Ask HN: What are your favorite statistics and probability textbooks? - <AUTHOR> I took stats in undergrad, but it was a very rudimentary "push x sequence of buttons on your calculator in y situation" ordeal and left me with less applicable knowledge than I'd like.<p>Since sometime after graduation, I've taken up serious study of higher-level maths as a hobby. I think it will be most useful in my career if I also have a strong grasp on probability and statistics.<p>[edit] The suggestions so far have been great, but it occured to me to add that I'm working through Spivak and Apostol right now with Dedekind's essays on the side. Hopefully that gives an idea of the tone/rigor I'm after. Answers to problems is also ideal. <comment><USER3> As a first text, I really like Introduction to Probability by Blitzstein and Hwang. It's not quite as mathematically sophisticated as some of the other treatments (e.g. you're not going to see the sigma-algebra treatment of events over a sample space), but it has a very heavy focus on building good statistical and probabilistic intuition which I think is invaluable for studying statistics in and of itself rather than statistics as a subset of measure theory. The book imparts a good knack for being able to quickly glance at a statistical problem and see "oh it's one of those kinds of problems," or "hmmm looks like there's a good symmetry argument [or other general approach] I can use here," which continues to reap rewards in more advanced and specialized statistical studies.

There are accompanying lectures, problems, and accompanying solutions on its website [https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/stat110/home](https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/stat110/home)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think you will enjoy Efron & Hastie's Computer Age Statistical Inference: Algorithms, Evidence and Data Science.

[https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/CASI/](https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/CASI/)

MIT 6.008 Introduction to Inference also goes over many of the classic problems such as Cookie Jar, Monte Hall, Fair Dice, One-Armed Bandits, etc. with tons of labs.

I find this stuff easier to grok by just writing code and running a simulation. To that end, I'd setup an Anacondas environment and start experimenting with PyMC3. As your intuition suggests, there's no downside to mastery of probabilistic programming. Best of luck!

[https://docs.pymc.io/](https://docs.pymc.io/)

<comment><USER5> I think Efron & Hastie may be a bit too advanced and terse for the OP. They cover many things in not so many pages and "our intention was to maintain a technical level of discussion appropriate to Masters'-level statisticians or first-year PhD students."

But given that they distribute the PDF for free it's worth checking out. Hastie, Tibshirani & Friedman's The Elements of Statistical Learning and the watered-down and more practical Introduction to Statistical Learning are also nice. All of them can be downloaded from [https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/pub.htm](https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/pub.htm)

<comment><USER6> Elements of Statistical Learning is the other text I came in here to recommend.

One of my most valuable activities in grad school was printing and studying each chapter of EoSL.

It's a comprehensive text on the fundamentals of statistics and machine learning, a solid foundation for the cutting-edge techniques relying on deep learning and reinforcement learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You should state your goals and timeline. There is a lot of deep stuff that can be ignored by many... Often there is a good 1st book, another for 2nd, for 3rd, and hopefully not many more after that.

It also depends what community you ask, engineers vs mathematicians vs actual statisticians. So the community you want to be a part of is the one you should ask. It is probably too much of a melting pot here to get one of these flavors.

In my past I've looked at courses I wanted to take, and then looked at the chain of prerequisites and books used there, hws assigned, and did those. Nothing beats talking to the teachers who you think are good. Alternatively you could have colleagues who you like, and whose history you want to emulate.

Having a specific goal is important. Egregious amounts of time can be spent in many corners of probability theory and statistics. Especially in the case that steps are taken in the wrong order. Trying to do Billingsley without first taking real analysis would be crazy. And maybe studying from Billingsley is crazy for most people's goals to begin with.

That said, I've enjoyed reading the suggestions here.

</comment><comment><USER8> Feller Vol. 1 is considered the classic text for discrete probability: [https://epubs.siam.org/doi/10.1137/1011021](https://epubs.siam.org/doi/10.1137/1011021)

Volume 2 is easily found as a pdf on google, but it's much harder.

<comment><USER9> Both Feller volumes have some good stuff. E.g., volume 2 has the renewal theorem -- roughly, arrivals from many independent sources look like a Poisson process, i.e., times between arrivals are independent identically distributed random variables with exponential distribution where the parameter in the distribution is the arrival rate. E.g., expect that between 1 PM and 2 PM, arrivals at a popular Web site will be Poisson, and might use that for capacity planning or anomaly detection.

But as my main probability prof summarized, an unguided tour of Feller is not promising. I believe he was correct. Look elsewhere for the first intuition, common applications, or the high quality math, e.g., based on sigma algebras and the Radon-Nikodym theorem, the limit theorems -- laws (weak and strong) of large numbers, central limit theorem (the strong Lindeberg-Feller version, irony here), the ergodic theorem, martingales, Skorohod representation, Kolomogorov extension theorem, Lebesgue decomposition, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A great starting book that helps build a good intution is "An Introduction to Error Analysis" by John Taylor (of Classical Mechanics fame). Basically if you are taking any kind of measurements and need to compose them intelligently this is where to start. From sig-figs to chi squared. A must read for any starting researcher

My experience otherwise with stats books has been horrendous.. (havent found a good "medium level" book to move on to yet)

</comment><comment><USER5> Lindley's Understanding Uncertainty

Jaynes's Probability Theory: The Logic of Science

MacKay's Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms ([http://www.inference.org.uk/itila/book.html](http://www.inference.org.uk/itila/book.html))

<comment><USER11> Jaynes is a delight to read if you like an opinionated style over the more usual dry prose of other textbooks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> All of Statistics by Larry Wasserman is the book I recommend for anyone who knows calculus and linear algebra and wants to learn statistics.

<comment><USER13> Came here to post this and "Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View" by Cosmos Shalizi

<comment><USER14> I just wish this would come out in paper book. It's excellent but I have difficulty reading math books online.

<comment><USER15> Supposedly in process. From the book's website: "The book is under contract to Cambridge University Press; it should be turned over to the press [...] before the end of 2015." But it sounds like that was after a few delays already, so maybe there have been more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not well rounded enough to draw a clear path from where you are. For me Gelmans Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models [0] drove home many, many points. More recently, I have a sense/hope that Pearl's The Book of Why [1] might take this to yet another level.

[0] [http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/arm/](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/arm/) [1] [https://www.amazon.com/Book-Why-Science-Cause- Effect/dp/0465...](https://www.amazon.com/Book-Why-Science-Cause- Effect/dp/046509760X)

<comment><USER17> Pearl's landmark rigorous book is Causality

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you're working through Spivek and Apostol, get Feller v1 and v2. Same level of rigor and emphasis on intuition. (If you're having fun after that, pick up Gallager's book on stochastic processes. Similar approaches, intuition, and focus on discrete probability to skip the metric theory complications of continuous dists.)

Another very good book is Bertsekas and Tsitsiklas, Introduction to Probability. This book will also give you some intuition.

I've heard Grimmitt recommended but I think B&T is better.

You could also start with Papoulis (a stochastic processes classic book, but it does the intro probability too.)

<comment><USER19> In my experience, those who grew up with Papoulis, 2nd edition loved it. I grew up with Papoulis, 3rd edition, and find the layout and typesetting to be among the worst of any book I've ever read, bad enough to significantly affect usability and ability to quickly find things.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I personally don't love Papoulis. But it has been regarded as the standard stochastic processes text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone has anything to say about The Lady Tasting Tea[0]? I'd like to hear/read your thoughts about this book. (I came across it on the comment section of John D Cook's blog post[1] years ago but haven't had a chance to read it yet).

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

[1] [https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/01/12/elementary- statist...](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/01/12/elementary-statistics- book/)

<comment><USER21> I enjoyed it. I read it when I knew almost nothing about statistics, and found that it motivated me to learn more. And it's frankly an interesting / entertaining read in its own right. It's not a textbook, so don't expect to come away knowing a lot of stats after reading it (unless you already do!), but I'd say it's worth reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I personally like Kruschke's Bayesian Data Analysis very much. It does a wonderful job in introducing readers to Bayesian statistics -- a good first text book for Bayesian statistics.

For a more classic approach to statistics, I also liked Builder's Analysis of categorical data. It's focused on categorical data but does a good job in explaining what's going on. A good introductory book.

Both books are well written and really try to explain stuff. IMHO they are two examples of good didactics in statistics.

If you're into ML you might want to choose something else though.

<comment><USER5> Another nice intro to Bayesian statistics is McElreath's Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan. There are also recordings of the lectures based on the book. [http://xcelab.net/rm/statistical- rethinking/](http://xcelab.net/rm/statistical-rethinking/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I GREATLY enjoyed Intuitive Biostatistics by Motulsky.

It assumes that you're not going to calculate any test statistic on your own, you're going to use Excel, R, or his own software. Therefore the book contains little to no formulas. Instead, it's plain English going over (biology's) most common tests and attributes, and explains what the test assumes about your data, what you can and cannot infer from the output, and what the pitfalls are. VERY useful if you like me come from a 'push X button no clue why' background.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've been enjoying the struggle through Statistical Inference by George Casella as a foundational text. This was the introductory text for stats graduate students at Arizona State University a few years back.

The Mathematical Methods of Statistics by Harald Cramér is also excellent.

<comment><USER6> +1 to this, I'm a big fan of Casella. I personally think it's most useful as a reference, moreso than a textbook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd recommend almost anything by Andy Field. He has a clear cut approach with a bit of comic wit to make the reading more enjoyable for hobby reading. His book on SPSS was fantastic, but may be a bit too specialized for what you're looking for. Check out discovering statistics:

[https://www.discoveringstatistics.com/](https://www.discoveringstatistics.com/)

</comment><comment><USER26> For probability, you need measure theory first. That's also when discrete and continuous methods unify, so it's an amazing edifice.

Statistics has four major branches: inference, exploratory data analysis, experimental design, and visualization.

Your question is probably mostly asking about inference. I like the first few chapters of Kiefer's book to get the context of decision theory. Then you're going to have to wander far and wide, but there have been some good recommendations. Since you're digging into Dedekind on the side, you might like to go back to some of the classics here as well: Wald's "Statistical Decision Functions" and Savage's "Foundations of Statistics."

For exploratory data analysis, Tukey's book "Exploratory Data Analysis" remains the place to start, if you can find a copy that doesn't cost a fortune. Casella wrote a book on experimental design that's solid. For visualizations Wilkinson's "Grammar of Graphics" and Tufte's books are the usual recommendations.

<comment><USER18> No no on measure theory. See below on Feller, Bersekas, Gallager. I think it's best to learn discrete prob first and skip the difficult math until you decide to become a mathematician or really need it for e.g. finance work.

One other objection: yes, those are fields in statistics. But statistics as a field is MUCH broader than departments called statistics. A ton of stats is done in engineering, psychology, and economics (econometrics). In fact I'd say the major research in stats for the past few decades has been done outside of "statistics" as a field. But yes, the books by Tukey, Tufte, and Casella are good.

If the OP is asking about statistics and probability needed for machine learning, he wants to focus on engineering statistics, like: estimation, stochastic processes, and filtering and mathematical statistics. The Wald rec is good and complements Feller.

<comment><USER26> The OP is reading Spivak and Dedekind and makes no mention of machine learning. He's interested in the deep mathematics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Statistics by Freedman et al. All exercises use real data as cases, I learned a lot more from them!

[https://www.amazon.com/Statistics-4th-David- Freedman/dp/0393...](https://www.amazon.com/Statistics-4th-David- Freedman/dp/0393929728)

<comment><USER28> The sequel to this book -- Statistical Models: Theory and Practice -- and it's accompanying (well, this is how I was encouraged to read them) text -- Statistical Models and Causal Inference: A Dialogue with Social Sciences -- are excellent for intuition building and accumulating a number of examples for personal reference.

<comment><USER27> Wow, I didn't know there was a sequel, oh what a pleasant surprise!

Statistics already had a lot of useful random trivia and left me with an impression that this is how a good student's resource should look like (my university had a really bad stats course so I had to learn stats myself).

But now you say there is more? Thank you random internet stranger!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Theory of Probability" by Bruno de Finetti is the best text on probability ever written.

<comment><USER5> "A book destined ultimately to be recognized as one of the great books of the world" according to the foreword by Lindley included in the English translation. "Probability is a description of your (the reader of these words) uncertainty about the world. So this book is about uncertainty, about a feature of life that is so essential to life that we cannot imagine life without it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The Probabilistic Method by Noga Alon and Joel H. Spencer.

I took a seminar on the probabilistic method and my advisor recommended me to read this book. This book is for scientists. It lays out the foundation of the probabilistic method and a theoretic background.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm in the same boat as you. I started studying advanced machine learning/AI concepts, and understand the intuition just fine, but I feel like i'm grasping around in the dark without a good foundation in statistics. Currently reading this online book and watching lectures: [https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/SticiGui/Text/toc.htm](https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/SticiGui/Text/toc.htm). The material is stated quite simply without advanced math, but it actually helps a lot to understand concepts better.

<comment><USER31> Great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> _Against the Gods_ by Peter L Bernstein, _Chaos_ by James Gleick, and _The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets_ by Benoit B Mandelbrot and Richard L Hudson.

<comment><USER5> In this less mathematical, more "pop science" vein I remember I enjoyed The Flaw of Averages by Sam Savage (who happens to be the son of Jimmie Savage) but I read it many years ago and I'm not sure I would still recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Thought this book had good detail without going too deep for some dev work I was doing: "Practical Statistics for Data Scientists: 50 Essential Concepts" [https://amzn.to/2MUmZt7](https://amzn.to/2MUmZt7)

</comment><comment><USER34> "Probability theory: The logic of science" by Jaynes is an amazing book on Bayesian statistics.

</comment><comment><USER35> Somewhat different to the suggestions so far, but Thrun et. al's 'Probabilistic Robotics' is a very good applied probability text, with a focus on physical systems.

Plenty of worked examples and problem sets as well.

</comment><comment><USER36> Kolmogorov's _Foundations of the Theory of Probability_ is pretty good, IMO. I haven't made it very far, but he has great examples, plenty of rigor, and the book is like $10.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've been watching this series recently. It's got quite a bit of statistics, mixed with some code and real world applications. It's certainly refreshed my memory on some things; some of them I'm not sure I really appreciated first time round.

[https://youtu.be/C1lhuz6pZC0](https://youtu.be/C1lhuz6pZC0)

It's probably not as rigourous as you mention in your edit but I'll leave it here in case someone else is drawn to the title.

</comment><comment><USER38> Introduction to Probability, 2nd Edition by Dimitri P. Bertsekas, John N. Tsitsiklis. It is textbook for EECS Probability course at MIT and very well written for beginners.

Additionally, there are video lectures available on MIT OCW which mirror this book closely.

[https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Probability-2nd- Dimitri-...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Probability-2nd-Dimitri- Bertsekas/dp/188652923X/)

</comment><comment><USER39> If you're looking for just mathematical statistics, I liked Hogg McKean and Craig's "Introduction to Mathematical Statistics" (4th edition was much better than the ones after it, imo).

But if you're looking to learn prob/stats for applications to ML, most ML textbooks have a chapter or two reviewing the relevant stuff. I liked the first two chapters of Bishop's PRML for that.

</comment><comment><USER40> Ronald Meesters book A natural introduction to probability is pretty good. i had it as an introductory probability theory text as an undergrad. its not too long and leaves you with a pretty good intuition of 'basic' probability theory. it does prove things but is not based on measure theory. id recommend searching for it as those big textbooks everyone is using are generally worse.

</comment><comment><USER41> With your background it's unclear if you want to statistics or mathematical statistics style book.

These are two very different approaches. Mathematical statistics goes trough measure theoretic probability, it connects statistics and mathematic and unifies the discrete and the continuous cases into a coherent whole.

Examples of both

\- All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference by Wasserman

\- Mathematical Methods of Statistics by Cramer

</comment><comment><USER42> _How to lie with statistics

The Cartoon Guide to Statistics_

(Don't laugh, it's a serious tome. Past chapter 2, it's not introductory level info.)

<comment><USER43> Darrell Huff is hilarious.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> FWIW here is a list of texts used in a data science conferene as references in presenter's slides (Cassella Berger was mentioned here by others, Hastie Tibshirani is also good). [https://hastebin.com/raw/upiqumenas](https://hastebin.com/raw/upiqumenas)

</comment><comment><USER45> Not a textbook, but I found "Statistics in a Nutshell" to be a good refresher for my long dormant stats knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER46> I found Wilcox's "Fundamentals of Modern Statistical Methods" extremely interesting: it explains the pros and cons of classical statistics with means and standard deviations. And all of this list carefully explained through examples and real-world cases.

</comment><comment><USER47> Probability and stochastics by Erhan Cinlar is a modern, measure theoretic approach to probability.

</comment><comment><USER48> Fun: [http://xcelab.net/rm/statistical- rethinking/](http://xcelab.net/rm/statistical-rethinking/)

Rigor: Feller vol 1, Casella & Berger 2e

</comment><comment><USER49> I'd recommend Feller for Probability seeing how you are interested in rigor and completeness. For Bayesian approach, I'd suggest Probability Theory - <USER2> Logic of Science by E.T.Jaynes.

</comment><comment><USER50> I've heard good things about Lev Tarasov's "The World is Built on Probability", but haven't dived into it so can't offer my own opinion

</comment><comment><USER51> All of statistics by wasserman, and then all of nonparametric statistics.

Since you're also interested in the philosophy side of things, definitely suggest Judea pearl too!

</comment><comment><USER52> Hosmer, Applied Logistic Regression.

Lots of applied stats problems are based on categorical data, and this book really helped me to understand the theory better.

</comment><comment><USER53> This isn't what the OP is looking for but Introduction to Probability with Texas Hold 'em Examples is a fun intro to probability.

</comment><comment><USER54> Shafer & Vovk: probability and finance. It bridges this gap for me that I didn't quite understand.

</comment><comment><USER9> How I learned: Early in my career, I was around DC doing mostly work in applied math and computing for US national security. No joke -- constantly the work was heavily probability, statistics, and stochastic processes. I had a good ugrad math major but no courses in any of those three subjects. So I was thrown into the deep end of the pool and was constantly struggling to understand. I did pick up a good overview and a lot of intuition. But the sources varied widely, in both the topics and the quality, over stacks of books and papers, documentation of software, etc.

Lesson: At least at first, one way to learn is just to jump in at the deep end and struggle using lots of texts, references, etc.

Sad Lesson: While nearly all the famous books were good, some of the books that, e.g., from the publisher, might have seemed good were not. The guy who wrote the stuff, I hope he got tenure -- can't be any other reason.

Later I got an applied math Ph.D. and had a terrific course in _analysis and probability_. So, the analysis part was, right, basically Royden, _Real Analysis_ and the first half of Rudin, _Real and Complex Analysis_. There was also some material from Oxtoby, _Measure and Category_ (ice cream and cake dessert -- super fun stuff).

The probability was right from the beginning sigma algebras, etc. So, a central topic was the Radon-Nikodym theorem and conditional expectation -- gorgeous once see it. So, there was beautiful coverage of the classic limit theorems, especially martingales.

Best course of any kind I ever took in school. The prof was a star student of E. Cinlar, long at Princeton.

For the course, the main texts in probability were from J. Neveu, L. Breiman, K. Chung, M. Loeve.

For statistics, for the applied stuff, I just remember the stacks of books I worked with early on, especially multivariate statistics. For the math, I just regard that as applied probability and sometimes just do my own derivations, sometimes at least a little new. I never found a statistics book I like or can recommend as the _single_ , main book, e.g., like Rudin in analysis or Neveu in probability. All I can suggest is just to dig into the stacks of the most famous books and also glance at some of the software documentation.

I suspect that there is a really good statistics book to be written, and maybe someone has written it, or is writing it, but I haven't seen it.

Here is a simple derivation I typed in yesterday with an intuitive result in statistics that maybe people should keep in mind. In a sense this little derivation shows the strongest possible result in statistical estimation is, and may I have the envelope please [drum roll], and the discrete data version of the winner is just cross tabulation, assuming that have enough data.

The context is a person applying for credit. Might proceed similarly for, say, ad targeting, etc.

We assume that Y is a real valued random variable where E[Y^2], that is, the _expectation,_ of Y^2 is finite -- meager assumption, especially for practice.

The Y is something about _credit worthiness,_ e.g., loss on a loan, we are interested in.

We assume that X is a random variable taking possibly very general values, e.g., a credit history at uncountably infinitely many points in time in the past. We assume that we have the value of X -- that's our credit data on the person.

Let's do a little preliminary derivation: What value of real number a minimizes

E[(Y - a)^2]

Well, we have

E[(Y - a)^2]

= E[Y^2 - 2 Ya + a^2]

= E[Y^2] - 2aE[Y] + a^2

= E[Y^2] + E[Y]^2 - 2aE[Y] + a^2 - E[Y]^2

= E[Y^2] + (E[Y] - a)^2 - E[Y]^2

which we minimize with a = E[Y].

Or, for one interpretation, the minimum rotational moment of inertia is for rotation about the center of mass.

So, for our main concern, suppose we want to use the data we have X to approximate Y. So, we want real valued function f with domain the possible values of X so that f(X) approximates Y.

For the most accurate approximation, we want to minimize

E[(Y - f(X))]^2

Claim: For f(X) we want

f(X) = E[Y|X]

So, f(X), using X, is the best non-linear least squares approximation to Y.

Proof:

We start by using one of the properties of conditional expectation and then continue with just simple algebra:

E[(Y - f(X))^2]

= E[ E[Y^2 - 2Yf(X) + f(X)^2|X] ]

= E[ E[Y^2|X] - 2f(X)E[Y|X]

\+ f(X)^2 ]

= E[ E[Y^2|X] E[Y|X]^2 - 2f(X)E[Y|X]

\+ f(X)^2 - E[Y|X]^2 ]

= E[ E[Y^2|X]

\+ (E[Y|X] - f(X))^2

\- E[Y|X]^2 ]

which is minimized with

f(X) = E[Y|X]

Done.

<comment><USER55> I think if you have such an exposure to so many stat and probability books, and yet cannot recommend one good one, then clearly you are the person fated by the universe to write that one book written correctly. :)

<comment><USER9> Back in grad school, my fellow students and I were amazed at how polished were the books of Rudin, Neveu, Royden, Luenberger, Dynkin, etc. but how comparatively ..., say not good, were the books in statistics. There are some hints that there are more good statistics books now.

One of my fellow students was very capable, and I was hoping would write a good book; I doubt if he ever got around to it.

I'm glad the statistics community has at least one foot in important applications, but both feet? Way back there was Cramer. At the Brown University of Applied Math long was U. Grenander -- maybe he could have written a Cramer Volume II.

I'd like to see (A) much more polish on the foundations and then (B) selected with good insight and expertise some of the keys to some of the more important applications.

Some of the application areas where I suspect, with varying degrees of strength, there is some good work include (i) particle physics such as at the LHC, (ii) a huge range of bio-medical research, (iii) high end military radar, sonar, and tracking more generally.

When I was in grad school, some of the gossip was that statistics of sample paths of stochastic processes was a wide open field -- I suspect it still is.

Apparently in the US, for well done theory, at least in attitudes, statistics is a poor cousin of probability theory, that is a poor cousin of pure math, and stochastic processes is just out of the picture.

I haven't tried to be a statistician, but I've done some projects and gotten some results. But for each of the results, clearly there were plenty of loose ends and more to do but without any very clear theory, examples, experience, or methods to tie off the loose ends.

Maybe here's one -- maybe since I'm not putting a lot into this just now: Above I gave my little derivation that with data X, the best estimate of Y is E[Y|X] with the idea that this partly justifies cross tabulation as the discrete version. Okay, but X might be a sample path of a history of a stochastic process with lots of dimensions with goofy _data types_. So, maybe to cut down some on the exponential explosion of the data required for cross tabulation on several variables, exponential in the number of variables, pick and choose the variables. Okay, but first cut we have not even zip, zilch, or zero on how to do that.

Once I published a paper on multi-dimensional, distribution-free statistical hypothesis tests, intended for zero-day computer security. But, again, the number of variables with data is huge; we encounter another exponential explosion and would like some help on which variables to choose.

Very broadly, from 200,000 feet up, we get to choose the variables to use and then want to know something about the accuracy of our results -- too often we are to use the TIFO (try it and find out) method, some form of Monte Carlo, _resampling_ techniques (B. Efron, P. Diaconis) deleting some variables or observations and trying again, etc.

My guess is that finding a welcoming department in a research university and/or an interested problem sponsor in a funding agency would be too tough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> What are people's thoughts on Loeve? Too old, too much to bite off?

<comment><USER57> It's an excellent book to get ones fundamentals right. Might not work for a large part of hacker news audience. Since CS deals primarily with discrete spaces they don't need as much rigour in analysis or measures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> _All of Statistics_ by Larry Wasserman (for its rigor).

</comment><comment><USER59> I recommend reading Taleb's books, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and Anti-Fragile. They will either reinforce your education or serve as an antidote.

</comment><comment><USER60> Hugh Gordon's Discrete Probability

</comment><comment><USER61> fuller- intoduction to probability theory

</comment><comment><USER62> casella and burger is the standard grad math stats book and good-ish departments i.e. it proves things using calculus but it's for statisticians (covers things like efficiency and biasedness and etc).</comment>


Borders to file for bankruptcy - <AUTHOR> http://www.thirdage.com/news/borders-bankruptcy-popular-bookstore-group-file_2-13-2011

<comment><USER2> Sad they went the way of Hollywood Video and Blockbuster rather than pivot and adapt.</comment>


GitLab 11.4 Released with Merge Request Reviews and Feature Flags - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/22/gitlab-11-4-released/ <comment><USER2> We just moved our whole company's set of repos to Gitlab (the integration was appealing, so we didn't have to have a half dozen SaaS memberships for Tickets, CI/CD, devops, etc).

But some basic things seem to be lacking, or not working great. I can't just easily go to an issue based on number (I try putting in "#85" in the top search and nothing happens, well nothing happens at all in the top search)

The issues are just the right level of simplicity that we need.

Performance overall is still just nowhere close to Github levels (where everything feels snappy), but I know Gitlab continues to improve this.

Overall I'm happy I never have to use JIRA again.

<comment><USER3> Could you distill your issues with JIRA down to a few items?

I've worked with JIRA and have my own complaints, but I'd really like the perspective of someone else as well that decided that a simpler issue tracking system is better than what JIRA offers.

I've used Bugzilla, GitHub issues, and now GitLab issues, but I still feel like there's an appeal to JIRA that these solutions don't offer, and examining the pain points helps me understand that a bit better.

<comment><USER2> My issue with JIRA comes down fundamentally to their UI.

I used to be a JIRA power user in the mid/late 2000s. I think that was the pinnacle of it feeling like a very powerful tool. You could do a lot with their table views, filters, saved views, etc. It was easy to add fields, etc. That's when they were an issue tracker and the primary interface for editing things was just a highly customizable table.

Where JIRA started going off the rails is when they started to bolt on Agile methodologies to their existing system (which, in their defense, was where the whole industry was heading anyway).

But the nail in the coffin (for 2 years now) is that their new UI is just so damn hard to use. I find myself CONSTANTLY frustrated with doing very simple things. The app is slow and doesn't feel snappy like an SPA does nowadays.

The other day, I was on a screen share and trying to edit my notification settings (we were bulk editing a lot of stories and wanted to turn off the deluge of emails). I think the two of us in our screen share spent maybe 10 mins trying to find out where to shut down notifications, and failed. The UI is so damn convoluted. It's like the designers won every debate over any UX people, and focused on making things pretty instead of intuitive.

For them to truly compete with today's tools, I don't think they have a choice but to throw out the existing app and start new.

<comment><USER3> Awesome, I feel the same way.

Just today, we were told to use a specific filter on our backlog so we could plan out the sprint. It took a bit to find it, and they had apparently set up a new board on an existing project so they could track issues in multiple projects. We plan a single sprint multiple projects because our team handles multiple projects (small company).

Since adopting Jira, management kept changing how they wanted to use it (experimenting, can't blame them), and adjusting within Jira has been super painful. I ended up building a couple tools outside of Jira so I could get exactly the view I wanted.

I went through this same process when management kept trying to tweak Bugzilla to get what we wanted, and I even ended up building a simple issue management application. I'm getting that itch again, so I'm just trying to figure out what people hate so I can know what to highlight. I don't think it'll go anywhere, but who knows!

<comment><USER2> Good luck!

One thing you might want to highlight is all the developer time that's wasted searching for things (or how to do things) in JIRA. It causes frustration and is a true waste of time.

But again, I don't think there's one issue tracker to rule them all. Gitlab's appeal was less about it being way better, and more about it being fully integrated.

<comment><USER3> > I don't think there's one issue tracker to rule them all

Oh, definitely. GitHub and GitLab issues are both pretty nice. However, they're not meant to be super featureful, and I think there's a niche between those types of issue trackers and Jira, where most people are actually probably better served by something simpler than Jira.

Some very large projects are managed with GitHub/GitLab issues, so there's definitely an advantage there, but they don't work when you want to track other things with them (e.g. hardware design/release process, customer support tickets, etc).

I just need to figure out what people dislike about Jira, then match the most common use cases making Jira's weaknesses my advantages. However, I'm not fully invested in it yet, but we'll see how much I get fed up with Jira/Gitlab issues (I work on projects that use both).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "File tree for browsing merge request diff" is a GODSEND.

They messed up Merge Requests about a year ago- they made is so hard to find out what files have changed.

FINALLY they introduced a solution to that!

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been using Gitlab for a while, and while it's not yet quite as polished as Github, it is rapidly improving and the gap is already far too small to justify Github's restrictive license and policies in general.

I strongly recommend it as an alternative to Github.

<comment><USER6> Hello, Community Advocate from GitLab here.

Thank you for your comment, we really appreciate your words. It's great to hear your feedback and you can check out the latest data on stability and performance here [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/11/gitlab-com-stability- pos...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/11/gitlab-com-stability-post-gcp- migration/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I didn't know GitLab had "Epics".

What's the main differences with "Milestones"? It's not really clear from the doc. We use milestones as SCRUM epics at my job.

<comment><USER6> Hey Gregoire, that's a good question. Epics let you manage your portfolio of projects more efficiently and with less effort by tracking groups of issues that share a theme, across projects and milestones. On the other hand milestones are a way to track issues and merge requests created to achieve a broader goal in a certain period of time.

Anyway, please check this documentation for Epics [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/epics/](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/epics/) and Milestones [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/milestones/](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/milestones/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice timing :)

<comment><USER9> They release every month on the 22nd</comment></comment>


Current Wuhan Situation - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/heylauragao/status/1241620966762938370 <comment><USER2> Doesn't this put into question the whole premise that _China had defeated the Covid-19_ and things are beginning to come to normal?

The lockdown is in effect and the moment it's taken down, we'll see a second wave. No?

<comment><USER3> > The lockdown is in effect and the moment it's taken down, we'll see a second > wave. No?

Who knows, I think they have no idea and are just keeping things as they are to avoid having Wuhan in the news. Would make awful press to admit to any new cases in Wuhan.

Are other major metropolises locked down similarly? Beijing, Shanghai?

In general, is it credible that China has had no new cases other than those so called "imported from outside"? Sounds like propaganda to me.

<comment><USER4> This is the thing that is so crazy about the economic suicide and authoritarian lockdowns we are all doing.

Evidence from China and Italy is that they don't actually work. It's been three months, and China still can't let people leave their front door or the virus will return full force, with no expectations that another month or even another year of lockdown will help.

In Italy, with two weeks of lockdown, the exponential growth of new infections hasn't even slowed. Now they are predicting that "just three more weeks" and the exponential growth might start to slightly decline.

Wealth and freedom are declining around the world, but it doesn't even slow the virus' spread.

Meanwhile, places like Korea have no trouble stopping the virus without the authoritarianism.

And yet, all people here call for is ever-more economic destruction, and ever more authoritarian controls, all to no detectable effect. Except, of course, the end of our free and prosperous societies.

<comment><USER5> > _Evidence from China and Italy is that they don 't actually work._

Don't work for what purpose? They work well at shutting down the virus in the short term. In Wuhan the reproductive number of the virus is estimated to have dropped from above 3 to ~0.3 after the lockdown.

> _In Italy, with two weeks of lockdown, the exponential growth of new > infections hasn 't even slowed_

This is definitely not true. If you plot Italian cases or deaths on a logarithmic scale it's easy to see the curve slowly bending down. Keep in mind it takes ~2 weeks for public health interventions to start showing up in data about identified cases, and ~3 weeks for them to show up in data about deaths.

> _places like Korea have no trouble stopping the virus without the > authoritarianism_

Places like South Korea have had plenty of "trouble", but have stopped transmission through nationwide testing, contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine, along with early school closures and a mass social distancing effort among the public, pervasive use of face masks, etc.

The South Korean public health response (and we might add also Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) was much faster and more decisive than the response in the US or Europe. As a result they have avoided the situation of widespread community spread, and not needed to undertake a total societal shutdown as became necessary in Hubei or Italy.

What other countries should be learning from South Korea is to act quickly and stay on top of the virus before it gets out of control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "For context, most people live in "neighborhoods" comprised of several high rise apartments in a compact area w/ a shared green space (see pic)."

Off-topic I know, but this is a pretty good description of the Sim City "donut" shape that was essential to building a megalopolis and winning the game. You built residential units around a park center, and with the right conditions that developed into white high-rises like those in her linked picture.

<comment><USER7> [https://solutions.synearth.net/a-community-dwelling- machine/](https://solutions.synearth.net/a-community-dwelling-machine/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let me make sure I have my timeline right.

For years experts have warned that another SARS-like virus is going to come out of China, due to their animal husbandry practices and culture of eating certain animals.

Then this disease appears, and China initially tries to suppress news of it. They deny it's an issue. Wasting valuable time and allowing it spread unchecked to the rest of the world.

Then, about three months ago they lock down Wuhan to contain it (an area with millions of people I think?) This means, based on this Twitter thread, that residents can't even walk outside. So, like being incarcerated?

And, people's wages are getting paid still, but as loans they'll owe when this is all over. So, like debt?

What boggles my mind is all the positive news coverage of this. Why are people fawning over this?

<comment><USER9> Strip away media narrative on both sides, an impartial timeline would be:

Wuhan medical community recognized a new pneumonia of unclear cause in late December during winter and the height of influenza season. The novel Corona Virus was identified, WHO was notified, the genome was sequenced. This took roughly 1 week. Then it took 3 more weeks of "stability management" before central government quarantined WuHan and essentially shutdown the entire country right before the most important holiday of the year and the largest annual human migration.

4 weeks for identification to evaluation to 3 months of aggressive techno- authoritarian quarantine, and assuming 2nd wave and import cases can be managed until the vaccine - China just demonstrated the first civilization model in human history to be able to suppress a virus of this magnitude in large countries. Other countries are only recently adopting the war analogy, China executed it on a dime. How they'll fair in rebooting society is unknown.

Was there missteps? Yes. Could they have done better? Not by much IMO. Every misstep with Chinese characteristics is being repeated just as worst in other countries with their cultural characteristics. The overall response as been not as agile (if there a response at all), despite having ample notice and more information.

The retrospect of this global health crisis is going to be interesting, China and a handful of islands managed to successful crush the curve, complacent developed countries may or may not successful spread the curve, and all the developing countries get rapid herd immunity because like the Spanish flu, they have no other choice. 1.4 billion people without herd immunity among a globalized world with immunity is going to be a conundrum though.

<comment><USER10> Lots of people left Wuhan before the lockdown though. Also lots of people still travelled for the Chinese New Year internally. January 10th is the beginning of travel season, Wuhan was locked down on the 23rd: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_in_November_2019_%E2%80%93_January_2020)

<comment><USER9> Locking down Hubei after 600 cases / ~3weeks is extremely expedient for an utterly unprecedented response. NYC was at 10k+ cases before they implement a light lock down, 60 days after Hubei, they're still meandering through half- measures. That's a comparatively severe response outside of China.

Many considerations in a region of 60million, i.e Jan 17th was the regional two sessions meeting. The early migration and WuHan being regional hub no doubt precipitated the decision to lock-down that fast. China locked down most of the country after ~30 days. Outside of a few city-states or island nations, we have ample counter-examples that no other country has responded as agile as China. Many don't even have a meaning response plan in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > the govt mandated employers must still pay salaries while [the workers are] > in quarantine. As a reaction, some employers are requiring workers to make > up this pay once they come back... effectively a loan.

So how are the workers going to pay it back? I presume it's going to be a pay cut for the next _n_ months until it's all made up for. While that's better than not getting paid at all, the unexpected pay cut might be problematic for households that live paycheck to paycheck (not sure how prevalent that is in china), and for the consumer economy. Also, are what happens if the employee simply quits? Are those debts legal debts?

<comment><USER12> For employees on the edge making 5-10 RMB/hour, that will be a huge burden for them. In China you need a signed/stamped release from your previous employer before you can take a new job, so they could just hold that back if there are any debts to make up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here is a video that better describes the situation - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER14> If you're interested in seeing the organized grocery run by neighborhood in Wuhan, this video interview[1] did an excellent job capturing the gist.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU2ut5Ark3Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU2ut5Ark3Q)

</comment><comment><USER15> Url changed from [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1241620966762938370.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1241620966762938370.html), which points to this.

<comment><USER16> What's the ruling on using threadreaderapp? Would a good submission post the original twitter source and link threadreaderapp in a comment?

<comment><USER15> "Ruling" is too strong a word but that's probably the best way. HN's guidelines call for original sources: " _Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._ "

If there were a community consensus that threadreaderapp.com links are better than the equivalent twitter.com links, we could maybe override that, but there's no such consensus.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER17> threadreaderapp is fast and almost always works unlike Twitter links that simply show "try again" because I block referer headers from being sent to their servers.

> _Our CSRF protection mechanism for POST requests checks that the origin and > referer headers of the request are sourced from Twitter. Since we knew this > to be effective for POSTs, we considered how we could implement this for GET > requests._

> _This proved effective in addressing the vulnerability, but it prevented > this initial load of the website. You might load Twitter from a Google > search result or by typing the url into the browser. To address this case, > we created a blank page on twitter.com which did nothing but reload itself. > Upon reload, the referer would be set to twitter.com, and so it would load > correctly._

[https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2018/twitter_silhouette.html)

<comment><USER18> Wow that's actually horrid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Taxis are repurposed for hospital visits! How dangerous for taxi drivers.

<comment><USER20> From what I've seen, taxi drivers have put up barriers between them and their passengers. Example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXJHp_zmgTE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXJHp_zmgTE)

Not sure how they disinfect the taxi afterwards though. Anyone more knowledgable on this?

<comment><USER21> A/C knows no barriers.

<comment><USER11> Depends on whether the cars have passenger air vents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Didn't the virus start from the Wuhan virus lab?

<comment><USER23> no

<comment><USER24> There's a decent amount of evidence to suggest it did, and China has already shown themselves unreliable (putting it mildly) regarding information about the virus. I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you propose to speak with such certainty.

<comment><USER25> I'd be interested in reading any evidence, could you provide some links?

<comment><USER26> No evidence here, but it shouldn't be dismissed either.

From Wikipedia ..

> _Coronavirus research In 2005, a group including researchers from the Wuhan > Institute of Virology published research into the origin of the SARS > coronavirus, finding that China 's horseshoe bats are natural reservoirs of > SARS-like coronaviruses.[6] Continuing this work over a period of years, > researchers from the Institute sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in > locations across China, isolating over 300 bat coronavirus sequences.[7]

In 2015, the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. A team from the Institute engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[8][9]_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In response to people who are saying, "it's just because Chinese people eat weird food that the virus started in Wuhan," here's a much more thoughtful article about how the shape of the global markets contributed to the shape of this pandemic:

[https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/chinese- viru...](https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/chinese-virus-world- market/)</comment>


ReConstitution 2012 - live deconstruction of the US Presidential Debates - <AUTHOR> http://recon12.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> really nice project -- built with "Open Web technology, including Grunt, Backbone.js, Backbone Boilerplate, Node.js, MongoDB, RequireJS, PhantomJS, and Engine.IO"

are they ready to scale for tonight? :-)</comment>


What Is Bandwidth (1985) – Christmas Lectures with David Pye - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HfRVun0MCk <comment><AUTHOR> The link to the full lecture here: [http://www.rigb.org/christmas- lectures/watch/1985/communicat...](http://www.rigb.org/christmas- lectures/watch/1985/communicating/no-man-is-an-island)</comment>


Rex – palm-sized, single-board computer for DIY robots - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alphalem/rex-the-brain-for-robots

<comment> C-- Just asking to those with more knowledge than me. How is this any different to a RaspberryPi or a Beagle Bone Black?

<comment><USER2> The RaspberryPi is supposed to be a computer you can use like a regular one. Rex seems to have a dual role: It's designed to control a robot (lots of pins and extension boards) and to act as a general purpose computer. So it sits somewhere between an Arduino and a RasPi.

<comment><USER3> The BeagleBone Black also sits in that range in that it is both an ARM-based general purpose computer but also has 2 real-time programmable microcontrollers onboard. Which isn't to say that this Rex project has no value, if it is produced it would be a much easier out-of-the-box experience for someone to just plug in some garden variety I2C motors and get going than it would be on the Black, but this sort of combined computer/microcontroller design isn't unique to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone who makes a lot of robots, I will support this on principle. I really like that the board can accept a high current power source and has a cutoff switch.

I am always a little nervous about building a robot around a board when I am uncertain about how it will be supported. If you are really building robots that are going to be used out doors or in rugged environments you want to be able to replace every part. Controller boards aren't really the expensive part of robots.

For Decapitron, an autonomous combat robot ([http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/140197-Decapitron!](http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/140197-Decapitron!)), I have had to replace the controller board twice. That may sound like a lot but shorts and power surges aren't that strange in combat. But now that board isn't made anymore. So it is a big problem if the board gets damaged in combat. That's the advantage of using something really standard, like Arduino or Raspberry Pi. I can get one of those next year.

Still, I will try this.

</comment><comment><USER5> As a hobbyist AI programmer with few hardware skills my dream is a for an out- of-the box robot with basic movement, sensors and maybe an arm that I can start programming for in a higher-level language. Rex looks like a huge step in that direction. If they could throw in a chassis for mounting standard motors and sensors, even my multi-thumbed self might be able to make it do something cool.

<comment><USER6> You might want to check out ROS from the willow garage people. It's probably the right tool that you're looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how much power it drains. The RaspPi uses "only" 3 Watt, but that is a way too much for many interesting applications. There are some hacks to reduce to the power usage (by replacing the voltage regulators for example) but i wonder how much this board will use.

<comment><USER8> Well, in most cases when 3 W is too much, the application is simple enough that you could do it with an Arduino - which draws far less power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always wonder with these boards why wifi isn't just built-in. It seems like a delightfully simpler interface than any wire, and means the base system can integrate with anything else over the network. Sure you can always add wifi, but the point of these boards is that they bundle all the basic stuff, and often include things like development environments that can't make use of wifi if they don't know if it is available. Power is a concern, but you can still turn it off.

<comment><USER10> It's probably omitted to keep the base cost down. WiFi modules that you can get for low-quantity applications are expensive[1]. Cheaper modules generally require higher-volume consumer electronics applications--not to mention volumes of NDAs simply to get module documentation. Adding WiFi (or wireless comms of any type) also makes you an intentional radiator[2], which potentially complicates your FCC testing, adding cost and delay. So, from an MVP perspective, it makes sense to leave WiFi off if it's not critical to the base application--at least for your first revision.

[1] TI's budgetary pricing for one such module--the CC3000--is about $10: [http://www.ti.com/product/cc3000](http://www.ti.com/product/cc3000)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_47_CFR_Part_15#C_- _Intent...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_47_CFR_Part_15#C_- _Intentional_radiators)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for those details, it makes more sense. People usually talk about the cost, which I don't buy – it's worth $10/unit, and these aren't super-low-cost units anyway. And in this case consumers of the Rex aren't going to develop something that will be the basis of thousands of units where that $10/unit cost becomes a big deal.

But I can definitely see how the regulatory overhead would be a big deal, and it seems like that regulation also makes other aspects of integration more bureaucratic. Like I bet a bunch of these chips could be used inappropriately (e.g., to emit stronger signals than are allowed) and they are using NDAs and such as an alternative to other security measures. In a sense USB wireless standards are the one interface/security layer that is well enough spec'd that it is easy to integrate.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I can see how the cost argument is borderline--it really depends upon what you value & connectivity is pretty important nowadays. But, unless the primary application is specifically "connected robots", I do think it makes sense to omit it for the first rev and get a cheaper product out faster. Don't forget that the $10 is the cost of the part itself.* You still need some support circuitry, hardware development time, software development time, testing time, etc. And then there's markup. Assuming absolute minimal costs for all of those--and direct sales with an aggressively minimal margin, I'd still expect a $10 part cost to translate to at least a $20 product cost.

* Admittedly, that $10 is _budgetary_ pricing and would probably come down with negotiation (and there might be cheaper low-volume options--that's just one I knew of offhand). But that's likely still the order of magnitude for the quantities of the Rex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Couple of things I wonder:

\- SdCard + full-blown OS = SdCard dies after a while? Or more serious problems like the rPi simply yielding it empty? Could another type of storage be used to boot and run from?

\- more information on the OS? What's it based on? Open source so we can fiddle with it?

\- what processor is that exactly? Likely the manufacturer provides an OS + libs for it as well (like Ti does for their OMAP), probably the board can be booted with that as well?

\- will the schematics be open-sourced?

\- debugging capabilities of running programs?

btw quite some comments starting with "I wonder" here. Authors should provide more information probably..

<comment><USER12> Howdy, project creator here.

The OS is based on the Yocto Project, so it's a distro we're putting together ourselves. It's still under heavy development, but the goal is to have something minimal that we can throw all our support under without having to rely as much on other distros that already have tons of other boards/projects to worry about.

We haven't committed to open-sourcing the hardware yet, but all the software will be FOSS. The stuff we have so far is on github, and feedback would be great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I the only one to see this and think "They're going back to PCMCIA?" (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REX_6000](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REX_6000) for a "palm-sized single-board computer" complete with 240x120 monochrome touchscreen).

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://alphalem.com/pages/alphalem-os](http://alphalem.com/pages/alphalem-os)

I like the reference to [MCP]([http://tron.wikia.com/wiki/MCP](http://tron.wikia.com/wiki/MCP))!

</comment><comment><USER15> Am I the only one to see $90.00 pledged of $90,000 goal with only 5 backers ?

<comment><USER16> Yes, looks like this just started today, so it's reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Stuff like this is why I run BigBoardList.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very cool!

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice!</comment>


Choosing an SSO Strategy: SAML vs OAuth2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.mutuallyhuman.com/blog/2013/05/09/choosing-an-sso-strategy-saml-vs-oauth2/

<comment><USER2> Some minor notes:

Conventionally, "authn" means authentication, "authz" means authorization, and plain old "auth" doesn't mean anything in particular.

I don't think it makes sense to blame SAML for the awkwardness of using the passive browser sign-in scenario for something for which it was not designed. There are other profiles and other protocols available from any competent security token service.

Also bear in mind there is a tremendous amount of confusion around the SAML terminology, which can mean the token format, or the protocol for exchanging authentication request messages, which are entirely separate things.

</comment><comment><USER3> Naïve question: why isnt any service on the internet providing sso using kerberos? The protocol seems to be appropriate.</comment>


8chan: The far-right website linked to the rise in hate crimes - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/04/mass-shootings-el-paso-texas-dayton-ohio-8chan-far-right-website <comment><USER2> Some (two) criticisms of the article:

> "But extremism has been central to 8chan identity since it was founded in > 2013 by a computer programmer and self-proclaimed eugenicist Fredrick > Brennan."

Brennan himself is both disabled and has said (I can't recall where so forgive me if I'm wrong) that he was just trolling when talking about eugenics. Article says in the next sentence "(Brennan has since distanced himself from his earlier writings and beliefs and has cut ties with the site.)" but I can't help feeling that the initial mentioning of his discussion about eugenics was unnecessary.

> "Protection from Cloudflare"

This entire section looks to me like the article is blaming Cloudflare for 8chan's existence (and subsequently the El Paso shooting). If the author had that in mind they're making pretty big grasps here. Cloudflare has a reputation for trying to support HTTPS for as many sites as possible and offer protection from DDOSing ((disclaimer: I use their registrar and DNS)). This is mostly just my personal thought rather than an actual argument though.

\---

I think 8chan is probably the seediest search-engine-indexed site on the web right now. Even members of 4chan's random board, popularized as the shithole of the 'net, disavowed the actions of the El Paso shooter. Cloudflare can choose to tolerate 8chan, and I find that decision to uphold free speech admirable, but 8chan is far worse than the Daily Stormer.

<comment><USER3> There isn't a meaningful distinction between ironic advocacy of eugenics and genuine advocacy of eugenics. The only question is whether the advocacy is received successfully or not.

Don't forget the _Daily Stormer_ style guide:

> _The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. > There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful > racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor - I am a racist > making fun of stereotype of racists, because I don 't take myself super- > seriously. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But > that's neither here nor there._

<comment><USER2> Yeah, you're probably right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish everyone would quit giving them free publicity

Just call them a fringe website instead of driving traffic to them.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how many people who subscribe to the "contagion" theory of mass shooters also think that 8chan is innocuous. These two lines of thought seem at odds, but I suspect what they have in common is a wish to deny the role of a particular strain of right wing ideology in these shootings.

</comment><comment><USER6> It wont work. Lunatics find their way to get together and talk. Call it Telegram group or Whatsapp.

<comment><USER7> This article suggests otherwise.

> What they found was encouraging for this strategy of reducing unwanted > activity on a site like Reddit:

> Post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 > percent. Members of banned communities left Reddit at significantly higher > rates than control groups.

> Migration was common, both to similar subreddits (i.e. overtly racist ones) > and tangentially related ones (r/The_Donald). However, within those > communities, hate speech did not reliably increase, although there were > slight bumps as the invaders encountered and tested new rules and > moderators.

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits- contro...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits- controversial-ban-of-its-most-toxic-subreddits-actually-worked/)

<comment><USER8> An interesting round of "invaders encountering and testing new rules" was when far right mods tried a takeover of /r/libertarian. /r/libertarian has always had a level of interesting with groups like /r/The_Donald, and has been full of right wing memes, but is also full of left wing libertarians (the original libertarian - Joseph Déjacque, was an anarcho-communist - left and right libertarian mostly split along the view on whether enforcement property rights are an unjustified state intervention leading to loss of liberty, or a necessity to ensure liberty), and new mods were added that started banning left-wing libertarians all over the place, even for things like just mentioning Joseph Déjacque.

Amusingly, they went too far, and the original founder of the sub came back, revoked their mod privileges and put in place a new "head moderator" who was an anarcho-communist, so it backfired spectacularly.

Though the new head moderator did take care to appoint moderators that represented a cross-section of the community, and things went somewhat back to normal, the explicit support inherent in having a left-wing head mod did embolden a lot of left wing users of the sub to post more commentary countering the right wing posts to a greater extent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unoccupied people making racist jokes are as unpleasant as journalists writing biased articles to push their political agenda against freedom of speech.

<comment><USER3> So we would have more freedom of speech if journalists refrained from publishing and people with political opinions refrained from expressing them?

<comment><USER9> Being pro freedom of speech doesn't mean that I can't critizice the opinions of people.

If the author had just pointed out how racist and unpleasant 8chan users are, I would have agreed. If she had said that racism and shootings are a bad thing, I would have agreed too.

I don't agree with questioning the freedom of people to say abhorrent things. And I don't agree with questioning a service provider that's just doing its job.

And answer to your question is no.

<comment><USER3> Sure, you can criticize the opinions of people. But you did not. You said that the fact that they had set forth their opinion, the fact that they had engaged in a speech act, was _itself_ unpleasant.

Now that's your right, of course, but it strikes me as hypocritical. Argue why their position is wrong and take delight in the fact that they set out an argument that you can respond to. Or, perhaps, argue that their position is too dangerous to be stated and poses a long-term threat to the freedom of speech—but distinguish that argument from their own, which is much the same.

<comment><USER9> > the fact that they had engaged in a speech act, was itself unpleasant.

I obviously think the author has the right to say whatever the hell she wants to say, but I'm against the content of her message.

I could write a really long argument to say why she's wrong, but in short: Because freedom and justice are the most desirable values to have in a society, even when people can use that freedom to say disgusting things.

Why is freedom desirable? Because it's the only way that an individual can develop their own life, chase their dreams and be happy in a manner that respects the freedom of other individuals. (My definition of freedom is that you can't physically attack other people or steal their property. Trying to expand freedom to things such as "freedom from being insulted" (i.e. censorship) is a contradiction, so the only logical way of defining it is around physical actions.)

Additionally, censorship implies that someone has to decide what speech is acceptable and what isn't, at that point, things become really arbitrary. What would the author think if her opinions were labeled as "hate speech" and people made posts wanting prohibit her from posting them? Where do you draw the line of acceptability? It's arbitrary and unjust.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite CLI or ncurses program? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I've become a big fan of ncurses software over the years without really realising. Newsbeuter, irssi, cmus/mocp, vim, mutt. It's the resource efficiency and speed of use that make the difference with their shiny UI counterparts. That and still having a GUI, albeit a minimum viable GUI.

It has inspired me more than once to pick up K&R's C and have a stab at a tool of my own that I'd love to have - but it's way down on the current list of priorities.

...Now wondering why the question - are you working on something?

EDIT: Forgot a special mention for Finch (pidgin client), which along with the others runs nicely on Tmux (another forgotten mention) on a perma-on server. Rpi2 in my case.

<comment><USER3> newsbeuter author here. If you want to develop your own text terminal tools, I can really recommend STFL: [http://www.clifford.at/stfl/](http://www.clifford.at/stfl/)

Without it, I would have probably been driven crazy when I attempted to put together a UI. It helped me get from an idea to a working prototype really quickly. In the case of newsbeuter, like 2 days.

<comment><USER2> Consider me suitably humbled. Thanks for a great (the best?) RSS reader.

Much appreciation and thanks for the pointer!

My own project would involve segmenting common office doc formats for translation, saving translations to translation memory (in standard TMX format), attempting to match new segments with pre-translated and perhaps later integrate some project co-working/server functionality. All a little daunting, so all help, such as your pointer, is very welcome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> With ncurses I would say htop, you can see what happens on the machine quickly. And for pure CLI, sysdig is a must-have on every machine !

</comment><comment><USER5> ncdu: ncurse disk usage (very convenient to see what is consuming too much space)

<comment><USER6> This is awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> tig: [https://github.com/jonas/tig](https://github.com/jonas/tig)

ranger: [https://github.com/hut/ranger](https://github.com/hut/ranger)

vim

<comment><USER8> Oh my god... how have I never seen ranger before? Back in my MS-DOS development days, I used an old program called LIST.COM. Ranger feels lighter than MC. I love it. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> mc aka [midnight commander!]([https://www.midnight- commander.org/](https://www.midnight-commander.org/))

<comment><USER10> Seconded. Although I still think Turbo C and Borland Pascal 7 win out, but it's not like I'm using those anymore.

I miss the demo days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Orpheus - an MP3 player. [http://thekonst.net/orpheus](http://thekonst.net/orpheus)

I used to love Wordstar and wordperfect. I'm a bit surprised at the glut of curses / cli text editors and the lack of curses / cli word processors.

<comment><USER12> Wordstar -> jstar from joe(1).

Or try wordgrinder

[https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/howto-use- wordgrind...](https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/howto-use-wordgrinder- like-a-pro/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Glances is a cross-platform curses-based system monitoring tool written in Python.... [https://github.com/nicolargo/glances](https://github.com/nicolargo/glances)

</comment><comment><USER14> Dwarf Fortress

</comment><comment><USER15> glances is nice if you want to get an overview of your system resources:

[https://github.com/nicolargo/glances](https://github.com/nicolargo/glances)

bmon and iftop can be used to see network usage:

[https://github.com/tgraf/bmon/](https://github.com/tgraf/bmon/)

[http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/iftop/](http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/iftop/)

Similar to iftop there is also iotop, but instead of showing network usage, it shows disk usage:

[http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/](http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/)

Side note: There was a blog a couple years ago, which isn't being updated now, that would post reviews of CLI tools. Anyone that is interested in this topic should take a look at it:

[https://kmandla.wordpress.com/software/](https://kmandla.wordpress.com/software/)

[https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/](https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/) (new blog from the same person that did [http://kmandla.wordpress.com](http://kmandla.wordpress.com))

</comment><comment><USER16> Mutt or The emacsclient in terminal mode (ncurses)

</comment><comment><USER17> For many years that is Midnight Commander for me.

</comment><comment><USER18> The bpython interpreter is great

[http://bpython-interpreter.org/](http://bpython-interpreter.org/)

[http://bpython-interpreter.org/screenshots.html](http://bpython- interpreter.org/screenshots.html)

<comment><USER7> if you are a vim person then I can recommend ptpython: [https://github.com/jonathanslenders/ptpython](https://github.com/jonathanslenders/ptpython)

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jonathanslenders/ptpython/...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jonathanslenders/ptpython/master/docs/images/example1.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Semi related, anyone got a great lib/framework for graphs/charts/plots in ncursers with python? I'm considering to build some simple terminal monitor utility to keep track of health status but haven't really looked in to it yet.

<comment><USER20> A couple of neat options here:

Look into urwid first, which is a full TUI framework in python.

Also consider using libcaca, which has excellent python bindings but is generally used for flashier stuff than simple utilities (text-based demoscene stuff, etc etc)...

Apologies for not linking to the relevant projects, but I'm certain you'll find them with a quick search :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> ATM when testing deployment flow:

      function sd()  {
      n=2
      while [ $n -gt 0 ]
        do
          sed -i ''"${1}"'d' $HOME/.ssh/known_hosts
          n=$(($n-1))
        done
      }

I like sed.

<comment><USER9> care to explain what the script does and how ncurses is involved here ?

<comment><USER22> It removes a line from the known_host file. When spinning up a new VM/container or reaching a machine that has an IP/hostname you've used before (happens a lot in dev environments/NATed networks), you'll get a warning about a possible MITM attack.

ncurses is not involved though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> mocp. It replaced iTunes for me (although I've long since switched to Linux).

<comment><USER24> I wish I could do that, but having an iPod forces me to run a windows virtual machine just for iTunes.

<comment><USER2> I used to sync my iPod with foobar2000 on Win7 to avoid having to deal with iTunes - I'm sure there are a few other Linuxy options to explore too. Vive la résistance :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Midnight Commander, a clone of the original Norton Commander for D.O.S.

</comment><comment><USER26> nvlc - a ncurses vlc videolan media player built into vlc.

nvlc is just a script supplied with vlc: #! /bin/sh exec /usr/bin/vlc -I "ncurses" "$@"

</comment><comment><USER27> Glances: [http://nicolargo.github.io/glances/](http://nicolargo.github.io/glances/)

</comment><comment><USER28> slrn was pretty much perfect back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER29> I only say that on many days I spend more time in my vim than in my bed. I usually run it in a terminal Window.

</comment><comment><USER30> ncurses: emacs.

cli: cd, ls, mv, rm, grep, …, i.e., the core utils, + git, svn.

I couldn't live without the core utils, and I use them a lot as I don't have a graphical file manager (I think the last time I used one was in 2007, I might try again someday).

Also, I don't know if it counts in either category but: ssh, _of course_.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does Vim count? I guess so :)

</comment><comment><USER32> I'll add two that have yet to be mentioned: moreutils and youtube-dl.

</comment><comment><USER33> Taskwarrior - www.taskwarrior.org, best CLI todo list manager.

</comment><comment><USER34> beet ([https://github.com/sampsyo/beets](https://github.com/sampsyo/beets))

</comment><comment><USER12> \- nethack \- mc \- ag \- ssh \- renice,pkill,htop \- ncdu

</comment><comment><USER35> Vim, mutt, wicd-curses, irssi, mplayer|mpd and conky

</comment><comment><USER36> menuconfig

</comment><comment><USER20> Does 'sl' count? Because it should...

</comment><comment><USER37> fortune | cowsay

<comment><USER38> Yep. Try also with [https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> jq, vim, sysdig

<comment><USER40> +1 on jq

<comment><USER41> jq is small peanuts compared with App::RecordStream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> nethogs: bandwidth usage by process(Does not work with UDP!)

iptraf-ng: bandwidth usage by port.

lsof: list open files(including network files).

</comment><comment><USER40> mitmproxy has a great terminal UI

</comment><comment><USER43> Moon-buggy.

<comment><USER44> #"$%#"$%RFDS I am hooked :) Damn you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Irssi

</comment><comment><USER46> Vim :)

</comment><comment><USER47> git, ranger, cmus, byobu (I shifted to i3 though)

<comment><USER48> i3: hell to the yeah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> rtorrent has become my go-to torrent client.

</comment><comment><USER48> tig

htop

ipython

vim

little bash and python tools that I write myself, to automate my specific workflows.

</comment><comment><USER50> ncmpcpp is a great MPD client.

</comment><comment><USER51> vim, htop and ncmpcpp :)

</comment><comment><USER52> tig

</comment><comment><USER53> iftop

</comment><comment><USER54> qemu

</comment><comment><USER55> ack

</comment><comment><USER56> mc

</comment><comment><USER57> git</comment>


Stereophile: A Personal Odyssey - <AUTHOR> https://www.stereophile.com/content/stereophile-personal-odyssey <comment><USER2> Stereophile routinely recommends $20,000 'power conditioners' and multi- thousand dollar cables. FFS they've claimed CD players 'sound better' sitting on 'special' racks. ([https://www.stereophile.com/standsracks/206finite/index.html](https://www.stereophile.com/standsracks/206finite/index.html))

This is the history of a successful charlatan.

<comment><USER3> >This is the history of a successful charlatan.

Agreed.

Its tough though... I know of a couple times in my life I've thought something was OK until I saw something else.

Examples, Glass. Binoculars, camera lenses, rifle scopes, telescopes. Glass differences are very real. You might be A-OK with some Bushnell Binos, but USE Swarovski or Vortex Razor or something lower-highend and you'll get it. Now, I didn't write LOOK THROUGH, I wrote USE. This has an obvious point of diminishing returns. I would never buy higher-highend glass.

Another example is something like TV black levels. If you don't notice black levels - good for you! Don't look for it. Because once you have a dark room and notice it, you'll see it forever. I notice soap opera effect, black levels, local/regional dimming, burn in, and it all removes me from the material. Again, Sucks. I wouldn't buy a higher-highend TV, but I pretty much can't get by with low end anymore.

So... I KIND OF WANT to believe there is a serious quality range with audio gear, but I guess the difference is in glass or TV black levels, I can snap a picture and prove a difference. Audio is only ever perception. I can't prove a wave on an oscilloscope is more pleasing than another exactly within reason.

That said.... You're right. Sterophiles and Audiophiles seem to be people with too many dollars and not enough cents/sense, and lots of people taking advantage of that. But maybe I just haven't used the right gear yet.

<comment><USER4> You can measure all the differences in TV picture you described (and you didn't even mention colour gamut & dynamic range). You can measure the differences in optical glass. You can't measure the difference between a $10/m speaker cable and $10000/m speaker cable (usually... some of the expensive speaker cable is so crazy it may mess up the sound), or an amplifier sitting on a $5000 stand. And $1000 power cables, plugging into your usual wall outlet...

<comment><USER3> We can measure the difference in cables though! I can put them through a scope or analyzer and I can even show you real hard differences between them.

What we can't do is prove that makes a difference to your ear vs mine and that's the real problem.

So there are two difference classes of scam here. The one where it's true there is a difference in this $10 and $10000 cable, but they're effective identical. And the scam where this is no measurable or even logical difference at all.

It's the former scam that I think allows the "audiophile" industry to thrive.

<comment><USER5> Especially because measurements like Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) use sine waves for their measurements. People pay thousands of dollars for marginally lower THD (say, .02 % instead of 0.5%) but they listen to music, not sine waves.

Well, I assume this. Perhaps people buy high end audio equipment so they can listen to sine waves.

<comment><USER6> THD is a measure of non-linearity, which adds harmonics not present in the original signal. Yes, the standard tests use sine waves, but the results are applicable to other signals. Just because most people don't listen to sine waves for fun doesn't mean it's a valid measurement.

On the other hand, the highest THD in a sound reproduction system comes from the physical transducers. Worrying about the THD of an amplifier makes little sense when the speakers provide an order of magnitude more distortion.

<comment><USER7> -I fully agree with your sentiment, except I'd like to stress that a loudspeaker provides _several_ orders of magnitude more distortion than a competently designed amplifier driven within its limits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what's a fair price for a pair of tower speakers? Is $10k crazy expensive? $5000?

People pay crazy amounts of money for some paintings so I don't see an issue paying crazy amounts of money for audio gear that looks and sounds nice.

I visit Stereophile from time to time to see what's new but never bothered to read all the crap. If you are into audio gear/hifi there is 10% useful content though(i.e pictures, price range and measurements)

[https://www.listenup.com/shop/media/catalog/product/l/i/lili...](https://www.listenup.com/shop/media/catalog/product/l/i/lilium_wh_1.jpg)

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_9_8lCDuL3Q](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_9_8lCDuL3Q)

<comment><USER9> Having owned speakers in that range and listened to numerous pairs in the 5k range: a fair price is the price the speaker that sounds good to you costs. Measurable differences do not matter, what matters is your ear and your taste, both of which change over time. So whatever you do, don't buy anything based on reviews, go into a hifi store with a CD (or usb or whatever) with your favourite songs that you have a good idea of how you would like them to sound, and ask them to have a listening session with a number of different models. Then buy the pair that sounds best.

</comment></comment><comment> W-Stool There is literally no limit to the insanity of the audiophile universe. You can spend a thousand dollars on a three foot "reference quality" ethernet cable. I've seen "audiophile" SATA cables, USB cables, and USB signal conditioners. There's a whole sub-culture around removing the stock fuses in equipment and replacing them with "audiophile" fuses. I actually once saw two guys comparing a song ripped by two different CD rippers and discussing which one sounded better - despite the fact that the MD5 checksum on both files was the same.

After a while it starts to look like an extremely dysfunctional religious cult.

<comment><USER10> SATA cables? USB cables? Try audiophile electricity poles.

[https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/15/japan-audiophiles- instal...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/15/japan-audiophiles-install-own- electricity-poles/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Coincidentally Onkyo is in talks to sell its audio business to the US owner of Denon+Marantz, after having rescued Pioneer. Hi-Fi as a whole seems to be in a downward spiral, just like cameras, and most of the growth is in mobile audio.

</comment><comment> compiler-guy Stereophile is a terrific view into a culture of pseudo science and science denialism, but with extremely low stakes: it's just rich people wasting their money.

It's worth reading because the prose is actually quite good and you can also see just how people determined to believe things can ignore or dismiss rational arguments.

<comment><USER3> "It's morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money." - W. C. Fields

My first impression most "audiophile gear" and specifically on ShakiStones below is "well, that's so ridiculous it shouldn't be legal" but on better consideration, good for them. If someone is that dumb, they need to be relieved of their money before they do something dangerous with it.

<comment><USER12> Does this sentiment only apply to rich dumb people, or does the "good" of exploiting people's gullibility for profit also extend to taking advantage of the poor and vulnerable?

I ask because I've often wondered if this trait of American culture, wherein we've decided that defending oneself against predators & charlatans is up to the individual and not up to society (and if the individual fails at this, then "good for" the predator), might be the key difference between the U.S. and other first world nations which tends to land the U.S. at or near the bottom of various social goods & services metrics (balanced against the relative cost and our relative wealth). Because if the bias is toward rewarding predators for having been successfully predatory, then the result of the incentive seems like it will be that the ecosystem will be dominated by predators.</comment></comment></comment>


Looking for feedback – hTime: a new clock for remote workers - <AUTHOR> I'd love to hear your thoughts/feedback on a product I'm working on that helps remote team across the globe.
I'm building a new clock that eliminates time zone calculations to simplify scheduling & communicating time globally for remote workers. So no PDT, CET, nor UTC +2 -7 is needed anymore. It's an extended clock concept utilizing a new UTC, a UTC that rotates with you according to you location on Earth. The clock knows where you are in the globe and adjusts itself for you. This unifies the reading of time everywhere. Thus, time zone math can be eliminated.
Other solutions out there couldn't help me, unfortunately. Almost all of them work by stacking different times zone together, which doesn't really solve the problem from the roots. Calculations are still needed in many use cases, which makes no sense. There should be one language of time everywhere, a global time. It's there and is called UTC, but the problem is that it's not integrated in our daily life. This clock does that.
The idea is to have a unified time zone that works for all locations on earth by using the same time system we all know (24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds) and adding on top of it a rotating UTC layer as the global time. This layer is presented in alphabet. The reason for that is to distinguish the local time in numbers form the global one in letters.
If you're interested, check it out on https://thehtime.com, and here is an 8-min-read on the idea and the motivation https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/introducing-solutions-to-solve-the-mess-of-time-zones-cdf44a7ee4ae
Would love to hear your thoughts, thanks! <comment><USER2> Going to challenge you a little on this one, why would I use this over [https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/](https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/) :)?

I get the point about making your own time, but that seems a bit hard as you still have to calculate and add it to your calendar right?

</comment><comment><USER3> Navigated a bit through website and how it works. It would be nice if I can state once my location and the conversion is done under the hood. Maybe after using it I would get used of it, but for now it seems like a lot of work. I like the way the slack has it when you click to some user and tells what is the local time for that user.

</comment><comment><USER4> When scheduling a meeting at W:30 I would still need to know if other people are sleeping that time (let's say it's 2am in Japan) but otherwise certainly beats .beat time (aka [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time))</comment>


Draw a Cat - <AUTHOR> http://www.drawacat.net/

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of [http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/](http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> So I went there expecting cats and got a giant penis!

</comment><comment><USER4> for lazy ones [http://magistravsh.github.io/random- cat/](http://magistravsh.github.io/random-cat/) :)

</comment><comment><USER5> some great piece of work about cats ^_^

</comment><comment><USER6> hahahahaha

<comment><USER6> I like this</comment></comment>


ARM's Mali Midgard Architecture Explored - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/8234/arms-mali-midgard-architecture-explored <comment><USER2> Could somebody familiar with the tech explain the Midgard execution model described on page 6 of the article. I don't understand how each arithmetic pipeline of the Midgard is "essentially it's own cpu". If this is the case, it's perfect no as I get an vast array of independent SIMD units. What is the downside?

<comment><USER3> I could imagine that independent SIMD units require more additional resources like instruction decoders and branch units, whereas in the warp/wavefront model, many ALUs can share those units, saving die space and energy. If the executed workloads are mostly coherent, that resources are wasted.

It's interesting that ARM switched to independent ALUs/SIMDs, because if I understand it correctly, that is exactly what PowerVR was doing with its SGX architecture before switching to a wavefront-like execution model. In a way, they are going in the opposite direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> First PowerVR, now Mali – great news! I wonder if Qualcomm will ever publish some specs on Adreno, though.

<comment><USER4> Read the comments below the article.</comment></comment>


Have any good domain names to sell? - <AUTHOR> I started a website that shows a list of 100 curated, good and brandable domain names (I only have my own 6 featured there so far...) and I'm wondering if anyone is sitting on a few domain names they would like to sell for the right price.
There are no fees whatsoever (although you are encouraged to tip me if you have a successful sell) and no need for ownership verifications and all that stuff. It's really just a basic site that I created for fun and out of boredom.
Feedbacks (and domain names submissions) will be appreciated.
http://valleyhunt.com <comment><USER2> [http://aleagues.com](http://aleagues.com) (not hosted)

<comment><AUTHOR> nice. can you submit it through the site with your email and asking price?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> These domains are not that good. I would suggest trying flippa imstead</comment>


International Obfuscated C Code Contest Winners - <AUTHOR> http://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2012 <comment><USER2> Tromp's entry is amazing.

Source: <http://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/tromp.c>

Spoiler: <http://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html>

It's based on a minimal implementation of Binary Lambda Calculus: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_lambda_calculus>

<comment><USER3> Did he _invent_ Binary Lambda Calculus as well?!?

<comment><USER4> "Binary lambda calculus is a new idea introduced by John Tromp in 2008"

Apparently so. Wow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We hope you enjoy the 21st IOCCC results - we enjoyed judging the entries.

If you have any feedback on the competition for the Judges, please contact us using the details at <http://www.ioccc.org/contact.html>

Thanks. SimonC.

<comment><USER6> Just curious, since you're handy to ask: How do the judges view code that depends on external (but cross-platform and FOSS) libraries? Only Xlib is specifically mentioned in the rules.

I'm specifically thinking of libpng, but I'm sure one could think of other meaningful examples.

<comment><USER7> I don't know the official policy, but anecdotally, I won with an entry that used libperl back in 2000: <http://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2000_dlowe>

<comment><USER8> I love this bit of history from the hint :)

Aside: history... Larry Wall wrote the original Perl in 1986-87, the same two successive years he won the IOCCC. I hope this program helps you to realize that this was no fluke - that Perl and Obfuscation are as inseparable as, say, camels and humps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> FWIW, if anyone is curious to see the process of building my entry ("Conway's game of death") I just made the repo public: <https://github.com/dlowe/death>

This contest is great. I'm so glad it's happening regularly again :)

<comment><USER9> Process of building my entry is mostly in spoiler.html.gz. For your viewing convenience, it's also here: <http://uguu- archive.appspot.com/nyaruko/edit.html>

<comment><USER7> How did you record that?

<comment><USER9> A VIM script snapshots the file every so often, and another program turns the recording into HTML. Package for both is here: <http://uguu.org/arc_homura.html>

Manual: <http://uguu-archive.appspot.com/homura/manual.html>

<comment><USER7> Fantastic. Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's actually a book that covers some of the old contest winners:

 _Obfuscated C And Other Mysteries_ by Don Libes

[http://www.amazon.com/Obfuscated-Other-Mysteries-Don- Libes/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Obfuscated-Other-Mysteries-Don- Libes/dp/0471578053/)

<comment> johnx123-up My all time favorite is Wesley's code in 1992 that prints world map (found through _A to Z of C_ ):

                 main(l
            ,a,n,d)char**a;{
        for(d=atoi(a[1])/10*80-
       atoi(a[2])/5-596;n="@NKA\
      CLCCGZAAQBEAADAFaISADJABBA^\
      SNLGAQABDAXIMBAACTBATAHDBAN\
      ZcEMMCCCCAAhEIJFAEAAABAfHJE\
      TBdFLDAANEfDNBPHdBcBBBEA_AL\
       H E L L O,    W O R L D! "
         [l++-3];)for(;n-->64;)
            putchar(!d+++33^
                 l&1);}

<comment><USER11> Care to share the output also (for those who don't have a C compiler handy)? Thanks!

<comment><USER12> <https://gist.github.com/3910435>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> saint-loup Fun fact: David Madore, co-author of the conspiratorial contest, actually didn't mean to obfuscate his code.

The winner page: <http://www.ioccc.org/2012/grothe/hint.html>

The source in french: [http://www.madore.org/~david/weblog/2012-10.html#d.2012-10-1...](http://www.madore.org/~david/weblog/2012-10.html#d.2012-10-14.2083)

</comment><comment><USER13> deckmyn.c is my favorite. That's beautiful source code.

Edit: This one is fun to look at too: <http://www.ioccc.org/2012/hamano/hamano.c>

<comment><USER14> hou.c is kind of neat too. Looks like a big blob, but actually forms an image via cunning use of syntax highlighting.

<comment><USER15> Is it supposed to be Kyubey? I pulled it up in vim, but the syntax highlighting didn't expose anything for me.

<comment><USER16> It is. Though it only works well if you use it like this: ./hou ansi.txt hou.c

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems to be the same John Tromp of the Computer Go bet. <http://dcook.org/gobet/>

<comment><USER18> Wow, John accurately predicted the year computer Go would beat him, 15 years in advance, and made a $1000 by being slightly conservative. Nice long bet!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Amazing entries.

These are also the winners for "language you currently hate" clear code contest.

</comment><comment><USER20> I must admit I was disappointed in last year's contest winners, namely their general focus. I thought maybe something had been lost in the years the contest was not running. But these entries are great! Binary lambda calculus? Top notch.

IOCCC is back!

Check this out

      { echo one;echo two;echo tres;}|./kang
       result: the sum in hex</comment>