Death March: The Long, Tortured Journey of Homefront (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2012/11/1/3560318/homefront-kaos-studios-thq

<comment><USER2> Why does it seem that every game development post mortem I come across read like the Rocky Horror Picture Show? After reading a million and one of these you inevitably come to understanding of what not to do - it would be nice to find an example of what actually to do!

<comment><USER3> Lots of postmortems on Gamasutra have a "What Went Right" section; pick a few games you consider successful from the list below, and read what they say about that. Of course, it's not so much about what to do, but about doing it right: there really is no silver bullet. But in products like games, where everything is so tangled up together, every mistake send ripples of trouble across the entire project and team.

[http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of- postmortems/](http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-postmortems/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am bit disappointed the author blames the failure partially on Peter's Principle. As if hiring outside managers is a silver bullet, especially in a situation where the very top management is clearly incompetent.

</comment><comment><USER5> Homefront is/was a fun game with IMO a great multiplayer mode. Not needlessly complex but enough variety for a casual to play pretty easily.

It's a shame not more people are still playing it.

<comment><USER6> The premise of Homefront is completely ridiculous! We're expected to believe that North Korea ... a nation of 25 million with limited resources and a half- starved population takes over the pacific rim and then pushes its way into North America?

<comment><USER7> Games don't have to be believable they have to be fun. I'd say believable games are the exception rather than the rule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And that is a great example of why career advice that uses words like 'dreams' and 'love' is such bullshit. People who follow it end up turning themselves into little more than slaves.

<comment><USER9> It depends if your dreams take you in an area of the software industry well known for long hours, terrible work practices and comparatively small pay. AFAIK, nobody asks pentesters to work 90 hours a week.

<comment><USER10> As a network security analyst, I know quite a few former pen-testers. Every single one of them cites 70+ hour weeks as their primary reason for getting out of it. Its not 90, but its also not 40.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr?

<comment><USER12> Don't work in the game industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >> "At Kaos studios in New York sitting with a team that's finaling on 7-day weeks for a couple of months. Talk about that 'thousand yard stare'."

Geez this twitter comment from Bilson makes me so damn angry I shouldn't even write here. I can understand why the developers freaked out. Turn the production line grinding down of your people into process jargon. Well done, sir.</comment>


The Growth Hacking Bootcamp for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://usergrowthbootcamp.com/ <comment><USER2> Your "As Featured By" section links to things that aren't about your specific startup/boot camp (you're just quoted in them, which is different). That's not growth hacking, that's deception.

<comment><USER3> Hey mimi, not sure I understand. The courses I'm running on growth hacking are mentioned in each of the articles linked to on that page.</comment></comment>


Text messages warn Ukraine protesters they are 'participants in mass riot' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/21/ukraine-unrest-text-messages-protesters-mass-riot

<comment><USER2> It's disturbing, indeed. Even moreso to consider, if the government puts a gun to the telecom's figurative head, they can find out:

* which people are in the vicinity

* which people "turned off" their phone near the vicinity

* which people removed their phone's battery near the vicinity

Depending on how paranoid / authoritarian, any of the above or all 3 could make for a good list of people to harass (to put it nicely).</comment>


Ask HN: What are you using for both offline and online backups? - <AUTHOR> It's been a while since this has been asked. Last thread I found was from 2011. It would be great to get everyone's views as I'm in the market for a full drive back up solution. For photos/video I use SmugMug, Google Photos and Amazon Prime's offering. Thanks! <comment><USER2> A D-Link DNS-320 NAS for home backup (mostly pictures and personal videos) and tarsnap for my VPSs or any local data that I want to backup remotely.

Where I work we have a 'server' computer running windows. I went for backblaze as an online backup option (full disk backup) because it's easy to use, it has a 'sort' of encryption[1] and it's pay-once save all kind of thing, so I don't have to bother all that much. Oh, also we have great upstream speed at the office so problems there...

That said, since my upstream speed at home is limited, the things that I can backup on the _cloud_ are limited.

[1] Backblaze's encryption key is submitted on the browser, via JS. Not the _most secure_ scheme you can find. IMHO if you're not worried about state- level espionage that's fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> All of my data lives on a Drobo to protect from drive failure and synced nightly to Google Drive in case the entire thing gets destroyed in earthquake/fire or is stolen in a break-in.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another happy backblaze user here. I use synctoy to backup data on a local USB drive and let backblaze sync everything to their servers.

</comment><comment><USER5> local machine/work files backed up to external drive with time machine and crashplan.

work files copied to an external drive monthly this is also backed up with crashplan.

photos to external hard drive and backed up to crashplan and burned to DVDs which are taken to my parents house a few times per year and stored there.

We also have physical prints made of our favorite photos.

</comment><comment><USER6> I print out the really important/nice photos and store a hard copy..</comment>


Humans are not automatically strategic - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p5/humans_are_not_automatically_strategic/

<comment><USER3> _[1] For example, why do many people go through long training programs "to make money" without spending a few hours doing salary comparisons ahead of time? Why do many who type for hours a day remain two-finger typists, without bothering with a typing tutor program? Why do people spend their Saturdays "enjoying themselves" without bothering to track which of their habitual leisure activities are _actually_ enjoyable? Why do even unusually numerate people fear illness, car accidents, and bogeymen, and take safety measures, but not bother to look up statistics on the relative risks? Why do most of us settle into a single, stereotyped mode of studying, writing, social interaction, or the like, without trying alternatives to see if they work better -- even when such experiments as we have tried have sometimes given great boosts?_

Because thinking is hard and suffering is easy.

<comment><USER4> _"Because thinking is hard and suffering is easy."_

This explains so much about the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Incidentally, Lesswrong has had a substantial impact on my thinking, and I recommend reading through the sequences, starting with Map and Territory and Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions:

[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysteri...](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysterious_Questions)

<comment><USER6> I'm enjoying "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", by the same.

<http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/>

<comment><USER7> Thanks, but note that OP is by Anna Salamon. _Mysterious Answers_ and _Methods_ is by me. Didn't know which of those you meant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Most basically, because humans are only just on the cusp of general intelligence."

I've been pondering this issue lately independently. Humans are basically the minimally conscious and intelligent creatures that could take over a planet. We're barely able to hold together our current society, and there's no particular guarantee that we're even necessarily capable of that (see the vanityfair article about Greeks currently on the homepage and remember they're the same species as every other human). A relatively morbid thought in some ways, even though it isn't a guarantee that we can't go further yet.

<comment><USER9> " Humans are basically the minimally conscious and intelligent creatures that could take over a planet."

I believed this about a year ago and thought myself well and properly cynical.

Then it was pointed out to me that _humanity_ is the minimally conscious and intelligent _population_ such that, with some random genetic shuffling, you wind up with 2-5% capable of taking over the planet, and pulling the rest up with them.

<comment><USER8> While I am a broadly cynical person, I do not mean this as a "we are certainly doomed post" to wave about my self-hating credentials; I rather dislike people who do that and consider self-hatred a pernicious and dangerous meme, not something to be rolled in. I rather see it as a cautionary tale about our need to be careful; we are not certainly doomed, but if we run about as if our success is ensured, an attitude that manifests itself in a lot of political debates in various ways, we will get ourselves into trouble.

I did mean the population, since of course we have rather significant variation in personal intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are so many ways to reach our general goals that just going through the motions of reaching a goal feels like we are actually moving toward the goal we want to reach.

Say I want to make $10 million dollars a year for the rest of my life. There are so many ways to achieve that goal from so many different paths that if I were to try and plan a path that isn't guaranteed to succeed I would spend all my time planning and never any time actually doing things.

That's exactly why we do things, because thinking and planning are good and nice but if that's all you do you'll never end up doing any of the things that might help you reach your goals.

For his [1], some folks don't do all that data analysis and tracking because for them it isn't fun and actually is distracting from whatever their goal may be.

<comment><USER9> "For his [1]"

Her [1], in fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article irritates me. It seems like trying to apply the equivalent of the Waterfall Method to life. I'm perpetually disappointed that ideas like this have such a big following here, because I like to think that most HNers would agree with me when I say that I think the Waterfall Method was stupid _even at the time_.

That's without even getting into the smug "only 5% of the population is smart enough to understand me" drivel.

<comment><USER12> Ya the 5% figure annoyed me as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thought provoking article but I'm not too sure that it is this simple. The heuristics outlined are inherently helpful and going through the process would be enlightening, but getting the answers to any of the questions in (a) - (h) are hard (some harder than most).

For example "(a) Ask ourselves what we're trying to achieve" I find that this is a problem with most people (including myself), they do not know what they want to achieve, nor how to even start on the process of discovering what they want to achieve. Given this, then the first order question then becomes - <USER2> do I find out what I want to achieve?. Answering this question probably involves gaining more perspective and this is probably why "many people go through long training programs to make money" (college). So it seems that if you dig a little more, seemingly unoptimal actions make more sense.

Regardless, this article is a great start and I would love to see more in depth discussions on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't need detailed answers, after all many of them are unanswerable in any absolute sense, just thinking about them enough to get a partial answer will help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the basic reason we pursue our goals ineffectively is that we are afraid to go at them straight on and, instead, look for activities that appear to be goal-oriented, but are not emotionally difficult.

The comments on the site to this article are quite good too. And the post to which it replied is worth reading. lesswrong.com is definitely going into my reader.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think you can necessarily verbally articulate some goals. Someone like Dave Letterman may have had a vision as he watched baseball on a black and white TV, and then Johnny Carson. But presumably it's taken him a lifetime to get close to what he had in mind.

You don't just take a kid and say "these are the heuristics you need. It's clear this is what you want to achieve, so these are the ingredients. Diverge from this at your own peril."

It might work if you want to recycle the existing societal structures and keep them in perpetuity as is. I suppose that's perfectly reasonable. You'll be excluding a hell of a lot of innovation though.

<comment><USER8> I still think that falls under "(a) Ask ourselves what we're trying to achieve". The author may not go deeply into it but I am relatively confident the author would agree with the statement that that step itself could turn out to be a challenge; some of the other lettered steps strongly suggest the author believes that, (g) in particular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Where does the 5% figure come from of people being able to understand the author's bullet points?

<comment><USER17> In the comments, the author mentions an informal survey she conducted with the conclusion that 2 of 5 randomly chosen people do not know what a "sphere" is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you're interested in stuff like this, check out 'How we decide' by Jonah Lehrer : [http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah- Lehrer/dp/06186201...](http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah- Lehrer/dp/0618620117)

I'm reading it now, and it's an amazingly insightful book, in that it manages to at once explain the workings of the brain on a psychological and physiological level, for a whole different slew of "decisions" we humans make.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the reason we behave like this is very simple:

"It's better to make A decision than wait forever to make THE decision"

<comment><USER20> Those aren't the options most people weigh. Obviously it's better to make a decision than spend an eternity contemplating.

But "making a decision" implies some amount of thought - some calculus for the _choice_. The article suggests that people don't _automatically_ / _naturally_ perform this calculus when acting. We just act. Do you think this isn't true? In my experience, it's very often true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I admit that I am not going to read the original post, but from a comment: Most basically, because humans are only just on the cusp of general intelligence. I can explain why this is so.

Every time there is a leap from one state to another one, and this latter state is better in the sense that it open new possibilities from transition, then when you get into the new space (the one that this leap open) you realize that the leap was a small one and that there are a lot of leaps to get to the next state (heaven is not one leap away)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is the most incoherent, vapid, meaningless tripe I have ever seen get on the front page of HN.

<comment><USER23> ...and yet it spoke to me as if the composition of our atmosphere could conspire to produce prismatic arcs of blended color in the sky.

(You're probably strategic in your approach to life, but if this is the most "vapid, meaningless tripe" you've encountered on HN, that speaks volumes about the site, because this article attempts to codify exactly what makes "vapid, meaningless tripe" the currency of our collective culture... if you are strategic in your day job tomorrow and aren't merely swaying in the breeze of office dynamics, I'd love to hear a brief outline of your day if you have the time)</comment></comment>


Climate change is an energy problem, so let's talk honestly about nuclear - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/jun/28/climate-change-energy-problem-lets-talk-honestly-about-nuclear <comment><USER2> It is actually a population and lifestyle issue, manifested by energy use.

</comment><comment><USER3> Once the New Madrid fault has another good shake all anyone will be talking about in the US is nuclear. And it will definitely be changing the climate of the entire midwest as those 15 nuclear reactors along the Mississippi suffer the consequences.</comment>


Teaching an AI to Draft Magic: The Gathering - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@zswitten/teaching-an-ai-to-draft-magic-the-gathering-ba38b6a3d1f3 <comment><USER2> Sorry but this is extremely shoddy work. M:tG will never be "solved" like this.

>> Using data from drafts carried out by humans, I trained a neural network to predict what card the humans would take out of each pack. It reached 60% accuracy at this task.

Going by what's in the linked notebook, the model was evaluated on its ability to match the decks in its training set card-for-card.

Without any attempt to represent game semantics in the model, the fact that the deck sometimes "predicts" different picks than the actual picks in the dataset tells us nothing. It probably means the model has some variance that causes it to make "mistakes" in its attempt to exactly reproduce its dataset. It certainly doesn't say that the model can draft a good M:tG deck, certainly not in any set other than Guilds of Ravnica.

>> The model definitely understands the concept of color. In MTG there are 5 colors, and any given draft deck will likely only play cards from 2 or 3 of those colors. So if you've already taken a blue card, you should be more likely to take blue cards in future picks. We didn't tell the model about this, and we also didn't tell it which cards were which color. But it learned anyway, by observing which cards were often drafted in combination with each other.

This is a breathakingly brash misinterpretation of the evidence. The model's representation of a M:tG card is its index in the Guilds of Ravnica card set. It has no representation of any card characteristic, including colour. If it had learned to represent "the concept of colour" in M:tg in this way, it wouldn't be a neural net, it would be a magick spell.

The author suggests that the model "understands" colour because it drafts decks of specific colours. Well, its dataset consists of decks with cards of specific colours. It learned to reproduce those decks. It didn't learn anything about _why_ those decks pick particular cards, or what particular cards _are_. All it has is a list of numbers that it has to learn to put together in specific ways.

This is as far from "understanding the concept of colour", or anything, as can be.

There are many more "holes" in the article's logic, that just go to show that you can train a neural net, but you can't do much with it unless you understand what you're doing.

Apologies to the author for the harsh critique, if he's reading this.

<comment><USER3> > The author suggests that the model "understands" colour because it drafts > decks of specific colours. Well, its dataset consists of decks with cards of > specific colours. It learned to reproduce those decks. It didn't learn > anything about why those decks pick particular cards, or what particular > cards are. All it has is a list of numbers that it has to learn to put > together in specific ways.

> This is as far from "understanding the concept of colour", or anything, as > can be.

It is very arguably bad feature engineering - if you have the information readily available, don't make the network infer it - but I think the description is fair.

Word2vec uses a similar model. It starts out knowing nothing about each word except an arbitrary numeric index, and learns everything else by predicting words that appear next to each other. By the end of the training it clearly has internal representations of concepts like "color", "verb", "gender", etc.

The same concept should apply here - by observing what cards are used in similar decks, with enough training data it should eventually associate concepts like card type, color and mana costs to each card.

In this case there isn't enough training data for that kind of resolution, but it has learned that blue cards go with blue cards, and red cards with red cards, and there's no hard lines from there to the concept of color.

Sure this isn't going to "solve" MtG, and I don't think it is a particularly good approach for the problem statement, but I think the idea is workable, and the network could already contain a proto-concept of "color" that would be refined with more training.

<comment><USER2> >> In this case there isn't enough training data for that kind of resolution, but it has learned that blue cards go with blue cards, and red cards with red cards, and there's no hard lines from there to the concept of color.

A card is blue (resp. red, etc) because it has a blue mana symbol in its casting cost. Not because it is found in the company of other blue cards. That is the concept of colour that a model must represent before you can say with any conviction that it "understands" the concept of colour. In terms of "hard lines"\- that's the hard line you must cross.

The kind of model you're talking about then would be a classifier able to label individual cards with their colours, or an end-to-end model with an internal representation of cards' charactersitics. That is not what was shown here.

<comment><USER3> By observing what cards people tend to pick together, you can infer that certain cards have certain properties, even if you never get see the card face.

A blue card is found in the company of other blue cards, because humans picked them, because of the blue mana symbol in its casting cost.

With proper training, you end up with exactly the "end-to-end model with an internal representation of cards' charactersitics"

Since it can't see the cards, it can't say anything useful about a card it hasn't seen during training, but if you added some new cards and started training again, a pre-trained net might learn the new cards faster than one you train from scratch. That would be evidence that the network has learnt a meaningful embedding.

There is no proof that this network has done so, but I think word2vec shows that it's a feasible approach.

<comment><USER2> >> By observing what cards people tend to pick together, you can infer that certain cards have certain properties, even if you never get see the card face.

You're assuming way too much capability that is not present. Just because a human can make this inference, it doesn't mean that a neural net can. Neural networks are notoriously incapable of inference, or anything that requires reasoning.

>> There is no proof that this network has done so, but I think word2vec shows that it's a feasible approach.

Word2vec (word embeddings in general) are actually a good example why this kind of thing doesn't work the way you think it does. A word embedding model represents information about the context in which tokens (words, sentences, etc) are found but it does not, in and of itself, represent the _meaning_ of words. The only reason why we know that words it places in the general vicinity of each other have similar meaning is because we already understand meaning and we can interpret the results. But the model itself does not have anything like "understanding". It only models collocations.

Same thing here. You seem pretty certain that with more data (perhaps with a deeper model) you can represent something that the model doesn't have an internal representation for. But just because the behaviour of the model partially matches the behaviour of a system that does have an internal representation for such a thing, in other words, a human, that doesn't mean that the model also behaves the way it behaves because it models the world in the same way that the human does.

And you can see that very clearly if you try to use a model like the one in the article, or one trained on all the magic drafts ever, to draft a set of cards it hasn't seen before. It should be obvious that such a model would be entirely incapable of doing so. That's because it doesn't represent anything about the characteristics of cards it hasn't seen and so can't handle new cards. A human understands what the cards' characteristics means and so can just pick up and play a new card with little trouble.

As to what I mean by "internal representation"; machine learning models that are trained end-to-end and that are claimed to learn constituent concepts in the process of learning a target concept actually have concrete representations of those constituent concepts as part of their structure. For example, CNNs have internal representations of each layer of features they learn in the process of classifying an image. Without such an internal reprsentation all you have is some observed behaviour and some vague claims about understanding this or learning that, at which point you can claim anything you like.

<comment><USER4> > A word embedding model represents information about the context in which > tokens (words, sentences, etc) are found but it does not, in and of itself, > represent the meaning of words. The only reason why we know that words it > places in the general vicinity of each other have similar meaning is because > we already understand meaning and we can interpret the results. But the > model itself does not have anything like "understanding".

This is a mostly meaningless semantic distinction. I can ask you to give a synonym for "king" and you might suggest ruler, lord, or monarch. I can ask a word2vec model for a synonym for "king" and it will provide similar suggestions. What "understanding" of the words' meanings do you have that the model lacks? Be specific!

Definitions are abstract concepts, so the fact that you can pick similar words and so can the model are equivalent. To put it differently:

>The only reason why we know that words it places in the general vicinity of each other have similar meaning is because we already understand meaning and we can interpret the results.

Is not correct. The only reason why we know that the words it places in the general vicinity of each other have similar meanings is because our mental models put the same words in the same vicinities.

>Same thing here. You seem pretty certain that with more data (perhaps with a deeper model) you can represent something that the model doesn't have an internal representation for. But just because the behaviour of the model partially matches the behaviour of a system that does have an internal representation for such a thing, in other words, a human, that doesn't mean that the model also behaves the way it behaves because it models the world in the same way that the human does.

This doesn't matter. Just because the model's internal representation of a concept doesn't map obviously to the way you understand it doesn't mean that the model doesn't have a representation of that context. Word2vec models _do_ represent concepts. We can interpolate along conceptual axes in word2vec spaces. That's as close to an internal representation of an isolated concept as you're gonna get. Like, I can ask a word2vec model how "male" or "female" a particular term is, and get a (meaningful!) answer. We never explicitly told the word2vec model to monitor gender, but it can still provide answers because that information is encoded.

>Without such an internal reprsentation all you have is some observed behaviour and some vague claims about understanding this or learning that, at which point you can claim anything you like.

Again, who cares? If it passes a relevant "turing test", what does your quibble about the internal representation not being meaningful enough to you matter? Clearly there's an internal representation that's powerful enough to be useful. Just because you can't understand it at first glance doesn't make it not real.

To address another one of your comments:

> Hi. From your write-up and a quick look at your notebook that's what your > model is doing. And you measure its accuracy as its ability to do so. Is > that incorrect?

neither I nor the person you responded to is the author. But yes, this understanding is incorrect. It is indeed trained on historic picks, but this is not the same thing as reproducing a deck that it has seen before. To illustrate, imagine that the training set of ~2000 datapoints had 1999 identical situations, and 1 unique one.

The unique one is "given options A and history A', pick card a". The other 1999 identical ones are "given options A and history B', pick b" (yes this is as intended). A model trained to exactly reproduce a deck it had seen previously would pick "a". The model in question would (likely, depending on the exact tunings and choices) pick "b".

This bias towards the mean is intentional, and is completely different than "trying to recreate an exact deck it's seen before", which isn't a thing you normally do outside of autoencoders and as others have mentioned, doesn't make much sense.

<comment><USER2> This is a mostly meaningless semantic distinction. I can ask you to give a synonym for "king" and you might suggest ruler, lord, or monarch. I can ask a word2vec model for a synonym for "king" and it will provide similar suggestions. What "understanding" of the words' meanings do you have that the model lacks? Be specific!

Why do you need to admonish me to be specific?

word2vec can only represent meaning by mapping words to other words. I have a human understanding of language that goes well beyond that. For example, I don't need to limit myself to synonyms of king- I can use circumlocution: "a king is the hereditary monarch leading a monarchist nation". word2vec can tell you which of those words are close to king, in its model, but it can't put together this simple sentence that describes their relation.

Not to mention I can generate and recognise who knows how many more representations of the concept "king" than word2vec can. I can draw you a cartoon of a king, or rather, an unlimited number of them, each different than the other. I can sing you a song about kings. I can write you a poem. I can dance you an interpretive dance about kings.

I don't know if you really think that word2vec is really as good as a human at representing meaning, but, just in case: it's not even close.

>> Again, who cares? If it passes a relevant "turing test", what does your quibble about the internal representation not being meaningful enough to you matter? Clearly there's an internal representation that's powerful enough to be useful. Just because you can't understand it at first glance doesn't make it not real.

What is that internal representation?

<comment><USER4> > I don't know if you really think that word2vec is really as good as a human > at representing meaning, but, just in case: it's not even close.

And I never said as such.

>Why do you need to admonish me to be specific?

Because I'm confident that for any particular definition of "understanding", the difference won't be relevant. Case in point, the one you provided. You're now claiming that a word2vec model doesn't have some "understanding" based on it being unable to demonstrate a specific skill (circumlocution/definition)[1]. All of your other objections follow the same general format. Because the word2vec model can't perform a skill that you can, its "intuitive" understanding of a concept must be lesser.

Following such an argument to its logical conclusion, you'd have to agree that you have a better intuitive understanding of language than a paralyzed person, because you can dance the word while they cannot. I doubt you actually hold such a belief.

So if the demonstration of an arbitrary skill isn't the marker of understanding, since that would be unfair to our quadriplegic linguist friends, perhaps performance on specifically relevant skills is how we should measure whether or not some model has the "understanding" you want. To be less abstract, given some embedding that we think has some "understanding" of some concept, we need to get the I/O right. If the same embedding can be placed in models that are wired up to interface with the world differently, but still perform well, perhaps the "understanding" is more than surface level.

Word to vec models clearly "understand" synonyms and antonyms and similar word relations. Word2vec/word embedding based models are also I believe still SoTA in automatic summarization and language translation tasks, although the machinery is fairly distinct from the original paper.

So what we have is representation that can

1\. Show you which words are similar to which other words

2\. Use that knowledge to summarize text

3\. Use that knowledge to translate text to a different language

4\. Be poked at by humans where we can find semantically meaningful clusters and patterns via tools like t-SNE.

>What is that internal representation?

For word2vec, for example, its that the vector space the words are in clusters similar words. For this model, its that the vector space clusters similar colored cards.

For complex neural models, who knows. On the one hand, it would probably be very useful if we could glean useful structure from the internal representation, and indeed people are working on that[2]. But on the other hand, they're demonstrably useful even if we don't have a perfect understanding of the structure. And given that we don't understand how and why we humans understand concepts, that's fine for now.

Of course, all of this assumes that "understanding" is even the right word to use. There's a good argument to be made that a neural network can and never will "understand" anything, because that's only something that self-aware entities can do. But again, that's mostly a semantic distinction. If we're discussing the efficacy of word-embedding models and whether or not the representation of concepts in those embeddings is real or just...happenstance, I'm not really sure what you're going for there, the entire question of things like self-awareness is irrelevant.

[1]: I apologize for over-anthropomorphizing an ML model here, but it's the best way of putting this I can think of.

[2]: [https://distill.pub/2019/activation- atlas/](https://distill.pub/2019/activation-atlas/)

<comment><USER2> What you say above, about understanding etc, doesn't make a lot of sense, sorry to say.

>> For this model, its that the vector space clusters similar colored cards.

I mean- what is the representation you speak of in the previous comment. What data structure holds the model's understanding of M:tG colour? The source code is available online.

<comment><USER4> > I mean- what is the representation you speak of in the previous comment. > What data structure holds the model's understanding of M:tG colour? The > source code is available online.

The network's hidden layers. I can elaborate, but looking at your profile, you've implemented an LSTM before, so I shouldn't need to delve deeply into how that works. I'm honestly not sure where your confusion or aversion to the idea that much models can learn to encode semantically meaningful concepts is.

The concept of "color" is never explicitly encoded anywhere by a human. It infers clusterings based on the correlations between which cards are chosen. Unsurprisingly, given reasonable training data, those clusters form along useful boundaries in the game world, one of which is color. If you similarly passed a pack containing _every_ card into the model, you'd likely get out what the model's opinion on the best limited card is. No one ever told it that, but based on the training data, the model "figures it out".

My comments on understanding can be summarized as such: either

1\. You're of the opinion that nothing that isn't "strong AI" can have understanding, because understanding is some concept unique to conscious entities (or some reasonably similar opinion). This is an almost completely semantic argument, and isn't particularly interesting. Its an argument about definitions that avoids any actual useful academic questions.

2\. You think that non-conscious entities can "understand" concepts, but deny that implicit understandings based on learned clusterings is "understanding". This is marginally more interesting, but wrong: if an implicit understanding can pass a "turing test" whereby I mean that the statistical/learned model can perform as well as whatever you're comparing against, whether it is a human or an expert system, at some task, the two things have the same understanding when confined to that domain.

In other words, sure saying a model doesn't "understand language" might be reasonable because language is multifaceted. But suggesting a model that outperform humans on the synonym portion of the LSAT doesn't understand synonyms is silly. Of course it does. Better than humans. Sure it can't express its understanding of synonyms as music or dance, but that's not because it lacks understanding of synonyms, that's because it lacks other basic faculties that we take for granted.

The question of whether or not you or I can introspect the model to see how its understanding is structured doesn't matter. I can't look inside your head to see how your understanding of language is structure. There's no ArrayList<WordDefinition> I can see in your mind. But I think anyone would agree that you and I both "understand" synonyms despite that lack of transparency. Why would you expect anything different from a statistical model?

<comment><USER2> >> My comments on understanding can be summarized as such: either

Please don't do this. Too many assumptions about what and how I think leave a bad taste.

Yes, a model that can identify synonyms accurately lacks human faculties, _including understanding_. That's what modern machine learning boils down to. There are many tasks we thought would require human intelligence or reasoning, that can, after all, be reduced to dumb classification. In other words, there is no need to claim "understanding" to explain the output of a classification model, just because a human can perform the same task _and_ can understand it.

As to the representation- that is the only thing that matters. If you want to claim a model represents a concept, you have to be able to show where in the model's structure that concept is represented. If there is a representation- _where is it_?

<comment><USER4> This response runs much to close to my position number one for me to have any more interest in continuing. This line of discussion. I'll just leave you again with one question

> If there is a representation- where is it?

Where is your understanding of language?

<comment><USER2> Why does that matter? Is there any doubt as to whether I can understand language? The question is whether word2vec etc can.

<comment><USER4> >Is there any doubt as to whether I can understand language?

According to your own metric, yes! You, not I, are the one who claimed

> If you want to claim a model represents a concept, you have to be able to > show where in the model's structure that concept is represented.

So by your own metric, I _must_ question whether or not you understand language, since you have yet to point out to me where you represent that understanding.

(To be clear, I think you absolutely do understand language, but I think the whole idea that the structure matters is absurd. It clearly doesn't to you or I, so why hold a statistical model to a higher standard of "understanding" than you hold yourself to?)

<comment><USER2> (also posted above- wasn't getting a reply link).

But, I'm a human being. Why do I need to show you my representation to convince you I possess human understanding of language?

Conversely, to claim that a statistical model possesses understanding is a very strong claim that requires equally strong evidence. And since we can inspect a statistical model's representation- that is where the evidence should be sought.

reply

<comment><USER4> >Why do I need to show you my representation to convince you I possess human understanding of language?

Why not? What makes you special? You're giving humans a double standard here. It's not like we have a particularly clear understanding of the human model of cognition.

And since we're venturing further into the philosophical, I feel safe making the assertion that no, I, a priori, have no reason to believe that you have more understanding of language than a model. I'm only interacting with you online. For all I know, you _are_ a computer program. Why should I trust you and hold you to a different standard than I would any other model?

<comment><USER2> >> You're giving humans a double standard here.

There is no double standard and the matter is not philosophical. We know humans to be able to understand language- we do not need to prove it in any way, including by examining our representation of meaning in language.

We don't know that statistical language models have an understanding of language, it's a very strong assumption to make that they do, and it must be justified with equally strong evidence. Their internal structure is available for inspection, therefore if they are capable of understanding language this understanding should have a concrete reprsentation that we can identify. If we can't, then they don't have anything like "understanding".

>> Why should I trust you and hold you to a different standard than I would any other model?

Assuming that I'm not a model is a reasonable assumption with a very high probability of being true and the simplest explanation for my participation in this thread.

<comment><USER4> How do we know humans understands language? How would you go about proving that to me?

<comment><USER2> Like I say, we know that already and we don't need to prove it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting there is no mention of the new Arena MTG game and the fact that you draft against bots as opposed to humans like on Magic the Gathering Online. With each new set that has come out, they have had to adjust the bots because they would allow a player to always draft a particularly powerful deck. Ryan Spain, who was involved in development of Arena, said on the Limited Resources podcast that the bots are essentially trained to make a few first pics and than "stay in their lanes". He said that each bot has a preference and attempts to fulfill it. In contrast, human players show more variance in their draft pics.

There is also more nuance in draft. For example, if you see that a particular color set is closes (i.e. people are drafting it), you might grab a particularly powerful card in that color set just to prevent them from obtaining it.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is cool stuff. Have you checked out mtgtop8.com? Some code for it from back in Kaladesh: [https://github.com/ivodopyanov/MTGML](https://github.com/ivodopyanov/MTGML). I asked the dev a couple of years ago and he said he had a newer version, but it wasn't on github.

Thinking about your jellybean guessing (wisdom of the crowds) analogy, I don't want an unweighted average of a Ben Stark and a random player. Years ago mtgo elo ratings were public - seems like that could be useful. With something like the deckmaster twitch extension you could (theoretically) grab drafts from stream replays of great players. Especially with the MPL players required to stream there must be some great data on video.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I have. I'm confused about it b/c [https://github.com/ivodopyanov/MTGML/blob/master/train.py](https://github.com/ivodopyanov/MTGML/blob/master/train.py) looks like he's doing a similar deep learning type deal with no handcrafted features, but [http://top8draft.com/about](http://top8draft.com/about) suggests he's using a totally different approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given the information that this AI now has and the ability it's displayed, should WotC/Hasbro consider actively banning players from using AI to build standard-format Constructed decks? After all, if the author actually is correct and draftbot here picks better than humans, wouldn't it stand to reason that it could build optimal decks if given a "draft" which included multiple iterations of the program working in tandem over an entire set?

<comment><USER2> The author evaluted his model's "accuracy" by looking at how good it was at reproducing the decks in its training set card-for-card.

That is no way to evaluate the quality of an M:tG deck. For instance, it can never tell us anything about "sleeper" decks, or about the value to an existing deck of new cards that are added to a format as sets rotate and so on.

All that the accuracy metric used by the author can do is tell us how good the model is at representing the past. I am of the firm belief that WoTC will be laughing in their tea cups in the tought of banning something as pointless as this. In M:tG the past is about as valuable as a hat made of ice in the tropics.

Edit: For some added context. The way M:tG metagames work is that at the start of a season, there are some "decks to beat" that are usually the most obvious ones in the format. As the format progresses, players often find strategies to beat the decks to beat, initially known as "rogue" or sleepers. These can't be predicted by representing the current decks to beat. Some level of understanding of the game and what's important in a format in terms of strategy etc, is required.

Famous example. "The solution" by Zwi Mowshowitz [1] that dominated the 1st Pro Tour–Tokyo 2001 Invasion Block Constructed. Mowshowitz noticed that the dominant aggro decks' clocks (sources of damage) were predominantly red, so he stuffed a deck with anti-red cards, shutting down the dominant aggro decks.

That requires way, way more than modelling the current metagame at any point in time.

_____________________

[1] [http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/22483_Innovations_Th...](http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/22483_Innovations_The_10_Best_Deckbuilders_Of_AllTime_Nassif_And_Zvi.html)

<comment><USER8> I think you're being too harsh here. The author didn't come close to claiming that MtG drafting was solved; instead the claim is that they were able to train a fairly straightforward model to perform relatively well — within the metric of "as hand-judged by a proficient player" — to draft cards.

There is a vast amount of interesting space (both as AImresearch and as a fun toy) between "fully groks the current and predicatable near-future meta on a professional level" and "drafts playable decks". As I read it, the OP is saying "Hey, I built something surprisingly simple that can draft playable decks. When I compare it to an available corpus of draft data from random human players, I think it does as well or better." On the other hand, I don't see anything like "I built AlphaGo for Magic drafts."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are there any MtG tournaments which are played for real-money prizes ?

This seems to me to be similar to poker, and considered a game of luck. But i am not familiar enough.

I also found this [https://boardgamegeek.com/article/29969194#29969194](https://boardgamegeek.com/article/29969194#29969194)

<comment><USER10> > Are there any MtG tournaments which are played for real-money prizes ?

Yes, routinely. [https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/mythic- invitational](https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/mythic-invitational) although the prize money amounts can vary wildly, most are nowhere near that high.

> This seems to me to be similar to poker, and considered a game of luck

It's like half-luck, half-skill. Deck construction is largely skill-based (both directly and metatextually), but decks are randomized during shuffling, which is obviously luck-based.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> When they say "Constructed" is expensive because you have to acquire the cards ahead of time... why don't tournaments allow you to play with cards where you've just scribbled with Sharpie whatever card you want it to act as?

<comment><USER10> Because copyright?

It's like saying, "why do movie theaters pay so much for films? Why don't they just download the film from a BitTorrent like everyone else?"

<comment><USER11> Copyright? There's no copyright infringement in writing "Black Lotus" on an actual genuine Magic card. That will never stick.

<comment><USER10> I don't mean "copyright" as in, Wizards would literally sue you for writing "Black Lotus" on a card.

I mean "copyright" as in the act of paying for the game you are playing, rather than reproducing it yourself.

For another example, what stops you from playing Monopoly by just writing "Boardwalk" and "Park Place" on a piece of paper, and drawing up your own fake money and cards? Nothing really, but generally it's considered a good idea to pay for games people make, as a way to reward them for making the game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I believe the author said he used MTGJSON, which certainly does include the colors of a card as well a host of other characteristics.

</comment><comment><USER13> Will AI learn that drafting is rigged?</comment>


Intercourse and Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligence.php

<comment><USER2> I sense too much negativity and frustration on this thread. I can sympathize. I was exactly the same way at 24, a nerd who couldn't hold a conversation with the opposite sex, had rejection after rejection, and was pretty depressed about it too.

I consciously decided to "improve" myself. Here are things I did:

1\. Improved my wardrobe. Believe me, it makes a difference. 2\. Consciously taught myself to listen, and ask questions that will lead to more conversation. 3\. Consciously taught myself to gauge the level of interest of the other person. Move on if the other person isn't interested - as they say, there is always more fish in the ocean. 4\. Push the envelope a little bit ... the man has to push - you have to ask for the phone number! And it is a good way to gauge interest. 5\. Don't forget that some level of IQ compatibility is critical. Just as "they" don't want the nerd in you, may be some of the "airhead" types aren't great to be around for you either.

Let me just say that I hit success after consciously doing it. It is like doing a start-up. Know your strengths and know how to compensate for your weaknesses - a superior IQ can help you figure out how to compensate :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> I asked my wife of twenty-six years, the mother of our four children, what she thought of this link, and she commented that maybe the link just shows that IQ and intelligence are not quite the same thing. It is paradoxical to suppose that high intelligence people might have less reproductive success than average intelligence people, but it's not too far of a stretch to suppose that IQ tests fail to capture all of the intelligent behavior necessary to enjoy reproductive success.

An older but much more thorough source on some of the same issues is

[http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Genes-Success- Scientists-...](http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Genes-Success-Scientists- Statistics/dp/0387982345)

with some very good discussions of differential rates of reproduction by IQ score.

<comment><USER4> Why is it paradoxical to suppose that high intelligence people might have less reproductive success than average intelligence people?

<comment><USER5> Seems that it should provide some selection bias, as the more intelligent you are, the more likely you will have a good idea and survive longer/provide better for your family etc.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps, but in times past physical strength was probably as much or more important than intelligence. Note that the least intelligent also have less opportunities to pass on their genes. It would seem that there's a sweet spot where a mix of intelligence and strength is most favored(note the testosterone hypothesis in the article).

Now, however, intelligence is much more important to success. How long will it take for evolution to smile on those with higher IQs such that potential mates find intelligence to be the most attractive trait?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An article the states something that we all know. I think the smartest people knows when to act dumb.

As a comp sci master student who also go out on weekends sometime to clubs, I have to say that women are not turned on by the occupation of a programmer.

<comment><USER8> I don't think they're turned on by room-temperature IQ construction workers (not saying they all are) _for their occupation_ either. Maybe the problem here is that you're talking about your occupation. If you meet a secretary or a doctor in a bar, do you want to hear her rattle on about her daily routine?

This could be related to the problems very intelligent people have getting laid. Their interests are less accessible and more focused, and so their conversations are more boring to people who don't share those interests. Whereas everybody but the stupidest people can easily follow along in a reality TV discussion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Few people are turned on by low intelligence. What the construction worker has on the programmer is masculinity; it's perceived as a more "manly" line of work.

However, both men and women tend to be more androgynous as intelligence increases, which is a problem for both genders, but especially for men, when it comes to attracting mates.

<comment><USER9> Marissa Meyer doesn't strike me as particularly androgynous

[http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=marissa%20mayer&...](http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=marissa%20mayer&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi)

:-)

<comment><USER10> I know you're joking, but this meme of "disproving" statistical statements with individual counterexamples really steams my clams.

<comment><USER9> Well, even though it was intended as a joke I can only agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Two mentions of the "opposite sex" make me wonder how heterocentric this study was. I haven't investigated his source studies and the link to the Counterpoint survey is broken.

If the wording of the original survey asks questions specifically related to kissing, holding hands with, and having sex with members of the opposite sex, this study could fail to consider the sexual activity of intelligent homosexual college students which could also provide some interesting results.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anybody else notice how this relates to pg's essay "Why Nerds are Unpopular" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>)? Getting sex as a teen, like being popular, takes fairly dedicated effort, and more intelligent, especially nerdy, people have other things to spend time on.

</comment><comment><USER13> There are sooooo many reasons why these numbers may look like this. You may consider it is because smart people are unattractive, or you could consider it that smart people are smart enough to know it isn't a good idea to have sex when you are _fifteen_.

<comment><USER14> The author suggests the same interpretations in more general terms:

"Another idea is that smarter people are more risk averse, and delaying these activities is a byproduct of enhanced concerns about unwanted pregnancy and disease. While not avoiding sexual behaviors, per se, they are just less likely to seek it out or consent to it for fear of the potential consequences.

...

Another idea, consistent with popular media portrayals of geeks and nerds (males at least), is that intelligent people actually want to have sex, but are simply less likely or unable to obtain willing partners because they are disproportionately viewed as unattractive or undesirable as partners."

edit: this comment is not meant to support your claims, only to suggest your claims are redundant to HNers who read the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's similar to "Why Nerds are Unpopular".

In my parents' day, "finding a husband/wife" wasn't something most people had to make an active effort in order to do. It happened fairly naturally. So smart people paired off at a similar rate to everyone else.

In the post-"Game" world, wherein breaking through womens' defenses and attracting them requires learning a bag of cheap sales tricks, the big losers are the people who don't learn them. These are the dumb, who are unable, and the smart nerds, who can't be bothered because they find childish social games uninteresting.

<comment><USER15> > In the post-"Game" world, wherein breaking through womens' defenses and > attracting them requires learning a bag of cheap sales tricks

The entire industry of pick up technology is based on the premise that there may be a technique that can successfully attract a woman. Wheras, in real life, there is no magic technique - it's all about confidence and putting youself out there, taking a risk/taking the lead.

What the pickup artists are really marketing is protecting the guy's ego - e.g. I wasn't rejected - it was the approach/technique. Which, as we all know, is false marketing.

<comment><AUTHOR> _The entire industry of pick up technology is based on the premise that there may be a technique that can successfully attract a woman._

It's not that simple, just as there isn't one "magic trick" that can close a sale. It's a complex set of skills that has to be learned over years.

On the other hand, some guys are able to feast because they've mastered a bag of cheap tricks, and there are a lot more men dying to be like them.

<comment><USER14> I find your use of the terms "close a sale" and "feast" in this context disturbing.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should. I'm not sugarcoating the ugly, ruined world that supposed "sexual modernism" has brought us to.

I am all for the right of gays to marry, legalized abortion, and 95 percent of the feminist platform. The problem is that we now have a generation of women who feel "empowered" to "try out" a few of the scumbag men that, in previous generations, they wouldn't have dared be seen with. That hurts almost everyone.

<comment><USER16> How outrageous that women should feel empowered to sleep with people of whom you disapprove. If only they had the sense to ask your opinion first!

<comment><AUTHOR> That clearly doesn't scale.

On the other hand, it's a better world when _people_ behave sexually in a manner that is consistent with their public morality. That means that they don't sleep with people they wouldn't be proud to be seen with by their parents, family, and friends and to call a boyfriend or girlfriend.

<comment><USER17> You know, I'm not entirely sure this discussion is going anywhere, but I thought I'd jump in and share a thought that might be valuable anyways.

> On the other hand, it's a better world when people behave sexually in a > manner that is consistent with their public morality.

This sentence here, it assumes people's public morality is their real feelings on the matter, instead of doing what needs to be done to get by without ostracism.

I think most people have at least a little different public and private moralities - there's what you believe, and there's what you'd be comfortable representing you believe in your community.

Assuming that the public morality is the real or sensible morality seems to miss that a lot of people aren't happy with the roles they're generally expected to take. Some very outstanding people openly show their countercultural preferences, but many people just quietly dissent, and that's not altogether too crazy if their dissent leads them to the best possible life for themself.

Now, people being unable to make good judgment calls on what furthers their real goals - that's a big problem. But giving a nod to public morality, much of which is imposed on people, seems to be a little off. I think the issue is more of good judgment and long term thinking than it is with public/private morality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nothing new - even for fruit flies

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4200-cleverness-may- ca...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4200-cleverness-may-carry- survival-costs.html)

<comment><USER19> Seems unrelated. The New Scientist article doesn't describe mate selection or reproduction.

In fact, it seems like they just bred fruit flies that over emphasize their past observations. They didn't make "clever" fruit flies.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Toky - Make calls from your browser - <AUTHOR> https://toky.co

<comment><USER2> Seems both this and Hello deal with/go through Telefonica. Advantages I can see for this are call filters? Seems to be it.

>we use industry-standard encryption technology

Which would be? I see no documentation behind it. Was it even implemented properly? Has it been audited? Anyone who actually gives a rats ass about security cares about details like this.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is nobody using gemstone/s? - <AUTHOR> This is something I was always wondering:
Essentially, gemstone/s is an OO environment with transactional persistent "heap". So all what you need is to put somewhere reference to a graph of objects and it will write all of them to disk automatically (and there is no ORM problem).
It's not limited (or doesn't have to be) to smalltalk either - there was a project called Maglev which would allow you to write code in ruby.
Is there anybody who has/had experience with gemstone? What were the pain points or is it simply that RDMBS are easier to optimize for speed or is it because of the tooling? Or because of SQL being universal query language? Or what? I understand this is very subjective but I'm still eager to hear anything. <comment><USER2> Image-based programming systems fell into disuse because they were harder to deploy, and because you had to run them in order to inspect their contents.

<comment><AUTHOR> hm, fair point, thx (although one could say docker images are also not very inspectable and yet they are popular)

<comment><USER2> They have the same name, but they're not related at all.</comment></comment></comment>


The Looming Decline of the Public Research University - <AUTHOR> https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober-2017/the-looming-decline-of-the-public-research-university/ <comment><USER2> Think of this article as describing the canary in the coal mine. The effect it describes is absolutely real. Universities in the US are facing serious issues.

The university system in the US is the envy of the world right now. But US universities are degrading on several fronts, some internal (rising tuition which drives out smart students from less well off families, most evident now in law schools) and some external (cuts in government funding, most evident in Wisconsin GOP donor attacks on universities and public education more generally[1].)

There are some posts below from students who say they don't see much going wrong. Yes, they don't see much going wrong _yet_. But the underpinnings of universities are being eroded.

Research funding is harder to get. NIH and NSF budgets are down 20-30% in real dollars in the past two decades. Meanwhile schools are expanding and hiring more faculty and staff that are supposed to obtain their salaries from NIH and NSF. At the same time the long-held commitment to educating the best students is fading [2].

[1] "Hacked records show Bradley Foundation taking its conservative Wisconsin model national" [https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2017/5/5/hacked- records-s...](https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2017/5/5/hacked-records-show- bradley-foundation-taking-wisconsin-model-national.html)

[2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review- failing-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-failing-law- schools-by-brian-z- tamanaha/2012/08/03/e7054c9c-c6df-11e1-916d-a4bc61efcad8_story.html) "If you think those claims sting, consider Tamanaha's argument that law school effectively transfers money from students to relatively well-to-do professors, via student-loan debt — much of which is ultimately guaranteed by federal taxpayers who are generally not as well-off as the typical law professor.

Law school faculties are also bastions of liberal politics, and this irony is not lost on Tamanaha, who accuses the professoriate of not only enriching itself but also erecting de facto barriers to upward social mobility and true public-service law practice, all in the name of "academic freedom" and other abstractions."

<comment><USER3> Your point about rising tuition driving out less well off families is also a result of reduced government funding.

Research should never be funded by tuition anyway. That research is a public good, the burden for funding it should not be placed on the backs of the nations youth, who have to in turn finance that tuition with debt.

It's a shame that one political party in this country has taken to believing that all of the world's problems can be solved with lower taxes (not low taxes, lowER taxes). Externalities and public goods do not exist.

<comment><USER4> It seems clear that easy money (anyone can get student loans) is the primary driver of rising tuition costs (driving out less well off families) not reduced government funding. [http://images.mic.com/gcnmd1o6fihnkyh0kgimslfoombvuel882tmho...](http://images.mic.com/gcnmd1o6fihnkyh0kgimslfoombvuel882tmhohvkeevifezxnbckipfamtbpvvx.jpg) [https://www.google.com/search?q=rising+education+costs&sourc...](https://www.google.com/search?q=rising+education+costs&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_tPTMufvWAhUnllQKHdJCAxgQ_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=940#imgrc=FXR8HQljRmAnaM):

<comment><USER5> It isn't clear to me. Your links only show that student debt and tuition costs are correlated. I think that costs cause debt rather than vice versa.

<comment><USER6> It's not just debt, it's the fact that the debt is effectively unlimited. The problem is that we want an education market but also for no one to be priced out of higher ed. So we provide easy credit, and there's consequently no brake on costs.

<comment><USER5> That is a matter of political interpretation. You aren't wrong, but your solution of reducing the availability of loans has the direct consequence of reducing access to education for poor people and reducing university budgets funded by that debt. I don't like these consequences. My solution is to increase government investment in education which is why I view reduced funding as the main driver of tuition costs. I believe this partly because I believe that a college education can be worth a million dollars, because it can increase salary by $80k/yr, not to mention the non-economic personal and societal benefits.

<comment> aaron-lebo If everyone in society had a college degree, they wouldn't increase salary by $80k. They already don't for most people and if you increase the supply...

I don't see how your interpretation is based in anything other than wishful thinking.

<comment><USER7> >> If everyone in society had a college degree, they wouldn't increase salary by $80k.

Free education doesn't mean that everyone has a college degree. It means that everyone who chooses to study for a college degree has the opportunity to obtain one.

Most colleges and universities in the USA were non-profit, until the 1970's. Everyone didn't have a college degree back then.

Finally, as an aside- it's a bit problematic to measure the value of a college degree just by monetary gains alone. Job satisfaction is at least as important and probably more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This problem is happening in part due to the ascent of the conservative political movement. Conservatives hate research universities for two reasons.

One is they get their grants from the government, and conservatives believe the government is awful for most things, and research instead be done by private corporations.

The other reason is that conservatives see universities as hotbeds of athiest, radical left ideology, and so basically want to shut them down. In fact, one of the founding books of the modern conservative movement is William F. Buckley's _God and Man at Yale_.

<comment><USER9> > conservatives believe the government is awful for most things, and research > instead be done by private corporations.

This seems entirely rational to me. A private corporation must strive to meet real human needs in order to survive. Capital tends to flow towards those who are best able to convert it into happiness for other human beings. Public institutions have no such constraint. Logically, one would conclude that they would be less efficient at converting capital into happiness for other human beings.

Is there any evidence of which I should be aware which supports the proposition that publicly funded research outperforms privately funded research?

<comment><USER10> The evidence is this: try to name one private corporation that either internally or externally funds basic research that is guaranteed to have no application in the next 10 years at the very least.

You most probably can't. The reason is that private corporations have a very short-term outlook and are (understandably) looking for short-term returns.

<comment><USER11> Depends on how you define basic research. I don't think there is a tremendous amount of difference in the type of research being conducted at many departments at MIT and Google or SpaceX. I recently had dinner with a Harvard Medical School professor who said he often encouraged bright academically- minded students to go to work at Google rather than pursue the tenure track because Google offered more freedom and a simpler path to resources.

<comment><USER12> The incentives are totally different. Industry will fund research if it may potentially provide an ROI. Google and SpaceX may be willing to take bigger and longer term risks, but ROI is unquestionably their goal.

Academics aren't incentivized by ROI. Instead, they want intellectual distinction and recognition, and pursue problems if they are perceived to be intellectually curious or may have a large impact on society.

Sometimes the actual work that is being done can overlap, but underneath the motivations are completely different, and each have their own pros and cons. We need both.

<comment><USER11> Yes and no. I'm not sure Google's research into glucose-sensing contact lenses is motivated by R&D in any sense a Wall Street analyst would recognize. Likewise with their research into life extension science. These are decade long bets that do not slot into any commercial structure at the company. Sure, if they cure death, it'll be huge, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of urgency, or ability, to commercialize that research. More important than ROI are these two factors (IMO):

\+ The founders retain a lot of control via the company stock structure, are nerds, and seemingly want to recreate a Bell Labs style culture. \+ Doing crazy science keeps up their brand as a tech thought leader current, even though 95% of their revenue comes from a pretty simple set of products that about 20 years old. This helps them recruit the best and brightest.

Doing this kind of research also gives them a plausible potential growth story to sell to the Street. So it's not that commerce doesn't cross their mind, but it's not in the short-term sense that a lot of people think of it as. I'm not opposed to university research, I just think people underweight the corporate side's contributions.

<comment><USER13> Sorry but - however inspiring this story may be - I as a citizen don't want to abdicate my role in society in the decision process and suffice myself to consume.

Google may be top "freedom of research" today but it's a private property I have no influence or stake whatsoever; one day they take a u-turn and "spring clean" all.

I can't trust a couple guys just because "they're nerds", that's not a long enough guarantee. You actually used Bell Labs as an example... is it still as prominent today as it was? Why not?

<comment><USER11> That's fine. But any argument against Google as a private property applies equally to Harvard (and the entire Ivy League), Stanford, MIT, etc.

State universities are great, but they're not where the lion's share of Nobel- caliber research is done. In the US, Private schools lead 10:1 in the Nobel race: ([https://www.bestmastersprograms.org/50-universities-with- the...](https://www.bestmastersprograms.org/50-universities-with-the-most- nobel-prize-winners/)).

<comment><USER10> There is still a difference between Google and Stanford: one is not a for- profit institution, and therefore has access to public research funding such as from the NSF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not really sure what to make of this article, as I'm currently a 4th-year student at the main subject, Ohio State. Perhaps as an undergraduate, I am divorced from the specific administrative and funding roadblocks plaguing research faculty, but in my day-to-day activities I see little in the way of a hurting OSU. The university this past year revamped the student living situation on north campus [1][2]. The university is expanding at a feverish pace because students _want_ to come here; we are gaining recognition beyond being simply a football school and aspiring high school students are not considering OSU to be nearly the backup school it once was. Sure, it isn't as flashy to tell your relatives you go to OSU as opposed to MIT or Harvard, but it's not the disappointment most used to consider it to be.

This article exposes much that I've been ignorant to as an undergrad, but it feels to blow some issues out of proportion. Sure, we don't nearly have as much funding as private universities, but that's par for the course for a public university which offers cheap tuition for local students, and is generous with its scholarships.

And many educated students leave for "greener pastures" upon graduation, but that also feels natural to me. Most students who come here are from Ohio, and so once they get that diploma, it opens doors in the entire country which they are hungry to pursue.

Maybe I'm just a bit too thick to see the apocalypse the author is foretelling.

[1] [http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/home_and_garden/2016...](http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/home_and_garden/2016/08/21/ohio- colleges-new-dorms-encourage-interaction-outside-rooms-not-luxury-perks.html) [2] [https://www.thelantern.com/2016/02/new-residence-halls- set-f...](https://www.thelantern.com/2016/02/new-residence-halls-set-for- north-campus/)

<comment><USER15> The American research university is two* institutions uncomfortably sharing an organization -- one has as its mission undergraduate and professional education and the other cutting edge research. Some of the staff involved with the latter participate in larger or smaller ways in the former, but for those that excel at research, especially in STEM, its a more or less voluntary choice how much time and effort they choose to put into the teaching part of the university. There's also plenty of staff on both sides that don't at all overlap.

There's all kind of post hoc explanations for why this historically contingent organizational structure is really super optimal and the best of all ways of setting things up, but frankly they aren't very convincing. Probably the least bad is the notion that this structure is the only politically palatable way to subsidize the intellectual output of arts and many of the social science. But even there, I'm not wholly convinced.

*Actually more than two. There's also semi-pro sports teams among other things.

<comment><USER2> >There's all kind of post hoc explanations for why this historically contingent organizational structure is really super optimal... but frankly they aren't very convincing.

Disagree. The best place for undergrads to get a top-notch education is where they have the opportunity to work with or even around top-notch researchers and people at the top of their fields. Yes, many faculty don't spend that much time with undergrads, but they spend some. And they spend time with grad students who spend time with undergrads. This is the best way we know how to organize great teaching for undergrads.

<comment><USER16> The opportunity to work with research faculty I would otherwise not have encountered literally changed my life.

<comment><USER17> > Maker of artisinal, small-batch simulation models for the discerning > infectious disease consumer.

Would love to hear more :)

<comment><USER16> I'm an infectious disease researcher who works with computational models of epidemics.

I'm also in the Pacific Northwest, so it seemed...appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't doubt for a minute that these budget cuts are awful but I was struck by the following passage and I'm hoping someone can answer my questions:

>"Universities perform more than half of all basic research in America, and public research universities in particular account for nearly 60 percent of the $63.7 billion allocated annually by the federal government for research. That spending, in turn, produces more than 2,600 patents and 400 companies a year, according to the National Science Board."

The US Federal Government allocated funding that produces "2,600 patents and 400 companies a year"? Does revenue from those patents and companies not funnel into the University's endowments?

Or is this a case of where its the public's money when it comes to funding but private money when that funding produces successful patents and companies and profits? For instance the article mentions Gore-Tex and references, presumably the Mosaic Web Browser. Did profits from those not flow back into the schools? Is there something in their charger that prevents that?

<comment><USER19> $63 billion to produce 400 companies seems like a statistic someone would cite if they wanted to argue against this funding. That is roughly $150 million per each new company. That seems like a very high number, particularly when their is no qualifier as to the success of any of these companies.

<comment><USER20> Don't forget that you also help to fund quite a few PhDs, masters students and undergraduate research assistants, many of whom go on to work in private industry....

<comment><USER21> And hopefully those students acquire skills that let them earn more (create more value to society) and hence pay more taxes than if they had only had a bachelors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is only semi-related, but it seems like the subtext behind a lot of these articles is that America was better in the 20th century, when elites made all the decisions, and the internet has resulted in too much democracy.

This is another problem that boils down to short-sighted politicians voted in to cut spending everywhere and kill regulations. Maybe things were better when a group of elite New Yorkers controlled the entire media and the range of political discourse.

<comment><USER23> Elites are still making all the decisions in the past and now. Actually I think this is a shift of elite thinking from a rounded "greek classics" education, and value of the foundations of civilization line of thinking, to everything has to pay it's way type of thinking.

<comment><USER24> Great description.

Old school leaders weren't as transactional as the people running things today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think it's going to be really bad because the people in charge, administrators and executives making large salaries in relatively low COL locations, are going to pretend everything is fine through years of slow burning until there is a nuclear explosion at the end of it. Why turn off the oil well if its benefiting you and you yourself arent hurt by the flames?

EDIT: exactly like the mortgage crisis went down

<comment><USER26> And exactly like the situation at newspapers 2005-2015

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Universities have become country clubs. Those funding figures include absurd overhead rates that fund absurd compensation packages for professors and administrators. Tuition has also gotten absurd. This bubble has to burst before we can repair our public universities.

<comment><USER28> I agree with your first sentence, but professors at public universities don't actually make much money compared to other professions with similar education levels. Typical pay is 70-90k.

[https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/11/annual- aaup-s...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/11/annual-aaup-salary- survey-says-professor-pay-34)

<comment><USER29> My understanding, the last time I looked into it, is that universities have a lot more administrators than they used to and those admins earn a lot more than they used to.

And it wasn't just absolute, it was relative to teacher/student ratios and tenured positions growth and educator wage increase.

<comment><USER2> Great article on this by a Nobel laureate at Harvard:

"A Top-Heavy Administration? By DAVID H. HUBEL January 31, 2012 17 In 1958, Stephen Kuffler was invited to come from Johns Hopkins Medical School to Harvard Medical School to become a full professor in the Department of Pharmacology. He brought with him four post-doctoral fellows: Torsten Wiesel, Ed Furshpan, David Potter, and myself. Along with Ed Kravitz, we formed the nucleus that led to the founding of the Department of Neurobiology five years later.

When we arrived, Harvard Medical School was directed by one dean—George Parker Berry. He was assisted by a genius, Henry Meadow, who joined HMS in 1950 as executive secretary to the Committee on Research and Development. The two of them ran the whole school. Berry was grouchy and firm-handed and what he said was law.

....

you should see the list of FAS administrators. My printout runs to over 16 pages. I haven't counted up the various kinds of FAS deans, but the list dwarfs that of the Medical School. "

[http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/1/31/david-hubel- harv...](http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/1/31/david-hubel-harvard- administration-deans-medical/)

<comment><USER30> Here's the list of deans at Harvard Medical School: [https://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms/leadership](https://hms.harvard.edu/about- hms/leadership)

Which positions do you think could be eliminated or merged?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo The article is focused almost entirely on the Rust Belt and Midwest. Kept waiting for the article to expand to the rest of the US, but it could as well be titled: "The Looming Decline of the Midwestern Public Research University".

In the South at a second tier university, it amazes me how alive everything seems and how useful the research coming out of there is. I don't really see the decline. The growth and construction and hiring just goes on and on. Wouldn't be shocked if the financial situation of some states (Illinois, hello) would cause some major difficulties with publicly financing education, but is that going on throughout the country?

Certainly a danger going forward will be private companies that can far outpace anything academia offers in money, prestige, or mobility. The semi- closed, semi-open nature of the research teams at the bigger companies is confusing, in particular, but if they are disseminating that research, it's hard to argue the private route of research is especially worse than the public.

<comment><USER31> It seems that, generally, public education and research funding is being cut nationwide. It's possible that the powerhouses on the coasts are able to make up for it with fundraising more than midwestern schools are. I can't speak to your experience in the south, but you might have similarly generous donors. Or maybe your state is a standout in public funding.

<comment> aaron-lebo I looked it up, and UT Dallas's most recent endowment numbers are $500 million. I know the state is really good about funding and the state isn't in an especially precarious situation, but "Wisconsin, and Illinois and Ohio State, which together enroll nearly 190,000 students, add up to about $11 billion" still puts UTD well below their mark and 76x less than Harvard's 38 billion.

It's been constant growth for at least the last 10 years, so not sure where the funding differential is, what allows a smaller college to thrive, while bigger and more prestigious ones have financial concerns. To be fair, UTD does a fraction of the research of the bigger colleges, so maybe it doesn't come into play.

<comment><USER32> I'm not certain which small colleges you are describing, but nationwide small colleges are getting hammered and will continue to do so based on demographic trends.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade- point/wp/2017/02/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade- point/wp/2017/02/09/small-colleges-fight-to-survive-amid-warnings-of-shaky- finances/)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/us/small-colleges- losing-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/us/small-colleges-losing- market-share-struggle-to-keep-doors-open.html)

[http://college.usatoday.com/2017/02/24/for-many-small- colleg...](http://college.usatoday.com/2017/02/24/for-many-small-colleges-its- a-challenge-just-to-stay-open/)

<comment> aaron-lebo I was describing the college I cited which is thriving (which else?). I can't access the first link (paywall), but the second starts off describing Franklin Pierce University, a small private university, which isn't the topic of the article (public research universities).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The main driver is increased state spending on health care, particularly Medicaid. That spending, which is mandatory, crowds out education funding, because states have a balanced budget requirement. Medicaid spending in Illinois, for example, is up 141% since 2000 and health care is 25% of the state budget. Obamacare, which did nothing to control health care costs, actually expanded Medicaid eligibility.

[https://www.illinoispolicy.org/health-care-costs- consume-25-...](https://www.illinoispolicy.org/health-care-costs- consume-25-percent-of-illinois-budget/)

<comment><USER34> A. It is not mandatory: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Indepen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Independent_Business_v._Sebelius)

B. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Afforda...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act#Medicaid_expansion): "The federal government paid 100% of the cost of Medicaid eligibility expansion in participating states in 2014, 2015, and 2016; and will pay 95% in 2017, 94% in 2018, 93% in 2019, and 90% in 2020 and all subsequent years."

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Sadly this will impact the states that are suffering the most and all voted for Trump in the election. The liberal elites on the coasts will be fine, with their Silicon Valley institutions, giant tech companies or Ivy League endowments. The midwest, who already took a huge hit in their economies by losing manufacturing, is losing their one competitive advantage. The inequality gap, already an issue for the midwest, will widen.</comment>


Where is hacker news for business? - <AUTHOR> I've been looking for source like hacker news for business related news. I've been on /r/business and /r/economics but wanted to check with hn community what are our favorite choices.<p>thanks! <comment><USER2> TechCrunch! Haha, just kidding.

In all seriousness, "business" is a very generic term, so you might need a little more in that; you could be looking for the Wall Street Journal or you could be looking for Paul Graham's Essays.

There aren't any other social news sites (to my knowledge) predicated on upvotes/downvotes, but here are some of my favorite sources for non-technical people the tech industry (which I assume you would be most interested in because you're on HN).

<http://PandoDaily.com> \- covers the Silicon Valley scene in general, each writer has his or her own perspective and is usually very opinionated. The PandoMonthly videos are among the best content on the web. Period.

Fred Wilson's Blog - <http://avc.com> covers a lot of the venture capital world for tech startups. Some fascinating stuff in there.

Mark Suster's blog is usually pretty great <http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/>

Venture Beat has some good stuff at times <http://venturebeat.com/>

Obligatory TechCrunch (I'll assume you've heard of it, if not, it is definitely the place with the most traffic) <http://techcrunch.com>

There's Wired (<http://wired.com>)

All Things D (<http://allthingsd.com>)

The Verge (<http://theverge.com>)

Robert Scoble's Blog (<http://http://scobleizer.com/>)

And a ton more.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, there are lots of publications that write quality articles but don't have place to weight them based on community opinions. every article has comments, but those wouldn't be in order of priority of reading. also business news are big enough so that every publication eventually covers it, what remains is the community insights about the news. that is why I like hn -- because of community opinions than content that is posted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like HN because of the intelligent off-topic articles (the largest retailers do not look healthy) or the unique perspective on current events (mass killings, randomness, statistics). In my experience, business people are very common sensical which makes them a tad less interesting than the hacker types.(BTW I am probably classified as a business type ;( ).

</comment><comment><USER4> Nuclear Phynance is usually trotted out as the finance equivalent, but it's a forum. <http://www.nuclearphynance.com/>

Hacker News is really the best business-of-software site. <http://inbound.org/> is essentially Hacker News for SEO/internet marketing.

For market news, it depends on what you want, but <http://caps.fool.com/> is good coverage and socially-driven. Unlike HN, it has built-in features to show if a user's predictions about the future tend to be correct (only really possible in the stock world.)

The best general research and analysis sites are, in my opinion, still the curated/paid ones with on-staff researchers. I greatly miss my Roubini Global Economics subscription. I think, though, that someone could really cut down businesses like those with the right kind of site.

<comment><USER5> Shouldn't forget the BoS forum:

<http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> More broadly, I'd love to know about "the HN for (insert profession here)". Lawyers, doctors, artists, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> There was one. (I'm blanking on the name, at the moment.) It didn't make it. As I recall, the founder disappeared from contact and that was the end of it.

It was even based on the HN/Arc code.

</comment><comment><USER8> I find it that people in Business have not embraced the "open" culture of technology and Silicon Valley.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or can it be that they never gathered as community, like hn?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Must have Wordpress plug-ins for personal (tech) blog? - <AUTHOR>

What plug-ins are a <i>must</i> for personal (tech & start-up) blog? <comment><USER2> Bit.ly Service - shortens links and works with Bit.ly Pro. <http://snippets- tricks.org/proyecto/bitly-service/>

Google Sitemaps - easily generate XML sitemaps. [http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress- plugins/googl...](http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress- plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/)

Lockout - good for when you F __* something up and dont want anyone to see your site temporarily.<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lock-out/>

Robots Meta - lets you easily control what is followed and indexed by search engines. <http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/>

Simply Show ID's - shows page ID's. Something WP should do, but doesn't. <http://sivel.net/wordpress/simply-show-ids/>

Simple Redirect - makes 301's really easy. [http://www.scottnelle.com/simple-301-redirects-plugin-for- wo...](http://www.scottnelle.com/simple-301-redirects-plugin-for-wordpress/)

Gravity Forms - a super powerful form plugin. It is not free, but well worth it's price. <http://gravityforms.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My list is pretty similar to this one:

<http://zemalf.com/713/most-essential-wordpress-plugins/>

though zemalf also discusses an alternative list:

<http://zemalf.com/1407/must-have-wordpress-plugins/>

Other ones that I would install:

Contact Form 7 (if you want people to be able to contact you)

Some kind of sharing plugin like addthis, addtoany or sociable

I so wish I had a resource like zemalf when I first started my Wordpress blog 2 years ago. Many posts on the site explain how to do things on Wordpress that you really should be doing, with detailed step-by-step instructions. I especially liked the series on Optimizing using W3 Total Cache and MaxCDN - though you may not want to worry about Optimization until you get to a few hundred page views per day.

Note that you also need to choose a theme. I suggest using a theme framework. CSS and PHP get customized in your child theme, so when you upgrade the framework or Wordpress your theme won't break. I use the thematic framework but there are others (<http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Frameworks>).

</comment><comment><USER4> None. Seriously. Wordpress is fine for blogging out of the box. Once you start getting traffic, you'll want a caching plugin, but you won't need to worry about that from the outset.

That said, you may benefit from things like Disqus or Facebook comments and social sharing plugins, if you don't want to code up the pieces yourself.

<comment><USER5> Not true. Any blog should have some sort of anti-spam comment thing in place.

<comment><USER4> Required email registration ships by default with Wordpress and works well enough. Something like Akismet or antispam baked into Disqus or Facebook comments works better, but isn't strictly necessary.</comment></comment></comment>


Webauthn – W3C's passwordless login specification - <AUTHOR> https://webauthn.io/ <comment><USER2> "Attestation type"? Why create something intended for general use and hinder its adoption by using words like that?</comment>