Stanford cancels in-person classes for rest of the quarter - <AUTHOR> https://healthalerts.stanford.edu/ <comment><USER2> Gonna be big changes if the outbreak continues for a longer time. Here in Vietnam, we're seeing what 2 months of school closures mean.

Children go to work with their parents now. My breakfast Pho place has a little dude who man's the register and is learning how the business works from his family.

Kids play in the park after morning studies at home.

It's not all sun and roses of course, but it's an interesting forced experiment that's happening under our very noses. The big losers are people who see the "school building" as the only way to learn. The winners are going to be those who embrace methods and technologies that help people learn without the rote of the traditional classroom.

<comment><USER3> It was about time to change!

Hope this will lead to

* more Khan Academy-like content

* free textbooks available to everybody in the world

* software companions to help children advance according to their exact needs and level (instead of being stuck in a 20-person class herd)

* online teachers paid by the hour or monthly subscription available for students

* less emphasis on expensive certifications and more on 'what can you accomplish'

What opportunities or hopeful outcomes do you see?

<comment><USER4> Not everybody is able and sufficient self controlled to self study off Khan or EdX or similar platforms.

<comment><USER5> Funny, I would say that's probably the most powerful and impactful thing a person could learn. Better then being force-fed every math concept in existence. And how would people learn to self-study without incentive and opertunity?

<comment><USER6> Purely online courses have huge failure rates - even when paid for and run through same university as in person variant. That is simply how humans work currently. The younger the kid, the worst it will be.

Incentive and opportunity is something quite different then "there is no other option".

<comment><USER7> There's the issue. What we need is complete automation, with fully automated machine-learning based students. This will help vendors attract more users and raise additional capital, and keep people employed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As all of these closures happen we're going to see a massive stress test of the modern economy. HN has already seen a lot of comments about the remote work experiment that's currently in-progress, but the other experiment is this: what are we going to do with kids when their schools are closed and both parents work?

A lot of moms work these days, and that's going to make things a lot harder for keeping kids at home. Not trying to pass any judgement on women in the workforce, just pointing out that in black swan events like this it makes reacting to it a lot harder from a social perspective. Consider for a moment if most women stayed at home: school being cancelled would be annoying, but manageable. I've already heard from friends (on the west coast) that they have no idea how to handle this (kids are grade school age, 2nd and 3rd grade) given that they're both expected to still do their jobs remotely.

<comment><USER9> It's normal here that kids aged 7-8 and up usually go to school on their own and come home on their own. Then they stay at home on (or go out to play) until their parents come home from work. So, can't you just leave the kid at home? I've heard anecdotes from the US and western Europe that this isn't done, but surely you can do that in cases like this?

Edit: I don't see how this doesn't cause a massive hit to the economy though. Some workplaces will be shut down and if stuff isn't produced then the economy isn't moving.

<comment><USER10> Even 35 years ago when I was in the 7-8 age range and still living in my childhood part of the US, being left at home all day without supervision would have resulted in a visit from Child Protective Services had anyone found out. Just being alone on weekend evenings while my (single, divorced) mom went to her second job was enough to tick off some folks. These days I'd be afraid they'd send in a SWAT team to arrest the parents and "rescue" the kids.

<comment><USER11> What age is considered ok for kids to be alone nowadays in the US?

<comment><USER12> If you are in illinois, it is 14 by law [0].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free- range_parenting#Restricti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free- range_parenting#Restrictions)

<comment><USER9> This is ridiculous. I'm actually speechless by how insane this is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I heard the University of Washington (WA state) has done that too.

Edit: Citation:

[https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/03/06/press- conference-...](https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/03/06/press-conference- university-of-washingtons-response-to-covid-19/)

<comment><USER14> University of Washington at least had a single positive COVID case in an employee. Stanford seems to have canceled two weeks of classes and quarter- finals without even a single presumptive case on campus?

Presumably all these kids are still living in dorms together and eating together in dining halls...

<comment><USER15> Stanford is smart. Closing up _before_ cases appear is the very definition of a precaution.

Source: I work at UW, was very perturbed that classes/operations hadn't been cancelled when it was quite clear that a case would eventually appear.

<comment> _-___________-_ Shall we close everything up then, just in case? Maybe then we should keep everything closed, as a precaution against other infectious diseases, including as-yet-unknown future ones?

<comment><USER16> No need to invent hypotheticals when we're dealing with an actual, unfolding crisis.

The cost of closing schools, canceling events, etc, for several weeks would have been very disruptive and expensive. But it stood a chance of containing this.

Now we're experiencing the beginning of the economic impact _plus_ we're allowing this to become a pandemic — and probably seasonal. It's hard to see how the cost won't be astronomically higher in choosing to _react_ rather than take proactive steps.

And we chose this path with Italy and China already showing us the seriousness of this virus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 Seems worth noting that the quarter would end in two weeks anyway.

<comment><USER17> Stanford cancels in-person classes for the next two weeks doesn't sound as dramatic though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What a shame it would be if this led to the realization that I person was always a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER19> With the CDC director saying that this thing is going to be a regular seasonal visitor[1], it makes me wonder what long-term impact this is going to have on society.

[1] [https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/13/health/coronavirus-cdc- robert...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/13/health/coronavirus-cdc-robert- redfield-gupta-intv/index.html)

<comment><USER20> Is there any reason to believe we wouldn't have a vaccine in the next 12-18 months? Multiple vaccine candidates are already entering clinical trials. [0]

If there's a vaccine and a large sample of cases studies on treatment with antivirals, I'd assume its fatality rate would fall down to regular flu levels or somewhere near that. Therefore the spread wouldn't be treated like a pandemic as it is now.

0: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-06/moderna-s...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-06/moderna- s-coronavirus-vaccine-trial-set-to-begin-this-month)

<comment><USER21> According to [1] the likelihood of approval for a drug entering Phase 1 trials is about 12%. So that's one reason to not be too excited. Another reason is that coronaviruses are one of the causes of the common cold (rhinoviruses another one). People have been looking for a cure for the common cold for hundreds of years. It's been challenging. It's possible that the efforts were not that focused as the common cold is not very deadly. Now that Covid19 appears to be more deadly, maybe the efforts will redouble. But maybe there are some fundamental reasons it's difficult to come up with a cure/vaccine for coronaviruses (like they mutate too quickly). I personally don't take for granted that there will be a vaccine in the next few years.

[1] [https://www.bio.org/sites/default/files/legacy/bioorg/docs/C...](https://www.bio.org/sites/default/files/legacy/bioorg/docs/Clinical%20Development%20Success%20Rates%202006-2015%20-%20BIO,%20Biomedtracker,%20Amplion%202016.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These types of measure are expected to slow down the propagation of the virus, which should at least help hospitals to manage the flow of patients, and overall save some time. The virus could decline naturally in the summer, or a treatment could be found.

But all these containment measures will also slow down the economy, which will have a cost too.

What I find interesting is that it seems a lot of people ask for greater containment (closing schools and borders, canceling events and conference), while at the same time, measures such as reducing speed limit, taxing junk food are hugely unpopular. I think it's similar in the sense that this would reduce mortality in exchange of loss of freedom and economic activity.

<comment><USER22> > or a treatment could be found.

A vaccine should not be expected for ~2 years from what I hear. Of course, not all treatments are vaccines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I just don't understand why the schools haven't cancelled classes in the Bay area..

<comment><USER24> For how long? A week? A month? If widespread infection is successfully avoided in a particular region, there's no herd immunity if it circles back again, so you'd have to cancel again and again and again. How long are you willing to keep kids out of school? They could easily lose half the school year or more.

Considering that serious complications seem to be confined to older adults and the elderly (as opposed to seasonal influenza, which is also dangerous for very small kids), perhaps it's better to let it burn through the population as quickly as possible. It might be easier to keep the vulnerable population confined for a short period during the burn; once there's herd immunity (assuming infection provides immunity, of course) they should be safe.

Stanford students can just do distance learning. The infrastructure for primary and secondary schools just isn't in place to provide that, so they're forced to make more difficult decisions about the needs of their students and the curriculum on the one hand, and the risks to students' families and the wider population on the other hand.

<comment><USER25> Many kids are cared for by older (60+) relatives. Losing their primary caregiver is going to negatively affect them way more than having to do school through the internet. Letting it burn through the population is exactly what we need to avoid.

<comment><USER26> It's really not that common for a child's primary caregiver to be 60+.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Investors in Coursera, Udemy must be counting their blessings.

Remote is good enough for Stanford fee levels.

</comment><comment><USER16> Relatedly it was announced today that a faculty member at the Stanford school of Medicine tested positive:

[https://www.ktvu.com/news/stanford-educator-tests- positive-f...](https://www.ktvu.com/news/stanford-educator-tests-positive-for- the-coronavirus)

</comment><comment><USER28> I look forward to HN's resident statistics gurus to explain how the traditional flu and drunk driving kill more people per year than the paltry 14 deaths in the US and therefore everyone is overreacting.

Edit: Apparently my sarcasm wasn't thick enough so let me make my point crystal: COVID-19 is a real, genuine threat that's just getting started, but HN is filled with armchair fuckwits [1][2] who dismiss it because they lack simple math skills.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22507532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22507532)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22508819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22508819)

<comment><USER29> Well, seems you've done it already!

<comment><USER30> This while "not that many people have died stop overreacting" stuff makes no sense to me. The whole point is to stop it before more people die. We have testing shortages and world leaders such as in China and Iran buried need about the disease, which has led to thousands of deaths. If we wait for 1-3% of the world population to die before deciding it meets some statistical threshold to start reacting - then that just makes no sense. We're trying to stop people from dying - we can't bring people back after they're gone.

<comment> _-___________-_ > We're trying to stop people from dying - we can't bring people back after > they're gone.

All of the coronavirus deaths have been people that were going to die anyway. (Edited to clarify: we all do, at least currently.)

The vast majority of them have been people that were going to die soon, if not of coronavirus then of something else.

Is the mass panic really sensible in the face of this?

<comment><USER31> > All of the coronavirus deaths have been people that were going to die > anyway.

Yes, all the doctors in China in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who died were just gonna die anyways, so who cares? For that matter, everyone's going to die, so it really doesn't matter, right? I'm hoping my sarcasm is apparent in my tone here, but if not; your argument is both counter-factual and full of fallacy.

> The vast majority of them have been people that were going to die soon, if > not of coronavirus then of something else.

Again, this is BS.

> Is the mass panic really sensible in the face of this?

Panic isn't, but taking quick, decisive, and committed action is the only way that a crisis can be averted. If you don't understand this, I imagine you haven't had to deal with life or death decisions before. This all may blow over, but the facts DO NOT support that outlook. They all point to a bend in the hockey stick, and if we don't have a strong plan of action to mitigate this, people you know, and people I know, will die.

<comment> _-___________-_ The first sentence you quoted is irrefutably correct, and will remain so as long as immortality is not achieved.

If you believe the second sentence is BS, please provide evidence.

<comment><USER31> > The first sentence you quoted is irrefutably correct, and will remain so as > long as immortality is not achieved.

Glad you agree. I imagine most of those doctors in their 20s-40s had at least 40 years of life left. Really interesting to hear that half a lifetime fits in your definition of "soon".

> If you believe the second sentence is BS, please provide evidence.

See my statement above, which extrapolates on a fact that you agree is "irrefutable".

Feel free to respond to my third paragraph as well, so as not to avoid the most important issue in this argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In Italy:

"The national health institute said the average age of those who have died was 81, with the majority suffering from underlying health problems. An estimated 72% of all those who have died were men.

According to government data, 4.25% of individuals confirmed to have the coronavirus have died, the highest rate in the world."

It is really really important for people to understand the risk group and take that into account in their lives and interactions. For those that are young and health the risk is still low.

The panic level of the general populous does not fit the facts at this point.

<comment><USER32> >For those that are young and health the risk is still low

I don't want to be the grandson who killed his grandma, I don't want to be the guy who pulled the trigger on a sufferer of another illness.

Are the people who paddle this argument of "you are too young and healthy to die from NCOV-19" are disconnected from their elderly and have no contact at all with people who are suffering some illness?

Please explain to me because I do not understand your angle here.

<comment><USER33> Do you know how many old people die every day from respiratory problems similar to Corona symptoms? But until the corona showed up no one cared. Coming to work sick with a flu was a common thing everywhere I worked. Sending sick kids to school etc. People stay at home now because there are too many unknowns. Once it's treated as another flu things will go back to normal.

<comment><USER32> Do the %20 of the residents of care homes die spontaneously in a week or two?

[https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/1236532896963280896](https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/1236532896963280896)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jasper van Woudenberg: Side channel analysis and fault injection [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu59ya8nOBM <comment><AUTHOR> This is a great overview of a topic I find interesting -- thanks to Fastly for hosting it!</comment>


A conversation with Dean Kamen - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/01/a-conversation-with-dean-kamen-on-the-myth-of-eureka/ <comment><USER2> DEKA _sounds_ like a fun place to work and then you talk to people who've worked there or check Glass Door...</comment>


India scientists dismiss Einstein theories - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46778879 <comment><USER2> No wiring have been found to date in excavations of Indian sites. Irrefutable proof that they had wireless karmic communication.

These are the folks who have been running our country for the past 5 years. The other party, congress, is a party of sycophants trying to upstage each other by their degree of sycophancy toward their party president that typically has come from a single family. In the current govt, its the "scientists" who try to out sycophant the other in legitimizing the current govt's beliefs to win favors. It helps them that a significant part of the population believes in that shit.

So here we are, caught betweent a rock and a hard place.

<comment><USER3> "It helps them that a significant part of the population believes in that shit."

An Indian past colleague of mine who is highly educated with a PhD in CS from a western country truly believed in the conspiracy theory that Indian gods were aliens and space travel was common during those days. It was horrifying to know that such highly educated scientist believed in such unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.

The amount of misinformation that spreads in India because of WhatsApp is truly scary and people believe it because "it was on WhatsApp"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My father (not a scientist, but a successful businessman) has been making such claims about ancient Hindu texts for the last 40 years. I've always wondered how otherwise educated people succumb to such obvious metaphorical myths. Perhaps the current trend is partly cultural insecurity but mostly scientific/epistemic illiteracy.

<comment><USER2> Part of the reason is that the 'humanism' movement that was instrumental in separating the church from the state in Europe during Renaissance was not uniformly replicated in India. It did happen in pockets, Bengal, Maharashtra were some of these pockets but this phenomena was not uniformly distributed.

Gandhi, for instance, believed that nothing ever good came out of the European civilization and its ideas. If you take such a stance you cant learn from them. His views were in stark contrast to, say, Tagore who had no problems in acknowledging the good parts while attacking the bad. What amuses me is that that banning of the practice of sati - burning of widows on the stake -- was strongly influenced by Muslim literature from Muslim golden age, the Mutazils to be precise. RamMohan Roy the chief figure in getting the practice abolished was a scholar of Persian literature and of course Mutazil literature. Its amusing because Islam is the current poster child of everything retrogressive.

Back to Renaissance, had Europe not retrogressed Renaissance would not have been necessary. The same holds for India.

BTW I am in admiration of the fact that you can talk about something that's this close to home.

My father, a scientist was heading a governmental body at the time of the previous BJP government headed by Vajpayee. He run a foul of them. He was being coerced in to scientifically endorsing that artifacts from ayodhya, bricks, to be particular, were from Ram's times. He refused to do so as those bricks indicated quite something else. It was a very trying time for our family. I have my full sympathies and respect for those who stand up against a corrupt government be it intellectual corruption or corruption of some other kind. I have immense respect for my father because given what he was going through I am not sure I would have made the same choices that he made. I would like to believe that I would have been as honest and upright but since I was not in the center of that harrasment I sincerely dont know what trade offs I would have made. This is the first time I have ever spoken about this to anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Misleading headline by BBC. The very first sentence in the article is this: "Indian scientists have hit out at speakers at a major science conference for making irrational claims."

<comment><USER6> A major science conference at which other Indian scientists absolutely repudiated Newton and Einstein, and pushed Von Daniken style theories about ancient Vedic aircraft and stem cell technology.

So clearly there are scientists in India who are fighting the good fight for scientific rigor and accountability, but this is in the context of ruling party politicians making comments pushing these sorts of crackpot theories in support of a nationalist glorification agenda. There is currently plenty of reason to worry about the politicization of science in India.

<comment><USER5> I don't consider these folks scientists.

<comment><USER2> What you consider or dont is irrelevant. They are speaking from a premier platform that represents the country's scientific progress.

Yes there are flat-earthers in the US, but they dont speak from the podium of the most premier scientific platform of their country. Trump himself is another matter, in fact there are some parallels between Modi and Trump.

<comment><USER5> Of course this corruption of a science conference is a serious concern but what BBC is doing with its misleading headline is to painting all "India" scientists with a broad brush when they (as well as HN readers) should be supporting the real scientists who are aghast at what is going on.

There are indeed lots of parallels between the two men.

<comment><USER2> Completely agree about BBC's bias. Hopefully articles such as these will create enough outrage and some good will come out of it. I doubt it though.

Its important to expose these guys and make people uncomfortable enough, have their ego hurt enough so that they feel compelled to respond. So in a backhanded way BBC is doing a good thing.

There is also the question of how the headline is read. Is it read as 'all Indian' scientists or Some whose nationality happen to be Indian. Given that its being broadcast from a forum called the "Indian Science Congress" I cannot honestly complain because that platform is intended to speak for India and its scientists.

<comment><USER6> Sp you agree about the BBCs bias, but you also can't honestly complain. I do agree with your point that it's important to expose this issue and I think the BBC did a good job here. Headlines are necessarily short and the very first sentence in the article makes it perfectly clear there is disagreement on this among scientists in India and there are scientists with integrity fighting the good fight for science. In fact the headline and first sentence sum up the whole issue very succinctly.

<comment><USER5> "In fact the headline and first sentence sum up the whole issue very succinctly."

Surely you jest.

An April, 2016 academic study of bit.ly links shared on Twitter to BBC, CNN, Fox News, New York Times and Huffington Post articles found that 59 percent of the links were never clicked. And another study of push-through news alerts to mobile phones found that "People click on the alert about half the time."

Source: [https://honestreporting.com/tag/misleading- headlines/](https://honestreporting.com/tag/misleading-headlines/)

What this means is most people only read the headline and not even the first line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of course, they were the first to discover and invent. They just lost all of the learnings somewhere in the past, presumably to a server crash.

<comment><USER8> Did you read anything before making the claim?

> "We don't subscribe to their views and distance ourselves from their > comments. This is unfortunate," Premendu P Mathur, general secretary of > Indian Scientific Congress Association, told AFP news agency.

BBC always have an agenda when it comes to India.

<comment><USER2> > BBC always have an agenda when it comes to India.

Yes they do but its not that they are lying here. These are the ideas that are being spread from a premier platform.

BTW I am sure cyberjunkie was being sarcastic.

<comment><USER8> Agreed but there was no need for such a provocative and misleading headline.

<comment><USER9> Well, if the shoe fits...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sanskrit being mother of most modern languages, including European. There must be a scientific reason why Sanskrit was declared the best language for Computers by NASA. Dwarika cities were discovered intact under seabed proving Indian civilisation is the oldest in the world and was far ahead even 12,000-32,000 years ago. It is clear that there is science in many rituals of Karama based Hindu Vedas, rituals, food, Yoga etc. It is not surprising the claim Indian scientists are making. On the other hand, in a Mahabharata speak, Britain would be called a land of daemons on the basis of the murder, loot, suppression and hijacking of cultures of its colonies. British would like world to believe that sun actually shines out of their backside.

</comment><comment><USER11> The Arabic countries led by the Muslims were the most advanced scientists/engineers in the world, until they let the religious crazies take over. Just saying Indian ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_science_and_engine...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_science_and_engineering_in_the_Islamic_world)</comment>


Show HN: Kea – The power of Redux with the simplicity of MobX - <AUTHOR> https://kea.js.org <comment><USER3> Looks pretty neat. My initial reactions:

\- I don't like the `@kea(...` because it's another bit of JS syntax I hadn't heard of before. Though I do like decorators in Python, I just feel like I have learned enough of JS syntax to be productive and they seem to keep adding unnecessary stuff.

\- There is still duplication between the action names and the reducers. When using Redux I now always use these two functions:

        function makeReducer(reducerObject) {
          return (state, action) => {
            if (Object.keys(reducerObject).includes(action.type)) {
              return reducerObject[action.type](state, action.value)
            }
            return state
          }
        }

        function makeActions(reducerObject) {
          const actions = {}
          Object.keys(reducerObject).forEach(name => {
            actions[name] = value => {
              return {type: name, value}
            }
          })
          return actions
        }

So I can just declare a single object of reducers and can infer the action names and creators from that e.g.

       const reducerObject = {
          increment(state, value) {
             return state + 1
          },
          decrement(state, value) {
             return state - <USER2>
          }
       }

       const reducer = makeReducer(reducerObject)
       const actions = makeActions(reducerObject)

<comment><USER4> I'm a big fan of decorators, but it seems like much of the React/Redux world is overly class-decorator happy. It's really common to define properties in a decorator which would be much easier to read, IMO, as static or instance properties. I'd rather read something more like this:

        @kea // kicks off the meta-programming to read the statics below
        export default class Counter extends Component {
          static actions = {
            increment: (amount) => ({ amount }),
            decrement: (amount) => ({ amount }),
          };

          static reducers = {
            counter: [0, PropTypes.number, {
              [this.actions.increment]: (state, payload) => state + payload.amount,
              [this.actions.decrement]: (state, payload) => state - payload.amount
            }],
          };

          static selectors = ({ selectors }) => ({
            doubleCounter: [
              () => [selectors.counter],
              (counter) => counter * 2,
              PropTypes.number,
            ],
          });

          render () {
            const { counter, doubleCounter } = this.props
            const { increment, decrement } = this.constructor.actions

            return (

                Count: {counter}

                Doublecount: {doubleCounter}

                <button onClick={() => increment(1)}>Increment</button>
                <button onClick={() => decrement(1)}>Decrement</button>

            )
          }
        }

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the feedback! This is definitely something to think about, as nothing in the syntax of kea is set in stone.

That said, the magic with having a big options hash in the `@kea({})` call itself is that then you can easily disconnect the logic from your components as your application grows. Here's more information about this: [https://kea.js.org/guide/connected](https://kea.js.org/guide/connected)

Also, I'm not sure you can do `this.actions` inside a static variable, but I understand the point that you were trying to make.

<comment><USER4> > That said, the magic with having a big options hash in the `@kea({})` call > itself is that then you can easily disconnect the logic from your components > as your application grows. Here's more information about this: > [https://kea.js.org/guide/connected](https://kea.js.org/guide/connected)

Interesting. I still think these are better modeled (and read) as part of the class declaration. You can do the same thing with mixins:

Transforming that example:

        import FeaturesLogic from '../features-logic.js';

        @kea
        class CounterExampleScene extends FeaturesLogic(Component) {
          // no change here
        }

Where FeaturesLogic is a JS class mixin: [http://justinfagnani.com/2015/12/21/real-mixins-with- javascr...](http://justinfagnani.com/2015/12/21/real-mixins-with-javascript- classes/)

        export const FeaturesLogic = (base) => class extends base {
          static actions = ...;
        }

> Also, I'm not sure you can do `this.actions` inside a static variable, but I > understand the point that you were trying to make.

Not in the current Babel transform, but I thought it may be in the latest unified class fields proposal. I'm digging for it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know it's just an example... But the Slider code is ridiculously overwrought.

Building this type of image carousel is trivial with just plain HTML+CSS+JS. This example uses "actions", "reducers", "selectors", weird functions from something called "redux-saga/effects", a "promise-based timeout" library AND generator functions to produce the magic ... of switching between images.

If someone I work with came up with this code, I would assume that the person is extremely bored with her job and wants to spruce up her résumé with buzzwords.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, indeed it's an example, as you point out. This was the best example I could come up with that demonstrated most of the functionality available, yet remained rather small in size.

The point was to show what this library is capable of, so that people with the imagination of your imaginary co-worker could extrapolate its usefulness to real world applications.

I have built 3 large applications using kea, and at that scale all these features come in handy.

<comment><USER5> Just to clarify, I'm not picking on you; I realize it's hard to come up with meaningful examples.

The problem with Slider is that it doesn't readily extrapolate into anything bigger. To put it another way, it's not the embryo of any real world web app.

I feel this indicates a larger problem with present-day web dev: due to the complexity of client and server stacks, it's really hard to come up with a self-contained example app that makes any sense as a starting point.

Looking back some 20 years, one could look at the example apps from the Win32, Classic MacOS and OpenStep SDKs, and come out with a solid feel for what it's like to build an app on each platform.

Today, I could compare the provided examples from twelve different JavaScript frameworks, and I wouldn't feel any closer to understanding their strengths.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Shameless plug for another take on the same promise: [https://github.com/jnorth/megalith](https://github.com/jnorth/megalith)

I think most people who are attracted to Redux's core principals but want a more opinionated structure will end up gravitating towards mobx-state-tree though.

<comment><USER7> If my favorite part of redux is structuring flows with redux-saga, does mobx- state-tree have a solution for me?

For example, this is nice:

      // On login, spin off the auth process. If an error or a logout happens, clean up.
      // Be sure to cancel any pending auth request!
      // Then get ready for a new login.

      function* loginFlow() {
        while (true) {
          const {user, password} = yield take('LOGIN_REQUEST')
          const task = yield fork(authorize, user, password)
          const action = yield take(['LOGOUT', 'LOGIN_ERROR'])
          if (action.type === 'LOGOUT')
            yield cancel(task)
          yield call(Api.clearItem, 'token')
        }
      }

(Genuine question...idk!)

<comment><USER6> This example doesn't cover all the cases you're showing above, but in megalith or MST you would typically have a clearer separation between the functions that change state and the async communication parts.

[https://github.com/jnorth/megalith/blob/master/docs/examples...](https://github.com/jnorth/megalith/blob/master/docs/examples/async- actions.md)

[https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx-state-tree#creating-async- pro...](https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx-state-tree#creating-async-processes)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I also like to use redux with a clear separation between actions that change state and those that don't. (For example, reducers only take actions prefixed by DATA_ or UI_, all other actions...the bulk of them really...don't have anything to do with changing state and are handled by other processes. But because of this I don't bother with action creators, so what do I know!)

A conceptual appeal of mobx to me is that this distinction seems baked in. The original mobx didn't click with me like redux did ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯, but if MST gives transactional updates and support for redux dev tools (right?) could be worth trying.

<comment><USER6> Right, maybe I called out the wrong part of your example. redux-saga gives a really elegant way to describe the flow, but I feel at the expense of wrapping the async code with special helpers (call, put, fork, etc). You have to learn a few extra concepts for it to be comfortable. Async code in MST and megalith interact a bit more directly with the stores.

One thing I tried to do with megalith is mapping ideas from Redux to built-in language features as much as possible. An action object can trivially be represented as a function call for example—action name and payload is mapped to function name and arguments.

I think Mobx gets into trouble there by building off of observables—you have to litter your async code with different types of action markers to keep state consistent. MST tries to corral all those variations down into a smaller set, where the Redux ecosystem is layering ideas on top of an small initial core. Megalith and MST are starting from two completely opposite sides, but end up looking very similar somewhere in the middle :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've made a lightweight React library influenced by functional setState, and supports async/await/Promises, extracting values from DOM / forms easily, pure function actions, animation with requestAnimationFrame, and reloading when props change.

I've put a lot of effort into providing some good examples (more coming!), and also on keeping it lightweight: core is 1.18KB gzipped.

[https://github.com/RoyalIcing/react- organism](https://github.com/RoyalIcing/react-organism)

Feedback welcome, here or as issues!

<comment><USER9> Looks nice, but I think I can get most of it using recompose, which I've been using extensively lately.

<comment><USER8> Yes, you would be able to do a lot with the flexible recompose. I've tried to make something more friendly and lightweight that makes common use cases easier. I can find recompose a little overwhelming in the multiple layers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny, I always thought of Redux as offering greater simplicity and MobX being more powerful.

<comment><AUTHOR> With great simplicity comes great power ;)

MobX is simple to get going, but I fear there are dragons beneath. Here's a small writeup I did about it on Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/6pni2i/kea_high_le...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/6pni2i/kea_high_level_abstraction_between_react_and_redux/dkr97n4/?st=j5lgq1hz&sh=4ba21f1e)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this type-safe? Can it infer the payload type somehow? With MobX you can write type-safe code, and it's pretty important in bigger code bases. Redux can be made type-safe but is a bit clunky to use that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, propTypes are supported as an (optional) first class citizen. Thus whatever is the output of a reducer or a selector, provided it is passed to a react component, is type checked.

That said, I haven't used flow or TS myself and can't confirm nor deny compatibility

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The concept expressed in the title matches a desire. Looking forward to checking out and hearing other's experiences.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why not just use state, which seems like the correct solution to the examples?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because the examples are just that, examples. Kea is designed for large complicated apps, and is in production use for at least 4 apps that I'm aware of (from marketplaces to fleet tracking)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have to dig into this but at first glance I like the approach</comment>


Gun violence in America, in 17 maps and charts - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/8/24/9183525/gun-violence-statistics

<comment><USER2> Disingenuous to plot gun ownership vs gun deaths, instead of vs all violent deaths. Turns out, no correlation there - without guns, violent folks use something else. But that's not clickbait, so they put up this nonsense instead.

<comment><USER3> What's more disingenuous is they tie guns to suicide.

Suicide is a mental health problem, not a gun problem. The problem isn't that guns are an efficient tool for suicide - the problem is people are attempting suicide to begin with.</comment></comment>


Murdoch Wants A Google Rebellion - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/03/rupert-murdoch-google-business-media-murdoch.html <comment><USER2> was I the only one hoping this article was going to be about a Galt's Gulch scenario?</comment>


With One Word – Yo – Messaging App Gets People Talking - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/with-single-word-yo-messaging-app-gets-people-talking/ <comment><USER2> One word. LAME.

Oh, and to add a few more words, this 'journalist' has been tweeting YO forever, yo! Does thou protest too much? Me smells some conflict of interest. Ah but it is TC. pfffffft</comment>


Dirichlet Process Mixture Models in Pyro - <AUTHOR> https://pyro.ai/examples/dirichlet_process_mixture.html <comment><USER2> Without getting too far into the Bayesian vs. frequentist debate, I find the whole field of Bayesian nonparametrics to be very mathematically satisfying. Hierarchical models effectively come with a hyperparameter search "built-in".

It's also quite appealing that many of these probabilistic models made by statisticians are "fuzzy" generalizations of ad-hoc algorithms originally developed for practical reasons. In the same way that Gaussian Mixture Models are a "fuzzy" generalization of K-means, Dirichlet Process Mixture Models are a "fuzzy" generalization of the adaptive K-means algorithm, which increments K whenever outliers are detected. This connection is nicely summarized by Kulis & Jordan 2012 [1].

If you're wondering where to get started learning a topic like this, it's good to know about latent variable models and expectation-maximization first. See for example my own notes [2] on the topic. Following that, you can start to understand variational inference, as well as topics relevant to modern deep learning like amortized inference, variational autoencoders, etc..

[1] Kulis & Jordan 2012, "Revisiting K-Means: New Algorithms via Bayesian Nonparametrics" ([https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/papers/kulis- jordan...](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/papers/kulis-jordan- icml12.pdf)) [2] [https://benrbray.com/static/notes/eecs445-f16-em- notes.pdf](https://benrbray.com/static/notes/eecs445-f16-em-notes.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Have you looked at capsule-routing algorithms that use expectation- maximization to generate layer outputs in deep neural networks? For example, in [https://research.google/pubs/pub46653/](https://research.google/pubs/pub46653/) and [https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.00792](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.00792) each output capsule in a layer is generated by a Gaussian mixture model and also has an associated "activation value" that increases to the extent the GMM can explain (i.e., generate) its input data data "better" than the GMMs of other output capsules in the same layer. I wonder, do you think these routing algorithms, which are differentiable end-to-end, could be generalized to Dirichlet Process Mixture Models?</comment></comment>


A pair of lawsuits highlight the decline of public order in SF - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-san-francisco-11593645034 <comment><AUTHOR> FTA: "Meanwhile, as a recent article in City Journal notes, San Francisco is "surreptitiously placing homeless people in luxury hotels by designating them as emergency front-line workers" and has spent $3,795.98 to buy guests alcohol, ostensibly to encourage them to shelter in place. The city has also provided complementary cigarettes and marijuana."

If true, this is bizarre indeed!</comment>


Elements of Statistical Learning - <AUTHOR> http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/ <comment><USER2> I highly endorse this book. Best explanation of linear regression I've ever read. I think a good litmus test for stats books is whether they explain how minimizing squared error corresponds to maximizing probability given Gaussian- distributed errors, and, of course, whether they acknowledge the eternal light of Bayes shining in the background of all things.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've gone through this book. I found it useful for theory, but not useful for gaining an appreciation of how the models work in practice. Most practitioners will appreciate a more applied book than this one.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Any suggestions for those applied books? I haven't found any yet.

<comment><USER5> I found Machine Learning for Hackers to be good as a practical, case study based book for learning to apply and understand what is going on in several machine learning problems.

<http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018483.do> [http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-for-Hackers- ebook/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-for-Hackers- ebook/dp/B007A0BNP4/)

It's definitely a practical approach. There's a lot of explanation but, despite coming from two PhD candidates, it certainly did not read like an academic paper.

It's also case study based, not necessarily algorithm based.

As a bonus, I used that book to teach myself R. I don't think it's meant to be an intro to R tutorial, but it worked for me.

All three are positives in my book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ESL is pretty much the go-to text for statisticians interested in machine learning. The math in it might be a bit more difficult than some of the pages you see on HN, but you won't get much better than this for a survey-course on machine learning from a statistician's perspective.

<comment><USER7> interesting. i've been going through gilbert strangs book and courses. this looks like a nice accompaniment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I found Christopher Bishop's book to have a good deal of knowledge in it. Plus, he compliments many ideas with graphical figures, which is a big plus. [http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning- Informati...](http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning-Information- Statistics/dp/0387310738)

Also, if you needed more information about optimization methods all of Stephen Boyd's books are really good, just check out his entire website for information. <http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/>

</comment><comment><USER9> other free drafts/full open content books

[http://www.ics.uci.edu/~welling/teaching/273ASpring10/IntroM...](http://www.ics.uci.edu/~welling/teaching/273ASpring10/IntroMLBook.pdf)

<http://alex.smola.org/drafts/thebook.pdf>

<http://www.p-value.info/2012/11/free-datascience-books.html>

<http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Barber/textbook/090113.pdf> (webserver's on verge of falling over, maybe we can stagger requests)

and i think some others are: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4672930>

<comment><USER9> The one from UCI is a very rough draft, shdn't have included that

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> great book, but you need to have a very high level math background to understand most of it (in my opinion)

<comment><USER11> Looks like completely normal math to me. It's not like they're trying to shove category theory down your throat or anything.

A useful book! Look just like what I needed. If there's something heavier about it, it's the terse encyclopedic feeling of it, it's not a gentle introduction in this sense.

<comment><USER12> Well that is not very helpful. If the last math class you took was 20 years ago, ESL probably seems rather intimidating. The good thing is that most of the book requires only calculus and linear algebra. By brushing up on those topics first, you could be in a position to understand most of the basics of machine learning.

<comment><USER11> "If the last math class you took was 20 years ago, ESL probably seems rather intimidating."

Actually, only ten years ago. :-) But I _do_ need a refresher. Just started working on it recently. I feel actually smarter today than I felt back then, so I don't think will hurt that much.

"The good thing is that most of the book requires only calculus and linear algebra. By brushing up on those topics first, you could be in a position to understand most of the basics of machine learning."

Yeah, I've noticed. The scope of the whole book is _vastly_ overblown for my needs, my application (NLP-related) won't probably need more then the basic stuff, but any good material at my disposal helps.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


50 Google +1s on sale at SEO shop for $9.99 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/seo-shop-puts-50-google-1s-on-sale-for-just-999/242517/

<comment><USER2> I sort of assumed that part of the point of Google+ was that you could have +1s from your social graph weighed much more heavily. Trust only the recommendations of people you trust, or people they trust, or so on with diminishing weight.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but as long as there will be people no knowing about that, there will be room for such freeloaders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My understanding is that +1s only affect your search results if you're connected to the person that's +1'ing. This makes ballot stuffing pointless. (edit: effect -> affect)

<comment><USER5> It still helps with social proof. Everyone can see the number on the site.

<comment><USER6> It probably does, but 50 plusses aren't very impressive. You'd have to buy thousands of them in order to appear viable. And even then, most people who are able to recognize a high "plus" ranking would probably be sophisticated enough to recognize a spam site instantly anyway. This kind of reminds me of those weird sites with a button on them displaying 3 million likes on Facebook and when you look at the actual source code, it turns out they embedded the widget with "example.com" as their site address.

Fifty ClickMob accounts on non-social sites are worth a lot more, for a short time you could totally dominate sites like HN, Slashdot and Reddit. But Google+ accounts that are not connected to relevant people, I just don't see the value...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google should buy 1000 +1s for some random obscure site and then ban all the IPs that +1'd it.

<comment><USER8> That'd be a good idea if you are sure all the +1's are coming from illegitimate users but with the existence of botnets/malware/etc, it's very possible that the people +1'ing have no idea they are doing it.

<comment><USER9> So shadowban them instead. The kind of people who would allow their system to be compromised are not the kind of people who would care or notice if their +1's didn't count.

<comment><USER10> I don't believe you're serious. Not only is that untrue (practically everyone is insecure in some way) but it's also a non sequitur; it's not the +1ers that suffer when their clicks don't count, it's their friends, who would otherwise benefit from having better recommendations.

<comment><USER11> It's not a bad suggestion. Their friends are going to be better off without the +1s of anyone whose account is compromised by a bot net.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if this could be used nefariously? Buy someone a 1000 +1 package, and watch as their account gets banned for spam.

<comment><USER13> That's not a bad idea. In fact you don't need this for doing that - you will probably _not_ want to avoid the obvious catches (like clicking from same ip many times, too frequently, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Both sites (<http://seoshop.biz/> and <http://plussem.com/>) use Google Analytics. So Google could feasibly track who makes a purchase. If you make purchase on those sites and you've recently logged into your Google Webmaster tools or something and then get a load of +1's Google could surely fairly easily see that.

<comment><USER15> Promoting google+ votes is becoming a very hot business. Using these types of services could have negative or positive affects on SEO. We just have to see how google treats them. Another place to buy google plus votes is bulkones.com Will be interesting to see how this evolves over the next few months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Surely Google can detect this for sites that use Google Analytics -- they know where the majority of their traffic comes from (presumably a high-value economy) and they know where their +1s come from. If there isn't a significant geographical overlap, then there's something fishy going on.

EDIT: For tl;dr, The article mentions that +1s are likely coming from developing countries.

</comment><comment><USER17> This may actually be detectable. If someone who has never, based on their search history, suddenly +1's something that would normally be outside their interest, you could weight that plus one differently than others.

In fact, I would be very surprised if Google _didn't_ weight +1 data, and simply used the total number as their "+1 Signal".

<comment><USER18> You'd be surprised how seemingly smart and dumb the Google ranking algorithm is. SEO's have been witnessing this for years. Techniques that shouldn't work do, and ones that are extremely complex and tricky are sniffed out by Google engineers quicker than anyone could anticipate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love how seoshop.biz offer a service to give fake product/service reviews for $1.20/review... and yet they show reviews of their own services on their product pages. Are these reviews meant to be convincing given they're coming from a company that actually SELLS the ability to create bullshit reviews?

<comment><USER20> Perhaps that's their "shopping window", where they showcase samples of their merch ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Haven't read the article, though I don't find it too strange. Anyways, I even find that price too expensive for just 50 +1s. You can find twice that much for half the price at Fiverr: <http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=google+%2B1>

These kind of service ("liking", "digging", and anything that involves "votes" of some kind) has been offered since forever, why would it be any different with Google's +1?

</comment><comment><USER22> Google have a few options here:

1\. Attempt to detect these scam +1 votes, and either ignore them or penalise the targetted sites (although the latter is risky as it can be exploited to destroy the ranking of competitors)

2\. Focus on encouraging more genuine use of the +1 button, so any +1 results that can affordably be bought are lost in the noise.

3\. The spy vs spy option. Start selling +1 votes themselves under a dummy name, and then immediately remove them as spam (whilst optionally continuing to display them in google analytics). Google could of course afford to undercut all other sellers, and their +1 selling services could appear at the top of all relevant searches, rather than other sites attempting the same.

Option 1 seems the most likely for google, but if I were a small startup I'd definitely pick option 3, then blog about it a few months later.

<comment><USER23> How about just removing the sites selling them?

<comment><USER24> I think Digg tried to do that with a company in Australia and failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Old news.. You could get this done on Freelancer.com since the beginning.. I'm sure you could even go cheaper than $10 these days.. <http://twitter.com/#!/freelancer/status/58323985988984832>

</comment><comment><USER26> Holy crap that's expensive. I'm not sure if it's scalable though. At that price I would be surprised if the botnets used mostly for sending spam doesn't just query google for whatever result and "click" the +1.

</comment><comment><USER27> You should pay them to upvote this story :)

</comment><comment><USER28> I see Google moving to use their 'news algorithm' to fight this kind of thing. When a news site gets linked to a great deal real fast then it shoots up in rankings, but once that super-high load disappears, suddenly as other news articles become more relevant, then Google basically blacklists that previous article despite that it has super-high backlinks.

Could Google just see a site get 1,000 +1's in a week and then never get another for 2 weeks and then blacklist it like the above news algorithm?

<comment><USER23> If you actually get +1000 and more people actually visit your site and enjoy your service you will be probably getting some more pluses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Surely this is a side effect of Mechanical Turk-type sites and offers; if you offer someone $0.10 for what amounts to a few seconds work, it kinda starts to all look worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER30> Maybe this is an in joke or something, but searching for "seoshop" on google results in a landing page as the first result.

<comment><USER14> the article is wrong, it's not seoshop.com it's <http://seoshop.biz/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is this a common practice on other +1-like buttons? (say facebook "like"s, twitter's RTs, digg/reddit upvotes, etc)

<comment><USER32> <http://subvertandprofit.com/>

<comment><USER29> WOW! $1/vote for Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon etc - the cheaters must have pretty deep pockets if they want to game the system! Or does it only take 10-20 votes to swing things in one's favour?

<comment><USER33> A few, early votes are what matter, then the snowball effect takes over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> They will probably get shutdown as soon as this story gets enough attention.

<comment><USER35> How?

<comment><USER34> Good question. I don't mean the sellers. But rather the accounts that are being sold. Meaning that the buyer of such an account will have wasted 10$. Don't see why would anybody pay for a +1 account though. Especially since they will eventually open the gates to everyone.

<comment><USER36> So imagine you are a black hat for a moment. You've run your drive by malware campaign and harvested a couple hundred thousand Google login credentials, or maybe you just sit and wait and when the browser is open you send a +1 to the site your master told you to send it to.

So now Google has hundreds of +1 votes coming from otherwise legitimate users. How do they fight that?

<comment><USER37> remove SEOshop from organic results, and block them from Adwords until they shut down the operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wonder if some algorithm using ratio of giving and receiving +1s/circles/posts/etc could be used to curb this kind of practice, by converting +1s of legitimate users into +2s, +3s, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER39> Seems to me the inevitable end game is PeopleRank as an analog to PageRank where Google trusts the +1s of certain people, for certain topics, differently.

</comment><comment><USER37> that is actually quite cheap...I think I saw a few months ago someone doing a similar service for reddit, and it was like $1 per upvote

edit: didn't find the actual site, but similar: [http://www.freelancer.com/projects/Internet-Marketing- Link-B...](http://www.freelancer.com/projects/Internet-Marketing-Link- Building/Reddit-Upvotes.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> Humungous banner screaming "WIN AN IPAD 2!" FTW!

</comment><comment><USER41> It was only a matter of time ;-) Surely Google must have relaized that as soon as they released their +1 button, some people would start gaming it?</comment>


Ask HN: Would you rather be lucky or good? - <AUTHOR>

The other day, one of my classes involved an extremely heated discussion on whether success is based more on luck or more on skill/effort. Surprisingly, the class was pretty evenly split between the two, with very extreme views on both sides. In reality, the two concepts aren't mutually exclusive, but if you had to pick one or the other, would you rather be lucky or good? <comment><USER2> This depends on the situation. I would rather be a good driver than a lucky driver.

For success in general, I would rather be lucky. The thing about luck is that it's a word which conceals a lot of behind the scenes action. We create our own luck and that creation often involves a lot of flailing around. That's something many "good" people may avoid, and that may be holding them back.

</comment><comment><USER3> Local saying: Daig ang masipag ng maswerteng tamad (a lucky sloth is usually better off than a hard worker). Must be a terrible joke, but ultimately I believe hard work + opportunity = success.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is more of a combination of the two, which I feel is most certainly the best pathway to success. People tend to give too little credit to luck (especially if they've worked hard as well), but here's the way I see it: you can have a lot of people who put in the same amount of work and are equally as talented, but the luckier ones are the ones who meet more success.

However, if you had to pick only one, your saying would seem to hint that luck outweighs effort and that's a sentiment that has been pretty common through the years (former Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez - "I'd rather be lucky than good.") I'm interested in seeing which of the two would be more desired if a single choice between the two was presented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I took archery, someone attributed my skill to "luck". I think "luck" often means "I don't understand what went right or how to replicate that result". I would rather understand what went right, if possible, so I can do it again fairly reliably. Therefore I would rather be good than "lucky" -- good enough that other people accuse me of having "luck".</comment>


Congress passes wide-ranging bill easing bank laws (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/05/business/congress-passes-wide-ranging-bill-easing-bank-laws.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1&emc=eta1

<comment><USER2> "The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system. The original idea behind Glass-Steagall was that separation between bankers and brokers would reduce the potential conflicts of interest that were thought to have contributed to the speculative stock frenzy before the Depression."

Being right is tough, especially when you're not vindicated until years later (and after years of "success" by the new policies).

More:

"''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,'' Mr. Wellstone said. ''Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''

Supporters of the legislation rejected those arguments. They responded that historians and economists have concluded that the Glass-Steagall Act was not the correct response to the banking crisis because it was the failure of the Federal Reserve in carrying out monetary policy, not speculation in the stock market, that caused the collapse of 11,000 banks. If anything, the supporters said, the new law will give financial companies the ability to diversify and therefore reduce their risks. The new law, they said, will also give regulators new tools to supervise shaky institutions.

''The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown,'' said Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska."

<comment><USER3> So Wachovia, instead of being sold to Wells Fargo, should have just went bankrupt? And Merrill Lynch, instead of being bought by Bank of America, should have went bankrupt? That would have eased the crisis, how?

Glass Stegall would have blocked both of those transactions.

Would Glass-Stegall have reduced unprecedented capital flows into the US housing sector from overseas investors and the monetary and fiscal policies of our own government? Because if you still have those capital flows, you still have housing prices going up by 20% per year, you still have lenders lowering their standards, and you still have them getting caught holding the bag.

I'm sorry, I just don't see it.

Not all deregulation is equal. Each individual policy has its own incentives. There are not two undifferentiated piles called "regulation" and "deregulation" that we can add and subtract from. I have a hard time seeing how the repeal of Glass Steagall did anything but _mitigate_ the current crisis.

And yes, during the Great Depression it was small banks that were made artificially small by anti-banking laws that failed. The repeal of anti-size regulation has sound historical reasoning on its side.

Meg McArdle had a good post on this. I need to find out about her background, because she is one of about 5 people on the internet that can write INFORMED analysis of issues like these:

[http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/clear_a...](http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/clear_as_glass_steagall.php)

" Even if you ignore the economic history indicating that Glass-Steagall didn't help the crisis it was meant to solve--even if you assume, arguendo, that the repeal was a bad idea--there's simply no logical reason to believe it had anything to do with the current mess.

Securitization was not introduced in the 1990s; it was invented in the 1970s and became popular in the 1980s, as chronicled in Liar's Poker. (As an aside, if you haven't read it, you really must. Especially now).

GLB had nothing to do with either lending standards at commercial banks, or leverage ratios at broker-dealers, the two most plausible candidates for regulatory failure here.

Most importantly, commercial banks are not the main problems. If Glass- Steagall's repeal had meaningfully contributed to this crisis, we should see the failures concentrated among megabanks where speculation put deposits at risk. Instead we see the exact opposite: the failures are among either commercial banks with no significant investment arm (Washington Mutual, Countrywide), or standalone investment banks. It is the diversified financial institutions that are riding to the rescue."

My own take on it:

[http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2008/09/22/the- end-e...](http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2008/09/22/the-end-era)

<comment><USER4> Point of interest.

Wachovia FELL because there was a SILENT run on the bank. More than 5 trillion dollars got taken out of the system which was largely owned by Wachovia.

Look for the day they increased the Fed Savings from $100,000 to $250,000 and you will know the preceding day was the "Silent Run".

<comment><USER5> Citation?

I thought the '5 trillion' silent run was fluff?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _the most interesting statement_

''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,'' Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ''This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.''

 _Yep, the same Lawrence H. Summers who is now Pres. Obama's top financial advisor._

<comment><USER6> <http://www.newsweek.com/id/185934>

<comment><USER4> Thanks for this. Changes my opinion a bit on Summers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People are complaining that this was a destabilizing bill. And yet, the current crisis is largely due to stabilizers: Fannie and Freddie manipulated mortgage prices to make them trade like treasuries, leading to artificial stability; AIG sold CDSs as part of a regulatory arbitrage, leading to a collapse later on; depositors didn't have any reason to care whether their bank was lending to someone who put 50% down on a first home or 0% down on a no-doc third home -- whatever happened, the FDIC would take care of it!

It is impossible to imagine an alternative history in which a lack of ostensibly stabilizing regulations led to a larger crisis. These rules will tend to reduce the chance of a small disaster, and amplify the effects of a massive one. Thanks to Fannie and Freddie, housing prices couldn't drop 5% in a year -- they could rise 10%, or they could drop by 20%.

</comment><comment><USER8> If my recollection is correct, when this was happening The Economist magazine was also in favor of it. And one of the reasons they gave was that _a more diverse business will make bankruptcy less likely_.

And logically I have to agree with that. It also seems to me, that is not what caused the crisis.

I think the core of the problem is

A) Too much risk was taken on because there was huge incentive to maximize profit, and very little disincentive to minimize risk. People were gambling with other people's money.

B) Companies that were allowed to get too big to fail.

So I think we can keep mark to market, and naked short selling and even the repeal of Glass-Steagall as long as we have legislation in place to prevent systemic risk.

Something like monopoly laws, but instead of monopoly, companies would be charged with being too big to fail.

If the courts convict them of being systemic risk, they have to find a way to split into at least two parts, but they can do it while preserving as much share holder value as possible.

 _And then no more bailouts!_

I am not sure how Glass-Steagall eliminates systemic risk and the too big to fail scenario? It makes it less likely but does it eliminate it?

<comment><USER9> You do realize that the popular catchphrase "Too Big To Fail" is politician- speak for "We know these guys are crooks and we know they committed fraud on a massive scale, but won't indict them because it would bare our own corruption and failure to enforce existing laws because we really wanted our friends to make more money and donate to the campaign!"

<comment><USER8> I kind of agree with that, but it's also oversimplifying.

Putting banks into receivership doesn't just happen magically, there's laws for it. There are no equivalent laws for international behemoth insurers like AIG. The government can't just make up laws as it goes along.

As to a disorderly unwinding like Lehman, well that basically caused a run on the banks.

<comment><USER9> _The government can't just make up laws as it goes along._

You are right, and I'm glad you are saying it :)

But didn't the Fed fail in it's regulatory role over the commercial banks _to whom AIG was counterparty on swaps_ , when they allowed valuation of Tier Capital assets based on the 'quality' provided by swaps from AIG and friends? With any due diligence whatsoever the banks would have known that AIG didn't have the capital to pay those contracts. From that angle it looks like some or all of: The Fed was asleep, AIG misrepresented itself to CDS customers, or banks were complicit in the misrepresentation (or they didn't care because they could hedge the CDS with short CDS from a different counterparty -- now that is systemic risk). Go a step further -- the Fed accepted these CDS- wrapped assets as collateral for TSLF/TALF loans -- so the same statements about banks could be applied to the Fed, they either didn't do the due diligence on the collateral or they are complicit in breaking the law. Right?

Edit: for God's sake, I despise economics. I just want to get back to work and create stuff!

<comment><USER8> Absolutely, regulators failed all over the damn place.

But I'm not sure how to fix that. It seems they will be merged into one giant super regulator, I'm not sure that helps. Perhaps making the head of the super regulator an elected office?

And sorry about keeping you from work :) I'm in a cubicle farm... but won't be there for long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _But other lawmakers criticized the provisions of the legislation aimed at discouraging community groups from pressing banks to make more loans to the disadvantaged. Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, said during the House debate that the legislation was ''mean-spirited in the way it had tried to undermine the Community Reinvestment Act.'' And Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, said it was ironic that while the legislation was deregulating financial services, it had begun a new system of onerous regulation on community advocates._

What really gets me, is that the very people that were pushing for banks to loan money to people who couldn't afford the loans (ie Barney Frank), are out there in the media as the biggest decriers of the financial mess we are in. They are so eager to lay the blame on others, including big, nasty Wall Street. Everyone is culpable here.

Can a brother get a "My Bad!"

</comment><comment><USER11> If we've learned anything from history, it's that we've learned nothing from history

</comment><comment><USER12> Holy crap - this is the most succinct explanation I've seen of the economic crisis:

 _"The opponents of the measure gloomily predicted that by unshackling banks and enabling them to move more freely into new kinds of financial activities, the new law could lead to an economic crisis down the road when the marketplace is no longer growing briskly."_

<comment><USER7> What does that explain? Does anyone actually claim that the main cause of the current crisis is that the same bank can make a loan or underwrite one?

<comment><USER12> Yes, that's definitely a big part of it - the fact that the same company can both provide a loan and then insure that same loan creates an ethical conflict of interest that calls into question their ability to objectively quantify risk, as well as creating an illusion of stability with these risky assets through false claims of insurance. The article gave an example of a company at the time (Citigroup) that would have had to split their insurance underwriting by law, which arguably would've created a more accountable and less entangled situation than having it all under one roof.

So what did the less ethical banks do with these troubled assets, since I'm sure somebody in the top ranks had to know what they were getting into? Bundle them up with a bunch of their other more reputable financial products and resell them to others. That's the part that's been getting a lot of the attention lately but it's only a symptom, not the root cause of the problem.

<comment><USER13> > Yes, that's definitely a big part of it - the fact that the same company can > both provide a loan and then insure that same loan creates an ethical > conflict of interest that calls into question their ability to objectively > quantify risk

> So what did the less ethical banks do with these troubled assets, since I'm > sure somebody in the top ranks had to know what they were getting into? > Bundle them up with a bunch of their other more reputable financial products > and resell them to others.

The combination of those two sentences doesn't make any sense.

The inability of an insitution to objectively quantify risk wrt a given entity doesn't matter if said institution doesn't own or insure said entity.

In other words, it doesn't matter how bad Citigroup is at estimating the risk of assets that it sells.

<comment><USER14> The problem is they sold the "good slices of the pie" and nobody would buy the bad slices. So they had a lot high risk assets on the books. Which was fine until the market decline wiped their value out.

<comment><USER13> The claim was that Citi can't distinguish good from bad. If that's true, they can't have preferentially sold either group.

Note that we now have two stories on what they sold. One story is that they "unethically" sold the bad. Now we're told that they sold the good.

<comment><USER12> _"The claim was that Citi can't distinguish good from bad."_

That's not the claim at all - it's that they had a sliding scale of how bad a loan they were willing to make because of incentive to have lax ethical standards, then they hid the "badness" of those loans by bundling them up with other financial vehicles that they resold to others.

<comment><USER13> Actually that is the claim - "fact that the same company can both provide a loan and then insure that same loan creates an ethical conflict of interest that calls into question their ability to objectively quantify risk"

Of course, the insurance that we're talking about wasn't for individual mortgages but for loan portfolios and tranches of loan portfolios. (The "insurance" wrt the effect of individual loans comes from the portfolio - instead of "loan fails or not", you get "fraction of loans that fail".)

> it's that they had a sliding scale of how bad a loan they were willing to > make because of incentive to have lax ethical standards

That's completely incorrect. The "how bad a loan" stuff came from loan orignators as pushed by CRA, govt officials, and fannie and freddie.

Ethics had nothing to do with it. Or rather, the "ethic" of "folks should get a loan regardless of whether they can repay" overrode the financial reality of "loans made to people who are unlikely to be able to repay are likely fail".

Citigroup wasn't big in loan origination. They did their "magic" on portfolios that they bought from other magicians and from folks who originated loans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Note that "mark to market" was reinstituted in 1999 after having been suspended in 1934.

Mark-to-market says that the value of an asset for regulatory purposes (bank or insurance company assets for example) is 0 on any day when no one offers to buy said asset or something comparable.

Many/most of these loan portfolios are throwing off cash. If anyone actually believes they're truely worth $0, I'll be happy to take as many as I can get for $1 each.

I'll even throw in a free toaster.

<comment><USER15> No. You've got that wrong. There are 3 types of valuations for assets:

"Level 1" which means that there is an observable price (a market and price) for this asset - such as a stock market. This is called "mark to market."

"Level 2" which means that there is no observable price. It takes an observable price and uses it as an input to some formula to produce a value. This is commonly called "mark to model" and derivatives are the most widely known products in this area.

"Level 3" asset valuation is where the asset holder makes up a value. Many call this "mark to make believe." Most of the profits in the past couple years in the financial industry were "level 3 profits."

The FASB's view on valuing the balance sheet of companies is to use "level 1" (if it exists), before using the other valuation methods. If there are enough CDOs sold that there is now a price for that CDO, then the only rational thing is to use that price - not the one that was made up. Until FASB 157 came out, if a company wanted to claim that their level 3 assets were worth what they said they were worth, then they could. Now, if there is a "street price" for the assests, then you have to use "mark to market."

<http://www.fasb.org/pdf/fas157.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think GLB is irrelevant at this point, if only because regulators were negligent in failing to enforce other existing laws which could have prevented and/or mitigated the implosion. Would the executive branch have behaved differently if Glass-Steagall were still in place?

</comment><comment><USER16> not only is this a warning about history, but it is one about politics.

we voted for this via popular support across the world. we took popularism and democracy too far. the populous was wrong, so....

my question is, how do you design a system that both accommodates the population of your system, but also allows success with counter examples?

i am afraid that wikipedia will develop a sedentary culture, and will slow down in its rate of change, hence making it corruptible. so how do we fix that, how do we protect communities from them selves?

</comment><comment><USER17> I find it highly ironic that the same bill that was largely responsible for our banking crisis actually REDUCED ACORN loans, and yet talk radio blames those loans for the whole crisis.

</comment><comment><USER18> Ammunition for the Paul Wellstone conspiracy theorists? <http://www.alternet.org/story/14399/></comment>


3D Face Reconstruction with Position Map Regression Networks - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/3d-face-reconstruction-with-position-map-regression-networks-36f0ac2d3ef1 <comment><USER2> To my human eye the facial landmark placement in this paper looks much better than the 3D reconstructions (which look pretty poor compared to the facial shapes a human eye or human artist would interpret from the photos). The authors argue that their approach isn't limited by the explicit finite number of facial basis functions problem encountered in most prior 3D reconstruction work, but they seem to neglect that because of the finite size of the ground truth 3D scan dataset their approach is still limited in exactly the same way, it's just limited implicitly rather than explicitly. If you don't have enough ground truth scan data for black or Asian or Slavic or etc. faces, the network can't learn to represent them correctly and you end up with the same low- dimensional results as the prior work, you've just hidden the low dimensionality from view by burying it in your neural layers rather than making it explicit in a set of easily identifiable basis functions. Sure, if these authors had a larger ground truth dataset they could do better, but so could the explicit basis function methods.

Again, the facial landmark detection looks great, my concerns are purely with the inaccuracy of the 3D model reconstructions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Next - select your own cast for the movie you're about to watch.

<comment><USER4> Sooner than later you will be able to spontaneously generate films from books or scripts. You will then do some high-level editing by clicking through latent spaces, and voila, you have your own Hollywood-grade film. It's gonna be weird.

<comment><USER5> Then it's just a short step to creating new stories in a known style:

        LAFORGE: Computer, in the Holmesian style, create a mystery to confound Data with an opponent who has the ability to defeat him.
        COMPUTER: Define parameters of programme.
        PULASKI: What does that mean?
        LAFORGE: Computer wants to know how far to take the game.
        PULASKI: You mean it's giving you a chance to limit your risk.
        LAFORGE: No, the parameters will be whatever is necessary in order to accomplish the directive. Create an adversary capable of defeating Data.

We're steadily approaching science fiction when it comes to creating things like this.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the average salary for an iOS Developer at a UK startup? - <AUTHOR>

I'm posted this using a throwaway account but I've been an active HN member for several years. I've been an iOS developer for several years and although I wouldn't describe myself as a 'rockstar programmer' I'm competent and a quick learner.
I'm considering job opportunities (I've worked freelance until now) and I am trying to work out the average salary an iOS developer should expect working at a small but fast growing startup in the UK.
Can anyone help? I know it's only one thing I should be considering but I've no idea what a 'fair' salary offer is.
tl;dr What is the average iOS developer salary at a startup in the UK? <comment><USER2> From what I've heard and seen: £60,000 and above is a decent salary if you're a mid tier developer in London.

Working at a start up should also mean you get some equity in the company but that depends on how early stage they are.

<comment><USER3> How much is the living cost there?

<comment><USER4> Depends - to a vastly greater degree than most cities - on the lifestyle you want to lead. It's possible for a fairly frugal person to live in London in a shared house on <£10k per annum, but on the other hand you'd need that £60k before tax for your family to feel anything like middle class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Central Scotland seems to be around 25-30k.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is there a black bar on top of https://news.ycombinator.com - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> If you search for "black bar"[0] then you will see why it appears every now and again. Here's a link for this occasion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14548030](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14548030)

[0] [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=black%20bar&sort=byDate&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=black%20bar&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, had no idea! Instead I was wondering why HN Special broke for the second time in the past few months without the extension getting an upgrade.</comment></comment>


Resources for Learning Graphics Programming - <AUTHOR> http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2019/3/25/resources-for-learning-graphics-programming <comment><USER2> Simplygon[0,1] has an SDK[2] - migh be worth a look, as well?

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

[1] - [https://www.simplygon.com/](https://www.simplygon.com/)

[2] - [https://account.simplygon.com/#/downloads](https://account.simplygon.com/#/downloads)</comment>


Kaspersky AntiVirus 13 download results in file with different MD5 hashes - <AUTHOR>

I just downloaded a handful of copies of Kaspersky Antivirus 13 via the HTTP link below and keep getting a file with the same name, but a different MD5 hash. Can someone else try downloading the file and checking the hash value for a couple of files to see if this is something Kaspersky is doing? Are they changing the MD5 hash of the file dynamically for each download?
The file name I downloaded is:
kav2013_18.104.22.16890abcdefgEN_4519.exe
I was downloading the file from here (expand Kaspersky Anti-Virus under "Personal and Family Security" at the bottom and get the English/USA Canada version): http://usa.kaspersky.com/downloads/product-updates
Does this happen for others?
The MD5 Hash app I'm using: WinMD5Free v1.20 on Win 7 <comment><USER2> I've done it three times, and get the same hash each time:

      e234d2efd7d7201e4886d2f21a329a3e

I'm using:

      md5sum --version
      md5sum (GNU coreutils) 5.3.0

Edit: On Windows XP

</comment><comment><USER3> Did this a few times, no change in the hash.

      MD5 (kav2013_22.214.171.12490abcdefgEN_4519.exe) = e234d2efd7d7201e4886d2f21a329a3e</comment>


Need Bitcoins? This ATM takes dollars and funds your account - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57570925-38/need-bitcoins-this-atm-takes-dollars-and-funds-your-account/

<comment><USER2> Interesting concept, but it's only part of the way there.

I don't see any thought put into physical security, yet, which is arguably one of the most important things when putting a box full of money anywhere.

Then, you have to factor in the cost of the box. Assuming they can actually design an ATM quality/secure machine, who pays for it? Assuming the retailer pays for it, what sort of return could a retailer expect for having the device? TCO - How long will it take to pay off the investment.

Then on top of that you need to offer a service whereby people are emptying the machines regularly. And since the people emptying these machines would be putting their lives in danger handling money all of the time out in public, you'd need to hire a professional firm like Brinks, or absorb the large costs of trying to do this yourself.

Then assuming these guys want to get paid themselves, there will be administrative costs as well.

How much does a bitcoin end up costing with all of the extra fees at the end of the day? Is it worth it? Does a system where you have to walk/drive to a location with cash in hand to purchase bitcoins, and pay a significantly larger amount of money for them offer value?

I can see this idea appealing to the anonymous aspect of the currency, but since any location these are placed in would have to be under constant video surveillance, that makes it a little more tricky.

In the end, since there already exists the ability to get bitcoins with cash at WalMart and CVS via bitinstant, I don't think this idea will go much farther than the hobbyboards and display they've tucked into a box and connected to the internet.

<comment><USER3> Idea: allow selling BTC for dollars too. And to maintain balance on the machine, adjust the exchange rate dynamically according to how much dollar bills are remaining or how much room is left. So people will keep it balanced to their own benefit and to the benefit of owners who would pay the difference in exchange rates and not do emptying/filling by themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is pretty awesome... I can't believe how much Bitcoin has grown in the past 6 months. Kicking myself for not investing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree it's awesome, though I wonder how many approach BTC as an 'investment' rather than a currency to actually use and buy things with?

<comment><USER5> Quite a large number, I'm afraid. I know a few people who keep hundreds to several thousand+ without spending any in anticipation of a massive buyout (or financial collapse). These were very early adopters that ran their vid cards 24/7 for years.

<comment><USER6> The good thing about the price increasing is that the early adopters are more willing to spend BTC and also convert BTC into fiat.

This increases the overall value of BTC because as more people who own BTC bought in at a higher price, it will be harder and harder for the price to crash down to levels lower than the average price of BTC purchased. (I argue this based on the psychology of buying BTC at a certain price)

Back when the large 2011 crash happened and even now to a slightly lesser degree the average BTC acquired/bought is still low, (i'd wager around $5 for the entire network of BTC still accessible, as a example)

As more earlies sell and purchase items, this average will increase, and as it does the possibility for BTC to fall below this average becomes harder and harder.

<comment><USER5> I remember that crash. A couple of those people were freaking out. And I think your price estimate is correct.

I'd much rather they start spending them within the BTC economy than cashing in for "real" currency instead. The biggest hurdle for BTC isn't even the hoarding, it's that they hoard just because it's still not seen as a real alternative by most folks so they're waiting for the "realization, spike" in prices (I don't think we're there yet).

Few people these days actually hoard cash; instead, they invest in commodities or companies. But these people are hoarding for the value of the currency itself. It's like gold all over again.

I must confess though, the first time I heard about BTC, I did take it for just a very elaborate ponzi scheme. The irony is that the hoarding may, if left unchecked, turn it into exactly that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lovely idea, but I can't help worrying that this would be a money launderer's dream, especially with the aim of installing thousands of these machines all over the place.

It's a difficult one, as money laundering is one of the easiest justifications governments can use for shutting down such services (whether justified or not).

<comment><USER8> Isn't it the same as walking into a bank and asking for a cashiers cheque?

<comment><USER7> _Isn't it the same as walking into a bank and asking for a cashiers cheque?_

Does anyone with ill-gotten gains keep them in a bank account? So no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _He said accepting Bitcoin was more reliable and safer than dealing with charge-backs, credit card fraud, and "scam sales from certain Asian countries like Malaysia or Indonesia."_

This is worrying because it means consumers have no protection.

<comment><USER10> _This is worrying because it means consumers have no protection._

I think in most transactions the seller is well-known and has to worry about reputation effects, while the consumer may as well be anonymous. In which case consumer protection is not that important.

For cases where both parties are anonymous/untrustworthy, you can use a protection scheme like escrow.

That doesn't work when the payer can take his money back after the transaction, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The only problem I see is that it takes 10 to 30 minutes for a transaction to be included in a block. If they give Bitcoins instantly could be double spent.

<comment><USER12> Not precisely. The only time you really need to worry about confirmations is when you're dealing with larger amounts. It costs a lot to pull off a double- spend, more than a tiny ATM transaction anyway.

This is why SatoshiDice processes immediately, except for bets over 2-5 BTC.

<comment><USER13> The reason why SatoshiDICE can do this is because they include the output of the bet transaction as one of the inputs to the win/lose response transaction.

If part of the bet transaction is doublespent there's a good chance it won't make it into a block. If the bet transaction doesn't make it into a block, the response transaction won't either and is therefore worthless.

<comment><USER12> Nobody can cheat SatoshiDICE by double-spending and spending their response transaction, because the transactions are chained as you say. But this isn't the kind of attack they're worried about.

If you broadcast a transaction and SatoshiDICE responds with a YouLoseTx, and you have built a block containing a double-spending transaction, if you "lose" you can broadcast your conflicting block. You wouldn't need much hashpower to do this and still remain positive. It's called a Finney Attack. <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Double-spending#Finney_attack>

This is why they only immediately respond to smaller bets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In the image showing the internals, the boards they are using look a lot like raspberry pis.</comment>


Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web? - <AUTHOR> https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html <comment><USER2> What happened to the Semantic Web was Machine Learning and NoSql databases. Even if the Semantic Web had been a good idea, it took a lot of work to get any benefits. Machine learning produced Big Wins For Free, or at least Comparatively Cheap. And they produced them from big piles of unformatted data requiring no standards meetings or agreements beforehand.

I felt (and said at the time) that the Semantic Web wasn't sufficient to achieve its own goals. The language they chose wasn't powerful enough to express sufficient semantics to enable the kind of data integration and integrity that they wanted. The result was ontologies that still required a lot of negotiation before you could start working -- and then provided little benefit.

So the semi-structured world instead picked NoSql databases, which promptly became full of impossible crap, but at least you could Move Fast And Break Things. And people took all that crap and ML'd it to get something -- what, exactly, is unclear, but it was a thing.

I'll note that I pursued ontologies with a more rigorous standard, and I couldn't get any traction, either. The up-front expense was too high, and I never managed to convey the story about how much good it would do you in the five-to-ten year time horizon. Nobody wanted to hear that. I still think it was a better approach than the Semantic Web, but in the end people chose flexibility over interoprability.

Semantic Web failed because it was neither Semantic nor Web. It wasn't smart enough to be Semantic, nor agile enough to be Web.

</comment><comment><USER3> a lively past discussion, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408)</comment>


Pirate Party falling out of favor across Germany - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/pirate-party-falling-out-of-favor-across-germany/

<comment><USER2> They brought this upon themselves, so no empathy from me.

They are a disorganized bunch of immature young activists, who in a streak of megalomania abandoned their strict focus on IT related topics and it just fell apart.

Sympathetic face of Pirate Party stepped down due to stress, Party was too slow to react to anything going on, Major Pirate Party Member faces drug allegations, at the same time they try to create some sort of grand program what they seem to not be able to achieve, and their views on political subjects other than the Internet are unrealistic, to say the least (some smart children wouldn't write such drivel).

So as somebody who has passively witnessed their decline:

Their fault! You could call their decline natural political selection :D

<comment><USER3> >They are a disorganized bunch of immature young activists, who in a streak of megalomania abandoned their strict focus on IT related topics and it just fell apart.

But isn't that the nature of the culture that they arose from?

I think it's more that conventional politics are incompatible with the culture of the Internet where there are no well defined parties, everybody can think for themselves and everything is disorganized and that's not a bad thing.

<comment><USER4> "Culture of the internet"? Theirs is actually a problem old as dirt. We're talking about a broad, participatory democracy vs. elected officials and representatives. Look at Switzerland, who are one of the few countries actually getting by with a semblance of the latter. But mostly it's not exactly considered an efficient alternative to current systems, something that proponents would have to work on hard to disprove it. And Occupy hand signals don't really help here. The Pirate Party needed to prove that their approach is working internally before they make it a general policy, and it seems they have failed.

And apart from the organizational chaos, it also seems to be a lack of passion. There's no really grand unifying consensus for the party, beyond "copyright is bad", which ain't something that really gets your blood boiling (like basic human rights, saving the environment or making sure that God has his rightful place etc.). A lot of the so-called "scandals" about party members was mostly them showing that they're not willing to sacrifice too much for the sake of the party, if I remember correctly.

If they want to emulate some internet access, they probably need a Linus Torvalds. Right now, they appear closer to 4chan. Having a dedicated Brony time doesn't really help that picture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just before the national election. Shame. They had a lot of potential with things getting worse and worse in terms of copyright, patents and privacy breaches by authorities in Germany.</comment>