The mysterious processor behind China's first homegrown supercomputer - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/thinking-tech/the-mysterious-processor-behind-chinas-first-homegrown-supercomputer/5556/ <comment><USER2> _MIPS processors in general, haven't been tested in the context of the modern supercomputer_

O RLY? Someone ought to tell (what's left of) SGI about that.

<comment><USER3> Sgi started switching to x86 for their supercomputers quite a while ago

<comment><USER2> Yes that it true, however it is also true that they were making 2048-CPU MIPS IRIX supercomputers before that, so to claim that MIPS is untried in the massively-parallel space is untrue.

<comment><USER4> Of course, that whole 2048-CPU IRIX machine was probably about as fast as a modern high-end video card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 8 core per die MIPS based processor at 1Ghz.

Not much else to the article other than a "China doesn't need Intel/AMD theme".

<comment><USER6> This seems like a bad idea.

Let's assume it costs a few million to design this chip, well you can already buy a an i7 which has 4 cores runs at 3.06GHz costs about 250$ in bulk. That's 4,000 CPU's per million in development costs before they see a single CPU off the line. If they get something 20% better then they are looking at a few hundred thousand chips to break even.

PS: They suggest that it's going to be 30% slower than a 6 core chip which suggests it's on par with a current generation chip 4core CPU.

<comment><USER7> China wants to be independent as far as computing goes. That is all.

<comment><USER6> There are plenty of reasons to build your own chip's. For example, NSA was doing so, and probably still does. But, it only worth it if your making something dramatically different than an x86 CPU.

The problem is keeping up with Intel is a ridiculously expensive proposition. _analysis showed Intel's R &D expenditures were $22.1 billion between 2001 and 2005_ [http://www.emsnow.com/newsarchives/archivedetails.cfm?ID=136...](http://www.emsnow.com/newsarchives/archivedetails.cfm?ID=13632) Either staying a few generations behind and building more chips, or buying from the beast seems like the best option.

PS: Intel does manufacturing in china ([http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/06/intel-china- fab...](http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/06/intel-china-fab-to- use-65nm-process-produce-notebook-chips.ars)) so they already have access to slightly behind the time manufacturing technology.

<comment><USER8> Hmmm. Could this possibly be something to do with US supercomputer export controls? Don't know much about this but a quick google showed that the US has been tightening controls lately.

I wonder what people are using supercomputers for in the military these days anyway - UAV? Crypto? I'm guessing ballistics is pretty well solved. And you hear the occasional story about suits showing up and requesting that labs disable-in-hardware the execution of Shor's algorithm on their quantum-related tech...

<comment><USER9> Nuclear weapon R&D. That's how the 5 weapons states acknowledged by the NPT have been able to maintain the unofficial test moratorium - all the supercritical explosions are happening in simulation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Given China's proclivity for stealing tech and previous history of stolen processors I'll believe this is evidence of China's R&D capability when an independent 3rd party tears the chip down.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure if you didn't read the article or are unfamiliar with the MIPS platform, but it is widely licensed and still widely used in certain embedded segments.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture#Licensable_ar...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture#Licensable_architecture)

My first thought upon seeing the headline was "IP theft" too.

<comment><USER10> I'm familiar with MIPS, I'm was referring more to the specific implementation and fabrication technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since when is MIPS mysterious?

<comment><USER13> Hell, I even know a small bit of 64bit MIPS assembly...

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I know a bit of MIPS assembly as well. It was my understanding that MIPS was the standard assembly to teach. Though, this is just through the narrow lens of my life. At my school, when you learned assembly, the first one was generally MIPS.

<comment><USER13> We learned x86 first and then MIPS. We went in pretty deep with MIPS though, going so far as running our programs in a simulator which visually showed the states of the different pipeline stages as the instructions were executed. It was a pretty interesting course, actually. At the end, the lecturer gave us a competition where the person who could sort a list of numbers in the fewest cycles won. I implemented quicksort and I think it took something like 10K cycles to sort 100 numbers. I think the median in the class was 20K and the best was 6K. Fun :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's not mentioned in the article, but Loongson 3 adds instructions specifically to support Intel emulation. According to Wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson>):

 _Loongson 3 adds over 200 new instructions to speed up x86 instruction execution at a cost of 5% of the total die area. The new instructions help QEMU translate x86 instructions by lowering the overhead of executing x86/CISC-style instructions in the MIPS pipeline. With additional improvements in QEMU from ICT, Loongson-3 achieves an average of 70% the performance of executing native binaries when running x86 binaries from nine benchmarks._

</comment><comment><USER16> Trivia: rms uses a Loongson powered laptop.

</comment><comment><USER17> MIPS processors are a tad bit more exotic than CISC or RISC architecture, but hardly mysterious. Hell, the PS2's main CPU was a MIPS processor and plenty of people have tinkered with it for various things, including a super computer: [http://www.geek.com/articles/games/researchers-create-a- play...](http://www.geek.com/articles/games/researchers-create-a- playstation-2-based-supercomputer-20030527/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Why post a link to this nothing article on HN? There is nothing new here except for the misconceptions of the authors.</comment>


Mostly λazy… a Clojure podcast – Episode 4 (podcast) - <AUTHOR> http://mostlylazy.com/2012/02/03/episode-0-0-4-antoni-batchelli-and-hugo-duncan-at-clojure-conj-2011/

<comment><USER2> From the page for this episode:

"I caught up with Hugo Duncan and Antoni Batchelli (everyone calls him Toni during one of the lunch breaks at the Conj. These guys have been on a tear with Pallet, an open source Clojure project that Hugo started in early 2010."

Here's the list of topics for this episode...

* Clojure/West, happening March 16-17, 2012 — be there!

* Disclojure, a great stream of links to Clojure tutorials and news maintained by Toni

* Pallet, representing computing infrastructure with Clojure abstractions

* swank-clojure

* JPDA (Java Platform Debug Architecture), includes the Java Debug Interface

* Clojure Debug Toolkit

* Alternative Maven support for Clojure, written in Clojure: zi

* clojure-maven-plugin (by Mark Derricut a.k.a. talios)

* Leiningen</comment>


Sammy.js, CouchDB, and the new web architecture - <AUTHOR> http://www.quirkey.com/blog/2009/09/15/sammy-js-couchdb-and-the-new-web-architecture/ <comment><USER2> Yes, history keeps repeating. It's hilarious to watch these kids reinvent, well, everything, over and over.

So, here we have the return of the fat client, episode 20.

And as with all the other episodes the standard question remains: If you're going fat-client then why on earth stick to a platform as horrible as HTML/JS?

<comment><USER3> The reasons to stick with DHTML/JS as a "thick client" development platform are simple: decent, free development tools, the ability to interpose proxies and application middleware between the client and server transparently, and a very, very large install base for the client runtime.

That being said, I share much of your amusement at/disdain for the attitude of "OMG, look at this brand new thing I have made that is completely different from all those old things!"

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure about these reasons.

 _decent, free development tools_

Well, you can have these for any mature platform. Be it QT, Flex or even Java. I'm not sure what's more decent about the HTML toolchain. The often cited FireBug is, to me, merely an emergency bandaid that makes development at least _possible_ but still far from enjoyable.

 _the ability to interpose proxies and application middleware between the client and server transparently_

There's nothing stopping any fat-client to speak HTTP. You don't need to a browser for that.

 _and a very, very large install base for the client runtime._

I'd say installation base is a red herring when talking about cross-platform apps but I'll give you that "instant-on" is an argument. For that I'd point to Air, which can run hybrid in and outside the browser.

I'm not arguing that HTML doesn't have it's place, mind you. But the extent to which it is abused nowadays is absurd.

<comment><USER4> > and a very, very large install base for the client runtime.

You are underetimating this. For evrything else, (air, java, Qt, C#) I have to start a new app. My firefox is always on.

<comment><USER5> In most cases, we are just swapping some startup time (for java, qt, etc.) for download time in the heavy web 2.0 apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When all you have is a hammer ...

jQuery is not a good architecture for a full client application. jQuery is meant for flipping some dom attributes here and there. It does a poor job of modeling the UI state. Sinatra is also a poor architecture choice for the client since the client has persistent state.

We already have a well designed client architecture. It's called Cocoa and its implemented in the browser as Cappuccino.

<comment><USER7> Interesting point. I tend to agree with you. I find myself hesitant about putting my business logic essentially on the front-end. With the current model we can hide some of the "secret sauce" that makes our applications unique on the server end. With something like Cappuccino (or Sammy.js, etc), how do we keep our secret sauce secret?

<comment><USER8>
       > I find myself hesitant about putting
       > my business logic essentially on the front-end

Leave the business logic on the server where it belongs - but hide it behind a REST API, and leave the rendering to the browser.

I think that's the core argument, if you omit the "CouchDB as an app server" part (which is orthogonal).

<comment><USER9> This was exactly the approach I took with an app about 4 - 5 years ago. Back then XML not JSON was the data transport format, but I kept it lightweight. The UI was built in the browser using XSLT to generate HTML. Additional transforms tied to UI events allowed filtering, sorting, etc. all on the client. IE, for all its other flaws, actually supported this much better than any other browser at that time and we were developing in an IE-only environment.

Business logic was on the server in stored procedures, which were exposed in a simple web service api so they could be called directly by the browser script logic. This also made it very testable because the stored procedures could be invoked by testing scripts that did not depend on the presence of any middle tier or UI at all. It also would have been a simple matter to build other client front-ends, as long a platform could work with XML and HTTP it could in theory be a client.

The XSLT to render the UI from XML could get a bit verbose but despite that it turned out to be a very productive way to work.

The downsides at the time were that IE was slow to render when you injected the HTML output of the transforms into the body.innerHTML property; this became noticeable if the generated page was large, but on the plus side this was a constraint against developing overly-complex pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _With the power of CouchApp and _attachments, the javascript and HTML files needed to serve the application are served directly out of the database._

That statement kind of troubles me. It shows that you're really just offloading all of the work from a normal app server to the data storage layer. From a "Mom look what I can do!" perspective this is cool, but, again, you're not eliminating your app server. Couchdb allows this because it uses HTTP as it's communication protocol, but one could do the same with MySQL, via an HTTP communication frontend, which sounds a lot like what Rails, Django, etc effectively are with some optimizations to make other non-data-storage operations faster.

</comment><comment><USER11> Good, _except_ that you still have to deal with authentication, authorization, and other security aspects of a server-side component. Server-side code won't go away no matter how fat the client gets.

<comment><USER12> In this case it will just move into the database. You'll have to start writing procedures and rules in the database instead of in your web framework and only expose those instead having only trusted code interact with the DB.

<comment><USER13> _You'll have to start writing procedures and rules in the database instead of in your web framework_

This will not fool anyone. You can't fold the business logic into the database and then pretend that you've eliminated the business-logic layer on the server. It's still there. You've just driven it into hiding.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. I don't think there is an equivalence between server code and client code. There are some things you just can't trust the client to do, so there will always have to be server code to do it. Whether that code is in a web server, a framework, a database, it doesn't matter. Someone has to write it.

However, I could see some of the code, such as the code that actually builds the page the users sees, being pushed into the browser. But then, don't we already have that with XML and XSLT (or whatever?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Honest question: How would one go about implementing authentication/security into such a setup? Maybe it could work for 1-writer, many reader apps (blogs) but how do you handle user signups, accounts, and security with this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think CouchDB might have built-in authentication coming soon, but I'm not sure about that.

There's always the option of using HTTP authentication.

<comment><USER15> Is that really good enough, though? For example, suppose that I write a blogging platform, and I want to ensure that a user can only query their own blog entries. How would I do that if the query is coming from the client (which always has to be untrusted) directly to the database? What prevents someone from rewriting the js client side so that it queries blog posts from other users? Or to prevent it from just sucking back all the blog posts in the DB and essentially DOSing the whole server?

Doing per-user security directly in the DB with simple CRUD permissions per table would be enough of a headache, but most applications eventually require finer-grained security than that, and for performance reasons you also don't want a client to be able to execute just any arbitrary query.

It seems like this is pretty close to same trap a lot of people fall into of only enforcing data validation client-side, or only enforcing things like view permissions client-side (by not rendering links), which leaves all sorts of holes open.

<comment><USER16> Well, all queries are accessed through URLs. There are two types of queries: temp views and permanent views. You can use apache/nginx to redirect all query through URLs for temporary views. Permanent views are stored on the db. That way, your client can't execute arbitrary queries. Then, the client can only be limited to views/queries that the web dev set.

<http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Nginx_As_a_Reverse_Proxy>

Then as long as the client can keep its identification token secret from others, you can implement "user can only query their own blog entry"

I suggest you look into couchDB a bit further. CouchDB is a different beast altogether from relational databases. Therefore, the assumptions you make about what a database can and cannot do coming from a relational world doesn't always apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This might work for the simplest of sites like some have pointed out (e.g. a blog) but what I can't accept is having application logic on the frontend. Beyond authentication (let's say OAuth et all solve that issue down the road), one of the benefits of having serverside code is that when it comes down to it, you as a developer don't care if the user messes with the frontend (exposed) business logic (usually form validation of some type) because you're always checking it again / cleansing it on the serverside. That's the tip of the iceberg...ranking algorithms, limits on certain activities (rules in general).

Now, that serverside code can be javascript serverd on something akin to 10gen if javascript is their tool of choice, but exposing any of those to the user so that they may edit them without any secondary sanity check is unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER18> I like this idea quite a bit. No application server means less maintenance and less administrative overhead.

Of course, it also means that the newly-empowered database has to scale out just as easily as an application server. For starters, request authentication becomes the responsibility of the database, and that could mean heavy volume.

</comment><comment><USER19> learning JavaScript & prototype i wrote a Twitter clone around this idea. I put up a number of textfiles in different user directories, and turned apaches directory listings on, and voilà a very basic restful interface. I also added post somehow, maybe a php script.

The client-side script could read who to follow from the server and by itself performed the task of assembling the timeline which was the CPU and IO extensive task that twitter had problems scaling with. Not sure the extra bandwidth cost of performing this client side would be worth it, but there's almost no logic at all server side so there's not much scaling of processor power at least. Programming with prototype was fun, but then I found jQuery...

</comment><comment><USER20> How on earth are these guys going to prevent a user from reading all the credit cards from that couch-db via its json interface?

</comment><comment><USER21> Is anyone actually using this architecture?

</comment><comment><USER22> Stop the madness. Just stop it.</comment>


Is Hacker News Bullshit? - <AUTHOR> https://liamp.substack.com/p/my-gpt-3-blog-got-26-thousand-visitors <comment><USER2> @dang: The title of this article is "My GPT-3 Blog Got 26 Thousand Visitors in 2 Weeks", but the title of this post is...not that. Is that intentional?

<comment><USER3> They've been trying to manipulate HN with multiple accounts and voting rings—which hasn't worked—and baity titles, which unfortunately has. Note how they're doing the exact same thing with this one.

GPT-3 is a red herring; the issue was the generic, baity title on a popular theme. Those routinely get upvotes because people see words like 'procrastination' or 'overthinking' and instantly think of their own experiences and ideas and want to talk about them. Such threads are not about the article, they're about the title, which the author admits writing ("I would write the title and introduction, add a photo"). Title plus introduction is already more than most people read, so this case is not what they say it is—which is consistent with their other misrepresentations, including the false claim "only one person noticed it was written by GPT-3".

Edit: as YeGoblynQueenne and minimaxir point out, given the other misrepresentations I'm not sure why we should believe that the article body was exactly "written by GPT-3" either, especially because the author describes it this way: "as unedited as possible"—in other words, edited. That doesn't much matter, though, because the salient inputs for the HN thread were the parts they wrote themselves.

We usually downweight such submissions, but occasionally we let one through because it seems healthy and interesting to have such discussions in the mix—just not too many. If there was a failure here it was that the moderators didn't look at the article. Or maybe we did; on my computer the title, photo, and introduction cover the entire first screen. Maybe that seemed good enough to let the discussion run.

<comment><USER4> Given this new information about the author's practices I'm inclined to think that everything they say in the above article should be treated with suspicion, especially since they accept that a) they do not have ready access to GPT-3 and b) they edited the "GPT-3" article to some extent. For example I would not be surprised to learn that, unable to use GPT-3 for a significant amount of time, they genereated some of the text of the article and then created the rest by hand, or similar. Not because I don't believe that readers on the internet can mistake GPT-3 as something written by a human, but because the author's ethics sound just... dodgy.

<comment><USER5> > they edited the "GPT-3" article to some extent. For example I would not be > surprised to learn that, unable to use GPT-3 for a significant amount of > time, they genereated some of the text of the article and then created the > rest by hand, or similar.

You should assume _all_ GPT-3 related text (including app demos and screenshots) is cherry-picked unless you can see the text generated in real time for yourself.

<comment><USER4> Cherry picked, yes, but the author says they also edited the "GPT-3" article to some extent. The extent to which this was done is what I'm wondering about.

<comment><USER6> Given the algorithm; generate text, cherry pick, edit. We could make a random number generator pass the turing test. It is just a mater of processing power and time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I often find the value of HN is less in the links and more in the comments. I went to check the article mentioned [1] and many of the higher ranked comments are simply using the article as a jumping off point. The top comments starts out with "A little tangential, but..." which is pretty common to see on HN. The quality of the writing of an article is mostly irrelevant in that instance because the value being generated is from the topic itself evoking conversation and the topic was provided by the human prompt.

Also 2 of the 22 top level comments mentioned GPT-3 and several others are clearly just riffing off the headline. I think the percentage of people who actually read the article and realized something was off about it was higher than the author is implying.

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817)

<comment><USER8> > several others are clearly just riffing off the headline

I don't blame them, the language is not pleasant to read, the ideas superficial and a cursory glance is enough to give a general idea of the content.

That said, the article was still surprisingly coherent for being auto- generated. I wonder how much was edited to make it so. If no or minimal editing was applied then this is darn impressive, and we just might indeed start seeing more texts like this. Or miss them, as it were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I bet people were upvoting the title - "Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking" because they agree with it, and a lot of the discussion on that article had little to do with specific points in the actual content. You can see that on most articles here - including this one! Still interesting, especially if the title was also GPT generated (kinda doubt that though).

</comment><comment><USER10> > _" I must confess, I actually lied earlier when I told you only one person > noticed. Only one person reached out to me to ask if GPT-3 was writing the > articles. However, there were a few commenters on hacker news who also > guessed it. Funny enough, nobody took notice because the community downvoted > the comments."_

this is pretty hilarious. Although the genre has probably much to do with it, virtually all business/productivity/ lifestyle/self-help stuff has the same sort of generic tone and is full of crap

<comment><USER11> It's actually quite scary and shows a lot about human nature.

The comment in question was insightful and displayed intuition and judgement a level up beyond other people. Really every other comment was a load of crap, and the one comment of actual substance was buried. Many comments like this are voted down on HN. These are the comments that should in a perfect world be the top voted comment under any topic.

The fact that this is common shows that there is a huge difference between what people actually value and what they think they value.

People value opinions they agree with, not opinions that are new, different or insightful.

What's even more scary is the fact that the comment wasn't insulting. It was factual and to the point, yet the replier accused the original commenter of punching below the belt and not being civil. Accusations that originated completely from his imagination.

It shows that people in general don't just respectfully disagree with differing opinions. People attack all opinions that aren't inline with theirs.

And what's even more crazy is no one is aware of this. That responder thinks he's being civil and logical when in reality he's being stupid, illogical and biased.

I know the policies of HN are done for the purpose of preventing HN from becoming like 4chan or reddit. BUt where do I find a community where that guy who made the insightful GPT-3 comment will get voted up?

Somewhere buried in every HN topic is a comment that is ahead of it's time but you won't see it because it's been buried to oblivion by the mob.

<comment><USER12> > People value opinions they agree with, not opinions that are new, different > or insightful.

> It shows that people in general don't just respectfully disagree with > differing opinions. People attack all opinions that aren't inline with > theirs.

It's not just that. The achilles heel of HN's readership/voting behavior is its bias towards positivity and validation, and against criticism and sarcasm. I've got tons of fake internet points here, so I often do some experiments to test this out. As a general rule, with some exceptions: No matter what the topic is, if your comment is positive, shows approval or otherwise supportive of the topic, you'll tend to get upvotes. If you raise concerns, point out flaws, or express cynicism, you're going to get downvoted.

So when something comes up that's actually false or suspect, the correct skeptics get downvoted, and the incorrect people praising the article are promoted to the top. I wish I had access to the raw data to do a sentiment analysis on the comments and compare it to voting trends. I guarantee they are correlated!

Ironically, the first vote on this comment was down.

<comment><USER11> Yeah it is ironic. You didn't say or do anything out of line. Yet people are voting you down simply because they disagree. Imagine what happens in the real world let alone on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To be fair, it's pretty easy to get top-10 on HN. Heck, I "gamed" the system myself a few times. In other words, yeah, I think a lot of Hacker News is bullshit.

Clever "retro" hacks will always gain traction (building a widget out of old vacuum cleaners), anything socio-psychological will usually get traction (dating apps, blog posts about loneliness), anything on advanced math/physics/logic will usually get traction (probably because it makes people feel smart, even though it's not accessible to like 99%), anything tangential to philosophy will get traction (again, makes people feel smart).

I really do miss when HN was a bunch of scrappy entrepreneurs that tried to build stuff. With all that said, it's still the best community left on the internet. At least it _tries_ to abide by the principle of charity, and flame wars/trolling is highly frowned upon. Dang and everyone else does a very admirable job of keeping everyone in line.

<comment><USER14> >"retro" hacks, socio-psychological, advanced math/physics/logic, anything tangential to philosophy

These are all examples of bullshit?

<comment><USER13> No, but I think they're examples of things that automatically pass through the "HN filter" \-- a lot of times they aren't BS, but it's certainly fishy (and, incidentally, that's how the GPT-3 blog made it through).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> site-packages1 The most striking one:

Person1: "The posted has no substance and is pure regurgitation, it was probably written by GPT-3"

Person2: "Your comment punches below the belt and isn't welcome in a community like this. Maybe you're new here."

YIKES.

<comment><USER15> HN is very tone-sensitive; I pretty frequently see comments that are correct (sometimes even by people who are extremely expert in the topic) that get downvoted because they're stated in a blunt or impolite way.

<comment><USER16> There is nothing wrong with the tone of Person1. Every aspect of their statement is true and correct, not exaggerated, and gives due respect to both the OP and the reader of the comment.

<comment><USER15> I agree, it's simply blunt.

But if they had said something like, "I suspect this post is written by GPT-3. Consider X, Y, Z sentence -- these are typical constructions of GPT-3 because of A," it probably would not have been down-voted.

<comment><USER16> I guess. That an asymmetrical expectation, though. If we require a great effort to politely point out that a blog is devoid of substance, the spammers win. It's also a very important skill these days to understand when you are being manipulated by the tone police into supporting an extreme position, or at least not denouncing it. It's super easy to lure some HNer into espousing an essentially eugenicist position on race and IQ, which weirdly is a topic that always makes it to the front page on HN, but then if you go on to denounce their position as eugenicist, you'll be flagged. I think that inevitably leads to decline in the quality of a community because if you don't have shorthand for "this is autogenerated spam", "this is climate denial", "this is a conspiracy theory", or "this is racist" then you'll instead waste all of your time trying to politely refute the bullshit point by point.

<comment><USER17> >If we require a great effort to politely point out that a blog is devoid of substance, the spammers win.

But until spam becomes a problem on this site, it is premature to alter norms to protect against a non-issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I absolutely love that the one person who called it out was shutdown and told to "be civil and give reasons"

How else are you supposed to respond to nonsense other than saying "This is nonsense"?

<comment><USER3> More than one person called it out (e.g. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894000)). You guys are making the same mistake that the upvoters did, of not looking at the details.

<comment><USER5> This case is slightly weird. Without evidence, there's no real way to call it out without sounding hostile, which is something you've also discouraged on Hacker News.

It's also why adequate disclosure of AI-generated text is important and it's good OpenAI is advocating that.

<comment><USER3> I don't think [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894000) sounded hostile.

I agree that it's an edge case. I don't think moderators would have replied to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742) as a guidelines violation, but the user who did meant well and all this stuff is pattern-matching anyhow. For example "this sounds like GPT-3" can just as easily be an internet insult (e.g. "sounds like GPT-3 regurgitated a sociology textbook" \- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23687199](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23687199)), in the same way that "this sounds like a Markov chain" used to be. The fact that that comment added "or the human equivalent" kind of made it lean that way. Perhaps that's why it provoked an immune response from a community member while the more neutral "I think this was written by GPT-3" comment did not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I started reading the original GPT-3 generated blogpost [1] . The first 10 paragraphs or so appear really written by a human. Not a brilliant one, but a human nonetheless. After that, it became a bit incoherent, and it gave me a headache, so I stopped reading, but it's perfectly plausible that a human could have written that as well. In fact I often get headaches reading human- generated prose too.

This got me wondering. Just like many GAN-generated human faces are actually very similar to actual faces in the training set, is it possible that this blogpost is quite similar to something someone actually wrote and was part of the GPT-3 training set?

[1][https://adolos.substack.com/p/feeling-unproductive-maybe- you...](https://adolos.substack.com/p/feeling-unproductive-maybe-you-should)

</comment><comment><USER20> The discussion here is focusing on the highly editorialized made up title, but as a writer I am concerned at the attitude here:

 _The biggest benefit of GPT-3 is efficiency. All I need to write is a good title and intro. I could write five of them in an hour and publish them all in one day if I wanted to._

The author admits that fact checked stuff can't be written this way. So you can't really produce solid writing this way. Yet it is being proposed as the future of content creation.

As someone who does some content creation, I really dislike this idea that this is "efficient" and "can save money." Good writing is increasingly hard to find as is, in part because we don't pay writers what we used to pay them. Good writing involves research and understanding the topic. It's not just about putting pretty words together.

I don't think this is a good trend.

<comment><USER21> I disagree, in part. As a (wannabe-science-fiction) writer, I think GPT-3 has potential to be useful.

In my case, I have plenty of stories I want to write, lots of ideas that I want to play with. The thing I struggle with is writing the first draft of a story - it turns out that I find writing the first draft of a story to be really, really boring work (even with the help of NaNoWriMo). My fingers are typing out the words for chapter 3 but my brain is already grappling with the obvious plot holes in chapter 28.

This is where GPT-3 could really help: churning out words to fill the page with crap first draft copy. Feed the existing copy into the GPT-3 engine, alongside some prompts about the directions I want the story to go, themes I want it to tackle, etc. Receive back 2-3 drafts of the next thousand-15 hundred words. Then edit the heck out of those suggested words to bring the crap copy into line with my vision for the chapter.

I like this idea because most of my storytelling work happens in the first and second revisions, not the initial draft. I'd be happy to call the results _my work_ , not the work of some mindless ML bot. Proper writers will probably feel differently about the process.

<comment><USER20> That's a different use case than the one I'm criticizing. The use case I'm objecting to is "You, as a writer, are no longer relevant. We are replacing you with a bot to save money."

<comment><USER21> I can see your point. And my initial reaction to the whole ML-as-writer thing was hands-up horror. Like everything, I think this new tech is going to impact in both good, and bad, ways.

In my scenario, I expect there will be a lot of books written by ML algorithms, then published/sold to readers with inadequate (or no) additional author/editor input. My bet for the first fiction genre to take this approach is Romance Pulp - particularly Mills&Boon-style novels which have been written in line with a tight template for decades. And ML 'authors' in the literary fiction genre - it wouldn't surprise me if these already exist!

<comment><USER20> TBF, the part I quoted is in line with your remarks. Perhaps quoting a different part of the article would have worked better.

(Shrug)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hah, I called it but decided not to reply in the end, damn etiquette.

I suspected GPT-3, but the lingering throught that it was written by a real person made me back down.

Well, at least I feel a little validated. And also concerned about the absolutely nonsense that gets promoted or upvoted by people that either don't read the articles, or just don't pay attention.

<comment><USER23> I've noticed the same issue around calling out "this person does not exist" faces. 99% chance your right, but 1% chance you leave some innocent person wondering what's so wrong about their earlobe that you were certain it couldn't be real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I do research in Machine Learning and Robotics and I can say that HN is bullshit most of the time when it is related to these issues. Also the tech- bro vibes are really annoying. Made this account just to say this.

<comment><USER4> If you have some knowledge on the subject why not contribute to the discussions and improve their overall quality, rather than just complain about how low it is? I appreciate that not everyone has the time to do that of course.

Edit: I recognise what you are complaining about but that low quality is not entirely the fault of the people who leave those low quality comments. They are encouraged to leave poorly researched comments on subjects they don't understand very well exactly because the average quality of comments on the subject of machine learning and AI is so low. People can see that almost everyone else is making it up as they go along or just trying to show off knowledge they don't have, so they think, "that's the done thing, I should do the same". If more knowledgeable users commented more often, the overall quality of the discussions would improve and less experienced users would be encouraged to think more about the quality of their own comments. And of course, if more knowledgeable uses commented more often, the average user would also learn more about machine learning and AI than they are likely to learn from the articles that are typically posted on HN about those subjects (and the discussions of them). Everyone would benefit from that, not least knowledgeable users who would have an opportunity to discuss these subjects at a higher level than they can now.

Generally my opinion is: if you have specialised knowledge that people are interested in, spread it around. Only good things can come from that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The domain chosen by author, inspirational writing, is a great application for GPT-3: one can really write texts with zero meaning and still deliver for the audience.

About a year ago some international business trainer made a splash in Moscow, Russia, selling out the whole stadium of quite expensive tickets. His show was an utter bullshit, people made memes with his quotes like "Do right things, and don't do wrong things" or "Ask with question, but answer with answers" and so on. But people who bought tickets to the show were still satisfied, because people in need of business trainer's advice are obviously in a very vulnerable position and will take any shoulder pat as a sign of support.

Next time that life coach should put a GPT-3 on stage.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Its true value lies as a writing tool.

I think the author is not making a clear enough distinction between writing and generating "content". Content has become a hollow commodity in the new media landscape. It's purpose it to generate clicks, not inspire on a deeper level. GPT-3 seems much more geared towards the content side vs the expressive side that defines great written pieces.

Writing is so much more about the mental process of refining ones thoughts, rather than the act of scribbling lines onto a page. Writing is hard because it forces clarity in order to be effective. I don't see how using an AI tool to outsource the heavy lifting of reflection and rumination can be considered a true "writing" tool.

</comment><comment><USER27> Depends on what you expect. I've gotten priceless, career/life-changing help and advice from HN because I come here to expose myself to conversations from people with more or just different experience in something I'm interested in.

In addition, it's also a big deal to me how rational and objective commenters on this site are in comparison to most other websites these days. As a hardcore free-speech fan and proponent of objectivity, it's a nice a breath of fresh air.

<comment><USER28> I don't find discussions here more rational or objective, to be fair. In comparison with most tech-related forums or communities, HN seems to have a similar level of quality, with stricter moderation to try to cut flamewars short... which is a good thing. But rational? I find people here run the whole gamut of emotional, reasonable, irrational, rational, confrontational, open- minded, biased (it has been mentioned multiple times there are certain topics here on HN where going against the grain will get you downvoted to hell, no rational discussion possible). It's just that flamewars here are nipped in the bud, whereas in other forums they are either ignored or moderated arbitrarily.

<comment><USER27> I respect your difference in opinion. Note I never said HN is purely rational, just that I find it much more rational than almost every other online platorm I've seen lately. If you have recommendations for other discussion sites that have similar or more objective and impartial discussion than what we have here, I think a lot of us would be happy to try them.

<comment><USER28> To be honest, minus the flamewar moderation (which I like), I find HN about the same as other tech/hacker minded forums. Note that the moderation is no small issue, however!

I've found that communities tend to develop a sense of self-importance and overrate their own "good" qualities. I remember when I used to read Slashdot, more than a decade ago, many users would write things like "of course, all of us who read Slashdot are above average users and $PROBLEM does not affect us, but consider a typical Joe User". When I read facebook groups about niche topics I find interesting, inevitably a member will claim "don't you find this is the best facebook group about $TOPIC? We don't argue, we have nice reasonable conversations about $TOPIC, and the mods are top-notch!" (similar groups about the same topic will of course each claim to be the most reasonable, well-moderated, argument-free group). And the list goes on.

Unsurprisingly, many HN regulars tend to hold the same views about HN ("the most rational, less biased, most diverse ideas"), possibly unaware that most communities tend to develop the same feelings about themselves. Human nature, I guess :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have noticed that the downvoting seems to be getting more pronounced and often what I would consider to be uneducated opinions are gaining strength on HN. (IE people who don't agree with me.) :)

I'm a newbie, but the reason I came here was for more signal than noise and several times in the last months I've considered looking for new places because the comment quality is slipping.

</comment><comment><USER30> Take a look at the original discussion. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817)

None of it is discussing the content, which makes sense given that it was nonsense.

It just makes me further believe a very small minority read the article before jumping into discussion. Like that other GPT-3 post where a ton of the commenters didn't make it to the punchline in the article.

I guess that points to the value of a clickbait headline too.

I remember skimming the article and thinking it was nonsense, but downvoting the "this is GPT-3 nonsense, or the human equivalent," comment. I don't see a contradiction there.

Last, I totally disagree with the author's premise quite strongly. Maybe if you're trying to just pump out clickbait where the whole point is the headline, it'll make a difference in your ability to churn out content.

> However, with very minor editing, you could make these decent. Cut out > irrelevant stuff, write a conclusion, and boom - people don't stand a chance > of telling the difference.

You can give it a nice form, sure. People might believe it, too, but it'll still be crap.

> The difference is, this is one of the first times technology has the > potential to affect jobs in the creative sector.

This is really wrong. MS word, spell check, printers, photoshop, grammar check, the ipad, digital cameras, practically everything in movies and animation these days. Technology has been helping creatives be more efficient for ages. One person with photoshop can do work in a day that would have taken ages not long ago. You can hire Eddie Murphy once instead of a full cast. You can film the mandalorian with massive LED monitor backgrounds instead of a greenscreen, which itself replaced other work.

I guess if your goal is to churn out thought pieces with a nice headline, but zero research and little critical thought, it's going to change the game. All you need to do is say whatever you need to fit your narrative, like the fact that computer technology and automation is just finally starting to affect creative jobs. It'll flow perfectly and people won't be able to tell it's all made up. Maybe the author's right and it's the sad reality that this is what most of the content we read is and what most of the internet content writing jobs consist of.

</comment><comment><USER31> Yes, most of the internet is bullshit. It's up to each person to find and verify their own nuggets of gold.

</comment><comment><USER32> I hangout on hackernews and think I remember "reading" all 3 of GPT-3 articles. I used a screen reader, it makes it fast for me to "read" while I do other things. I generally enjoy the content hackernews links to and often read it before I evaluate the source, because really I'm just looking for something to listen to while I make my tea or something. I noted that they didn't seem to reference anything and decided I would try not to heed the advice they contained.

I did think it was a human. I just thought it was low quality selfhelp stuff that you see out there. The "...too productive" one was more convincing because it felt like more of a personal story that didn't need to have references.

</comment><comment><USER33> The natural follow up question is "Are Hacker News Comments Bullshit?". It seems easier to post GPT-3 comments than create a blog, so I wonder now if it exists, but what percentage it's at.

</comment><comment><USER34> You could launch an SEO content farm and see how well Google does vs GPT-3.

<comment><USER35> This is the relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/810/](https://xkcd.com/810/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Perhaps there is a better voting model for content/comments than the purely democratic method (one account, one vote). It would be interesting to see an expert weighted HN homepage/comment stream.

(punting on how "expertise" is measured or assigned)

<comment><USER35> Of course there are. Slashdot had better voting models 20+ years ago. You should only have a limited number of votes per day, you shouldn't be able to comment and vote on the same article, votes can be subject to "meta- moderation", you don't have simple up/down votes but instead you categorise (informative, unhelpful, spam, etc), and for quick viewing you can show only (eg) informative +2 comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is where we find out that _this_ article was also generated by GPT-3. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER38> I disagree with how frequently some topics or perspectives are pushed....i.e. Rust is better for this, now Rust can be used for that.....although that comes subjectively from a bias and appreciation I have towards C

</comment><comment><USER39> It's possible that half the articles in today's New York Times are already being written by GPT-3. 600 words that rattle on and add no information beyond what is stated in the article's title.

</comment><comment><USER40> Yes

</comment><comment><USER41> > However, there were a few commenters on hacker news who also guessed it. > Funny enough, nobody took notice because the community downvoted the > comments.

HN does seem to fetish certain orthodoxies.

</comment><comment><USER42> I am upvoting this because it shows how much we rely on good intentions. We expect the submitter to have verified the source, the upvoters to read and critically analyze the content and everyone else to have long attention spans to read the article. In reality, people consider title to be TLDR, commenters reply to the comment and not to the article, and people form opinions before reading.

I am actually proud that the community stood up for the ideals of trusting others (even if the trust was misplaced). I am also pleasantly surprised at how well GPT can mass produce such articles.

<comment><USER43> I think at this point if the poster didn't post a good article it would be voted down quite quickly so we mostly rely on peoples own selfishness a few who did become the scape goat and in the angst downvote a post, that saves us all from reading a terrible article.

<comment><USER44> I'm not sure what you mean. By "article" do you mean submission? Those can't be downvoted. You can "flag" a submission, but that's not for low quality submissions, but submissions that don't follow the guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Can't help but wonder if GPT-3 is trolling us...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The thread about the post that was written by GPT-3: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817)

<comment><USER46> Very funny to read through now, comments like 'good points'!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> As increasingly often, the flagged and downvoted comments were right.

</comment><comment><USER48> The answer to all clickbait titles that are questions is no.

</comment><comment><USER49> Not necessarily. But the way some of the mods act is.

<comment><USER50> The HN mods are responsible for the fact that HN continues after many years to operate as a genuinely interesting anonymous forum where insanity is kept at bay. That's no small thing - and most of us are very grateful.

<comment><USER51> What definition of "interesting" are you using?

<comment><USER50> I won't define the word "interesting" here, but I'll clarify that I mean it in the intellectual sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any Javascript Framework specific Selenium Version? - <AUTHOR>

I am developing a site which is completely written in Extjs Framework. Which means 0 lines of static HTML code. All the Ids, classes etc are assigned during run time. I am not sure how to use selenium in such situations. Can some one help me out? <comment><USER2> You have complete control over which classes are assigned to what nodes.

For example if you create an alert box with ExtJS you can always add a no-op classname to it. This way you can write your Selenium test to do class based look ups and then verify the contents of the child nodes within.

<comment><AUTHOR> This sounds the most promising one. But say I have an Extjs COmboBox and I want to select a particular item in it. It becomes too difficult to do it your way. I have to use the Selenium.Eval function and write some javascript in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If all the ids and classes are assigned during run-time, you're kinda SOL. Though Selenium does support other locator strategies like XPath, and even plain old JavaScript expressions to find an element. I would ask the the ExtJS folks how they would expect someone to test their app from a GUI perspective. You need some kind of reliable handle to find an element on the page so you can act on it.

</comment><comment><USER4> The only advice I can offer is to keep as much code gui-agnostic as possible. The usual advice, really, just applied to javascript. Then you can use something like <http://jsunity.com/> to test most of it. Gui testing is inevitably harder anyway, even if there are tools.

<comment><USER3> "Gui testing is inevitably harder anyway, even if there are tools"

I agree. The Selenium project could really use some volunteers to look at the major JS frameworks out there and help make them more testable with Selenium (or WebDriver, which Selenium is merging with in Se 2.0).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://extjs.com/blog/2008/11/03/testing-ext-js-ext-gwt- appl...](http://extjs.com/blog/2008/11/03/testing-ext-js-ext-gwt-applications- with-selenium/)

Might be a good start.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes that helped a good deal, but not solved the problem completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh boy. Someone found a hammer and quickly ran out of thumbs.

 _I am developing a site_

Everything that followed that utterance was a bad idea. At that point, you're not using javascript for the portability, light weight OR "scripting". You should have used any "applet" RIA technology out there and you would have been fine; java, flash, silverlight.

<comment><USER7> Neither Flash, Java or Silverlight will work with Selenium either. In fact, it's pretty hard to get any form of automated acceptance testing working with any of the RIA technologies.</comment></comment>


Microsoft President Urges Nuclear-Like Limits on Cyberweapons - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/05/16/528555400/microsofts-president-reflects-on-cyberattack-helping-pirates-and-the-nsa <comment><AUTHOR> Why not just sponsor def con and the other conventions? Oh right because it will actually fix things.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I put display ads on my site? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in the process of overhauling a free web tool that also displays user generated content. I never incorporated ads in the old site and am considering putting them in the new site on pages that publicly display user's content. I'll probably build a freemium model in the future (ad-free, more features, etc.)<p>Is this the right time for me to start incorporating ads? <comment><USER2> Maybe.

My website has articles and essays on a wide variety of unrelated topics. Ads associated with some topics got lots of clicks, others didnt however most of my pages get lots of organic links.

My advice is to remove ads from pages that dont yield clicks. The links are worth far more than ad revenue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good insight. I like the idea of removing ads from pages that don't get clicks.

My biggest concern is, my users are the ones generating the content. I want to be sensitive to that, but at the same time would like to generate some revenue I can put back into things like upgrading hosting from VPS to AWS, building new features, etc.

<comment><USER2> Link popularity in general, pagerank in particular is transitive. A link to a page with no ads will result in greater ad revenue from some other page.

That is, if I link to Alice and Alice links to Bob, my Alice links generates more traffic for Bob.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, makes total sense.

In my case, my pages are the equivalent of Bob's, they are at the end of the link referral line. Users create content on my site and link to it from their sites. If it were blog or article type content, I would think there's no issue putting ads on the content, but seeing how my site is a web tool/app, it seems like more of a gray area. There's risk I'll piss off my users. I'm trying to decide if it's even worth going down that road.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Useful Reddit resources? - <AUTHOR> I've been ignorant of reddit since it's inception,  but recently I've discovered that technologists do make good use of it.
Are there complimentary websites out there that might give more insight into tech or even just generally popular subreddits? Apart from searching for a specific subreddit by name, I can't seem to find any useful list of tech topics or subcategories etc.
Please post any useful complimentary websites you use to help explore reddit. Thanks. <comment><USER2> You might find the 'multireddit' functionality useful - it combines multiple user-defined subreddits in to a single 'front page' to browse. For example, I follow the 'it_resources' multireddit created by another user - [https://www.reddit.com/user/neztach/m/it_resources/](https://www.reddit.com/user/neztach/m/it_resources/) . It's a useful combination of a lot of IT related subreddits across multiple areas - from networking, to system administration, to security etc. Of course, the challenge is finding suitable multireddits in the first place - /r/multihub contains lists of them, you might find it useful to have a look on there and sort by 'top', or to run a search on that subreddit for a term and sort by top.

The other strategy I can recommend is looking at related subreddits. So if you stumble across a 'good' subreddit that's interesting to you, have a look in the sidebar and see what other subreddits are suggested by the moderators of that subreddit. I find that to be a great way to find high quality related subreddits either with a narrower focus or just on generally related topic. For example, the /r/homelab subreddit recommends /r/networking, /r/sysadmin, /r/datacenter etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your help. I've been accessing reddit via my iPad, and didn't realise there was a sidebar with related subreddit entries, as my iPad has been showing the mobile view, which omits the sidebar.</comment></comment>


Uroboros Programming With 11 Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> http://asiajin.com/blog/2009/09/22/uroboros-programming-with-11-programming-languages/

<comment><USER2> I was not all that impressed until I saw the size of the original source code, dang.

</comment><comment><USER3> What fascinated about this article is that there's a whole other world out there of geeks/programmers/hackers beyond our English speaking world doing their own things and sharing their own ideas.

<comment><USER4> The reddit crowd shares you fascination and expresses itself eloquently:

<http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ku-ma-me/20090916/p1#c1254244804>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For a Theory of Computation class I had as a part of the homework to write a program that writes itself _in one programming language_. It is amazing that such programs exists that can switch languages and can go through several methamorphoses

</comment><comment><USER6> Someone has _way_ too much time on their hands.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to have that much time on my hands too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That is pretty cool but really, could whoever wrote that not have spent however long that took (which I'm guessing is quite long) doing something a lot more worthwhile.

<comment><USER9> _doing something a lot more worthwhile._

This is narrow minded. The same thing could be said about most any of the great thinkers of history... specifically those in Mathematics since it's so abstract. Arguably programming like this is closer to Math than hacking industry software.

There are of course a handful of exceptions like Benjamin Franklin who tended to be pragmatic. And there is nothing wrong about only being productive in a way that is economically quantitative. But I think there should be room for both.

<comment><USER8> I think you are right and wish I could take back what I said now. :-)</comment></comment></comment>


An analog clock in your bash prompt on OS X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/paulsm/bashtime

<comment><USER2> That is a lot of if statements just to get some directly adjacent unicode characters, which can easily be generated with some simple math.

This solution may be a little terse (96 bytes; I wrote it for the 140bytes golfing challenge), but it should help explain how to get the current time's clock character: <https://gist.github.com/eligrey/985721#file-annotated-js>

</comment><comment><USER3> Instead of using a very long set of If statements, I think you could just use something like

        a=$((`date +%M`/15));b=$((128335 + `date +%l` +((a*(a**2-39*a+110))/6)));printf '%x' $b;

and print the resulting hex's character, no?

(I'd finish off the code myself, but I have a bus to catch)

Edit: Ah, I see Sephr came prepared. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure you could. It's a quick hack.

<comment><USER3> No criticism here; your quick hack let me do a quick hack and learn some bash in the process. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wondering what this looks like on GNU bash (version 4.2.25 i686-pc-linux-gnu)? Wonder no longer:

      $ ./bashtime.sh
      🕤

<comment><USER5> A font that supports Emoji is required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Honest question: Do you prefer this to a digital time display? Why?

Personally, when it comes to time, I "think" digital.

<comment><AUTHOR> No idea really. I made it quickly this morning, and I'm trying it out today. It does make it easier to see whether a bunch of commands were performed at roughly the same time than a digital display.

<comment><USER7> Your advantage unfortunately obscures other useful information.

My [zsh] prompt displays the exact time down to the second on its own line. I just scan up looking at the time to see if the hours match or minutes... But I still have the ability to know if one was 3 minutes 33 seconds or one was 27 minutes 10 seconds within that hour/half hour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there a particular font that works better than others for this? I've tried all my fixed width fonts and the clock is barely readable in any of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use Source Code Pro. Consolas used to be my favorite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is cutesy, but having a timestamp on your prompt is an easy-to-implement sometimes-lifesaver. Highly recommended, one way or another :)

<comment><USER10> Out of curiosity, could you describe a scenario where you'd consider time- stamping like that to be a lifesaver?</comment></comment>


A Concise and Precise Definition of P-Value (a vaccine discussion) - <AUTHOR> http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1030/1 <comment><USER2> I see students every semester struggle with the p-value. Most can use it in a formula, but almost none could explain fluently what it actually means. I'm not sure how to make it more clear.</comment>


Mini.css 2.0 – a lightweight CSS toolkit - <AUTHOR> https://chalarangelo.github.io/mini.css/ <comment><USER2> Is this from the original author on min.css ?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, different person entirely.</comment></comment>


Electoral map over population density - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/gPoFk.jpg

<comment><AUTHOR> Creator is <http://www.reddit.com/user/Felicia_Svilling>, unfortunately there is only an imgur link to this.</comment>


Translation From MS-Speak to English of the "Native HTML5″ announcement - <AUTHOR> http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/04/15/nativity-scene

<comment><USER2> It must be an interesting moment in a software developer's career when you're offered a job on the Internet Explorer team. On one hand, regardless of how small your contributions are, your work will be used by millions of people around the world. On the other hand web developers will treat you as guilty by association until the very end of your career.

<comment><USER3> I can't resist this one, can I please have a go? I know you didn't specifically ask for my opinion, but perhaps it gives some food for thought. Forgive me if this is more off-topic than you would like.

As someone who joined the IE dev team relatively recently, I must say I had much of the same ambivalence you express in your first sentence. To add to that, I was a Mac user and moved from the Bay Area -- not exactly the bastion of Microsoft love -- and still have friends who are skeptical of my move. For me, the decision boiled down to two things:

(1) Web browsers have intrigued me for about a decade, and this gave me a chance to help push the web platform ahead. I love how through a process of public discussion and consensus some of the largest technology companies come together to build these (more or less) mutually compatible and complex platforms (a.k.a web browsers). Notice how I skipped past much of internet history there? You might say that, well, there are other browsers out there that I could have contributed to, and I will then ask which one do you think needed the most help? ;)

(2) Where would my small contribution be able to have the most impact. As you rightly point out, IE remains the most used browser (on the desktop at least) and every line of code I write may some day be exercised by hundreds of millions. I cannot emphasize enough just how fulfilling this is to me. When I was graduating and interviewing, Facebook liked to say that their user to dev ratio was a million to one, and our team easily tops that.

How's it like to be an engineer on this product? Lots of fun and very challenging. Much (as my limited view sees it) boils down to adding new features and/or rewriting older subsystems for performance reasons. Simple enough, but when you factor in about 15 years of legacy code, much of whose functionality has to be maintained (or emulated even in the new subsystems), life becomes very interesting very fast. I _suspect_ Firefox and Chrome are running into some of these challenges with the Electrolysis project (FF) and adding in graphics hardware acceleration (Chrome), which is perhaps why they're taking longer than anticipated.

Do other web developers treat me guilty by association? I don't know :)

<comment><USER4> I don't see you as guilty necessarily, especially as a relatively new member of the team. Your point about the complex and nasty legacy stuff you have to deal with is good too.

From my perspective, the IE team's priorities are _weird_. That's all. Yes, the race for performance is super-important as we're pushing our browsers to do more and more but if IE can't _DO_ the same things other browsers do I don't really care how _fast_ it can not do them. ;)

EDIT: grammar.

<comment><USER5> To me it makes perfect sense. For many people, web browsers have very little to differentiate them. Chrome's single major differentiator is that it's fast. If you asked the average person what's different about Chrome— they probably wouldn't care so much about the robustness of the html5 or css3 support— they'd say that it's fast.

Microsoft can attack on that front very aggressively. So they're taking the one thing that most people know is different or special about Chrome, and saying, 'IE is faster. Faster canvas, faster svg.' Seems like a great strategy to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really don't understand why people are whining so much about this.

I think native is justified given that (1) they are (finally) JITing their JS and (2) their graphics renderer in using the new DirectWrite lib which is very close to what the WDDM graphics drivers talk. They're saying that they're running much closer to the hardware than they did in the past.

Why are people being so negative about it? Better browsers are better for the web. Period. Exclamation point.

<comment><USER7> 1 isn't exclusive to them, so doesn't add to their point of being "native." 2 comes with a ton of caveats, if I'm not mistaken. Other browsers also take advantage of graphics cards for certain kinds of rendering.

I have no evidence for this, but I think that IE is trying to ride on the positive association people have for "native apps" on mobile phones.

<comment><USER6> I don't see how exclusivity has anything at all to do with a technical point (I am considering "native" a technical point.)

But I'm tired of defending them.

I honestly just don't understand people's negativity. I'll say it again, better browsers make for a better web. You can laugh at their marketing pitch, but we should all be excited that they put a thoroughbred horse in the race.

<comment><USER7> When they claim they are the _only_ native browser, then the feature set that defines native better be exclusive to them.

It's not negativity to call bullshit on a claim. There are plenty of things Microsoft could be touting about their browser without making up marketing speak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Although I agree with the author's frustration, the link's just another rant on the press release.

Anyone care to explain to me what their "Native HTML5" really means?

<comment><USER9> Taking a random stab: the fact that _native apps_ —i.e. non-webapps—that embed the MSHTML web view control to render some of themselves, will now be capable of using HTML5 features in the pages they display within those controls, might get called "native support": as in "installing IE10 _provides_ native HTML5 support to Windows."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> MS already removed WGA validation for IE upgrades when they released a new installer for IE7 in 2007.

</comment><comment><USER11> what the fuck DOES "native html5" mean, anyway?

<comment><USER12> they have digitally native coding monkeys now</comment></comment>


LDC (LLVM D Compiler) 1.0.0 has been released - <AUTHOR> http://firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> well done!

I really hope that now you guys will add some example how to build for android/ios

I feel that dlang is a nice language, that deserve more, and does not have all the noise from rust/go/javascript

to bad I will say</comment>


I'm the only developer in a start up team and want to leave - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,<p>I'm the only developer in the web team of a startup and I'm no longer interested in the product we're building. The thing is since I'm the only developer, nobody knows the stuff I'm working on and it'd be horrible for the business if I leave. What should I do? <comment><USER2> 1\. Clean up the code as much as you can and document everything if you haven't already.

2\. Explain your feelings and situation to the team, help them understand. Tell them you did the above and help them try to hire someone new.

3\. Irregardless, leave if you are unhappy. No point in suffering longer if you're not happy. While doing the above 2, look for a replacement job.

</comment><comment><USER3> Leave. You are not indispensible even if it feels like you are.

</comment><comment><USER4> Tell the team, help them find your replacement.</comment>


Marissa Mayer's Boring Plans for Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/yahoos-dynamic-ceo-boring-plan

<comment><USER2> Maybe boring is the wrong word. "Indistinct" might be better. I don't know the identity of yahoo. I've got a feel for many trademarks and companies, but yahoo doesn't give off much other than "they're still in business?" with emphasis on the word "still".

Lack of identity does not mean dead man walking. Say "Johns Manville" and 99.9% of you will go "who?" "what do they do?" but commodity license plate stamping shoveling can make a lot of money, even if it isn't interesting or cool.

Yahoo will either get an identify or end up the Johns Manville of the internet.

<comment><USER3> Johns Manville has a problem with name recognition, not branding. They can define what they do, the public just haven't heard of them.

Yahoo is the opposite. They have no problem with people knowing who they are, but beyond "Internet stuff," can't define what they do. Actually trying to find out what they do eventually takes you to [https://everything.yahoo.com/](https://everything.yahoo.com/) where you see most of their sites are clickbait next to a search box.

It's probably not the brand identity they want to advertise.</comment></comment>


Visualization: Are expensive phones worth it? - <AUTHOR> https://www.picked.cc/news/smartphone-data-science <comment><USER2> Candidly, blue texts are worth whatever thousands of dollars you have to pay each decade, for they singlehandedly raise the user's social class. So are expensive phones worth it? Plainly, yes.

(Note - I am not endorsing this style of classism.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here, you're right, I should do a followup with social data for specific brands !

Phones bring social status, just like cars. It's no coincidence that Huawei partners with Porsche for special editions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Screen quality is nowhere on the list and is a major factor. As is OS, that has a major impact on the user experience and price and should be factored in.</comment>


The Zombie Preacher of Somerset (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/69/the_zombie_preacher_of_somerset/ <comment><USER2> The thing about this is that a "philosophical zombie" actually is expected to be absolutely indistinguishable from the outside from an ordinary person[1]. This person's stated self-reflection violates that and so this person couldn't be philosophical zombie - or at least couldn't be deduced to be p-zombie because of this behavior.

Given that the concept is basically utterly dull - there literally "nothing to see here" \- I understand the impulse to liven it up by conflating a zombie- like-person or person-who-says-they're-a-zombie with a p-zombie. But it's more reasonable to discard the idea of immeasurable, inherent, atomic consciousness/qualia/satience as something useful to consider and look at measurable, meaningful versions of these labels.

And by the end of the article the author admits his example is an "imperfect p-zombie" but I think that entirely misses the point of p-zombies, which absolute hypothetical constructs or they are something else entirely.

"A philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, a philosophical zombie could be poked with a sharp object, and not feel any pain sensation, but yet, behave exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "ouch" and recoil from the stimulus, or say that it is in intense pain)" [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie)

<comment><USER3> > or at least couldn't be deduced to be p-zombie because of this behavior.

But that's rather the point of the p-zombie concept: Anything you can do, they can do just as well, to all outwards appearances, it's just that they don't have the true deep awareness of doing that you do... You _do_ have that, right? You sure? _Really_ sure?

So there's no objective test which can distinguish between you and a p-zombie, but there's still a difference. Poking into the nature of that difference is either blasphemy or contrary to the spirit of the thing, your choice.

<comment><USER4> > So there's no objective test which can distinguish between you and a > p-zombie

Oh there is for _me_ , just not for anyone else. I know I'm conscious, but I don't necessarily expect anyone else to believe it.

<comment><USER3> > I know I'm conscious

Ah, but do you really?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Possibly among other things, it sounds like he was suffering from extreme depersonalization. It's a dissociative state that can present after a traumatic event, then persist.</comment>


Drift's anonymous user tracking - <AUTHOR> https://www.drift.com/intel/ <comment><AUTHOR> Found it creepy that it correctly identified my business account after I had cleared my cookies.

This is becoming a standard feature in sales and customer support software.</comment>


He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense - <AUTHOR> http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ <comment><USER2> A major omission of his energy analysis is the concept of Energy-returned on Energy-invested or EROEI. EROEI simply means how much energy it takes to produce a give unit of energy. Taking this into account provides a much more meaningful analysis than just looking at simple reserve and consumption numbers.

For example, it doesn't matter how many billions of barrels I might have in a field if each barrel takes 2 barrels to extract(except as perhaps a chemical feedstock).

It's absolutely meaningless to take theoretical oil reserves and simply dividing them by currently yearly consumption and concluding that we have hundreds of years to go.

The easy oil has been extracted and all that is left is the hard stuff. Even Saudi Arabia is drilling wells that sit under a mile of water.

McCarthy mentions extracting uranium from seawater for christsake! That is really crazy.

Also, it doesn't matter if all of our energy problems could be solved by building a million nuclear plants if the building of them takes so much capital no one can afford it. Again EROEI for nuclear is negative until the plants actually start producing electric.

And it doesn't matter if we have tons of electric if all of our transportation infrastructure requires oil products. Converting all of that infrastructure is going to take lots of capital and energy.

Check out theoildrum.com for lots of good energy articles.

<comment><USER3> why does it take so much capital to build a nuke plant? Sounds like a regulatory problem.

<comment><USER4> I really hope this was sarcasm.

Plutonium is not cheap. Uranium is not cheap. Redundant safety systems are not cheap. Pressure proof concrete vessels are not cheap. Industrial grade power turbines, also not cheap. The list goes on and on.

<comment><USER5> A lot of that expense is redundant safety systems, inspections, etc. Which cost is born because of regulation.

Whether regulations like that are a problem or a solution is a source of endless debate depending on your political position. But given recent events in Japan, it is clear that we are headed for more regulation, not less.

<comment> mkr-hn I would hope they'd do most of that stuff in the absence of regulation.

<comment><USER5> A lot of people would hope that. However all available evidence suggests that people will and do cut corners until they get burned. And companies that refuse to do so will find themselves becoming less profitable than their less scrupulous competitors.

The result is public pressure for regulation.

Unfortunately economic theory and practice show that once an industry has come under regulation it becomes their priority to get control of that regulation. This process is called "regulatory capture" and inevitably succeeds. Once it has succeeded, the protections erode and the regulatory scheme is used to create barriers to entry for competitors. See the recent financial crisis for an example of this.

Depending on your politics you are likely to think that one of these failure modes is a bigger deal than the other.

<comment> mkr-hn The choice is often between a shaky regulatory structure and a melee between profit and common good. I usually prefer to take a chance on regulation unless someone comes up with a better option.

Sometimes the third option of going to an industry and asking them to do something does work, but not always. I'd always try it first, but it's not always going to work, and the consequences of inaction can be pretty bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I refuse to do arithmetic in units such as the acre-foot.

</comment><comment><USER7> >In particular, we argue that the whole world can reach and maintain American standards of living with a population of even 15 billion.

That's one doubling away from the current population. There's no particular reason to believe population will never exceed 15 billion.

<comment><USER8> Actually, the claim that it _will_ is the one not currently supported by evidence. The UN currently estimates the peak of world population will be 9.22 billion in 2075, followed by a general decline, assuming current trends [1]. Now, I'd like to think we continue to extend lifespan, but birth rates are dropping. Against all (first-order) biology, when humans become wealthier, they have fewer children, and this result is very robust now, not just the aberration of one particular culture.

[1]: [http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/Wor...](http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf) , second paragraph of the executive summary. Oh, and I'm just quoting the 9.22; I think that's an absurd number of significant digits but one should quote sources as directly as possible.

<comment><USER7> to last billions of years. You yourself think that projecting the tens of millions place 64 years in the future is an absurd number of significant digits. How many significant digits do you think is appropriate in a time frame 100M years longer? Even the UN itself only purports to project population trends until 2300, which is far short of a billion years, as hubristic as it is.

Also, the UN projections have some unjustified assumptions. From page 7, under section C:

>Over the long run, total fertility is projected to settle at 1.85 children per woman in each country—in between the current rate for Northern America (which is just below replacement level) and the rate for Europe (which is currently well below). This figure is somewhat arbitrary

In the longer run they expect the growth rate of all countries to stabilize at 0:

>The eventually similar growth between more developed and less developed regions is produced by similar long-range assumptions, especially the assumptions that fertility will fall in all countries below replacement (in the medium scenario) and rebound to replacement after a period largely similar across countries of a century or so. Starting their fertility declines later, less developed regions will reach low fertility levels after more developed regions but also stay at these levels until a later date.

Of course population stabilizes at a rate not too much higher than the present rate if you assume fertility rates converge around the replacement level. Garbage in, garbage out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> this should be read by every Malthusian environmentalist.

<comment><USER5> His underlying assumption is that if we raise everyone's standard of living, population will stabilize permanently. It is true that raising people's standard of living drops population growth - typically to below the replacement level. But anyone who thinks that this effect will last for billions, millions, or even thousands of years has failed to understand evolution.

<comment><USER9> > But anyone who thinks that this effect will last for billions, millions, or > even thousands of years has failed to understand evolution.

Oh really? Evolution selects for survival, period. (Actually, survival selects for certain kinds of evolution.) Where is it written that survival implies over-population.

<comment><USER5> _Evolution selects for survival, period._

No. Evolution selects for genes that manage to leave lots of descendants. This is a local optimization that is not the same as long-term survival. In fact there are lots of examples of species going down evolutionary dead ends where eventually they get wiped out.

Thanks to the miracle of exponential growth, a successful trait that is possessed by a small fraction of the population will spread like a cancer until it dominates the population.

In the case of humans, any trait that leads to lots of kids despite economic pressures to have few of them is going to be evolutionarily successful. And it will be successful in a surprisingly short time. To take a simple model, suppose that we have a recessive allele that is 1% of the gene pool. (So 1.99% of the population carries the recessive, but only 0.01% of the population expresses it.) Suppose that people without it just replace themselves, while people with it expressed have twice as many kids. At first the trait will be utterly invisible. But in under 100 generations it will completely dominate the population. That is only a few thousand years.

<comment><USER9> > Evolution selects for genes that manage to leave lots of descendants.

Nope.

Survival selects for genes that have enough descendants. One way to have "enough" is "lots", but it doesn't necessarily work and isn't necessary.

> In the case of humans, any trait that leads to lots of kids despite economic > pressures to have few of them is going to be evolutionarily successful.

Nope - lots of kids is neither necessary nor sufficient. The key metric is "do your kids have kids, rinse and repeat." Too many kids can break that, as can too few.

<comment><USER5> All else being equal, in an environment like our own where survival is easy, generally the more kids the merrier.

Modern economics and birth control have created pressures against reproducing that we have never faced in our evolutionary history. Our species has not yet evolved a response to it. Once we have evolved a response to it, I would predict exponential growth rate until we exhaust available resources.

This may not happen in 10 generations or 20. But in 1000 generations, our species will have adapted and reached a crisis.

<comment><USER10> The only way I see of "evolving a response to it" is selecting for baby-crazed women who are basically addicted to the hormonal changes of childbirth and rearing. Men would already be happy to impregnate women as much as possible, if they didn't have to stick around or pay child support.

It's hard not to think of Idiocracy.

<comment><USER5> And you think that selection process is not going on?

Anyways there are other possible responses. There is a strong correlation between being religious and having lots of kids. Therefore genes that incline one towards being religious are positively correlated with kids.

Another is a trait of failing to worry about future consequences. (Now you'll really be thinking about Idiocracy.)

Complex traits like these are part nurture and part nature. But to the extent that they are nature, there is evolutionary pressure for them to spread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Arithmetic is required to be logical? I doubt it.

<comment><USER12> Be logical? No. Make sense? Yes.

You can make all the navel-gazing syllogism you want with pure logic, but if you want to make conclusions about the real world then in many cases (like the domain under discussion) you're going to need to involve math.

<comment><USER11> So what you're saying is you could listen to someone and agree that what they're saying is logical but it doesn't make sense?

I'm not being a jerk, but could you please give me an example of something logical that doesn't make sense?

<comment><USER13> All noses are frozzle.

Some wiggles are noses.

Therefore, some wiggles are frozzle.

<comment><USER11> I'm not advocating fuzzy logic, just like the people who believe math is needed to make sense aren't advocating bad statistics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a bunch of standard issue cornucopian gee-whizery. I can't help but notice that nowhere in this article does he cite so much as one, single, solitary number or statistic to back up any of his claims.

Here is essentially how this entire page read, for me:

"Q: Will we ever run out of resources?" "A: No, of course not, that's silly!"

My personal favorite: If global warming is a problem, why, then, we can just reverse it!

Of course! Why didn't we think of that before?!?

<comment><USER14> > Here is essentially how this entire page read, for me: "Q: Will we ever run > out of resources?" "A: No, of course not, that's silly!"

Well, then you need to read better. For instance, he estimates that nuclear and solar energy will last us 5 billion years. If he's wrong by a factor of 1000 that's still 5 million years which is not too bad.

And there's a whole page of references:

<http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/references.html>

PS: I expect that some people will assume I'm in the same "camp" of the author, but I'm just pointing out that the criticism above is unfair.

<comment><USER15> The estimates of 5 billion (or 5 million) years ignores the potential side effects of widespread distribution of the current generation of fissionable fuels and the level of political will required to develop an infrastructure for coping with these potentials.

In other words, if one is inclined to ignore issues of this magnitude, why bother mentioning nuclear at all when no less questionable assumptions about relevant factors would allow a similar projection based on solar energy alone?

<comment><USER8> Well, we also have 5 million/billion years to _deal_ with those problems. Our descendents, if they are still using nuclear power, will be no dumber and less capable than we are of solving problems, and probably a great deal more so. If nothing else, "blast it into space" is likely to be feasible within our lifetimes. (And not just "leave it in orbit", but drop it somewhere where it won't be a problem anymore. Space is full of such places; space arguably is nothing _but_ such places. Space is _big_.)

Besides, what massive problems are you worried about? On that timescale, radioactive waste just dissipates. It doesn't build up over millions of years. If it could build up over that time scale, it wouldn't be "radioactive" in the first place.

<comment><USER15> > _"Our descendents"_

One of the potential issues which accompanies nuclear power is the "what descendents?" issue. Sterility and infertility and death are known side effects of exposure to common fissionable materials and their byproducts. One need not even consider the potential consequences of deliberate human activities designed to harm people or fulfill religious prophesy.

In other words, it's not so much the last 4.99999 billion years that's a concern as the 1000 years which must precede them.

<comment><USER16> Er, that's why you _don't_ go around exposing people to high-level radioactive waste. You stick it in a cooling pool to let the really nasty isotopes decay, then store it with radiation shielding. If you want to get really fancy, and have enough excess neutrons, you can even get rid of worst of the waste by turning it into something else.

On the list of existential threats, mass radiation poisoning really doesn't rate very high in likelihood.

<comment><USER15> PU-239 has a half life of 24k years. Or to put it in perspective, if the Neanderthals had been using it, we would be running the risk of stumbling over cooling pools where significant quantities of nasty isotopes were still decaying - assuming anyone could build a cooling pool with a 24,000 year service life.

The half lives of U235 and U233 are significantly longer (approx. an order of magnitude).

<comment><USER16> Wait, what? Pu-239, U-235, and U-233 are not waste. They are _fuel._ Those are all fissile isotopes that we burn in conventional nuclear reactors.

The isotopes you get rid of in cooling pools are the highly radioactive ones with short half-lives.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 'Old Dogs' Who Build Apple Products - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-old-dogs-who-build-apple-products <comment><AUTHOR> Apple depends on Asian factories to build its devices. But it also relies on people like Mike Janicek, part of a vanishing breed of American experts in metalworking, machine tooling and other aspects of manufacturing</comment>


The Pirate Bay Turns 15 Years Old - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-turns-15-years-old-180810/ <comment><USER2> How the non-pirate-bay world is supposed to work? I just bought two books from Google, because I got hooked on the first book of three from Pirate Bay. I would never have paid 10€ just for testing if it was OK. Foreign language, not available in local libraries in Helsinki.</comment>


Ask HN: Real estate market and selling your house - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
asking for help/feedback/advices from HN community.
I am trying to sell my house in South Italy and I wanted to try an alternative way than just going through a real estate agency.
Every real estate site that I've found online did not have great web presentations of each house and I've thought that it could be nice to create a good landing page for my house. I set up an website describing about the house, the neighbor and what it offers. There are photos and maybe a video in the near future.
Is this a good way to market your own house?
How could I get good visibility for my house?
Google Adwords? Facebook ads?
It is the first time that I needed to sell my house and I am just experimenting how to market it.
Any advices? Feedback is really appreciate it! :)
Here, you can find the site that I am creating (in multiple languages): http://thevilla.estatedock.com/ <comment><USER2> Not sure in italy but your going to probably pay a buyers agent some %. But, I could see spending some money on an ad directly in google with: {your city} homes for sale, etc. assmuing you have a good way to price your home, you have a good sales contract that protects you, have all the buyer disclosures you need, etc.

Adwords Costs: probably about $80-$120 a lead.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is common to pay an agent in Italy. My brother is contacting them but I wanted to see if I could some good leads online.

About the price, it is more or less what an agency told us sometime ago. I guess that I could try some A/B testing on the price.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not really sure if I had to put ASK HN or SHOW HN :P

<comment><USER3> Agreed, this sounds like a great opportunity to capture people that want to sell privately.</comment></comment>


How Machine Learning Is Eating the Software World - <AUTHOR> http://www.datanami.com/2015/05/18/how-machine-learning-is-eating-the-software-world/ <comment><USER2> How is anyone supposed to take seriously an article that in the very first sentence gets it so wrong. Marc Andreessen did NOT create the world wide web – that accolade belongs to Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

</comment><comment><USER3> First line, "Marc Andreesen, who created World wide Web... ". This aside article seems to be pretty shallow.</comment>