Once a somebody, now a nobody: Starcraft 2 has destroyed my life - <AUTHOR> http://www.olganon.org/?q=node/27012 <comment><USER2> As somebody who went through nearly the exact same experience with a different game several years ago, it's really disappointing (and unhelpful) to see so much emphasis put on the game. Starcraft 2 didn't destroy his life, his lack of self-control did. There are millions of people playing Starcraft 2 worldwide who did not do what he did. Taking action to overcome the Starcraft addiction is a good first step, but it won't do him any good if he lapses into addictive behavior in another aspect of his life.

It sounds like the poster is a really motivated guy, and lionhearted is correct in his sibling post here that that can be a strong force for productivity if you can master it. I really hope that Tom manages to do so, because at 21, he's got his whole (non-destroyed) life ahead of him. Losing two years to an addiction is a big deal, but it's something you can overcome and possibly even come out stronger from.

Edit: Since I talked a little bit about my own circumstances in a reply, I might as well go into detail here, particularly since it looks like the actual linked post might be a lie/exaggeration. I played Final Fantasy XI (an MMO, unlike most games in the series) from the fall of 2004 until the fall of 2009, and World of Warcraft from then until January of 2011.

During that time, my life outside of the game basically stopped. I dropped out of college, I moved back in with my parents, I stopped programming and reading, which were my main interests before the MMOs came along. For a few of the years in the middle I didn't work or even really leave the house. Eventually I got pushed out because my parents knew that what I was doing wasn't a healthy lifestyle, but I did just enough to adapt and got a job an an apartment and continued gaming.

What pushed me to quitting wasn't any sudden realization, but just a slow- building frustration with the whole idea of MMORPGs. Eventually it hit critical mass and I quit FFXI, thinking that the problem was just that I needed a better game. A year of WoW convinced me otherwise, and I've been putting my life back together since then. I (obviously) don't mind talking about it now, and I'd be glad to answer questions if anyone has them.

<comment><USER3> You could make the same argument that a lack of self-control destroys the lives of heroin addicts.

That self-control is based, however, on biological and physiological pathways.

Dopamine receptors, and anomalies with the dopamine system, in particular, can leave people vulnerable to various addictive habits: [http://www.people.co.uk/lifestyle/real-life/2010/10/03/ms- tu...](http://www.people.co.uk/lifestyle/real-life/2010/10/03/ms-turned-me- into-a-compulsive-gambler-102039-22603246/)

<comment><USER4> The difference between Starcraft and heroin is that the _vast_ majority of Starcraft users do not become addicts. In fact, only a _very, very_ small portion of users do - heroin has no claims to the same.

This also brings social gaming in as a concern - what is the moral stance on games what have been _specifically and deliberately_ engineered with said biological and psychological pathways in mind, with addiction as an intended outcome as opposed to an accidental and marginal one?

<comment><USER5> It's morally wrong to trick someone biological and psychological in order for them to play games in order to generate income for a game company. But I think there's a way to balance between making users like the game thus generate income for the company and making users biologically and psychologically rely on the game.

<comment><USER6> In the end, is there really any difference between making a game that is fun and a game that is addicting? I really don't think there is even if they went in with the idea of "lets make this game addicting".

I've never once seen a game that is not fun, but is addicting. Although my friends have said Master of Orion 3 fits that description, but I never actually saw them ever play it so I think it was a joke.

<comment><USER7> There's a great talk about this from some guy at Digital Illusions. He found some definition of what a "game" is and compared that definition with Farmville, it failed on every single bullet. I can't remember the exact details but it contained things like it has to be challenging, a skilled player should easily beat a newbie, not requiring grinding. What's interesting is that the definitions are not designed with the sole purpose of bashing farmville, all of them really make sense and origin from even before computer era.

 _If somebody knows where to find the talk please post it, my google-fu is weak today. He also compares the iphone to a swiss army knife and the ipad to a "swiss-army-kitchen-utensil" (i.e too bad to be really useful and too big to fit in your pocket). The talk was just a few weeks after the first ipad release. It also contains alot of other talk about the future of gaming for the general masses, facebook games and gaming anything in life(like shopping), etc. If that's enough to trigger anyones memory._

<comment><USER8> Jesse Schell at DICE. No Google-fu required. I just know that talk inside and out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article has a lot of things which sound fake. Here's one:

 _I was 6'2'', 168 lbs, 1% body fat_

When I was climbing competitively, I once had my bodyfat measured (by DEXA) as just under 3%. For climbing, pretty much any weight (even most muscle) is just dead weight, so climbers are as skinny and lean as any athletes out there, and I only very rarely ran into people as lean as me.

I've known a lot of bodybuilders and wrestlers, and even there, it's rare to see people below 3%, and I've never heard of anyone who's tested below 2% bodyfat. 1%? I won't say that it's impossible, but to be alive and functioning at that level would require you to be a genetic freak on the same level as Lance Armstrong or Michael Phelps.

<comment><USER10> This was my main problem with the article. While it's well-written, it has many details that (on the face) seem way too contrived.

 _My friends even looked up to me, as they are monks who train Taoist Wudang Kung Fu in southwestern China. At one point I became a monk by my own right, and I was looked to for even spiritual advice._

So you're such a badass that monks that train others in Kung Fu looked up to you at 18 years old? They also made you a monk and decided you were enlightened enough to give spiritual advice, despite the fact that you have very obviously poor impulse control?

 _I tried being a drywaller, and a welder twice._

Why didn't you try doing what you spent all that time in southeast Asia learning, and start doing martial arts professionally? You could be a martial arts instructor, stunt man, or any other profession that hires badasses of this caliber.

Also, "being a welder" isn't something you just jump into without previous experience and/or equipment.

This whole thing feels made up for sympathy. Apologies if you're telling the entire truth, Tom.

<comment><USER11> >> _My friends even looked up to me, as they are monks who train Taoist Wudang Kung Fu in southwestern China. At one point I became a monk by my own right, and I was looked to for even spiritual advice._

> _So you're such a badass that monks that train others in Kung Fu looked up > to you at 18 years old? They also made you a monk and decided you were > enlightened enough to give spiritual advice, despite the fact that you have > very obviously poor impulse control?_

That is not as incredible as it seems. You can see his addictive and competitive personality in the martial arts training. I know people like that in the martial arts world.

Sometimes, in the East, you're promoted beyond your skill and competency in order to encourage you to grow into the role. If his teachers are genuine, they would have recognized his addictive personality to begin with. What's even funnier and sad is that, they would have accepted his shame in going a little crazy. It is surviving and healing from this that will allow him more empathy as his role as a monk in the future.

You're also making a very common mistake that seems to pop up in America, these strange notions about enlightenment and giving spiritual advice.

> _Why didn't you try doing what you spent all that time in southeast Asia > learning, and start doing martial arts professionally? You could be a > martial arts instructor, stunt man, or any other profession that hires > badasses of this caliber._

That's the same thing as jumping into the UFC. I feel the same way, and have avoided teaching, let alone doing stunts or getting paid to inflict violence and death. If he were as obsessed about Buddhism in his teenage years as he was to games and martial arts training (likely), then these professions would not have appealed to him.

Anyways, the post is to Gamers Online Anonymous. I'm glad there's such an organization out there. I doubt this guy wrote it gain sympathy from you specifically. Maybe the post is for sympathy, maybe it isn't. It doesn't matter, because the addiction is real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds like he has the "rage to master" personality trait... very conducive to hardcore training and mastery in something like martial arts or a craft skill, or a discipline... also conducive to addiction or getting "way too into" hedonistic pursuits.

I've got it too, and have made insane/amazing progress and gotten quite good at some skills, crafts, and disciplines in fast time. I've also burned many hours on something like Civilization IV or playing lots of Chess. It's a mixed bag.

I wrote about it here --

[http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/advice-if-youve-got-the- rag...](http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/advice-if-youve-got-the-rage-to- master-personality-trait)

Definitely worth reading if you've got the same personality mix.

<comment><USER13> I've never heard of the term 'rage to master' but I've been told this behaviour is common in people with Aspergers Syndrome. Intense interests which takes priority in life only to be substituted with something else weeks, months or a couple of years down the line.

Maybe you can shed some more light on the 'rage to master' personality trait you're talking about?

<comment><USER12> Ellen Winner coined the term in the book "Gifted Children: Myths And Realities" --

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465017592/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465017592/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0465017592&linkCode=as2&tag=sebastianmcom-20)

I'm not able to find the definitive research paper on it right now which was titled "The Origins and Ends of Giftedness," but here's one on the trait in the visual arts which should give you an idea --

<https://www2.bc.edu/~winner/pdf/talent_in_visual_arts.pdf>

Despite the term being catchy/interesting, most of the literature on it is very academic and somewhat dry. It probably makes for poor curiosity reading, but it's _supremely valuable_ to dig through the academic papers if you have the trait yourself or you're a parent/guardian/teacher of someone who does.

<comment><USER13> Seeing as I have yet to read up on the matter I can't say that I do or do not have the trait myself. But from the little that I've come to understand I'd say it's highly plausible.

I'll continue to look into it, I find awareness of oneself's personality of highest importance and I always strive to learn more about why I do the things I do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems like he was already screwing up his life pretty well before SC2 was released:

"Fast forward to summer '10. By now I had moved out of three apartments with my friends. I lost three jobs. I tried being a drywaller, and a welder twice. In between my friends and I would do odd-jobs that lasted a week at a time then would get paid one large sum, then blow it all on alcohol and marijuana. Living literally off of pickle juice, beer, bread once in a while, redbull, and cigarettes, we found ourselves wasting our days away on the Xbox with nothing else to do but wait for a job. Finally, I had to move back into my mother's house (a big time alcholic, who is seperated 15 years now from my father, a raging, abusive in every way alcholic) _and that's where I took the deep plunge into hellish unconciousness._

Waiting eagerly for years for the realease of Starcraft 2 I waited in line 2 hours at 2:00 am for the special release...."

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure the whole thing is a fabrication - the details all sound like what you hear from a bad liar:

      - 1% body fat
      - ran 12 miles and got bored (so he walked home??)
      - 20 one-handed push-ups on either side (but only 100 combined??)
      - became a monk
      - shrank an inch in a year do to inactivity

<comment><USER16> 24 miles in a day is a long day but feasible. I've done 18 miles walking, starting mid-morning and ending early afternoon. Running one way would shorten the time needed (though would also cause faster exhaustion, I presume).

The other sounds less likely...

<comment><USER17> I think the silly part is why would you run 12 miles, get bored, and then WALK home? Shouldn't you just run home?

<comment><USER18> Nah, sometimes you just don't want to run anymore. I've definitely done 10k runs, and just stop and look for a bus home. It's not even that you're too tired to run (though that plays a role). Some people can just keep running as long as they keep in the flow. When you lose it, running quickly becomes boring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can relate to the OP in certain parts – though some bits do sound odd. (Like the mentioned 1% and being a top monk.)

When SC2 was released, I got into it big time as well. I know I have an addictive personality (if given the right method and circumstance), but I didn't know the term 'rage to master' I'll have to look it up.

Anyway, I slept and breath SC2. I knew it was going to get me in trouble, I had no delusions of going Pro, but I just wanted to be good. I hated the feeling of losing to cheese tactics and winnings games, surprisingly, only gave me a mild high. If I won, I wanted to be a legit win. SC2 to me is chess on steroids. I'd kept playing no matter if I won or lost.

I was aware of my personality flaw so I gave myself a goal – Plat #1 on my division and I'm done. So I reached the goal and immediately quit the ladder game. My ability to do this made me doubt if I really had an addictive personality. I find myself going through the same process for other games such as WoW and D3 – aim for the highest (reasonable) goal, 'prove' something to myself and be done.

It's really unfortunate, since I rarely play games for the sake of 'fun' anymore (any online game bring out the competitiveness in me.) Just like the Matrix guy, I don't see them as games anymore, I see them as ways to min/max, look for exploits, efficiency, risks vs rewards, mathematical equations.

<comment><USER20> "... I don't see them as games anymore, I see them as ways to min/max, look for exploits, efficiency, risks vs rewards, mathematical equations."

I was talking with a fellow gamer, and we both made the same observation about playing video games at an above-casual level. I realized (when playing Skyrim) that I was focusing so hard on being as efficient and successful as possible, that I wasn't really enjoying myself anymore.

I've since been making an effort to play games more casually. I can still be competitive, but if playing games feels like a chore, I'm doing it wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This sounds so fake :/ There are certainly video game addicts out there, it's a serious problem in korea and china, but I think this is a troll and/or pathological liar.

<comment><USER22> I do know what you mean. All that stuff about becoming a monk was curiously non-specific. Still, we should assume good faith here: we stand to gain nothing by making accusations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think video games can become extremely addicting to a certain mental/psychological cross-section that is highly represented on Hacker News. While most drugs have a cycle of reward and withdrawal video games have that in very small sustainable bursts but connected to the act of being clever. We like being clever for its own sake but we really enjoy it when we use it to defeat or conquer something, no matter how synthetic and abstract. Do you feel any different zergrushing an unprepared base or finally getting that Clojure script to run correctly? I really don't, and I've had to remind myself over the years to focus my endeavors towards productive learning even if the rewards come a little more slowly and are harder to get.

It's great that he posted this though. He'll be able to come back and read it over and over - and hopefully it will help him begin to take responsibility for his life and what he can do to change it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Bit of personal insight here, I have anger issues that may border on bi-polar. I've never attempted a diagnosis or treatment, I just try to maintain a cool head. Most of the time I'm rational and level headed. However, there are certain triggers that just make me snap, completely flipping my personality.

On more than one occasion, Starcraft 2 was one of those triggers. It only occurred after long heated anonymous matches that I lost, never during single player or with friends. I shelved Starcraft 2 shortly after a bad outburst where I broke the door of my wooden keyboard tray.

If I had to guess, the intense focus I was putting into Starcraft broke my normal awareness of my emotions. Thus, loosing control when I was defeated.

<comment><USER22> Going from normal to angry is not "flipping" your personality. It's called bipolar for a reason: there are two poles, equidistant from a center. It's also called manic depression: when you're not depressed you're often high as fuck.

What you described is called "getting really angry and losing your shit." It happens to pretty much everyone.

EDIT: I probably should have written that like less of an asshole. Sorry - I'm not here to deny your problems. The point still stands though.

<comment><USER24> Perhaps I chose the word bipolar incorrectly, but it's the closest word that describes the situations I've encountered with my anger.

I guess the feeling is hard to describe; "getting really angry and losing your shit." doesn't cover it at all, especially in the situations I can remember. Everybody looses their cool, this is way beyond that for me. The situations where it's come up wouldn't constitute the level of rage I've felt.

<comment><USER22> There is a continuum between losing your shit, like normal people do, and having a full blown behavioural disorder that destroys your life. We all lie somewhere on it. There's probably another continuum that goes off in the other direction, with jesus hanging out on the end with master joshu or something.

If you need to put a label on yourself, intermittent explosive disorder or something is likely closer than bipolar.

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

There really is no reason to pathologize your behaviour unless you want to seek treatment though. There's a lot of shite in the DSM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I totally understand. Totally. This is a dangerous path taken, but it could happen for everyday things. Having the inner pressure to do things when things dont need to be done only to avoid feeling stale.

I was better than anyone I knew in my job and I kept studying edge cases of my profession that I would never need. Soon my job became too easy. I would spend time studying professioms related to mine only in case I come up with something useful. Make no mistake this was not workaholism since it had nothing to do with my day to day work except in very rare circumstances. I also know that this is personally unproductive since I work as a manager and I can tell mismanagement of resources I mile away. I am very strict unfortunately only on everybody else but me. I read issue queues and follow forums for open source projects for thing I will never use. Same thing goes for stackoverflow for a series of languages. I have studied history books, correlating things on various books and sources and historical archives. Attempting to put everything in an elasticsearch cluster for better fulltext search. To what end, I don't know. My spouse has gotten used to this but my friends seem to have changed during the years. I have no long term goals and many things I learned I won't use. Since my addictions are not fun related they just look like hobbies. The problem is they add up to many hours a day.

I would not call it rage to succeed, I would call it inability to stand still mentally.

</comment><comment><USER26> > I'm afraid to leave the house to be seen; I don't even want to see my > friends anymore. All I want to do is sleep because I'm so ashamed of what > I've become it's painful to be awake and have to think about it all.

God, do I know this feeling. I don't know if I would have gotten away from it without friends and family.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is bizarre, really. You known, while being addicted to something may be a big problem, the OP sounds much more depressed than addicted. Come one, 21 years old and his life is destroyed? how come? He even has money for beer and cigarretes? The guy should take a walk into some hospital to watch people that are screwed up really bad, both physically and mentally.

And I don't mean to be moralist, even if I sound like one. The main problem is that he must get up and decide to change his life, see that he is a perfectly normal young guy. If he can't quit playing by himself, why don't he look for help? A psychologist or even a psychiatrist may be of great help, but they sure wont come to his home from out of nowhere.

<comment><USER28> You do realize that obsessive/addictive personalities and depression go hand in hand right?

<comment><USER27> Sure, and I'm also aware that there is cure for this, but you must go for it. If this story is real, I hope that now that he is aware that he is troubled, he will seek professional help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The poster has what my mother always called an 'addictive' personality. It's both a benevolent and malevolent trait to have. I'm sure most professional athletes or anyone that 'masters' something to any sort of extreme has to have this sort of trait to stay intrinsically motivated.

I am disappointed to see people blaming 'this or that game' for their problems. Personally these types of folks need help and a good safety net of friends and family to point out what's truly happening instead of being surrounded by those with the same issues. Unfortunately it sounds like this guy had none of the former and plenty of the latter.

</comment><comment><USER30> Definitely a troll, this was the tell (where he refers to the UFC/combat fighting): "those institutions are false and insulting to real martial artists. The people who take place in them worship violent demagogues."

Funny.

<comment><USER31> I dunno... I could see the heads of some traditional McDojo type TKD or Karate schools trying to promote thinking like that. I think they realize that most of the world has moved on and recognized MMA / hybrid training as more effective for actual combat, so they might try to reposition themselves by trying to paint MMA as wanton violence.

Heck, some of them might actually _believe_ that their stuff is superior to MMA, based on some woo aspect or other. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Would it be possible to make a nicotine patch for Starcraft 2? How about a less addictive version to wean yourself off it. Maybe, you switch to Starcraft I, and then Warcraft. How about messing up the resolution, or having a slow internet connection with lag? What if you have a computer that cheats for you?

What would it take to make such a thing? Is it possible? Exactly what elements of Starcraft make it addictive? Would it be possible to make a similar but less addictive version?

</comment><comment><USER33> Should I feel terrible now?

I work in the team, making one of the the best selling fps games.

Then again I don't like playing fps games, I'm just supporting tools code.

I don't like multiplayer games at all, especially mmorpgs ones. I do love hot- seat multiplayer games like Heroes of Might and Magic - it's great fun. People in the same room, taking turns, and in the mean time having laugh and jokes (and smelly clothes, also a bit drunk after 24hr marathons)

For single player - old quest games, and JRPGs took many hours of my life...

<comment><USER34> No, it is not your responsibility if people have no self control and abuse the game. Just like if you work in McDonalds and someone keeps eating there everyday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> If anything this story has nothing to do with SC2, and all the fact that this guy is a depressed addict. Anything would do, he just chose video games.

</comment><comment><USER36> I find this story pretty hard to believe. It might, I guess it might be true, but it seems a bit fanciful. For sure, even if only partly, this person clearly has major problems with balancing things. But the Kung Fu master part seems a incredulous to me. In the story, we go straight from being one of the greatest monks the Wu Tang Clan has ever seen to ... doing drywall odd jobs for money to buy weed and beer ... seems like something is missing there. Then there's the bit of moving out into the wilderness, resuming this big regime of training. I just don't know about that.

IANAP (psychologist), but I would say probably this person has a big problem with video games, but more specifically impulses and I would venture to guess possibly a hard time distinguishing reality from fantasy. Probably, the inability to distinguish reality from fantasy is one of the bigger problems here and then addiction. It's good that this person seems to want help, get out of the hole. I think it will definitely take professional help; there's more going on here than just playing Starcraft 2 too much.

</comment><comment><USER37> Guys this is obviously fake.

</comment><comment><USER38> Believe it or not, even learning can become addictive. I know a lot of people that have an addiction to learning new technologies, but they never actually build anything. The pleasure of learning new things is what they crave. They learn something, then they go learn something else, then something else. Sometimes they get two or three degrees in unrelated fields. It gives them a false sense of productivity. In the end its like playing Starcraft. It does not lead to any output. Just firing of neurons within their brains.

<comment><USER39> Accomplishment can also become addictive. That's why they call it workaholism.

Usually these things result from a misfiring in the brain. Some are more impressive to the outside world than others, but none of them really satisfy the person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Videogames are harder to quit than drugs? What has he been smoking?

<comment><USER41> I lost a lot of seventh and eighth grades to video games, and the final departure from them entailed smashing Starcraft 1 and Brood War CDs in my driveway, in front of my friends, who were telling me "not to waste the CDs." But I needed to do something cathartic, and in my case smashing the discs helped me go cold-turkey.

I wrote about it a little bit more here: [https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/from-the- departmen...](https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/from-the-department- of-no-shit-technology-and-computers-are-not-a-silver-bullets-for-education) .

<comment><USER40> I guess there is still a chance that playing those games gained you some super powers, similar to Karate Kid washing the cars.

There are also a lot of ways to waste time. Few people seem to make good use of it, so perhaps again it is not really Computer Games that are to blame?

<comment><USER42> Who didn't lose a lot of time on 7th and 8th grade to something? That age is defined by being a lost time for the most of us.

<comment><USER41> I think a lot of people were playing sports, or practicing an instrument, or learning how to deal with the opposite sex (or maybe even the same sex), or reading. . . all of them, to me, more viable activities than Starcraft, at least at the level I played.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> A friend of mine was just as bad of a game addict when it drove him to drop out of graduate school and become a deadbeat. He's now a successful game designer at Blizzard.

</comment><comment><USER44> I would bet on contrived.

</comment><comment><USER45> I find that videogames fill a void more than they create it.

Spending too much time on them seems more like an effect than a cause.

</comment><comment><USER46> I haven't played StarCraft 2 yet. Wow; is it really that good? Think I might go buy a copy today.

</comment><comment><USER47> it would be very interesting to know how is he doing now (since a year has passed, as you can see the post linked is from 2011) and why he didn't try to teach martial arts professionally

</comment><comment><USER48> What league are you in? I hope GM!

</comment><comment><USER49> I am very thankful that I don't have a too terribly addictive personality. At worst, I'm addicted to "the Internet", but only in the sense that I'd rather be reading Hacker News or programming a side project than hiking or sitting on my ass watching TV.

That having been said, I have a handful of friends or acquaintances that have problems with addiction. Each of them ruined their college experience with a combination of: drinking, pot, alcohol and finally Adderall (to fix their attention, but ultimately fueling alcoholic-ish binges).

It's terribly sad because I'm an excellent student who spent basically three years straight getting high after classes and homework and continued to work on my github projects. Stopped when I moved away for an internship cold turkey and had a headache for a few hours and then was back to normal.

I hope that we can learn how to screen for these things or provide better treatments for people that get addicted to those sorts of psychological releases. Video games are a nice way for me to relax and I've been known to have a four hour binge with a bottle of wine on a Friday night, but I can't imagine literally losing control of my life.</comment>


Kim Dotcom: 'Eat this FBI, leading the Time100 poll with a 93% approval rating' - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/10/kim-dotcom-eat-this-fbi-leading-the-time100-poll-with-a-93-approval-rating/

<comment><USER2> _First place for positive votes is Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi (no, I didn't recognize the name either)_

Good grief. He should be embarrassed to call himself a journalist and be so ignorant of world affairs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Didn't Kim Jong Un win the poll last year? [http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2012/12/4chan-votes- kim...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2012/12/4chan-votes-kim-jong-un- to-top-of-times-person-of-the-year-poll.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I love how the FBI illegally fucking with him has essentially legitimized him. (Didn't really seem to work with Julian Assange, though)

<comment><USER5> Assange is an entirely different case... while the US have proven in the Dotcom case that they're willing to step way over the boundaries of law (and force others to do so), Assanges cred took a huge dive as he fled to Great Britain, of all countries.

That the Swedish government is a f..kbuddy of the USA is widely known since the TPB raid, but the GB gov't even went into war together with the Americans, just for the sake of it. So why did Assange choose a country with even CLOSER ties to the US to flee there?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't that poll a total joke dominated by mass multi-vote hacks?

<comment><USER7> Yup. Just wondering what they'll make it spell this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh, it's an online poll. For a moment I thought this was something worth being posted on HN.

</comment><comment><USER9> Leading an online poll is not that much of an achievement - it puts him in the august company of people such as Hank the angry drunken dwarf.

</comment><comment><USER10> IIRC at various times, the Time100 online poll has been led by L. Ron Hubbard, Ayn Rand, Kemal Ataturk and Paul Atreides.

</comment><comment><USER11> Because that is totally hard to manipulate and he's totally not the kind of person who'd do that.

Right.

<comment><USER5> I'd rather expect manipulation from Anonymous, in contrast to him they have a proven track record of manipulating online votes for teh lulz

<comment><USER11> Kim Schmitz, on the other hand, has a proven track record of manipulating anything and everything for personal gain and self-aggrandization.</comment></comment></comment>


Spam now accounts for 92% of all email, all-time record  - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/2009/08/02/spam-email-all-time-high/ <comment><USER2> (..as a user of GMail) What's that "spam" thing I keep hearing about?

I really wish Google could share their spam filters with the rest of the world. I hardly see any spam.</comment>


New approach to AI to improve many Google products - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429442/google-puts-its-virtual-brain-technology-to-work/?

<comment><USER2> Lets go easy on the virtual brain parts and hype. These approaches basically all consider some simple, fixed function f that is parameterized by some unknown numbers W, and everything comes down to finding the numbers W that give some desired result (for voice recognition example, correct answers to a huge dataset of pairs of f( <some sound wave features> ) = <some word>). Now, it is hard to do this efficiently and it's all very interesting, but are we going to reduce AI to finding a conveniently-tuned input -> output function? This is much closer to simple regression than a thinking brain.

Also, this approach is not new but has been around since 1980's. We do have a richer family of models to draw from and a few new tricks, but much of the progress comes primarily from faster computers and infrastructure.

The correct article is as follows: Google is building an amazing piece of infrastructure that allows them to run stochastic gradient descent across many machines very quickly. This engineering feat is particularly convenient for a certain family of models that have been around for the last many years and, as it turns out, scaling up these models actually seems to work well in several common and important scenarios. Equipped with this hammer, Google is currently busy trying to figure out just how many of their problems are a nail.

<comment><USER3> > that have been around for the last many years

Unsupervised deep learning is the heart of what they are doing, and this is a relatively new method (first I saw it was at NIPS in Dec 2006). The 1980s were dominated by two layer supervised feedforward neural networks, which are quite different.

<comment><USER4> Correct, and an excellent point. Also, using unsupervised learning to process very complex input, that builds simpler models - and then using supervised learning on this simpler input is useful.

I wrote a commercial Go playing program in the late 1970s that was all procedural code. I have been thinking of hitting this problem again (on just a 9x9 board) using this combination of unsupervised learning to reduce the complexity of the input data, and then use a combination of supervised learning and some hand-written code.

Fast hardware was not available before to use deep neural networks (> 1 hidden layer) the last time I did Go playing programming. (There are also new monte carlo techniques that are providing really good results.)

<comment><USER5> Are 80s-style neural networks better at anything, or is the new stuff going to always be better?

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind that they are a supervised technique so they can't be compared to what google is doing.

80s style neural networks are flexible and powerful learners. Theoretically they can learn any function, and in practice they often come up with decent solutions. They aren't perfect - there is no guarantee they will find the best solution ('local minima'), and they operate as a black-box, meaning we can't properly interpret them.

I've heard the saying "80s style neural networks are usually the second best solution", which is oversimplified but close to correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't consider neural networks "real AI" (whatever that means) but they are extremely useful and with faster hardware, I expect to see a lot more use in the future. At SAIC in the 1980s we built special expensive hardware using ECL just to get about 25 megaflops to simulate neural nets; now I probably get better than that on my cellphone :-)

In the late 1980s I was on a DARPA 'neural network tools' advisory panel and at my company we used neural nets to solve some otherwise very difficult problems. In a nutshell: one or more hidden neuron layers provide complex decision surfaces. In a simple toy scenario, with just two input variables, decision space is a 2D surface. In the 1980s, people often used linear models where a decision surface in this toy example would be a straight line. With neural networks (again in this toy scenario) a one hidden layer neural network allows a fairly arbitrary continuous curve as a decision surface; two hidden layers allow "islands," basically allowing arbitrary non-contiguous decision surfaces. Sorry if this is unclear; if we were at a white board together this would be easy.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I use "raw" LLVM IR or some wrapper over it? - <AUTHOR> Hi!
I feel like HN seems to be good place to ask this question because compilers seems to be quite popular topic here, so I'm going to ask
I want to write yet another programming lang which uses LLVM to generate WebAssembly
My perception of it is that I have to write parser of my lang and then some "translation layer" which will translate abstraction over my language to LLVM IR
But I'm not sure whether I should write "raw IR" or use some library like https://github.com/microsoft/LLVMSharp
I feel like "raw IR" is better / more reliable way, but I've no experience with low lvl stuff (asm and so on)
Also I'm not sure about how good LLVMSharp actually is
PS: I've heard about other LLVM IR wrappers in other languages, I'd rather stick to C# because I have some kind of deadline on it
Thanks in advance <comment><USER2> I built Yoga (a language for real-time robot control) using LLVM as the code generator in ORCJIT (on request just in time) mode. I'm pretty happy with LLVM.

LLVM is well documented, and generates extremely fast code. Robot control used a lot of floating point ops, and LLVM turns it into a surprisingly small number of SSE4 instructions.

I found it easier to call the LLVM API than to generate the IR as text. But it's _extremely_ convenient to be able to dump the result as IR. Like 80% of my debugging involved looking at IR dumps. And for really hard-core debug sessions you can hand-edit the IR, compile it, and call it from C programs.

I'm calling LLVM directly from C++, but LLVMSharp is probably the way to go if you want to work in C#.

If you use LLVM's JIT system, beware that orc::jit is about the 3rd different API and there are tutorials on the web for the previous APIs. You should probably start with LLVM 9.0.1 and ignore any tutorial not for orc::jit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment></comment>


Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Im-Chinese-I-will-go-to-university-in-America-but-Im-afraid-of-racism-Are-there-many-people-in-America-who-dont-like-Asians/answer/Bernard-Wang?share=1 <comment><USER2> "Confucian behaviorism is optimized for a Confucian society, and western behaviorism is optimized for western society." This is so true. Speaking Chinese/Japanese on a daily basis and regularly interacting with these two cultures, I would regularly encounter such differences.

In Japan, if you speak Japanese well, eventually they stop forgiving you as "oh, he's just a foreigner", and they hold you to similar standards. I.e. You should be careful how you express your opinion/thoughts to an elder.

Similarly, in China, it took me a bit to adjust to how direct Chinese people were about certain topics. For example, they will call you "fat" or call out many personal flaws that we would not do in America. (I know this is counter to the traditional thinking that Chinese are very withdrawn).

Similarly, with language, Japanese people will rarely call out any grammar/pronunciation error. Instead, they will ask a question, or give a gesture that you have to read into and infer from. Chinese people will call you out very directly, maybe even embarrass you in front of people to the point where you are too shy to speak. They don't mean it personal, they are just more open to this sort of direct personal criticism.

The author also mentioned jokes. I can relate to this, learning the language, let alone the culture is hard enough. Often times, humor is even harder as it requires a deep understanding of both language and culture.

Like the other said, the list goes on and on, but these things take so many years to adapt to and overcome. They are huge barriers to cultural integration.

I have a lot of respect for foreigners who even attempt to integrate with our culture (and vice versa).

p.s. I admit, I have gained some weight, so the criticism is deserved :)

<comment><USER3> "Japanese people will rarely call out any grammar/pronunciation error" & "In Japan, if you speak Japanese well, eventually they stop forgiving you as "oh, he's just a foreigner", and they hold you to similar standards."

There is also something else I notice: some people will decide they will not understand you because you look/are foreign no matter how hard you try or even if you don't make not many mistakes. There is a famous video about that[1] but this is not limited to Japan, I also saw it in France too with foreigners trying to speak French.

Also even in a cultural area there can be wide differences. Almost all Mandarin speakers I interact with (be they Taiwanese, mainlanders or huaqiao) seemed quite happy to talk their language with me. The Japanese not so much. I even sometimes hide my Japanese language ability and play it dumb to fit more in a group. And I plan not to expose a too great ability the day I got it unless necessary precisely too avoid being judged to harsh by the local standards.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLt5qSm9U80](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLt5qSm9U80)

<comment><USER4> Sorry to go off on a tangent, but where in France did you experience this? I'm a non-native speaker of French and I have never experienced this, not even when I was in my teens still learning French.

<comment><USER5> Paris is famous for it, though I've been to several parts of France and didn't have much issue... old people definitely tried to correct my accent but that's fine by me.

<comment><USER6> I'm not exactly sure what is the issue? My step-sister is Irish, I talk to her in English and she talk to me in French: this way we can practise our knowledge of foreign language. At work sometimes I did the reverse: a colleague would speak English and I would answer French, it's nice also: no cognitive load when you talk, you just have to be a little careful when you listen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It strikes me as really odd that mocking Asians this way is acceptable, while almost any remark about black people can be interpreted as serious racism.

In my opinion, people in the US are, without realizing it, very hypocritical and very stuck-up when it comes to racism. If your roommates joke that you will study all day, they are being really rude, but making fun at a cultural difference which is indeed very noticable (in general, Asian students study way more than American students). I don't think this is racism. The basic problem is that people think that being racist is a binary thing that can be triggered by saying something bad about groups of people (nowadays, it doesn't even have to be a racial group anymore). It is a very bad thing that such an undefined thing is taken so seriously (I think the usual definition of 'racism' is 'the idea that people of some racial groups are inferior to people of other racial groups', which would make the only racist thing to literally say that people of some racial groups are inferior to people of other racial groups.

I think similar behaviour against other ethnic groups should be treated the same way as this behaviour against Asians (as rude, but not racist). I think it is mainly due to Asian people who deal with mockery very well (as illustrated in this story). In the long run, I think it will only benefit Asians. For example when I am around black friends, I will subconsciensly watch my words and avoid touchy subjects or remarks.

<comment><USER8> There is nothing odd or hard to understand about it. The rule for mockery or jokes in the US is generally "you don't punch down." No cop has ever flipped out and shot an unarmed Asian kid based on stereotypes about how hard asians study. There is no such thing as "driving while Asian." Asians make more money on average than even white people, they live longer, etc. They are well represented in higher academia and high income professions. You'll find Asians in high income neighborhoods around the country. The country didn't fight a war over half of it trying to enslave Asians.

One of the things I've always found shocking about America, as an Asian immigrant myself, is how black people are treated as more foreign, in their own country, than actual foreigners. There are small pockets of unintegrated Asians (mostly first generation immigrants) but cities all over the country are highly segregated along black/white lines. If you really want to understand what makes American culture tick, live somewhere like Philadelphia or Baltimore for awhile.

<comment><USER9> > If you really want to understand what makes American culture tick, live > somewhere like Philadelphia or Baltimore for awhile.

Baltimore here, almost two decades. If the point you're using my city to make were as obvious as you make it sound, I would not now need to ask that you make it explicit.

<comment><USER10> Most likely referring to the deeply segregated neighborhood population percentages.

[http://graphics.wsj.com/baltimore- demographics/](http://graphics.wsj.com/baltimore-demographics/) [http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/data/bal-baltimore- segregat...](http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/data/bal-baltimore-segregation- map-20150710-htmlstory.html) [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/28/baltimore- segregate...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/28/baltimore-segregated- maps-riots_n_7163248.html)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, nothing makes a body feel more welcome than being called a gentrifier. Ask me how I know. The several nearby homicides that occurred within the week after we closed on the place really helped make us feel at home, too. And I really miss sitting out on the back stoop for a late-night smoke to the sound of sporadic pistol fire in the middle distance. There are places in Baltimore you can go if you want to live around nothing but white people. I didn't leave East Baltimore for any of them. But I sure did leave East Baltimore.

It's very easy and very comforting to say that maps like the ones you linked are just a result of white people not wanting to live around black people, because white people are racist. I get that. Who wouldn't rather believe a just-so story than acknowledge that not everything is simple and not every problem has an easy solution? Just don't make the mistake of confusing a just- so story with reality, or imagining that by doing so you're very likely to be of benefit to anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I grew up multicultural. Austrian mum, Indian dad; Swissman weekending in Saudi Arabia then moving to Cupertino and studying at ASU. I never belonged in one place and saw that as a weakness. But heterogeneity has strength. It forces you to reconcile values from their primitives. This is tough, but I think it makes you stronger.

I remember everyone who shat on me. Swimming against a culture is different from being a contrarian. One is challenging the fundamental premises of a people; the other is innovating within them. The former is biologically designed to hurt.

Corollary: call your friends when they are fired. I remember everyone who called me when I quit my first job.The congratulations? Can't remember one.

TL;DR Engage where others aren't engaging. At a minimum, you will reap rare cognitive primitives.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. The hardships can definitely be turned into a strength, one that is hard for mono-cultured people to grasp. I also had a rough childhood, and I somewhat held a grudge on my parents for it. But now, I feel like I am reaping those cognitive benefits you so speak of :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The main problem I've had with Chinese students is rampant cheating and lying, including with help from Chinese professors. I dated a Chinese girl in my PhD program for a bit and she showed me it all first hand, including a Chinese professor giving exams to his Chinese students ahead of time. She giggled about it and didn't see a problem; to her, it was just an easy way to get ahead.

During undergraduate, I participated in international competitions twice, both times with a Chinese girl on the team I led and who both times tried to collude with competing teams in China (who were colluding with each other) until I yelled at her to either stop or get out of the room and let the rest of the team finish without her.

I've seen this in two out of two institutions, and have had this confirmed by friends at other schools.

In the first big boy job I got, we hired a Chinese guy who ended up having lied on his resume about being able to code. At my last position, I've admonished the Chinese guy on my team at least once for copy pasting others' code into PRs without understanding it (which would never even occur to me to do because it is so obviously wrong), and have once caught flat out lying about having done something, apparently because he thought I wouldn't check his work.

All of these cases have been with people who went to high school or undergrad in China. The ones I've met who grew up here seem to be better about it.

So, personally, I look down on what I've seen of Chinese culture for this reason. Not people - culture; when I work with someone that grew up in China, I check for cheating and lies, because of what I've seen of the culture. With people that grew up outside China, I don't worry as much.

I expect I'll get a negative response to this, and I don't care. I'm criticizing a culture, not a race, and these are my life experiences with that culture. It's possible I've just had an extremely unlikely series of uncounters, but, tautologically, that is extremely unlikely.

<comment><USER13> I acknowledge your observations and would like to note the culture between Chinese students in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam are all different and warn you against pinning Chinese culture with cheating. I imagine the behaviour you are talking about is more unthinkable to Singaporean Chinese than even to you yourself for example.

<comment><USER12> Everyone I mentioned is from mainland China. I don't have reason to believe it's the same elsewhere. As I said, my comment is about one particular country's culture, not a race.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. This was a pretty personal blog post for me to write, so I hope that it can help you integrating into your new environment.

If you'd like to talk more about this topic, feel free to send me a chat at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER14> Related discussions on "Adapting to German culture as a Chinese student": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769385](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769385)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great resource!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Didn't read the content from the link, only the comments here, already knew the topic. As a native Chinese, I should say that this fraud culture is a common sense in China since the government itself is a fraud, so people living in the country will get used to it and finally adopt it. Because every time you wanna strive hard to get something, you will find the fraud is taking the "shortcuts" and making better progress than you. Eventually, you will be part of the culture and fraud in a daily basis, which means, when you want to achieve something, you will always think of this kind of "shortcuts" at the first place. And, this is the 2nd main reason why so many middle class people want to immigrant besides the environment crisis. The good part of hunman being is something nature borning. If you can't change it, you can change yourself. Ye, but some people will still be influenced by the old habit. That's a shame.

<comment><USER16> Agreed, I can testify to this observation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As an aside, I find Quora much easier to read with a sans-serif font: [https://imgur.com/jdu9fw4](https://imgur.com/jdu9fw4)

I use the Stylish Chrome extension with this override for Quora to achieve this:

        html,body,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,.box_feed,.box_feed div,p,.link.selected,blockquote {
    	    font-family:"Tahoma", Sans-serif;
    	}

Stylish: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER18> My GF works with foreign students at ASU. From what I gather there (but it might be a particularity of such large university) if you speak mandarin or cantonese, you will have staff support in your own langage to help with integration, and thousands of events every year planned to mix with other people. It should be noted that Americans tend to shun the foreign student events, but at least you'll mingle with people form other countries, and English and American cultures will be your common ground.

</comment><comment><USER19> The Japanese have the word Gaikokujin (Foreigner) but it doesn't really mean that. It really only applies to whites or blacks. If you're American of Oriental ancestry they dont really see you as gaikokujin. Also, you get treated way differently. I'm a Hispanic American so I mostly got the gaikokujin treatment but my friends of Chinese ancestry got something different when we were studying in Japan for 2 years.

</comment><comment><USER20> A lot of the stuff in the first response feels like it could be easily taught (eye contact, deodorant, basic smalltalk), do universities offer some kind of class or workshop to help acclimate people?

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. That is a business opportunity I have pondered a lot about... Do you think its a viable idea?

<comment><USER21> No (and yes). I think that if foreigners are motivated to integrate in the local society and culture, they will find a way to do fine. If that motivation isn't there, I doubt any of these cultural courses and workshops will help much. On the other hand, I do think many if not all people do know that integrating is hard, so a course/workshop/self-help book/whatever will be attractive. Therefore, yes, here lies a business opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This really reminds me of this post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769385](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769385)

</comment><comment><USER23> Check [http://www.xenophobes.com/the- Americans/](http://www.xenophobes.com/the-Americans/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Don't adapt. Best part of the US for me is all the other cultures living in it. Pho soup, Ethiopian pancakes, Burmese cuisine. Please don't adapt.

<comment><USER25> Adapting doesn't necessarily mean assimilating -- it can be "code-switching" in a cultural sense.

<comment><USER26> To some extent, though, a culture is it's aversions. If your birth culture demands intolerance of some kind of behavior, you can't adapt without losing some of that culture.

And to what code do you switch when people of conflicting cultures are present in the same room with you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27>
        > as being quiet and
        > reserved in the public

This guy comes from a China that's aspirational rather than real

<comment><USER28> The Chinese grad students are definitely a different crowd than the undergrad students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Chinese are so successful in the US!

</comment><comment><USER16> Good analysis, very helpful to both sides. Better understanding will lead to better outcome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Dad! :P</comment></comment>


EU accepts Mastercard and Visa offer to cut inter-regional interchange fees - the-dude http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-19-2311_en.htm <comment> the-dude The EU pressured them to lower online fees in 2015 already : [https://stripe.com/en-nl/blog/pricing-update-for- europe](https://stripe.com/en-nl/blog/pricing-update-for-europe)</comment>


Raganwald on Meanies - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/08/off-topic-meanies.html

<comment><USER2> "Learn from my experience: if there is no intellectual benefit to be had from a discussion, walk away."

 _sigh_ yet another thing <a href="<http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html>">I wish I'd known earlier

</comment><comment><USER3> The original poster is the most entertaining troll I've ever read. It's depressing that so many people didn't realize he was trolling.

</comment><comment><USER4> Internets is srs bsns.</comment>


Don't just write comments, tell a story - <AUTHOR> http://shahriarhaque.com/blog/?p=83

<comment><USER2> Otherwise known as Literate Programming with an IDE. :-)

The general problem with this is that code changes too rapidly for documentation to be of any use. Writing the documentation for code can easily take 2-3 times longer than writing the code itself, so if you're iterating at all, that documentation will probably be about 5 revisions out of date. At that point, it's actively harmful, because it tells the reader things that are wrong.

It works great for TeX, not so well for a startup that will have a new business plan in a couple months. That's also why the best comments tend to be API docs: APIs change (or should change) much less rapidly than implementation, so the documentation is both more useful and has less chance of being out-of-date.

<comment><USER3> I completely disagree. When code changes rapidly, and especially when multiple people are working on the same code, documentation which explains the "why" of the code is very valuable. Without it, you're left trying to figure out if some piece of code is really necessary, or still necessary. If you're lucky you can rum 'blame' and figure out who wrote the bit in question and go talk with them about it. If you're unlucky, they don't work there any more. Either way, it's more time consuming that reading a good code comment about why something is being done.

Is there a cost to writing good comments? Yes. Does it take discipline to keep them up-to-date and accurate? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes.

<comment><USER2> "Why" comments are often quite useful, but the example in the article was filled with "What" comments, and doesn't seem to be talking about that at all. "Why" comments are often infrequent enough that there's nothing wrong with putting them inline with the code.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that "Why" comments are infrequent, but they are still important. I work in the scientific computing field and here "whys" are they key to understanding code. But lengthy explanations of why certain steps of the algorithm are needed, are very distracting. Such a scenario calls for a separation of code from comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Narratives in code are a tempting analogy, but code is non-linear. Verbose 'how' code comments usually assume one path through the code, and it only matches my actual path 0.1% of the time. The remaining 999 times out of 1000 all the verbosity just gets in the way.

The best idea to come out of literate programming, IMO: order code in the best possible order for reading and navigating, and let the computer figure out how to compile it. That's one thing we've largely gained from more dynamic languages like python and ruby, and from AOP. That's about it. It's good to to aim for a codebase I can curl up with on my iPad, but if so my interest is in the _code_. Don't get hung up on typography, and assume I'm going to be choosing my own adventure at the end of each page.

<comment><AUTHOR> When you start your source file with a huge chunk of "how" comments it is likely to _not_ match the actual code path. But that's not how I think the "documentation mode" will work. You write how comments for every small chunk of code. Then whichever code path the program executes, you will see a flow of comments from that path

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that's really cool! Next step: parse those stories using a BDD framework! Looking at that interface brings to mind something like lettuce.it

You could parse out the comments into a separate story block then write in the features/notes from lettuce and have them link back to each chunk of the code - providing coverage reports and the like.

Now it just needs a vim plugin ;)

<comment><USER6> Whoever eventually figures out the obvious-yet-hidden confluence between cucumber-style BDD 'stories' and javadoc-style documentation is going to make a big splash in the word of programming. I can only hope it's me :)

<comment><USER7> Did you see doctest? (<http://docs.python.org/library/doctest.html>)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this could be another brilliant addition to the "documentation view". Imagine a multi-tabbed documentation pane. The first tab lets you write normal comments, but in another one you could write doctests like the example you gave, or even assertion of pre and post conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Docco is cool. Is there an online version of it, to give it a try?</comment>


Illustrated FixMatch for semi-supervised learning - <AUTHOR> https://amitness.com/2020/03/fixmatch-semi-supervised/ <comment><USER2> The cold hard reality of machine learning is that most useful data isn't readily available to just be collected. Semi-supervised and weakly supervised learning, data augmentation, multi-task learning, these are the things that will enable machine learning for the majority of companies out there who need to build datasets and potentially leverage domain expertise somehow to bootstrap intelligent features in their apps. This is great work in that direction for computer vision.

Even the giants are recognizing this fact and are leveraging it to great effect. Some keywords to search for good papers and projects: Overton, Snorkel, Snorkel Metal

<comment><USER3> Also Flying Squid, another interesting project from Stanford - [http://hazyresearch.stanford.edu/flyingsquid](http://hazyresearch.stanford.edu/flyingsquid)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great summary! Reminds me a lot about Leon Bottou's work on using deep learning to learn causal invariant representations. (Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbZNQt0Q5HA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbZNQt0Q5HA))

We can view the augmentations of the image as "interventions" forcing the model to learn an invariant representation of the image.

Although the blog post did not frame it as this type of problem (not sure if the paper did), I think it can definitely be seen as such and is really promising.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, thank you for sharing that. It reminds me of this approach called "PIRL" by Facebook AI. They framed the problem to learn invariant representations. You might find it interesting.

[https://amitness.com/2020/03/illustrated- pirl/](https://amitness.com/2020/03/illustrated-pirl/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish all papers were structured this way, by default.

That is, plenty of good diagrams, clear explanations and intuitions, no unnecessary mathiness.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

Wanted to clarify that this is the summary article of the paper. I wrote it to help out people who might not have the math rigor and research background to understand research papers but would benefit from an intuitive explanation.

The actual paper is available here: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.07685](https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.07685)

<comment><USER6> I would argue that folks like you translating the heavy science into comprehensible ideas to those less deep into the field are doing just as much to advance science as the authors of these papers.

Seriously, this is fantastic work and I cannot compliment you enough on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. It's very encouraging to hear that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if a two step process could work better than this, first use a variational autoencoder or simple an autoencoder then use it to train the labeled sampled.

In (1) there is a full example of using the two step strategy but using more labeled data to obtain 92% of accuracy. Someone can try changing the second part to use only ten labels for the classifying part and share results?

(1) [https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/autoencoder- cla...](https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/autoencoder-classifier- python)

Edited: I found a deep analysis in (2), in short for CIFAR 10 the VAE semi- supervised learning approach provides poor results, but the author has not used augmentation!

(2) [http://bjlkeng.github.io/posts/semi-supervised-learning- with...](http://bjlkeng.github.io/posts/semi-supervised-learning-with- variational-autoencoders/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, authors have tried mixing the strategy you described(self-supervised learning) for semi-supervised tasks.

Basic idea is to learn generic image representations without manual labeling and then finetune that on your small dataset. These are relevant articles I have wrote on it: [https://amitness.com/2020/02/illustrated-self-supervised- lea...](https://amitness.com/2020/02/illustrated-self-supervised-learning/)

[https://amitness.com/2020/03/illustrated- simclr/](https://amitness.com/2020/03/illustrated-simclr/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish there was a way to augment data as easily for free text, and other business data. I always see these few-shot learning papers for images, I suspect because it's easy to augment image datasets and because image- recognition is interesting to laypeople. The vast majority of data we deal with in business is text/numerical which is much harder to use in these approaches.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree with you on this. For text data, there was a paper called "UDA"([https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.12848](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.12848)) that did some work on this direction.

They augmented text by using backtranslation. Basic idea is you take text in English, translate that to some other language say French and then translate back the French text to English. Usually, you get back an English sentence that is different that the original English sentence but has the same meaning. Another approach they use to augment is to randomly replace stopword/low tf- idf(intuitively say very frequent words like a, an, the) with random words.

You will find implementation of UDA on GitHub and try that out.

I am learning these existing image semi-supervised technique right now and the plan is to do research on how we can transfer those ideas to text data. Let's see how it goes.

<comment><USER9> Haha that's how we used to generate blog spam content and comments :p

<comment><AUTHOR> What are other techniques you use to generate spam? Maybe the research community can learn from you guys

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know much about ML/Deep-Learning and I have a burning question:

Say we have 10 images as a starting point. Then we create 10,000 images from those 10 images by adding noise, filters, flip them, skew them, distort them, etc. Isn't the underlying data the same (or some formal definition of shannon information entropy)? Would that actually improve neural networks?

I've always wondered. Is it possible to generate infinite data and get almost perfect neural network accuracy?

<comment><USER11> This is already done. It's called data augmentation and is extremely helpful in computer vision

<comment><USER10> How do we generate more "information" from a limited given information? Doesn't that break some law of information theory?

<comment><USER12> With data augmentation, we're effectively injecting additional information about what sorts of transformations of the data the model should be insensitive to. The additional information comes from our (hopefully) well- informed human decisions about how to augment the data. By doing this, we can reduce the tendency for the model to pick up dependencies on patterns that are useful in the context of the (very small) training dataset, but which don't work well on new data that isn't in the training set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I had a read through this and I couldn't really tell if there was something novel here?

I understand that perturbations and generating new examples from labelled examples is a pretty normal park of the process when you only have a limited number of examples available.

<comment><AUTHOR> The novelty is in applying 2 perturbations to available _unlabeled images_ and use them as part of training. This is different than what you are describing about applying augmentations to labeled images to increase data size.

<comment><USER14> My immediate question was "how do you use unlabeled images for training?" But then I decided to read the paper :) The answer is:

Two different perturbations to the same image should have the same predicted label by the model, even if it doesn't know what the correct label is. That information can be used in the training.

<comment><USER15> What if the model's prediction is wrong with high confidence? What if the cat is labeled as a dog for both perturbations? Then wouldn't the system train against the wrong label?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope,because of the way it works. So in the beginning when the model is being trained on the labeled data, it will make many mistakes. So it's confidence for either cat or dog will be low. Hence, in that case unlabeled data are not used at all.

As training progresses, the model will become better at labeled data. And so it can start predicting with high confidence on unlabeled images that are trivial/similar-looking/same distribution with labeled data. So, gradually unlabeled images get started being used as part of training. As training progresses, more and more unlabeled data are added.

The mathematics of the combined loss function and curriculum learning part talks about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It is not the same thing but kind of reminds of my naive and obvious(meaning something that came up when drinking beer) idea of generating bunch of variations of your labeled data in cases when you do not have enough.

Let's say you only have one image of dog, you generate bunch of color variations, sharpness adjustments, flips, transforms, etc. Voila you have 256 images of the same dog.

EDIT: I noticed that this is definitely a common idea as others have already pointed out.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am not sure how this article got ranked so high. I am suspicious about reading these article written by non experts. I would prefer to go to authentic sources and read the original paper. Most of the time information in these articles are misleading and wrong.

<comment><USER18> Instead of speaking in generalities, can you point out what is wrong in the posted article?

<comment><USER17> The title is fraud. It fraudulently report 85% accuracy gain.But the inside it is something else. "FixMatch is a recent semi-supervised approach by Sohn et al. from Google Brain that improved the state of the art in semi-supervised learning(SSL). It is a simpler combination of previous methods such as UDA and ReMixMatch. In this post, we will understand the concept of FixMatch and also see it got 78% median accuracy and 84% maximum accuracy on CIFAR-10 with just 10 labeled images."

<comment><USER17> We should flag these fraudulent articles, I am not sure the author has any credibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Title is (slightly) wrong.

As the first paragraph says: "In this post, we will understand the concept of FixMatch and also see it got 78% accuracy on CIFAR-10 with just 10 images."

Reporting the _best_ performance on a method that deliberately uses just a small subset of the data is shady as heck.

<comment><USER20> Agreed, also this model fully uses the other images, just not the way that traditional supervised learning would. With "just 10 labels" is more accurate. Impressive results, but this isn't some hyper-convergence technique that somehow trains on only ten images.

<comment><USER19> This depends a lot on the application.

It seems like a big win for images and other stuff where getting images is cheap, but labelling them is expensive. Less great for (say) drug discovery where running the experiments to generate the data points is the bottleneck.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How important is "unobtrusive javascript"? - <AUTHOR>

I have read in many books that all javascript should be "unobtrusive". Its said to be best practices to avoid the problems of traditional JavaScript programming (such as browser inconsistencies and lack of scalability).
But here I see world's biggest search engine which handles zillion, jillion, and gazillion of web traffic are not following this "best practices" and it works just fine
See image: http://i.imgur.com/q9N4n.png
Further, unobtrusive javascripts requires bit of extra effort(adding event listeners etc). for user's perspective it works the same way.
I guess, the number of people do not follow these "Best practices" are more than who do the extra effort and follow these Best practices. In both cases, apps work just fine.
so question is:
How important are these "Best practices"? And why should we follow them knowing smart people at google don't? they must be doing this for a reason, right? <comment><USER2> google is not an acronym for web standards. Half of the time google things (adsanse, adwords, analytics, gmail, you name it) don't work on my main browser (opera), and each time i say to myself, ffs, cant they hire someone to fix this..</comment>


Ask HN: Hiring Remotely and US Tax Nexuses - <AUTHOR>

I know that a number of companies discussed on HN (such as GitHub) have a policy of hiring from anywhere in the US or in the world.
The company I work for has been trying to hire remotely, but we are having some trouble with the issue of tax nexuses. For example, we were interested in someone in NY state, but if we hired them we'd have to collect sales tax in that state.
Is there some way that companies like GitHub and others have worked around this problem? <comment><USER2> There are two types of tax nexus: federal/national, and state.

Federal/national tax nexus is a matter of federal law, and can be affected by treaties with other countries (i.e., "permanent establishment" or "branches"). Treaties can occasionally result in a foreign person/company having a US tax reporting requirement (i.e., tax returns) without actually owing any US taxes!

State tax nexus is an entirely separate beast which differs from state to state and is not affected by US treaties! In some states, physical presence is required to have a nexus; in others, merely selling to customers into the state is sufficient. Generally, having an employee permanently working from a state is sufficient nexus to subject a company to state tax compliance as your company is then treated as being physical present in that state (through the employee). However, an independent contractor might avoid nexus concerns as an IC is usually legally and economically independent from his/its clients.

Your best bet is to talk to a NY-based lawyer (or at least, a lawyer licensed to practice in NY).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I'm aware of all those details. I'm just wondering if companies like GitHub simply bite the bullet and pay sales tax in each state as needed, or if they've found some sort of workaround (like incorporating a second entity that hires people but doesn't receive sales revenue directly, just to make up a random thing).

<comment><USER3> Some companies use an intermediary, like Trinet [1]. You write them a check every pay period, and they disburse the funds to your scattered employees for a small fee without you having to handle the logistics of it.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> From research done by folks at our company this apparently does not eliminate the nexus issue. I had high hopes for this approach but it didn't pan out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't it as simple as hiring as a contractor instead of hiring as an employee?

Having contractors simply turns the situation from "we have labour laws to deal with" to "this is an expense like any other", although speaking to a labour + tax attorney wouldn't hurt.

As far as your company hiring remotely goes, tell them not do it if this is their first time and everyone else is local.

They will get burned (almost always likely) diving in the deep end, so if they do plan on doing it, this is (roughly) how:

Find some obscure 50-hour task and give the contractor an opportunity to complete it (making sure it is possible to be done in 50 hours).

AFAIK, when working with "contractors", the tax-reporting burden becomes theirs.

<comment><USER5> It's unlawful to hire full-time employees as contractors, and there is a somewhat elaborate test (in the sense that its results can be unpredictable when applied under duress) used by the USG to tell the two apart.

This is, in fact, what several companies have done to resolve this problem for foreign workers. But there is a downside.

It's a very bad idea to treat US full-time employees as 1099 contractors. This, by the way, is one of the reasons that freelancers sometimes have a hard time establishing a master agreement with Fortune 500 companies.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for this.

It seems like labour laws in the US are similar to other countries in this regard.

There could actually be another way around this, as the contractor could register his own LLC and work through that.

I'd advise the OP (again) to consult a labour and/or tax lawyer on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have consulted lawyers, I was just wondering how some companies are able to still hire from anywhere. I'm guessing that it's some combo of hiring non-US workers as contractors and simply biting the bullet on sales tax as needed in each US state.

<comment><USER6> Can you check if sales taxes even apply? For some types of things there is no sales tax. Also it's not the end of the world. You can use software such as [https://taxcloud.net/default.aspx](https://taxcloud.net/default.aspx) which is compatible with numerous systems.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Exploring Design: Outstanding Start Pages - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/17/exploring-design-outstanding-start-pages/

<comment><USER2> Ugh, these are horrible from a user interface standpoint. Sure they look great (and are an interesting experiment) but how will the average person use them? Does the use of these fancy flash pages create value for your website? Only if it's a particularly creative website e.g. bands.

<comment><USER3> I love all the sites on this post. There is a diffrence between websites built for art and websites built for commmerce. There is no reason these sites need to be indexed well or valid CSS, they are not trying to monetize the user, or get top placement in google. Most are just experiments in new ways to visualize and display information. As flash and other methods become more advanced we will be able to use more navigation techniques like these while giving up less as far as SEO. New ideas like this help us rethink how people interact with the internet and ultimatley lead to innovation. Art is about breaking the rules. These sites are art.

<comment><USER4> Debate useless without actual numbers.

<comment><USER3> What kind of numbers would you be refering too?

<comment><USER4> Conversion rates, user loyalty, whatever is relevant to the purpose ultimate purpose of the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These Flash interfaces are awesome. Anyone here got any advice on starting to learn Flash to design these kinds of interfaces?

<comment><USER6> First read stuff by Tufte and Tognazzini and Cooper first.

Learn Flash second

<comment><USER3> there someting in arcitecture called form vs.funtion.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function> I live by this in interface design. First decide what funtion needs to happen, then decide on the best visual representation or form to achieve this. Basically this means the technology should not dictate what the interface or idea is. If you come up with a great idea, then you can explore what technology you need to execute it at the highest level, be it Flash, or another method.</comment></comment></comment>