how to go about reporting this? I couldn't find a bug report submission link, so for lack of a better alternative, I reported it in "Feature Requests":

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363></comment></comment></comment>


Kelp Highway Hypothesis - <AUTHOR> http://natural-history.uoregon.edu/research/paleocoastal-research-project/kelp-highway-hypothesis <comment><USER2> Kelp forests are incredible marine ecosystems. Kelp looks like a chaotic disaster on the surface, but under the water resolves into tall, tree-like forms that are full of wildlife. It's well worth making a trip to Monterey, CA (about a 3 hour drive from San Francisco) to see the beautiful kelp forest exhibit at the aquarium there.

If you're a scuba diver, Monterey is also the best place to see this world firsthand. Unfortunately, it can take a few dozen dives before you have a day with clear enough visibility for a real underwater panorama, but once you see it, you'll be hooked.

Be sure to dive with someone experienced, rent proper cold-water gear, and get the briefing on how not to get stuck in kelp on the surface. It's not dangerous, but it can take all the fun out of diving.

</comment><comment><USER3> A recommendation for the book 1491 ([http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491)). It covers a _lot_ of ground in 500 pages but spends at least a chapter on various theories for how the Americas were first populated (and whether they were populated multiple times). Later chapters focus on major New World cultures. I thought I knew a fair bit about the pre-contact Americas but I learned a lot

</comment><comment><USER4> No mention of the recent genetic studies that show genetic similarity between deep-Amazon Native Americans and indigenous _Australo-Melanesian_ people, which would seem to support this hypothesis[1]. It seems like there were at least two (actually probably 4) waves of non-European colonization of the Americas - the "Kelp Highway" one described here, followed by the big-game hunters who eventually wiped out that initial wave almost everywhere except in the marginal lands deep in the Amazon jungle. There was also the Athabaskan / Dené and the Eskimo after that.

13,000-15,000 years ago: Kelp Highway settlers

11,000-13,000 years ago: Big-game hunting ancestors of majority of Native Americans (Clovis culture) at time of European contact arrive and mostly wipe out the first wave of settlers except in isolated areas like the Amazon jungle

[somewhere in between]: Athabaskan / Dené come across from Siberia and occupy Alaskan / Canadian interior, as well as parts of the Pacific Northwest and American Southwest (not sure how they got there)

~3,000 years ago: Inuit / Inupiat / Yupik migration and settling of the circum-polar region

[1] [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7567/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7567/full/nature14895.html)</comment>


Google Maps Street View capture... from a bike - <AUTHOR> http://fivebells.livejournal.com/24977.html

<comment><USER2> Wow, that is awesome. I wonder if Google is working on actual hardware "spiders" to crawl the real world.

<comment><USER3> It would probably be easier and cheaper to make hardware for any given person to wear. It's not like they'd have a shortage of volunteers.

<comment><USER4> I cannot think of something more Big-Brother-like that every other person wearing a 360° camera helmet. Given enough of those, you can visit every place on earth virtually with live data, including everyone in that location. Hooray...

<comment><USER5> What you're describing sounds like sousveillance, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance>

Inverse surveillance is arguably a good way to combat authoritarian systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> just goes to show that Google has no problem spending money to make a great product, even better.

I mean how many people will actually use something like this? But for those few, Google will be the only option

<comment><USER7> In the DC area there are various trails that you can use to bike to work (or other recreational uses) however it is hard to actually map you route or see if there is a cut through between a parallel road and the trail. I would use this right now if I could.

<comment><USER8> There's a service called Cyclopath operated by the University of Minnesota that's doing exactly that, albeit only for the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I suspect Google is doing this for more reasons than "just because". Imagine all the data they're collecting other than just pictures.

<comment><USER10> What data are they collecting?

<comment><USER9> Aside from the cameras, it's already known that they are using range-finding sensors to map building shapes, and I'd be surprised if they weren't recording GPS data to go along with the photos.

<comment><USER11> _I'd be surprised if they weren't recording GPS data to go along with the photos_

Of course they are, that's how they know what street you're on ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing people are missing is that using bikes doubles as escalation in the arms race between Google and locals who don't want their neighborhoods to be photographed with Street View. Considering that extreme cases of the conflict included a situation where a human chain was formed to prevent the car from driving into the area, it seems remotely possible that unpleasant incidents might occur when some Neighbourhood Watch attempts increasingly hostile measures to restrain an overzealous Street View cyclist who won't listen to reason. While I don't know that the photographers' walking orders look like, it seems like most of the cases involved photographers who were being flat-out callous to the locals, making the situation more severe than necessary and giving a bad name to their company. Since Google are the people suffering the consequences and getting the resulting negative publicity, it's still Google's problem. Google's PR, of course, isn't helping the matter when they act like the locals don't have a legitimate concern in not wanting their property mapped.

See, I recognize the usefulness of having access to this data, but it's still personal data. It's not like it's impossible to construct a useful database of locations in a manner respectful of local residents' privacy; but unexpected issues always arise. The very mission statement of Google opens a philosophical can of worms: "to index the world's information and make it useful". Useful? Who to? How can you tell when making a piece of information 'useful' to one person becomes an affront to another person's human dignity? This really is a problem for which, no matter how much one tries to foresee complications, there's always some new issue popping up. Resolving the issue requires a much greater amount of accountability - accountability to the public whose information is being gathered and 'made useful' - than we can get out of Google as a publically traded corporation. Heck, it arguably requires much more accountability than we can currently get out of the United States' _democratically elected government_ (otherwise we wouldn't be worrying about things like wiretapping).

So certainly this Street View thing is all in the name of progress right now, but I'm not certain that it's worth the while to humanity to be able to see photos of bike paths in Google Maps before we've got some answers to the accountability question.

</comment><comment><USER13> I saw one of those in LA 1.5 years ago, I don't think they're exactly new.

</comment><comment><USER14> This past May I was on vacation in Orlando, Florida, and while visiting Sea World, some Google employees were capturing the attractions inside the park using this type of bike.

</comment><comment><USER15> Actually, this isn't completely a new thing; It's just Google is doing it.

<http://openviewproject.org/>

Check out our fly ride! [http://openviewproject.org/wp- content/uploads/2008/08/polycy...](http://openviewproject.org/wp- content/uploads/2008/08/polycycle.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER16> One of the reasons why caving is an interesting sport is just that - no easy way to capture all the imagery.

<comment><USER17> Coming soon, Google Spelunking Cam

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm waiting to see Juan Valdez and his trusty mule to be equipped with the Google "Trail" View equipment.

</comment><comment><USER19> I hope they will be very careful where they park that bike in Amsterdam, with all that gear on it it would be gone in less than 10 seconds.

<comment><USER20> Maybe take this up with the police department rather than HN? There's not much we can do about it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple SMTP proxy that bridges legacy software to modern SMTP servers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kz26/mailproxy <comment><USER2> Can't you just do this with Postfix and the 'relayhost' setting?

<comment><AUTHOR> You could, particularly on *nix machines, but the idea was to provide a more lightweight cross-platform solution that would specifically work on Windows.

<comment><USER2> Ok. I don't wanna be 'that guy' but... I feel I must point out that all Windows Server SKUs come with IIS, and a optional component of IIS is the SMTP server service which supports 'smarthost' forwarding. It takes about 5 minutes to install and configure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> nullmailer is also a solution for this case where running a full mail server is an unnecessary complication. However, it doesn't seem like this supports queuing which I think is a requirement for real SMTP support.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there a POP or IMAP server for jailbroken iOS?

I tried installing Dovecot from here, but it put my iPhone into a boot loop (try it at your own risk!).

[http://ios-webstack.tk](http://ios-webstack.tk)

The reason I want it is so that I can distribute arbitrary files to other iPhones using a local WiFi network without sending data to a cloud sharing service. For example, a mixtape of MP3 files, or a photo album.

<comment><USER5> Why not use a static file server listening on a local IP address? Why on earth do you need an email server to transfer files??

<comment><USER6> The popular jailbreak program iFile allows running a server out of any directory. Not sure if it's still around or not; I haven't been jailbroken since about iOS 8, but I'm sure it still is

<comment><USER4> FTP server or web server, yes. Email server, no.

The benefit of an POP/IMAP email server is that a non-jailbroken iPhone can connect to the local hotspot, add the email account, check mail, and download all the files at once.

Saving photos one at a time via a web server is a hassle. And it doesn't work for other file types (e.g. music).

<comment><USER7> Had a similar idea.

Wanted to get my vpn keys onto an i-product without A) going over the net and without B) installing itunes.

So I first tried hosting the file on a local webserver, but apple treated it as a text file and displayed it in the browser.

Then I wrote a pop server on android to deliver a client.ovpn file as a mime attachment in an email. Worked wonderfully and thought about extending it to deliver photos from my phone to others' i-products.

<comment><USER5> You didn't set the MIME type correctly on the server. I know for a fact that you can serve .mobileconfig files to Safari iOS, which will open them as config files if the mimetype is set correctly.

I'm sorry but the idea of using email servers for file exchange, in 2017, is ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FWIW, requiring encryption on a public MX host is a violation of RFC, if memory serves.

<comment><USER9> Having written multiple RFCs, violating the RFC is not always a bad thing. Some of the MUSTs are a result of the committee process, and follow the lowest common denominator.

If the recommendations don't make sense, don't follow them.

<comment><USER8> > _If the recommendations don 't make sense, don't follow them._

In general, I would tend to agree -- so long as you aren't "hurting" (affecting) anyone else.

OTOH:

      $ tail -n 4 ~/.signature

      "The total budget at all receivers for solving senders' problems is
      $0. If you want them to accept your mail and manage it the way you
      want, send it the way the spec says to."  --John Levine

I'm responsible for a bunch of mail servers and occasionally get reports that messages from some random sender to a mailbox on one of these servers is not being accepted. More often than not, it's because RFCs aren't being followed (WRT SMTP, I'm _not_ very liberal in what I accept). Of course, they will demand that I "fix" my "broken" servers that are refusing to accept their messages. Sometimes the non-compliance is intentional but usually it is simply out of ignorance (especially true when the remote host runs Microsoft Exchange); I try to point them at the RFCs, explain _why_ their mail is being refused, and what they can change so that the mail will be accepted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Daaamn, this would have been great when we were trying to resurrect some ancient MFDs. We ended up ditching Scan to Email completely and moving to our FTP. Cheers OP, I'll keep this in mind.

<comment><USER11> You could also have used stunnel, which is the generic program for proxying in/out of TLS connections (might not work with starttls, though).

<comment><USER8> Where do I find documentation for installing stunnel on a proprietary printer/scanner/copier? :-)

<comment><USER12> I'm confused by your question. If you can't install stunnel how are you going to install python on "a proprietary printer/scanner/copier?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think you can also use nginx as a SMTP proxy for a less custom made solution</comment>


Ask HN: Minimal html code to make a black page - <AUTHOR> This is totally pointless, but can you feed a browser any code smaller than the example below that will produce a fully black page?
The smallest code I could work out is:

   <body bgcolor=black>

 Although I'm fully aware bgcolor is deprecated since HTML 4.1 this still produces a black page in almost any browser today (2018). <comment><USER2> I haven't checked if this works, but using a HEX code for the color value would be slightly shorter:

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh! nice =)</comment></comment>


Honeypot Captcha - <AUTHOR> http://haacked.com/archive/2007/09/11/honeypot-captcha.aspx <comment><USER2> interesting. i had never thought of that, is there any downside to implementing this type of CAPTCHA?</comment>


Show HN: Why I do Open Source and why sometimes I shouldn't - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@theandreamazz/why-i-do-open-source-and-why-sometimes-i-shouldn-t-4a1fb6eb3ad1

<comment><USER2> Great post, sorry to see you got bit by blatant plagiarism. :(

Maybe submit this as a normal post, not a Show HN? I think it might fit better.</comment>


Pandemic could trigger a spiral of disasters – if we let it - <AUTHOR> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-potential-spiral-of-global-crises-looms-but-there-is-hope/ <comment><AUTHOR> _A lasting collapse in economic growth, then, is the worst thing that could happen. Not only would it ruin the lives of millions of vulnerable people who were already in precarious straits, but it would starve us of the ability to make the investments needed to prevent the next big crisis, whether it's epidemiological or ecological._</comment>


How to type faster and keep your hands healthy - <AUTHOR> https://effectiviology.com/how-to-type-faster/ <comment><USER2> While that was a fairly informative and accurate article, I got absolutely nothing out of it, since these things are commonly known.

My main issue is reaching for the arrow keys, really throws off my nerd-game. I don't want to learn Vim though, and I can't seem to find any other solution that will work across Visual Studio, Notepad++, and WebStorm.</comment>


Ice age wolf pup and caribou dug up in Canada - <AUTHOR> https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/14/spectacular-ice-age-wolf-pup-and-caribou-dug-up-in-canada <comment><USER2> What a beautiful discovery!

For context, 50k years ago was the early phase of a North-African pluvial period when the Sahara was a wet and fertile region; this lasted 20k years. The Neanderthals disappeared 40k years ago. The first evidence of the domestication of dogs dates to around 35k years ago in Europe and Siberia.

For the Northern Europeans here, reindeer and caribou are actually the same species, Rangifer tarandus, but with substantial differences: caribou are large, wild, elk-like animals which can be found in northern North America and Greenland and have never been domesticated. In my experience the meat tastes the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> A tip to everyone that likes natural history: the Royal Tyrrel Museum in Drumheller, Alberta (one hour drive North East of Calgary), Canada is probably the finest natural history museum in the world. Their collections of Jurassic/Cretaceous dinosaurs and fossils from the Cambrian Revolution from the Burgess Shale are mesmerizing.

[1] [http://www.tyrrellmuseum.com/](http://www.tyrrellmuseum.com/)

<comment> 52-6F-62 My grandmother always promised to take me there when I was a kid. She's passed now, but I'd _still_ like to get out there. Sadly never made it that far east. (I _had_ to get to the mountains instead :P)

The surrounding badlands are supposed to be quite the sight as well.

[https://abprairies.com/30-thickbox_default/majestic- badlands...](https://abprairies.com/30-thickbox_default/majestic-badlands.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The wolf pup looks so much like a modern dog, it could almost pass for a golden retriever.

<comment><USER5> It is often the case that domesticated animals (including humans vs their common ancestor's descendants) look like "eternally infantile" versions of wild creatures. I think there is a name for this phenomenon, but I cannot find it. Does anyone know?

<comment><USER6> You are probably thinking of "neoteny":

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They were found in 2016. How come this wasn't announced earlier? It seems like no research about the bodies was done between 2016 and today.

<comment><USER8> This seems to be a common feature in "found" things in the natural sciences—the actual discovery is years before the publication of the associated journal article or conference proceedings. Until the peer review is done, the scientists are understandably reticent (well, with some notable exceptions) to crow about the discovery. It doesn't say in the article (tsk tsk, Guardian) but I'm betting that the "news" in this is actually a scientific publication about the find.

<comment><USER9> In some cases, they probably don't want to talk about a recent discovery because then there'll be a bunch of people looking for more mummified remains. The researchers might want to have a nice long look around before attracting a crowd of tourists.</comment></comment></comment>


Speed Kills - <AUTHOR> http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Speed_Kills <comment><USER2> Do you know what kills more than speed? Code that isn't "done". Code that isn't done doesn't ship, not shipping means no money, which means no food, which means death.

In the end, bad code is simply trading your time three weeks, months, or years from now for time _right now_. It's exactly the same as taking out a loan. Sure, it's cheaper to save and not pay the interest on the loan, but unless you have the luxury of time (You hardly ever do) the loan makes better sense both in the long and short term.

Every time you rewrite code, just think of paying interest. It's a lot easier to deal with if you see it as trade of for the nice warm house you're living in or laptop you're coding on.

<comment><USER3> Rewriting code is paying principal. Dealing with the shit caused by bad code is the interest.

The longer you go without paying the principal, the more interest you're paying.

<comment><USER2> I think you just paid some principal on my comment; nice extension/extrapolation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm going to call BS on this one. As a business owner, I realize that sometimes there's a balance between "perfect code" and "getting to market." You can't be a pragmatic business owner and a perfectionist.

Artists can afford to be perfectionists. A software artisan may wish for perfection, but this sort of tripe is exactly what I was referring to in this post: <http://dailytechnology.net/posts/3>

If you want to perfect software as an art form, then great, take this advice. But if you do it for business, then you realize that there is a trade-off when you aim for perfection. You may write the most stable, secure software in the world, but if nobody uses it, then who cares? You painted the Mona Lisa, and it's in a basement somewhere. Congrats.

<comment><USER5> You're obviously not familiar with the research on software development and productivity. I would strongly suggest that you pick up some books from Steve McConnell (eg Rapid Development) as well as some classics like Peopleware. You may find some of the lessons invaluable.

Researchers have studied variation in speed of development between programmers. A common scenario are coding tests where different programmers are asked to do the same task. These studies have consistently found differences in speed of a factor of 10 or more. Follow-up research has found that programmers at the fastest end of that scale spend the smallest fraction of their time actually programming. Instead they spend time in other activities such as design and testing. So time invested in design and testing pays back during development. And not just in a large project, but in a sample coding exercise of less than a day.

Here is another data point of interest. Another study assigned multiple professional teams the same project, but asked each team to optimize a different thing. A few of the dimensions were performance, development speed, maintainability of code, and memory usage. Most of the teams managed to win on the characteristic they were optimizing for. The team that was aiming for maintainable code came in second on most of the other dimensions.

When you consider that as an industry we spend about 70% of our software development dollars in maintenance, aiming for maintainable code has lopsided benefits relative to the other options. Your code is done almost as fast as possible, performs reasonably well, uses a reasonable amount of memory, and costs a lot less to maintain. Situations exist where that isn't the optimal trade-off, but it is optimal often enough that it should be treated as the default.

Which is exactly what this article was arguing.

<comment><USER4> I'm quite familiar with the research ("Code Complete" is a book I constantly reread) and with the arguments for good design. As another commenter pointed out, the argument wasn't so much for "perfection" as it was for "good code" (which I can't argue with). It's still somewhat arbitrary, thought, and the more "good" it is the more you edge into diminishing returns. There's some point where the trade-off for "better code" trails off.

Design, however, is a whole 'nother ball game. As you pointed out, research has shown that most of the problems, and indeed the most expensive problems, are caused by requirements. (IIRC)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ironically it took a ridiculously long time for this article to load.

<comment><USER7> But you should see how clean and maintainable the code is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> From a previous life ... "Speed is life" ... as long as there is control. Speed with control is better described as velocity, and is a vector - it's getting you where you want to be, rapidly. Speed without direction (control) is simply rapid, and possibly random, change in position - you probably won't like the end result - kind of like jumping naked off a tall Scotland cliff - it's great fun for about 10 seconds ...

<comment><USER2> Pilot? (Flying is the only thing I can think of where going faster gives you more options, not less)

<comment><USER9> Going faster in the right direction is a sign you've made the right choices -- not a way to get more options for the choices you make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I view this as a lesser version of <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html>

When you read the 5. of joels article (and some others points) you realize exactly in what this article must be right.

But without the facts this has no sense. Sometimes you need to go faster, but it's a tradeoff you will have to fix later.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is all motherhood and apple pie and such, but I guess it deserves repeating from time to time. He's got that Clean Code book out, which is a pretty good read.

What I want to know is how in the heck do you get to call yourself "Uncle Bob"? What? Is there like an agile family, with uncles and nephews and stuff? If so, I want to be Cousin Dan

</comment><comment><USER12> _The best is the enemy of the good._

\-- Voltaire

<comment><USER13> and good is the enemy of at all. (I attribute that to what I heard Paul Buchheit say once at a YC dinner)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you want a mantra to remind yourself of this, I like "fast is slow and slow is fast".

<comment><USER15> "slow is the new fast"

<comment><USER9> More seriously, "Deliberate is the new fast."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> tortoise and the hare

</comment><comment><USER17> "Festina Lente"

</comment><comment><USER15> "Professionals do not write bad code — ever."

Bla, blub</comment>


The 12" MacBook Air: Back to Basics? - <AUTHOR> http://sixcolors.com/post/2015/01/the-macbook-air-returning-to-its-roots/ <comment><USER2> Not having standard ports would be pretty annoying -- at most offices, there are lots of power adapters left in common areas (I think at CloudFlare it's all MagSafe w/ MagSafe2 adapters, or MagSafe 2, and I've tried to make sure they're all 85W; outside of tech, I've seen Lenovo 20V the same way).

Having HDMI out built-in on the rMBP15, vs. needing to carry a mdp/tb2 to whatever dongle all the time, is a plus too.

USB 3 A ports are probably a minimum for me.

If I wanted no ports at all, I'd just use the iPad.

I don't think I could deal with OS X 10.10 on less than 16GB, either.

<comment><USER3> Just out of curiosity, what do you do with 16GB of RAM? I'm running OS X 10.10 on 4GB Macbook Air and I have faced no issues whatsoever. My general usage includes Chrome with ~20 tabs open, a Vagrant VM, terminal and text editor.

<comment><USER4> When away from a power socket, I use Safari instead of Chrome. Saves battery a LOT. Was able to run 11" Air with 19 tabs on Safari and with vim (on iTerm). 2hrs later still had 95% battery left.

<comment><USER5> > _When away from a power socket, I use Safari instead of Chrome. Saves > battery a LOT._

Were you comparing Safari with 0 extensions vs. Chrome with 0 extensions? Or does each have a different extension load?

I will often fall back to Safari if a page doesn't render properly in Chrome, but that's because I installed a bunch of extensions on Chrome and have consciously left Safari pure as the driven snow. It's a different problem domain, but I know certain extensions can use resources in surprising ways.

<comment><USER6> One factor is that I believe chrome has flash by default, and Safari does not

<comment><USER7> It's not just that. I see nearly 2x better battery life using Safari over Chrome on a 15" rMBP, and I have plugins turned off (click to play). It just uses a lot less CPU, full stop. I don't know what the real difference is, but I suspect Safari just does a better job of idling than Chrome does.

<comment><USER8> When you click the battery dropdown on the top right, Chrome is consistently listed as an "Apps Using Significant Energy". On previous releases of OS X I also noticed that by default it would use my dedicated GPU at all times, whereas Safari would not (not sure if this is still true).

<comment><USER7> This is no longer true, but it still does request the dGPU on certain pages, such as the Chrome Web Store.

What's especially obnoxious about that behavior is that if you disable the dGPU, it works just fine. So what's the point?

Also, one would expect Chrome's own Web Store to work well in Chrome... but Google's attitude toward long-standing bugs is anything but exemplary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm actually looking to go the other way; I want a desktop replacement. I dont care about size or weight, I just want a big screen and a huge battery. My current 17" MBP is just about perfect. The only downside is that the screen is not Retina and they aren't making them anymore.

As the laptop offerings get smaller and smaller my frustration grows larger and larger. Sure, I can use my big monitor at work, but what about when I travel, or work from "home"? I'm willing to lug around a huge laptop if it means that I can see the screen and get actual work done.

<comment><USER10> Then may I perhaps interest you in this monstrosity?

[http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/5/7495073/msi-mechanical- keyb...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/5/7495073/msi-mechanical-keyboard- gt80-titan-laptop-ces)

This is a laptop with a full mechanical keyboard, 2x graphics cards and a 350W power brick.

But if that is not insane enough, there is a company called Eurocom, which will build you this monster: [http://www.eurocom.com/ec/configure%281,234,0%29ec](http://www.eurocom.com/ec/configure%281,234,0%29ec)

It can be configured with a 12-core(24 thread) Xeon CPU + 2 GPUs + 4 hard drives. It needs TWO 300W power bricks to function, and is supposed to be used as a mobile server.

<comment><USER9> Wow, I think those are a bit more than I bargained for. :) I would still like to stay in the OS X family; the hardware/software combination is just too good to pass up. Thanks for the alternative view though.

<comment><USER11> Depending on the hardware combination, you may be able to make some of those Eurocom laptops into usable Hackintoshes though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For any of the Apple adverse, Samsung has already been showing off their 12.2" notebook at CES [0,1]. Dell also has an interesting small-bezel XPS 13 starting at $800, but I'm sure that will end up a bit thicker than the MBA 12" [2].

✓ Fanless.

✓ 700 nit low-glare 2560×1600 display.

✓ Ports (μHDMI and SD reader is better than nothing).

✓ Apple-esque price tag.

[0]: [http://www.samsung.com/us/news/24347](http://www.samsung.com/us/news/24347)

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2vYob7rzQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2vYob7rzQ) (Brad Linder's hands on)

[2]: [http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/6/7501385/dell- xps-13-2015-ed...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/6/7501385/dell- xps-13-2015-edition-announced-at-ces-2015)

<comment><USER10> >>2560×1600 display.

What is Samsung doing to make sure that this resolution is usable at this size?

<comment><USER13> They are probably expecting their OS of choice (that is, Windows) to do it's job, since it is marketed as being usable on such combination. For the most part and by itself it probably is, but many desktop applications still have problems, or so I've heard to this date.

2560×1600 is not a bad choice, however, since at 200 % scaling it has 1280×800 logical pixels, which is perfectly normal for such a monitor. If only Windows could reliably tell which applications do NOT support higher DPI displays even though they say they do, they could be just doubled in size and still be perfectly usable, if a bit blurry (you don't get aliasing effects, though). I guess Microsoft'll just have to make _yet another_ API for DPI-awareness to catch the rest of the offenders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What might be most interesting about the USB3 connector will be the opportunity for compromising such machines. People might be cautious about plugging in unknown or unexpected hardware and flash drives to their machines, etc, but they'll always recognise what looks like a charger and won't think for a minute that it might be doing anything other than supplying power.

Could be very interesting, especially in office locations where charger sharing goes on. Or even at home, how do you know that /your/ charger isn't the special version that not only powers the MacBook while also appearing as a bus device that's backdooring your machine and radiating your secrets back over your mains cables to an adversary?

Lots and lots of fun to be had there.

<comment><USER15> You can say the same thing about any other port, USB 3 is not the exception.

There's a big bug with both Firewall and TB that can bypass the security and infect the firmwares and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's a recurring pattern that Apple has to re-invent the entry level laptops every once in a while because they've become so powerful and versatile the target audience for the "pro" laptops starts to prefer them over the heavier, more expensive and overly powerful high-end alternatives.

Personally I have found myself continuously switching between the "pro" and "regular" offerings ever since the days of Powerbook and iBook, and if a 12" Air would be nothing more than a newer, better Air with a retina screen I would probably pick it over the 13" Pro I currently use.

Apple regularly moves the goalposts to avoid cannibalizing the high-end line.

<comment><USER17> This time around it's the opposite, the Pro line has been creeping towards the Air line (from TFA): _" The 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro aren't that different—$300 gets you an extra half a pound, a Retina display, and a processor that's an awful lot faster."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a former 12" Powerbook owner/lover and current 11" Macbook Air owner, I want my 4:3 aspect ratio back. Screen real estate is at a premium on a machine this small, so I want more pixels (more area). And carrying a elongated rectangle around is no easier than carrying a more squarish rectangle. (iPad and Chromebook figured this out.)

</comment><comment><USER19> As a frequent traveler, I regret replacing my 3-year-old 4GB + 128SSD with a 13" rMBP. I like the rMPB, but I should have kept my Air and gotten a quad- core 15" rMBP. The point? I'll pay a lot, in terms of cash and power, for portability and battery life.

I've been eager to move off of OSX for some years [1], but with this rumored laptop, they'll probably sink their teeth in me for another 3 years.

[1] If anyone knows of a laptop that is portable, that supports 16GB of RAM and works well with Linux, please let me know. Even the newly announced X1 and XPS13 are limited to 8GB (and I assume they get relatively poor battery life on Linux)

<comment><USER20> Have a look at Lenovo's X series.

<comment><USER21> I was pretty disappointed with the X1, was getting RSI from the trackpoint, while its touchpad was unusable. I got an rMBP and can't be happier. Hopefully the precision touchpad in the new XPS 13 really works.

<comment><USER22> Got a Dell M3800 expecting a decent trackpad. It's a premium machine and even sub-$500 Acers bring precision trackpads now, right? Wrong, it's excruciatingly low-res and persistently jumps by unpredictable distances on clicking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So, you can't charge this supposed new laptop while you are at a desk with it attached to an external monitor? What will Apple do, make you buy a special Apple monitor that allows you to connect more peripherals?

<comment><USER24> What's stopping the monitor from charging the laptop? The spec affords such things.

How cool would it be if every monitor in the future used the exact same type of connector and also doubled as a power supply for anything connected to it? Same thing goes for ethernet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Something that hardly ever gets mentioned, yet makes a huge difference to how productive I can be on a given system, is whether it has proper cursor keys or not.

Nearly all PC laptops, even many otherwise high-end ones, have had this horrendous cursor key arrangement for a few years now: a compromised design for a lower cost, one-piece, rectangular keyboard. It's one of the reasons I switched.

I really hope this isn't the start of a trend for Apple. At the very least, I hope sensible key layout can be a differentiator for the Pro line.

<comment><USER26> Given the space required for proper cursor keys, I wouldn't expect to see them as much anymore except on external keyboards.

Also, given that Apple's wireless keyboard and all current laptops have the tiny "T" version, I wouldn't hold my breath for them to change course anytime soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> As a heavy vim user, I immediately thought "hopefully Apple would _never_ do something so ridiculous as moving the power key to the upper left, right above the ESC key." Right?

<comment><USER26> I recommend retraining muscle memory to one of two things. Ctrl-[, which works a treat with capslocks mapped to control, and/or mapping kj or jj to escape (can cause problems in a few instances - pasting random text without `:set paste`, and the Dutch language).

Apple keyboard escape buttons have always been a bit harder to hit (imo), so I have trained up both of those shortcuts to good effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm thinking more a Thunderbolt 3 connector - not USB type C.

TB3 allows for 100W power transmission. Your Thunderbolt Display can then plug into your laptop with a single cable, including charging needs.

Additionally, TB3 comes with a new connector - which is smaller vertically. Perfect for a new thinner MBA.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have a 2012 MBA. I find myself taking my iPad on my shorter trips, especially since I can work from Dropbox or Evernote. I do not see this new MBA as replacing my current one. I feel I have already won my chase for "thin and light."

</comment><comment><USER30> √ no fans.

√ retina display.

<comment><USER31> Those are square root symbols. Here's a check mark: ✔

(In case you didn't notice – perhaps because of your font settings.)

<comment><USER11> At the risk of being pedantic, in addition to U+2714 (HEAVY CHECK MARK), I'd like to point out a few other check marks represented in Unicode that could be used as well:

☑ (U+2611 BALLOT BOX WITH CHECK)

✅ (U+2705 WHITE HEAVY CHECK MARK)

✓ (U+2713 CHECK MARK)

<comment><USER32> First one renders rather illegibly at this font size here on my Windows machine in Chrome.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think characters like that (such as the glyphs for the Emoticons Unicode block (U+1F600〜4F) that the font Symbola¹ uses) aren't as legible on low DPI displays at font sizes like 12pt, which is even worse when you're using them in plain text where everything has to be the same size. On 'HiDPI' or 'Retina' displays though, even in the situations mentioned above, they look razor sharp.

Here's an example of how it looks on an iPad Air².

――――――

¹ — [http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/](http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/)

² — [http://cl.ly/image/0r2d2x3F1P0F/U%2B2611.PNG](http://cl.ly/image/0r2d2x3F1P0F/U%2B2611.PNG)

<comment><USER32> Huh, surprising green checkbox there on the iPad.

<comment><USER11> Ah, yeah. It actually shows up like that on my OS X v10.9 computer as well. This webpage's stylesheet specifies that comments should use either Verdana, Geneva, or a sans-serif font. Since neither Verdana or Geneva have a glyph for U+2705 WHITE HEAVY CHECK MARK, the browser uses font substitution¹ to look for another font on the system that does have a glyph for that codepoint and use it instead. (Font substitution is pretty much necessary since it's currently impossible for one font to hold Unicode's repertoire of 110,000+ characters; even the OpenType format is limited to a maximum of 65,536 glyphs).

Both iOS 5+ and OS X v10.7+ include the font Apple Color Emoji, and that font does have a glyph for U+2705 (the same glyph you see in my screen shot)², so OS X and iOS text rendering systems use it. On your Windows computer, I'm guessing the font that was substituted for Verdana/Geneva there was Segoe UI Symbol³.

As an aside, I'm pretty interested on how OS X and Windows decide on which font to use when there are multiple fonts installed containing the required glyph. For example, I have two other fonts on my OS X system that have a glyph for U+2705 (Everson Mono and Symbola), but OS X always seems to consistently pick Apple Color Emoji's glyph. Maybe OS X's text rendering system goes through the fonts in alphabetical order and uses the first one it finds containing the required glyph? It would be great if end users could have a bit more control over the font substitution process. I know it's possible to do in some text editors like Emacs⁴, but I believe that programs like that use their own text rendering systems instead of that supplied by the OS (could be wrong though).

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to add, as for having the glyph be a green box with a white inner check mark, The Unicode Consortium actually mentions how the glyphs should look for characters with BLACK or WHITE in the name⁵:

 _"Q: What about characters whose names include WHITE or BLACK?_

 _A: Names of symbols such as BLACK MEDIUM SQUARE or WHITE MEDIUM SQUARE are not meant to indicate that the corresponding character must be presented in black or white, respectively; rather, the use of "black" and "white" in the names is generally just to contrast filled versus outline shapes, or a darker color fill versus a lighter color fill. Similarly, in other symbols such as the hands U+261A BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX and U+261C WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX, the words "white" and "black" also refer to outlined versus filled, and do not indicate skin color."_

――――――

¹ — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_substitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_substitution)

² — [http://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode#block-2-di...](http://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode#block-2-dingbats)

³ — [http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2705/fontsuppor...](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2705/fontsupport.htm)

⁴ — [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6491202/overriding- emacs-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6491202/overriding- emacs-23-font-substitutions)

⁵ — [http://unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html#6](http://unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html#6)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It looks like the folks at Apple insist on misinterpreting the "less is more" principle. Apple is becoming more each day a dictatorship company who thinks that whatever product it launches, they will be loved as they were in 2000's.

<comment><USER33> > Apple is becoming more each day a dictatorship company

As the article notes, the original Air was very similar to the purported new Air. It had a micro-DVI, a single USB port and a headphone jack.

It didn't quite succeed, but I'd guess more because of its anemic performances (SSD was an expensive option to an already costly machine, the CPU wasn't exactly a performance star, and let's not talk about the GMA X3100) than its I/O limitations. And if anything things have gotten better since (more wireless and "cloud" with less physical connectivity required).

<comment><USER10> And a separate power connector.

This is the biggest issue with this Air - that if you want to charge this laptop and use anything, even a USB mouse with it, you will need a usb adapter with power pass-through. It's just stupid. They should have left Magsafe 2 on it + USB-C, or at least 2 USB-C ports, so you can use one for charging and another for video/data.

<comment><USER33> Not that we know they have removed it, this is a render based on rumours, and it conflicts with other rumours (such as the removal of F-keys)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the most innovative new OSes in active development? - <AUTHOR> There was a recent thread about SerenityOS [0] which lead me to Andreas Kling's youtube channel.  I like his ideas about tighter vertical integration between the OS and desktop apps, and a browser that is a smart document reader, as opposed to a VM for web apps.
I am curious to hear about other innovative ideas happening with other OSes in active development.
Bonus points for non-POSIX plays or language choices beyond C/C++/Rust :)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21212294 <comment><USER2> > I like his ideas about tighter vertical integration between the OS and > desktop apps, and a browser that is a smart document reader, as opposed to a > VM for web apps.

Other actively developed OSes that fit this level of OS + desktop apps integration are:

ReactOS: [https://reactos.org/](https://reactos.org/)

Haiku: [https://www.haiku-os.org/](https://www.haiku-os.org/)

Redox: [https://www.redox-os.org/](https://www.redox-os.org/)

> Bonus points for non-POSIX plays or language choices beyond C/C++/Rust :)

Then you will pretty much like Fuchsia, a new OS by Google that is actively developed in the open and uses its own kernel called Zircon which is a microkernel optimised for modern processor architectures and multi-core machines.

Several drivers are actively written in Rust and its networking stack is written in Golang. Everything else including the kernel is written mostly in C++11.

[https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/the-book](https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia- src/the-book)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting..

ReactOS -> targets Windows XP compatibility.

HaikuOS -> targets BeOS compatibility & POSIX too.

Redox -> Unix-like with Microkernel design

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not sure how active is it but Genode looks interesting:

[https://genode.org/about/index](https://genode.org/about/index)

"The Genode OS Framework is a tool kit for building highly secure special- purpose operating systems."

"Genode is based on a recursive system structure. Each program runs in a dedicated sandbox and gets granted only those access rights and resources that are needed for its specific purpose."</comment>


De-Google-ify Internet - <AUTHOR> https://degooglisons-internet.org/ <comment><USER2> Seems like they have the code. Now they need a Framadesigner to make the things look framagood.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of something I heard about restaurants not too long ago (paraphrased):

> Avoid restaurants with too many things on the menu. It means the cooking > staff doesn't focus on quality, instead opting to offer many choices to > appease as many customers as possible.

<comment><USER4> If you heed that advice you miss out on the experience of a diner, which is fine if all you want is upscale food.

<comment><USER5> Isn't "the experience of a diner" just greasy food cooked from frozen ingredients and average service?

<comment><USER6> The thing I love most about a diner is they poor you coffee while handing you the menu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really dislike how it is just relabeled projects from others.

<comment><USER8> From what I'm seeing, they don't relabel them. What they do is host the open source project "Foo" so that you don't have to figure out how to host it yourself and they name that hosting service "FramaBar". But "Foo" is always there under the heading of "FramaBar", to explain that "FramaBar" is really "Foo".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, solve centralization by more centralization.

Also: one reason people use Google is that their services are in one place, users don't have to keep track of n amount of sites, it's all there.

P.S. I don't like Google.

<comment><USER10> Isn't this a website for self-hosted alternatives to Google services?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good intention, bad execution.

</comment><comment><USER12> Although we have deep respect for many languages, HN is an English-language site, so this is off topic here.

<comment><USER8> Are we looking at different things here? When I click through, I get a page in English.

<comment><USER12> Moi, je vois français.

<comment><USER13> They must have some locale detection that's misfiring here. I also see English.

<comment><USER12> Alright, I've restored the title and removed the moderation penalty.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Harper's Index on the web - <AUTHOR> http://harpers.org/index/ <comment><USER2> This gives a better idea of the index ... <http://harpers.org/subjects/HarpersIndex>

</comment><comment><USER3> very cool...what does it do exactly?</comment>


The man who hand-draws fractals - <AUTHOR> http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/01/the-man-who-hand-draws-mathematical-fractals.html <comment><USER2> Padgett's drawings, viewable from the link below, are not fractals. The fact that they resemble mathematical diagrams in Euclidean geometry does not make them fractals. I would be curious to find out who first christened his work 'fractal', as I think it does him a disservice.

[http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/jason- padgett.html?tab=ar...](http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/jason- padgett.html?tab=artwork)

<comment><USER3> I don't know why or how they called it fractals.. but am not surprised.... i would have believed them a couple of years ago right out.. Now,i know that am not sure either way.... The point is it's near impossible to be accurate when translating from the language of mathematics to English.. The only difference btw me now and a years b4, is now i have a slightly better understanding of hausdorff and box-counting dimension.... Not good enough to be a mathematician, but good enough to spot the problem in this picture..

<comment><USER4> No, he's right, those are not fractals. Although they are pretty impressive to do by hand.

I'm sure the Greeks would have had a name for these Compass and straightedge constructions because they made a lot of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The loss of particular functions like the ability to see color, or sense motion are interesting demonstrations of the localization of cortical function.

In this case, it is possible that visual area MT (V5) is damaged. This area processes motion signals.

For people interested in follow up reading the story of Phineas Gage is an interesting illustration of the functions of the frontal lobes, and the book "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" is also very interesting.

Also fascinating is Gazzaniga's book "The cognitive sciences" which has chapters relating to very odd sensory/cognitive deficits.

</comment><comment><USER6> I used to see fractals when I was a child. No one understood what I was saying. Now it's evolved into something larger than that. People still don't understand what I'm saying.

<comment><USER7> What do you mean by larger than fractals?

<comment><USER6> I used to "daydream" a lot. When I would "daydream" I would no longerr see or hear or smell, but I would follow these strange patterns in my mind, always going deeper and seeking and end but never finding one. After about 20-30 minutes, I would always reach a strange point where my mind could not go any further, but I knew there was something beyond the point I had reached.

There were no clear directions, it was a very strange experience. I can't attribute it to a dimension and I did 2 years of University Math. I wish I knew what it was.

They became less frequent as I grew older and I had my last experience at 16. Nowadays, I feel like it has translated in me viewing the infinite of the patterns in this world. It's kind of more than that though, and still I cannot explain it. It makes me not want to speak because everything I say, even in this explanation, is incorrect because these words I'm using do not accurately express the thought, emotion, and experience involved at all.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing, I think it's very interesting. Don't give up on explaining it though. I'm sure with time and effort you will find a way and/or the words to explain it. If we all spoke more about how we perceive the world, we all would have better words for it, and a better understanding of everything.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facing opposition, Amazon reconsiders NY headquarters site, two officials say - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/facing-opposition-amazon-reconsiders-ny-headquarters-site-two-officials-say/2019/02/08/451ffc52-2a19-11e9-b011-d8500644dc98_story.html <comment><USER2> I can't even try and take an article like this seriously. I understand it says in the article that Jeff Bezos owns the WaPo, but the way it's written sounds like Amazon trying to make a threat. Just look at the way the article starts off.

> Amazon.com is reconsidering its plan to bring 25,000 jobs to a new campus in > New York City following a wave of opposition from local politicians, > according to two people familiar with the company's thinking.

Amazon isn't considering bringing 25,000 jobs to NYC out of the goodness in their heart. It's a business play where they are doing what they think is most profitable for them. They want to be in NYC because it's the largest market in the US. I think their plan all along was to come to NYC. They just thought they could stage this elaborate "pick my city" nonsense and get a bunch of tax breaks. This article just sounds like them whining that people caught on.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. The whole HQ2 Willy Wonka show was never going to move to some area that really really needed it. NYC is currently a boom town, and I as a NYer am disappointed that we gave them such a huge amount of tax breaks. I support NY perhaps lifting some of its bureaucracy to make such a large move here possible, but do not support giving Amazon money.

Amazon needs NYC because it has a metro area of 20 million people with more developers than Silicon Valley, and also many other skilled people in management and business. The days of someone moving to a company town to work for them are over as you have seen with GE moving to Boston and other corporate moves. Nobody is going to move to a small city to work for Amazon.

<comment><USER4> What's wrong with tax breaks? It's like people are under the impression that the government is actually paying Amazon. If Amazon didn't get any tax breaks, they would have gone somewhere else.

The people who don't want Amazon in Queens don't actually live there, all the protests are in Manhattan.

People are protesting the likely rise in rents that an Amazon HQ will cause. But the real problem is government regulation. If real estate developers could build housing without all the NIMBYs yelling to their city councils or if they could build without onerous regulation about fire escapes or whatnot, people would have housing.

All this regulation that is supposed to help consumers actually hurts them. It's not like with regulation companies will do the same thing as if they didn't exist. Many companies will just opt out.

I'm guessing I'm going to get downvoted, but I honestly believe that regulation is the root of all evil and most social ills (like healthcare costs, pharmaceutical prices, etc).

But instead of protesting the bad incentives government creates, people just blame the "greedy" corporations.

<comment><USER5> I've never really heard a claim like this. What regulations lead to higher prescription drug costs and higher healthcare costs generally?

<comment><USER6> I always thought the high prices in the US was because of not having universal healthcare - when you are buying for millions of people, you can have lower prices? It's not like the US is the only country that regulates drugs?

<comment><USER7> United Healthcare, a US insurer, covers 40M people. That's bigger than the entire population of Canada, but Canada has cheaper drugs.

<comment><USER6> Good point, thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If this happens (and I'm not all convinced it will, I think this is just Amazon posturing) then Cuomo, De Blasio and Amazon will have no-one but themselves to blame for it.

The secrecy around bids for HQ2 was already a joke, but the announcement for NYC even more so: De Blasio and Cuomo basically just announced that it was happening whether people liked it or not. Then said they were going to do an end-run around the NYC city council to ensure it does. Some of the objections to Amazon moving to Queens are legitimate and some are not, but you can't blame residents for freaking out when a huge, huge change like this is just dumped on their neighborhoods with zero consultation or warning.

(It should also be noted that the timing of this is probably not coincidental. An outspoken critic of the Amazon deal has been nominated to the state's Public Authorities Control Board, which has to approve of the deal. But he hasn't been confirmed yet, so I suspect this is an attempt on Amazon's part to stop that approval:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/nyregion/michael- gianaris...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/nyregion/michael-gianaris- amazon.html))

<comment><USER9> It's worth noting that government placement of massive economic projects over the desires or even well-being of local people is a feature of Soviet and modern day Chinese economic systems.

And so it seems, American capitalism as well.

<comment><USER8> I will say that I think there is a balance. NIMBYs hold back large-scale development in a lot of area where it would be very sensible (high density housing in SF, for example). But at the same time, the community ought to have a say in a giant change like Amazon coming to town.

<comment><USER10> Who is "the community"?

<comment><USER11> On all sides of Amazon's planned NYCHQ are a million+ people living in neighborhoods that are predominantly working and lower middle class and that skew towards renters over buyers. Them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If HQ2 falls through, the history will remember the politicians who were opposed to this as it remembers the board of Yahoo after it rejected the $50BN offer from Microsoft: yes, high five all around right after you kill the deal, but then you are the loser of the century.

25000 jobs at an average of $150k/year. State income tax is 8.8%, city income tax 3.8%, state sales tax 4%, city sales tax 4%, property taxes, etc. You easily take back in taxes 30k/year from each employee. That's 3/4 billion per year. But then wage inflation in the whole tech sector, let's say 3% per year for a few years, for 100k employees, that's about $100MM/year. Then the real estate appreciation. We are talking millions of condos/coops going up in value. Not a lot, but a little bit everywhere adds up. In NYC every apartment sale over $1MM is subject to a 1% "mansion tax". You would see tens of thousands of apartments changing hands. That's hundreds of millions of additional tax revenue right there.

Well, I guess Boston is a nice city too...

<comment><USER13> Nobody informed is opposed to it because of the finances. People just don't understand why we would want so many more people when gentrification and overcrowding are already making life harder for everyone in the city. If 25000 people with jobs at over 150k a year decided to leave and go to Boston, personally I would be excited.

A few things taxes can't seem to buy are lower rents and a public transportation system that isn't completely overcrowded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like this HQ2 thing is becoming a complexifier for Bezos

<comment><USER15> :-)

It makes you wonder -- had they not staged this whole HQ2 fiasco and just chose a city and moved there (you know, like companies normally do...) -- would the move to NYC be more widely accepted?

<comment><USER16> Yes.

Google plans on adding more people to NYC than Amazon does.

They just didn't make a huge hue and cry about it, and have faced almost no opposition.

<comment><USER17> It's not more people (6-8k I believe) but your point stands

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "The Amazon transaction was probably the greatest economic transaction in 50 > years in this state," Cuomo said in a recent radio interview. "We don't get > a business to come with 25,000 jobs anymore. I spend hours and days trying > to get 100 jobs, 200 jobs."

This sounds like a _severe_ waste of his time.

<comment><USER19> I wonder what he could actually mean by this quote, unless it's an outright fabrication.

NY, home of NYC, struggles to attract 100 person businesses? How am I supposed to interpret that claim?

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't be surprised if it's true for parts of New York other than NYC. New York is a very high-tax and regulation-heavy state. NYC is a big enough draw to overcome that, but I don't think Buffalo is similarly attractive just because NYC is in the same state.

<comment> j-c-hewitt The way the sham works is to give the companies tax breaks and regulatory easements and then to shunt the costs onto the employees. The employees bear the NYS taxes and the companies connected enough to get exceptions reap the competitive benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Personally, I would like to work at this new "HQ2" but the political rhetoric is pretty interesting to follow. Giving so much tax credit and incentive doesn't really make sense to me (and not just this deal to Amazon, the deal to Foxconn is even more baffling). $2.2 Billion for 25000 jobs is about $88000/job. That is a lot of tax money we're using up. On top of this, Long Island is a pretty occupationally diverse area to begin with. 25000 is a lot of jobs, but not make or break amount for Long Island that everyone is making it seem to be.

<comment><USER22> Worth noting for people unfamiliar: Long Island City is a neighborhood in Queens, a borough of NYC. While both Brooklyn and Queens are both technically on the physical island of Long Island, "Long Island" generally refers to Nassau County and the areas to the east.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Amazon is just whining because NYC won't cut them a sweetheart deal. There's nothing stopping them from just buying or renting office space like everybody else.

</comment><comment><USER24> Fat chance of happening, but it would be interesting to see a 2020 candidate run on the promise of convincing Amazon to put HQ 2 1/2 in a swing state.

<comment> murph-almighty Put it in a district just outside of Pittsburgh with cheap housing, and there goes PA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One part I don't see people is explaining: are the NYC tax breaks amazon is getting out of line for the revenue they're bringing in? Cuomo is touting a 9-to-1 and that seems like a pretty sweet deal even if they're somewhat fudging the numbers.

<comment><USER26> Out of line with previous deals. Look at what wasn't offered to Google when they bought/built their office

<comment><USER25> Google is one data point, I'm asking what the average/distribution is. Do banks get more? I can find some examples that point to this being normal: [https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy- tracker/ny-...](https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker/ny- chase-manhattan-now-jpmorgan-chase)

<comment><USER27> That's a great source, and directly counters the "nobody else got subsidies" argument:

Subsidies for NYS:

Subsidy Total: $34,026,482,575

Number of Awards: 127,154

Earliest year of data: 1980

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _the world's most valuable company, led by its richest man_

AAPL ($801B) reclaimed this mantle recently; AMZN ($775B) is back to #2.

EDIT: why the downvotes? I'm not saying the sentiment is wrong, but it doesn't look good for a news organization to get something like this wrong, especially when they are owned by the CEO of the company that they are misreporting on. It also tends to corroborate the pro-Amazon reporting bias that others have expressed here.

<comment><USER29> MSFT at $805B ;-) (disclosure, my employer, etc)

<comment><USER28> Touché. So Amazon is 3rd, unless someone else wants to jump in.

<comment><USER30> And after the divorce, Bezos won't be the world's richest man anymore. I wonder if Bill just so happened to leak some compromising info to regain the title!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Cached link: [https://outline.com/4qM8rZ](https://outline.com/4qM8rZ)

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm amazed it took three WaPo journalists and this still comes off as a biased screed that could have come from the mouth of Bezos himself.

I mean, casually referencing Bezos as "the worlds richest man" instead of calling him by name or title? Come on.

</comment><comment><USER33> Can amazon reconsider the Crystal City site too?

</comment><comment><USER34> As someone who lives in Long Island City, the opposition to HQ2 seems mostly coming from a vocal minority. Sure, most people are not in favor of the tax breaks, but they're also primarily in favor of Amazon coming in general[0]. There is so much misinformation about these tax breaks...so many people are saying, "We're spending $3 billion! This is unconscionable!" without understanding that NYC isn't actually going to be cutting a check to Amazon and tax revenues will almost certainly be net positive as a result.

Really, the political posturing about this is bonkers. The local council member, Jimmy Van Bramer, now says he is allegedly against this deal[1]. Here's his signature on a letter in favor of the deal just about a year prior[2].

In my mind, the biggest problem is where we're going to put all these people. I really hope (but am not holding my breath) that our local pols have the courage to vote in favor of upzoning large swaths of the area to provide enough housing for everyone. Otherwise the most vulnerable among us will just get pushed further to the fringes.

I'm against tax breaks for special interests, as I think it is a prime example of crony capitalism. I'm disappointed that Cuomo and DeBlasio offered any argument besides "NYC is a dynamic city with a great talent pool and halfway decent infrastructure for US cities." But the amount of fear-mongering, inconsistencies, and falsehoods swirling around HQ2 really irritate me.

[0] [https://poll.qu.edu/new-york-city/release- detail?ReleaseID=2...](https://poll.qu.edu/new-york-city/release- detail?ReleaseID=2589)

[1] [https://twitter.com/JimmyVanBramer/status/109317279168637747...](https://twitter.com/JimmyVanBramer/status/1093172791686377472)

[2] [https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://big.asse...](https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/athena/files/2018/11/13/5beb0912e4b0caeec2beaa08.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Yes it probably will end up net benefit for NYC but in any deal you have to ask did we overpay? Google bought 111 8th avenue, one of the biggest buildings in area in NYC, and also the premier datacenter location for 1.8 billion and added a lot of employees. Tax break: 0. Facebook and other large tech companies have also been expanding their staff in NYC for no tax break. NIMBYs aside in the local area I am for Amazon coming to NYC along with any other company. NYC is in effect cutting a check to them because now they are losing revenue, and starting a precedent that was previously not needed to get big companies here. The market conditions of NYC have attracted business just fine.

<comment><USER34> I agree, the precedent being set is the worst part of this. And I do think that we "overpaid," in the sense that this erodes any sense of trust and fairness in NYC/NYS government (which I think is critical to a smoothly running society). These tax breaks bolster the idea that political means are a viable route towards a business advantage.

I was just expressing my frustration that the situation is being misrepresented by many parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I see comments bringing up comparisons between Amazon and other NYC employers who are not asking for- or getting a tax break. But I think that comparison doesn't mean much on its own...

The deal with Amazon is independent of what decisions other companies make. Other companies may have different circumstances - with respect to financials (e.g. profit margins), growth prospects, etc. Or maybe they are just bad at negotiating. But either way, all the government has to do is evaluate the incremental tradeoffs associated with making _this_ deal - is it a net benefit or not? And both parties (NY or Amazon) can make their evaluations and accept or decline accordingly.

Most negotiations take place with imperfect information and involve complex assessments of the risks and tradeoffs of accepting/declining any deal. In this case, the projected 9:1 ROI on the subsidies was too good to pass up and public leaders made a decision that is probably correct.

I think the general public understanding of these subsidies is also very limited, and the vocal minorities that have ruled the airwaves on this issue have painted a false picture of how the subsidies are structured.

[https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-and-mayor- de...](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-and-mayor-de-blasio- announce-amazon-selects-long-island-city-new-corporate)

First, note that $1.2B of the $1.7B of state benefits in this deal are from the _existing_ Excelsior program. Numerous other employers are eligible to apply. See details of program at [https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs- program](https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program)

Many other companies have utilized this program. Take a look at this subsidy tracker: [https://projects.propublica.org/subsidies/programs/excelsior...](https://projects.propublica.org/subsidies/programs/excelsior- jobs-program)

Note that other parts of the Amazon HQ2 deal in NY are also pre-existing:

> Under pre-existing as-of-right programs authorized by law, Amazon is > eligible for a partial property tax abatement through ICAP and an annual > credit of $3,000 for twelve years per eligible employee under REAP, a > program available to all companies to encourage job growth outside of > Manhattan. REAP benefits for Amazon's 10-year expansion are projected at > $897 million through 2038, and ICAP will abate approximately $386 million.

Chances are, Google and Facebook and others are also going to take advantage of all these generally-available programs. As far as I can tell, the $505M capital grant from the state is the only Amazon-specific part of the deal.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think the objection comes from perspective, more than anything:

What sounds like a Day 1 company?

\- Build a second HQ where there can actually be meaningful development, like Raleigh.

\- Build two satellite offices in the most cozy-up-to-establishment choices possible, NYC and DC.

Couple in the questionable deal making around choosing NYC, and it's clear where the frustration comes from: we want to see the same strength of character leading Amazon as standing up to AMI.

The Day 2 satellites aren't that, for a number of reasons.

<comment> murph-almighty This is a pretty solid capture of my feelings about this. It is downright weird to swing from "Amazon chose this place for money" to "Amazon's CEO is standing up to (possibly) international cyberbullies" in the space of spending like 20 minutes on HN. It's the disparate decision making processes that are throwing me for a whirl more than anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> "We want jobs"

"But we don't want clean, high paying high-tech information worker jobs!"

Nobody is suggesting the HQ2 NYC move it out of the goodness of anyone's heart, and massive tax incentives are probably questionable.

But 'jobs' are the ultimate path to some kind of opportunity for people, and the best tool against 'inequality' because it enables a much more fair distribution of surpluses than arbitrary distribution.

This 'anti Amazon NYC' thing is making the classical socialist look really, really bad.

If there are thoughtful changes to the program, great.

But otherwise, this is effectively as good as it is going to get.

</comment><comment><USER38> Ironically, the low-income community opposes high paying jobs coming to the neighborhood.

<comment><USER39> Sorry if I missed your point, but I fail to understand the irony here. As far as I can tell, their concern is reasonable if you take in account that a new influx o high paid employees might drive real state prices up (which in fact could benefit some people) making rents skyrocket.

<comment><USER38> First off, some of those jobs will be available to them. Secondly, having high paid people around patronizing the other businesses in the area will help them and their employees and families.

All you need to do is look at communities across America where the big good- paying employer folded up and left town. It's a disaster for those communities, not a boon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Amazon should build their head quarters in Bangalore. Plenty of tech talent, very low cost of living compared to USA, and no shitty visa policies. Not to mention the 1.3 billion population of India which will soon sky rocket to 1.5 billion making it one of the biggest economies in the world. I guess even Canada would be a better option because of their good immigration policies.

<comment><USER26> 1- This is boldly assuming they're trying to bring in immigrants. They likely will, but they're also not nearly as concerned about getting those people visas because if you can't get a visa, they can just select from other elite candidates who can. 2- There's also plenty of bad things about Bangalore, like the fact that the infrastructure isn't nearly as established as NYC. 3- NYC offers immediate proximity to one of the nerve centers of global commerce. There are hundreds of major multinationals based there, and that proximity is valuable. 4- The US has the 3rd largest population behind China/India, so it's not like they're lacking in bodies to fill roles. The size of the population and the size of the economy aren't the same thing (India's GDP is currently 1/10th of the US's, despite having more humans living there).

<comment><USER40> 1 - My idea of a starting headquarters in a country which dont have much VISA issues was to help hire more diverse pool of candidates which is not limited to the US citizens/people studied in USA.They can also do internal company transfers but these things are mostly for people who are really good at politics or that is what I heard.

2 - Yup. But people from India and Indian subcontinent are used to these things.

3 - I mean Amazon already have a US headquarters.

4 - Yup. Indian economy is currently lagging behind USA. But its still a huge economy. Maybe Amazons 2nd biggest userbase after USA and its heavily growing.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's 64-bit A7 chip a 'marketing gimmick', Qualcomm exec says - <AUTHOR> http://news.techworld.com/personal-tech/3471543/apples-64-bit-a7-chip-a-marketing-gimmick-qualcomm-exec-says/

<comment><USER2> I think its been clear that the move to ARMv8 provides lot of benefits in terms of performance and cleaner instruction set. 64-bit comes in as free perk. Also Apple has used 64bit to improve ARC performance on iOS.

</comment><comment><USER3> 32bit is a marketing gimmick too. 8bits is more than enough.</comment>


IT Question - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I work for Cogent, a global, Tier-1, fiber optic ISP.  30% of the worlds internet traffic runs on our backbone and I've been trying to get in touch with people who make IT decisions in the adult film industry.  Can anyone help me out?  I would really appreciate the help!
Thanks,
Laura email@example.com <comment><USER2> "Inside Sales Representative at Cogent Communications"

First time I have seen a sales person post here to try and get contact details, hopefully this doesn't become a habit.

Afraid I cannot help you and doubt someone who can will. Good luck though, I know Sales is a hard game, I'd rather code any day!</comment>


Differences between the word2vec paper and its implementation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bollu/bollu.github.io#everything-you-know-about-word2vec-is-wrong <comment><USER2> Speaking as someone who has read about 40 years of papers in compiler optimization, it's very interesting.

In the early days, there were fairly exact algorithms that worked as described, and were implemented as described, but were pseudocoded in papers. Where the pseudocode differed from implementation, differences were described in great detail (IE they may say an array can be shared but isn't to make the pseudocode easier to describe).

Then, over time, things start to get further away from that. You start to see papers published with algorithms that either don't work as described, or are so inefficient as to be unusable. Like literally cannot work. Where you can get source code, later looking at the source code shows that's not what they did at all.

One infamous example of this is SSAPRE - to this day, people have a lot of trouble understanding the paper (and it has significant errors that make the algorithm incorrect as written). The concept sure, but the exact algorithm - less so. Reading the source code to it in Open64 - it is just wildly different than the paper (and often requires a lot of thought for people to convince themselves it is correct).

It's not just better engineering/datastructures vs research algorithms.

The one shining counterexample is the Rice folks who wrote their massively scalar compiler in nuweb (one of many literate programming environments), so the descriptions/papers and code were in the same place - these are very very readable and useful papers in my experience.

Nowadays it's coming back to the earlier daysdue to github/et al. People seem to try to make the code more like the paper algorithm since they now release the code.

Word2vec appears to be a counterexample (maybe because they released the code they didn't feel a need to get the paper as right)

<comment><USER3> Editors gotta be more rigorous and only accept papers with completely reproducible portable examples, i.e., docker images, literate code and source code repos. Pseudocode is helpful to be platform neutral, but if it's not precise enough to implemented as code, then it's still a proprietary figment of someone else's imagination akin to the squishy social sciences where almost anything goes, not rigorously reproducible science. Keep the standards high or the quality will taper off.

PS: Sometimes I think some researchers think they're helping themselves keep their research proprietary so they will able to monetize their special knowledge or implementation, especially if no one else can make it work ("knowledge" (job) security/silo). Why do the hard work of figuring out how to make a novel AI/ML algorithm if it can be readily commercially monetized without recompense? (Modern Western civ doesn't have a good patronage system to uniformly support arts, trades and sciences.)

<comment><USER4> In some fields, like in ML/AI or in other data-sciencey fields, keeping your code / training data closed prevents other researchers from building or improving on your work. It's more than just monetization, in that case it's just tragedy-of-the-commons career growth

<comment><USER5> > keeping your code / training data closed prevents other researchers from > building or improving on your work.

I might be naive in this regard, but isn't that the main point of doing research?

<comment><USER4> In theory, yes. The actual main point of doing research, from the researcher's point of view, is to advance their career. Typically this means posting cutting-edge results in high impact journals using novel methods. Relinquishing control over crucial details allowing a researcher to continue publishing high-impact papers would increase the competition for the researcher in that academic space, making it harder for that individual to advance their career.

<comment><USER5> How do the sources of funding (R&D divisions, universities, governments) fit in this picture? Do they have access to the "secret sauce" or do they have to pay extra consultation fees on top of research grants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find the title of the article rather exaggerating...

As of the first difference pointed out in the article, one of the CS224D lectures on word2vec did addressed it:

[https://youtu.be/aRqn8t1hLxs?t=2650](https://youtu.be/aRqn8t1hLxs?t=2650)

It was also mentioned later in the lecture that having two vectors representing each word is meant to make the optimisation easier (so it's kind of a trick); at the end, the two vectors learnt will have to be averaged over in order to reach a single vector for each word.

To be fair, the fact that each word is represented by two vectors was also mentioned in the original paper describing word2vec:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4546.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4546.pdf)

On page 3, just beneath equation (2).

Why so surprised?

</comment><comment><USER7> For the past week I have been frustrated by an opensource code of a deep learning paper. This type of things are so common in academia. The particular code I looked at has missing documentation, hardcoded local paths, broken dataset download links and broken pretrained model download links. I have to fix bugs before the code can run. I'm very curious how did the author run that code with the bugs.

I call them insincerely opensourced projects.

<comment><USER8> This sort of thing is aggravating to read. Frankly it comes off as really entitled. As researchers, the expectation is now that we not only have to do the research and write a paper like the good old days, but we have to release the code too. Okay, fine. But now that's not enough either -- the code has to be well-documented and clean. Ugh, alright, fine -- it's going to take me a few extra weeks of not doing research, but I'll clean up all the code, rerun experiments to make sure it all still works like before, and add a bunch of documentation. But no, still not good enough -- it has to run at the press of a button in _your_ particular programming environment. If we don't know how to write a script (or couldn't be bothered to spend the time writing one) to check that the data is on disk and, if not, crawl a website to download some huge dataset in one click, test our code on your OS, your CPU/GPU/TPU/..., etc., we were being "insincere" with our open-sourcing efforts.

<comment><USER9> Pardon me, maybe I just misunderstood the whole idea of research but _what good is it if it 's not reproducible?_

I can understand it may be part of a meaningful personal journey for you, and I appreciate that. But if no one else can validate your research they're correct to discredit it and you.

So what is the optimal outcome here? Should we hold you to a standard of reproducibility even if it is as minimal as, "actually describe your algorithms correctly and don't misrepresent a piece of code and a paper?" Or should everyone just decide you can find your own research funding if it's not going to help anyone?

<comment><USER10> The original idea behind "reproducible" is that the ideas conveyed in the paper should be enough to reproduce the results. Physicists and biologists are not expected to drive over to your lab to figure out what's wrong with your setup.

Now, that said, reproducibility is terrible in many fields. CS has an opportunity to act as a trailblazer here, but it should be noted that this would be holding themselves to a higher standard than their peers in other fields. As a result, there's going to be a learning process for everyone as they figure out how to make this all work. :)

<comment><USER11> Some pretty good computer science got done before devops was gifted to the world.

And some pretty good science got done before computer scientists were gifted to the world.

I'm genuinely skeptical that modern software engineering practices are a good way of thinking about reproduction in science. Even in computer science. There's a lot that scientists can learn from software engineering (and in fact I've helped run workshops in the past on exactly this topic), but science is not engineering.

<comment><USER9> > Some pretty good computer science got done before devops was gifted to the > world.

I'm happy to talk about this if you want. One of the most important aspects of this work was that people like Dijkstra started using notions that approached what real computers could read while remaining human-readable. This is some measure of classical "reproducibility". And work like McCarthy's was revolutionary in part because it was a definition of reproducibility as a result!

I can give examples of shockingly good papers that are struggling to see the light of day in their industry because they're written in ways that make them hard not only to understand, but to reproduce.

So don't presume to lecture me about this. Part of the reason the word2vec paper stands out is precisely because this is such a deviation from the norm to have a paper misrepresent its most fundamental component: the algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it very unfair to the original set of word2vec papers to be talking about 'academic dishonesty'. This is a case of a user that has little to no experience with neural networks. There are a ton of articles describing the need for random initialization [1][2]. In fact, if one spends a few seconds thinking about it, the need is evident. Without it, the NN cannot perform symmetry breaking: If inputs are set to zero, all neurons will perform the same calculations, rendering the network useless.

[1] google: "neural networks vector initialization" [2] [http://deeplearning.ai/ai-notes/initialization/](http://deeplearning.ai/ai- notes/initialization/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's hardly the point of the article --- the actual paper does not describe the use of two separate vectors for each word. The initialization was an interesting tidbit.

<comment><USER13> Except it does? After Equation 2: "v_w and v'_w are the input and output vector representations of w."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On a similar note, a long time ago I read the Doc2Vec paper, then looked at popular Doc2Vec implementations. They didn't seem to do the same thing. The paper said you basically make vectors for words, then append on an additional space that represents the additional information of documents as opposed to single words.

All popular implementations I found seemed to put the document vectors into the same space as the word vectors. They also didn't seem to do any better than a tf-idf weighted average of word vectors... curious if anyone has ever bumped against this.

<comment><USER15> The only code released by the 'Paragraph Vector' paper authors was a small patch, from Mikolov, that added paragraph-vectors to the original `word2vec.c` implementation in a very simple way: treating the 1st token of each line as a special paragraph-vector, still string-named (and allocated in the same lookup dictionary). Only by convention (a special prefix on those paragraph-vector tokens) could collisions with similarly-named word-vectors avoided.

That's a nice minimal way to demo/test the idea, but limited and fragile in other ways. The initial gensim implementation did something similar, then I changed it to use a separate doc-vectors space, to better support a lot of options (including the PV-DM mode with a concatenative input layer – which has never been confirmed to perform as well as the original paper implied).

<comment><USER14> Insightful. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just as a curiosity, complementing what others have already written... I read part of Mikolov's thesis and code in the past (when I was still studying at the university, so I might have got everything wrong (I still don't get half of it :D)). First I found it quite shocking that the code was so bad. The training code was pretty confusing to me, and I found the lack of useful comments discouraging. The test code (which loaded stored embeddings from a file and allowed some basic operations) was even much, much worse. Like, declaring three variables (a, b, c) and reusing them for different things in the main functions without explaining anything, and doing linear searches through the whole embeddings to find a word vector... very ugly and scary things.

So, I had a very bad impression of the code. But then, I checked the thesis, and I found it awesome. The amount of tests and implementations the guy made, and how he showed in practice how better results could be achieved in a good number of different setups... I found it really impressive. But such great work paired with such bad code! I was just a CS student, so I found it shocking. Nowadays I realize he was simply focused on a different thing, and the results he obtained were indeed outstanding and talk for themselves.

It's easy to look back and criticise the code, but when you look at the work he did in perspective... it's completely unfair to ask more from him (admittedly, they had time to address some of the issues later, but they probably had better things to do too).

</comment><comment><USER17> This kind of things happens all the time in academia. The authors are either constrained by space due to paper limitations or they are too lazy to explain all the little details that go into the algorithm.

I used to do research in computer vision a few years ago and it used to be that people won't publish their code _and_ they purposely won't put in all of the details of the algorithm in the paper. Many of those algorithms were patent pending and I assume the authors were hoping to make some money from the patents. Compared to that, it's a lot better nowadays where most of the popular papers come with published code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is this really that common? That's disheartening, I want to spend time in academia but experiences like this are sucking the fun out for me...

<comment><USER18> I tried to make use of some public audio research and it was pretty bad. There was an audio comprehensibility competition a few years ago. Some of the papers submitted are still around, as well as the summary paper describing the results. But many papers are hard to find, and those that claimed to have source code available are hard to find --- i was able to get matlab sources for a few algorithms, but they somehow work on the example files, but mostly crash on my files.

It's a shame because I understand the idea of the paper, and have an excellent place to apply it, but I lack the DSP background, so I can't really rebuild the code from scratch -- so the work is not able to be used.

<comment><USER19> this sounds interesting, would you care to reference the paper in question?

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure if I can find the exact paper anymore. This was in response to the Hurricane Challenge, a summary of results is available [1]. I tried to use code for uwSSDRCt available from the legacy page of the conference [2], under the link "Live and recorded speech modifier", direct download here [3].

The basic context is verification code delivery -- I'm playing pre-recorded samples of numbers to users, and can't control or sample the noise (either transmission or environmental), but would like to enhance intelligibility to reduce user effort, improve experience, and reduce costs.

[1] [https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/17887878/Cooke_et...](https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/17887878/Cooke_et_al_2013_Intelligibility_enhancing_speech_modifications.pdf)

[2] [https://web.archive.org/web/20131012005150/http://listening-...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131012005150/http://listening- talker.org/legacy.html)

[3] [http://www.laslab.org/resources/LISTA/code/D4.3.zip](http://www.laslab.org/resources/LISTA/code/D4.3.zip)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They're not really that different.

There's only a second vector for a word in the (common, default) negative- sampling case, where each predictable word has a distinct "output node" of the neural network, and the second vector is the in-weights to that one node. Still, most implementations don't emphasize this vector – the classic "word- vector" is a word's representation when it's a neural-network input. And in the hierarchical-softmax training mode, there's no clear second vector.

I suspect the original word2vec authors left out a clearer description of the initialization as they were following some oft-assumed practices implied by their other descriptions.

Another minor difference between the literal descriptions, and original C implementation, was a slightly different looping order in skip-gram training: holding a target-word, and then looping over all context-words, rather than holding a context-word, then looping over all neighboring target-words. One of the authors once mentioned that the shipped approach was slightly more efficient – maybe it was due to CPU cache issues? In any case all the same context->target pairs get trained either way, just in a slightly different order.

</comment><comment><USER20> instead of thinking about what it is in practice: skip-gram negative sampling, I think it's much more intuitive to think about what it is in theory: extreme multi-class classification.

word2vec is a multi-class classification problem with a softmax output layer and cross-entropy loss. The novel part of word2vec, in my opinion, is two:

1\. dataset (proximal input word & output word) generation from documents eg: skiagram, CBOW, etc 2\. engineering speedup for softmax: Approximate Softmax eg Negative Sampling using NCE, hierarchal softmax, etc

If you just build word2vec w/o step 2, it's a easier to understand. Then when you get that working, add in the negative sampling speedup trick which isn't core the theoretical algorithm.

<comment><USER12> Can't really call it a speedup trick, since it actually improves the performance of the embeddings but in terms of qualitative understanding, I see where you're coming from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The title reads to me like hyperbole.

The implementation can differ, they got time to refactor/optimize it after the publication. But they can't probably revise the paper itself. As long as the code is there and can produce said/better result, then it is probably your responsibility to keep the differences in check.

It is actually quite common for deep learning papers overall, the github repo gets updated after the paper is out, and you will find the divergence lying there.

</comment><comment><USER22> My intuition for that, and you can tell me if its wrong.

The normal explanation for Word2Vec is 2 weight matrices, so the formula looks like this: (One_hot_input x W1) x W2, which is then softmaxed.

W1 then is the matrix that contain our focus embedding from, but if we only evaluate specific words on the target side, then W2 are actually our context embeddings, and the normal multiplication then is focus_w x context_w.

Am I wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> Now it's `one_hot_focus x W1 x (one_hot_context x W2)^T`. So we still pick one row of the matrix from the focus and context embeddings, but they're separate embeddings.

<comment><USER22> Yes, but thats also what happens in the normal formulation, no? So the second weight matrix actually are our context embeddings?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's patented BTW — [https://patents.google.com/patent/US9037464B1/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US9037464B1/en)

<comment><USER24> Turns the patent only describes the paper, but not the implementation. Great, and somewhat ironic

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Grossly unfair title</comment>


Running the Arctic's Alt-Weekly Newspaper - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenation.com/article/arctic-newspaper-climate-svalbard/ <comment><USER2> That "international feeling" likely results from the unique (as far as I know) visa policy of not having any: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_Svalbard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_Svalbard)

Interesting place for sure.

<comment><USER3> So if you come to the mainland from Svalbard, do you have to go through an entry process as if you were coming from outside the Schengen area?

<comment><USER4> That you do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excerpt:

 _About three years ago, I was sitting in this cafe at 4pm on a Thursday and I got a call from someone in my building saying, you might wanna go home—our building is suffering massive structural damages from sinking into permafrost.

Well, I did exactly what she said: I got home and threw as many belongings as I could get my hands on into vehicles anyone could provide. In two hours, they blew up the building and that was that. I had a flat that was worth, I don't know, $200,000 dollars and immediately it was worth nothing, I was bankrupt.

The only reason I'm still here is people chipped in and helped me find a place and also helped when I was injured. If I was in the US I'd be homeless and definitely dead because health care is that bad.

My rent is 23 days overdue and my landlord is tired of me being late._

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