Hubble returns. Nasa: 8 new images since servicing mission in May 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/hubble_gallery/

<comment><USER2> Stunning pictures! [http://internal.hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2...](http://internal.hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/25/image/a/)

I found a better page for viewing the images, not quite as painful as the Wired method (Next... Next...).

</comment><comment><USER3> Pictures like these bother me because I don't know which have been manipulated (brightness, contrast, color, etc), for public consumption or to highlight certain features for study. Anybody know if there are unaltered images from Hubble? I'm talking about the true visible light spectrum ones (if there are any).

<comment><USER4> There are no images that mimic the color response of the human eye, though you could approximate such an image by combining many images in filters covering the visible colors.

But they would still not be "unaltered". Astronomical objects have an extremely large dynamic range in terms of brightness. If you've ever looked at a galaxy through a telescope, you'll see what I mean. You just see a blob that's the bright central bulge. The brightness distribution in a galaxy falls off _exponentially_ with radius. If you amplify the signal to see the faint outer parts, the central part would hurt your eyes (or, practically speaking, saturate).

We made a movie of a simulated galaxy merger for a competition last year: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqLEbOFT2A> In this rendering, the colors are approximately realistic, but the brightness is not. For my own education, I made an alternative rendering with just a fixed linear stretch that should more realistically (barring monitor gamma) mimic what the eye would see. In that movie (I've been meaning to upload it), you basically only see the centers of the two galaxies, nothing else.

So the bottom line is, to see any detail you _must_ "manipulate" these images. It's reminiscent of High-Dynamic Range photography [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging>], where you compress the range of brightnesses to be able to convey a scene in one image.

<comment><USER5> "For my own education, I made an alternative rendering"

Please upload it. A side-by-side comparison does have an educational value on itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Images like these always bring up that Brother Cavil's (from BSG - <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407362/quotes>) line: "I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! (...) And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me!"

I don't know about you, but it's deeply moving for me.

</comment><comment><USER6> the pictures with the hundreds of galaxies shown is the real kicker, you talk about sizing one's self up instantly.

amazing, i'm glad we have programs like this. I can say being in my 20's i'm actually pretty sad too have missed the excitement of the apollo program's in the 60's and 70's. i can only hope i get to witness similar events in my lifetime.

<comment><USER7> I guess we will put live on Mars within our lifetime. Not necessarily human live. Perhaps microbes or advanced robots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Few things make me feel palpable joy like this.</comment>


Our Newest Developer Is Ten Years Old - <AUTHOR> http://tech.osper.io/post/95466827667/our-newest-developer-is-ten-years-old <comment><USER2> I'm stuck here trying to figure out if this is a satire article promoting that silicon valley show.

<comment><USER3> I used to work for the Squirrel who Max mentions. This seems like a 100% plausible Squirrel move.

Whether Squirrel is a satire on Silicon Valley is, i believe, an open question.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice to hear from you @twic. I can assure you I am not a satire (at least consciously) [smile].

<comment><USER3> Well of course you would say that, wouldn't you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> our newest developer is 45 years old.

i'm not sure which one is more rare these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> I imagine both are. At TIM Group I regularly hired grey beards and they made a huge contribution - but it was definitely bucking a trend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Child Labor: It's Not Just For the Garment Industry Anymore!™

<comment><USER6> It's a shame children can't work more often. I think people are smart enough to tell the difference between abuse and an awesome opportunity for experience.

<comment><USER7> So, this is a bit off topic on a super click-bait-y story, but I think the notion of child labor laws is that we specifically include child labor as statutory abuse, in the same way the basic speed limit law ("don't drive too fast to be safe") is augmented by the more specific and easily enforceable speed limit signs. It'd be great if we had the throughput to actually make wise decisions about such a broad range of potential disputes -- that way, we wouldn't discourage non-traditional calls that might suck up a lot of time -- but I think this is a fair compromise.

<comment><USER8> And just like nobody actually thinks they are driving to fast to be safe, nobody would think that the jobs they provide would be abusive. Even long hours in a sweatshop would be randized as providing opportunities in a free market.

<comment><USER6> No. You're turning a fallacy into a bumper sticker. First of all, speed limits are way below the capabilities of how safely cars can move today. Hence, the original federal law that said limits should represent the top 80th percentile of drivers. (That's obviously not used anymore.) Slow can mean dangerous, don't depend on obvious quips for all your thinking.

Second, "sweatshops" in the derogatory sense only exist in socialist countries where families are starving to death trying to support the government. If kids didn't work, they wouldn't have food. You know very well they and their parents would prefer that school be an option.

Third, the work that these companies provide are NOT inherently wrong. Making clothes? Sounds like a good skill to me. Don't base your "opinions" on some dark imagery you've developed in your head.

<comment><USER9> _speed limits are way below the capabilities of how safely cars can move today_

Speed limits are for people, not cars.

<comment><USER6> I can't tell if you're joking or not. Please say yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a bit of a clickbait headline, bit of backstory. Osper is a product which allows kids to use a debt card, funds are controlled via parents and kids can see the balance via a smartphone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair cop on the headline, I was mostly just excited to share the story of Max who I think is incredible. He really did contribute to our code and is better than at least half the developers I interview, so we plan to have him back regularly to continue coding with us.

<comment><USER11> Shouldn't he rather be playing with his friends doing normal stuff 10 years old do.

He's gonna be able to do this kind of work for decades starting in his twenties. What he won't be able to do his reclaim his lost childhood years.

<comment><USER12> Shouldn't he do whatever he likes?

<comment><USER11> You don't have kids do you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yay!

Actually this is only legal if the child is voluntarily contributing. Which means, of course, than instead of child labor you should let the kids contribute to open source projects and run their own business.

If the kid is running their own business then I don't think it's considered child labor. Although IANAL. So, you see, lemonade stands may still be legal in this country :-P

<comment><USER14> A number of kids' lemonade stands have wound up closed by police/health inspectors in the US for lack of permitting. Heh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, uh, child labor laws?

<comment> atom-morgan As a child, I used to voluntarily go around my neighborhood asking people if I could mow their lawn during the summer. In the fall, I'd offer to rake their leaves. Should I have been stopped?

<comment><USER14> "Should" is a value judgement. Legally, if it's not an agricultural job, age 14 is the lower bound.

<comment> atom-morgan Which makes child labor issues almost entirely subjective and driven by emotion.

<comment><USER14> Kids losing limbs/lives in sweatshops certainly gives rise to emotions, yes.

<comment> atom-morgan I thought we were talking about a 10 year old developer?

<comment><USER14> We are, as well as the fairly strict rules in place on employing said 10 year old because of extensive historical abuses of child labor.

I'm sure there are plenty of situations where children can conceivably work in a positive, safe manner. This looks to be one of them. It is generally illegal, though, because leaving it as a judgement call between employer and child opens a _lot_ of holes in the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We hired a 17 year old intern and she was smarter than me. I felt bad. :(</comment>


Ask HN: Update from Midphase hosting status thread - <AUTHOR>

Earlier this week I shared some hosting issues I'm facing.  42 comments followed, all of which were helpful, detailed, encouraging and (most importantly) useful.
Here's the thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326012
I wanted to share a quick update.
Based on advice here I took the following steps:
1.  Posted to linode.com and Slicehost.com forums as well as the Drupal paid-services forum, soliciting paid, contract work to migrate to better hosting and optimize my server situation.
2. I received 18 responses.  Many were impressively detailed.  A few were hilarious: "My brother's setting up a box.  It's 10x more powerful than anything out there.  Let us host you."
3. I heard from a developer I already knew and have worked a bit with in the past.  Turns out he's interested and knows his way around Slicehost.  I hired him based on our past track record, at a price we both thought was fair.
4. Last night we moved my Drupal site to a 1GB slice.  It's already noticeably faster and is no longer crashing every 2 hours.
5.  Next week I have some "Drupal sharks" who'll start crawling over my install looking to optimize the Drupal piece of it.
So thanks, HN.  It was really useful to learn that I needed more RAM for my setup in addition to Drupal optimization.  I am happily on a Slice and now have an experienced hacker to defer to now and then. <comment><USER2> Let this be a lesson to everyone: the time you invest in finding a web host is _critical_. I went through 3 VPS and 2 Dedicated hosts before finally finding and going with Softlayer and boy oh boy was it worth the time and effort, not to mention the anger I caused other companies by calling them incompetent and issuing chargebacks ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats, your host is one of the most important decisions you'll make. And slicehost is one of the better options, frankly I never heard of midphase

<comment><USER4> A tested disaster recovery plan (including tested off-site backups) is much more important, in many situations, than your choice of host.

Choosing a good host is like running on raid disk. It's a great idea, and it dramatically reduces downtime, but if you keep important data it's not nearly as important as a good, tested, offsite backup.

This does depend on your business model. Ask yourself: what is worse, being down for a few days? or losing all your data? Now, you did say that your site was news focused, so it's quite likely that losing the archives would be a fairly survivable event, if expensive (as you'd need to rewrite the code) but if you are entrusted with customer data, well, a failure without backups usually means death (or starting over with no customers and a bad reputation.) My experience has been that if you lose a customer's data, even if you warned them ahead of time that you were not keeping backups, the customer will leave, and more importantly will tell other people to avoid your service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excellent news! Hope you are happier in your new home.

<comment><AUTHOR> So far, yes indeed. The performance difference is like night and day. We're still combing out blips from the migration, but all's well thus far.</comment></comment>


Carthage must be Destroyed - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/05/ceterum-autem-c.php

<comment><USER2> If you are going to read this article, read it all. (He starts off saying he does not believe in evolution, but he really means to say he considers the word overly broad, for example.)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note the use of Google Wave for comments.

<comment><USER3> Hmmm, there are issues. I messed up the captcha, got the captcha error page, clicked the inviting link there, which brought me back to my comment editing box, but now there's no captcha, just a submit button. Of course clicking the button gives me the same captcha error page.

Here's my attempted comment: \</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

"So now whenever I read anything involving research and walking outside, I get to "climate change" at some point in the article. I'm willing to bet a huge number of news stories, papers and research reports will continue mention "climate change". After all, it's so poorly defined it works for anything. Simply drop it in there towards the end with the rest of the factors."

Also, be sure to include favorable comments from Researcher X, who "was not part of the study," to shore up credibility.

Wave comment: I didn't see any "write your comment in the box" box the first time through. Then I clicked on this article's link that was in the wave area, and got stuck on a redirection page. I clicked the article link there, which brought me back here, and now I'm typing in the "write your comment in the box" box. Maybe it was random cosmic rays.

Cool idea though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I think using Wave as a blog commenting tool could be the killer app for wave. Lots of bugs left to work out, though.

Thanks for the feedback. Need to tweak some more :)

EDIT: One of the interesting features of Wave is that, as people show up and comment, their icons appear at the top of the wave. Also you can get all the updates to your conversations right in your wave inbox.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Git-subcopy lets you link files across repositories - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/jD91mZM2/git-subcopy <comment><AUTHOR> I believe there's some confusion around what git-subcopy does. It doesn't actually preserve history or anything like it. It just clones a certain file into your repository as a new commit, while saving which revision the file is from.

A potentially good candidate for using git-subcopy would be on this file: [https://github.com/nix-community/rnix- parser/blob/master/ben...](https://github.com/nix-community/rnix- parser/blob/master/benches/all-packages.nix). It's copy-pasted from the nixpkgs upstream repository. It can't be used as a submodule - it's just one file out of dozens, no way people want to clone all that. Even worse with subtree, that'll _always_ clone the whole upstream repo, and pollute the history on top of that. But the way it is currently, there's also no hint where it comes from.

git-subcopy is basically just me imagining a solution where you can not only link files or directories between repos without bloating down code size or history, but also modify them and later check what modifications you've made and rebase them. If you don't have a use case for this tool, good for you!

</comment><comment><USER2> Every so often I find it necessary to move things from one repo to another and preserve history along the way. I've made do with a janky shell script that recreates all the commits touching relevant files in the new repo, but this looks like a much less sketchy way to do it. It even sends changes back to the original repo if I understand the code right.

<comment><USER3> Git can already do that with subtree, no other tools needed.

<comment><USER4> git-subtree is for incorporating an entire repo. To cherry-pick a single directory from another repo you probably need git-filter-branch to split that out into a standalone repo first, followed by git-subtree. Still, this is just two commands so I don't see why a third party tool is warranted, especially since the third-party tool here seems to require a more complicated process (maybe it achieves more than what I think it achieves, I just don't see it from the description, especially considering the problem it set out to solve seems to be exactly what I had in mind).

<comment><USER2> Filter-branch / subtree doesn't let you move files outside the subdirectory, as far as I'm aware. Happy to be corrected on this point though.

<comment><USER5> There's basically nothing you can't do with filter-branch and the variety of filters it can execute. Moving a subdirectory to the root is trivial with --subdirectory-filter, but even without that, you could do it with --index- filter or --tree-filter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like this idea and want to know more, but I wish the README.md actually told us how and what, instead of just why. I didn't want to watch an asciicast.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback, I'll update the README

EDIT: Updated

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the architecture of this idea? Is there a reasonable assumption that it would keep the complexity for maintainers low in 3+ repos having a relationship with each other? If so, how?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure I understand the question correctly, but here goes:

My personal bias is to keep using submodules or at least subtrees where possible, mainly because it's builtin and because it's written by smart people. This is mostly for when repositories are pretty big and you don't want to submodule/subtree the entirety. But that's just me.

I hope the maintainer complexity is as low as any other git solution, all the rebasing tools are just using standard git so there should neither be any advantages or disadvantages. The advantage of using this is to not check in _everything_ into one repository (perhaps avoiding accidental modification of unrelated files that could cause merge conflicts).

<comment><USER7> My impression is that monorepo got popular because submodules are too complicated to use on 3+ projects combined together. And I don't mean that the user interface sucks or that it's illogical to use, but most people will tend to use rather less submodules than more, even experienced git users. Therefore I think the breakthrough will come with someone who really understands submodules but has a great idea how to simplify the process. I hope this project may be a step in the right direction. Therefore I want to know more about the internals.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm afraid I'm not the messiah you're looking for, then. This is not a replacement for subtrees/submodules. But from my limited experience I agree with what you're saying :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was looking at this for a similar use case [https://bit.dev/](https://bit.dev/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this similar to Android repo tool?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm unfamiliar with that tool, so you tell me! Looks like it though, from what I'm reading, with the exception of keeping the internal configuration in a git-friendly format instead of huge XML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hell I want this to be a standard</comment>


Show HN: Akita – Customer Success Software with Over 100 Integrations - <AUTHOR> https://www.akitaapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hacker News! OP here. We recently launched our new Customer Success Management application. It's been a _really_ long road but we are starting to see a bit of traction and some happy customers. Happy to answer any questions or give you a demo!

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks great! Who is this targeted at?

<comment><AUTHOR> At this point we are targeting other SaaS businesses who _already_ know what Customer Success is, why it's important and what their goals are. They are definitely the "low-hanging fruit".

We don't really have the resources to go after/educate other businesses about the benefits (but there are many). In time we'll broaden our marketing a bit and try and bring Customer Success to the masses.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you make a good screencast? - <AUTHOR>

I've been trying to make a good screencast, but since I'm a bit of a perfectionist I'm running into some difficulties. So far I've approached it in two ways:
1) Record the screencast and audio at the same time. This leads to me using a lot of "um"s and "uh"s and seeing lots of little mistakes. It's not the worst thing in the world, but I'd like it to look and sound more polished.
2) Record the screencast first, then go back and script the audio portion. This works a bit better, but I have problems getting everything synced properly.
What are your tips and tricks to making a killer professional screencast? <comment><USER2> I don't have a lot of experience doing this but I was asked a few days ago and recommended using <http://fiverr.com/> for finding a good voice.</comment>


Dishwasher Hack with a 3D printer - <AUTHOR> http://hacklab.akan.fi/archives/868 <comment><USER2> If you havent seen Tinkercad.com yet, its pretty awesome.

You can go on here and design the object and print it out.

If you live in SF, you can go to NoiseBridge.net and use their Makerbots they have there.

There is another site called 3DTin.com which allows voxel drawing.

Both sites have evolved since first launch allowing for more complex shapes, such as domes and wedges.

Super easy to use, with tutorials and quests to teach you how to draw.</comment>


7373170279850 - <AUTHOR> http://www.ams.org/journals/mcom/2000-69-229/S0025-5718-99-01116-3/home.html <comment><USER2> Basically, there is a problem known as Waring's Problem[1] which asks if for any natural number _k_ we can find a positive number _s_ , such that we can express any other natural number as the sum of at most _s_ natural numbers raised to the power _k_.

In this specific paper we are talking about when _k=3_ , that is "Is there a positive integer _s_ such that every natural number can be expressed as the sum of _s_ cubes?"

A result by Dickson in 1939 showed that every integer (except 23 and 239) can be represented by the sum of 8 non-negative cubes. This was further refined by Linnik who showed that large enough integers can always be represented by 7 cubes (more details in the paper, I'm just summarising).

This paper provides support for the conjecture that for sufficiently large integers you only need 4 cubes, and find a possible lower bound on what large enough means - greater than 7373170279850.

It's relatively easy to show that 7373170279850 cannot be written as the sum of four cubes. The hard aspect is finding such a number in the first place, and then determining if it is the largest such number.

Their method was to find a number _N_1_ that is not _C_4_ (where _C_s_ means it can be written as the sum of _s_ cubes), and then check every number between _[N_1, 10.N_1]_. They chose the number 10 by simulating pseudo-cubes sequences, which gave them confidence 10 is a good choice. If you find a number that is _C_4_ in the interval, call this _N_2_ and repeat the process, if you don't then you have found a candidate for the largest.

There are some more details about number theory tricks they used to reduce the search space in the paper, but that seems to be the gist of the whole thing.

[Edited to include more information from the paper]

[0] direct link to the paper: [http://www.ams.org/journals/mcom/2000-69-229/S0025-5718-99-0...](http://www.ams.org/journals/mcom/2000-69-229/S0025-5718-99-01116-3/S0025-5718-99-01116-3.pdf)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waring's_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waring's_problem)

<comment><USER3> > A result by Dickson in 1939 showed that every integer (except 23 and 239) > can be represented by the sum of 8 non-negative cubes

I'm not sure I follow this. Which 8 cubes add up to 2?

<comment><USER4> 1^3+1^3+0^3+0^3+0^3+0^3+0^3+0^3?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Number theory conjectures that can be [possibly] disproved by selective, brute-force programming are hazardous to my sleep schedule.

</comment><comment><USER6> Abstract for those who like have trouble parsing the page:

      We conjecture that 7,373,170,279,850 is the largest integer
      which cannot be expressed as the sum of four nonnegative integral cubes.

</comment><comment><USER7> Despite appearances, there is no paywall. To read the paper, click on "Full- Text PDF" about 7 lines down from the title.

</comment><comment><USER8> What about 4,556,543,113,106,166,912,761,976,150?

<comment><USER9> in jest or in seriousness? if in seriousness, would you mind elaborating?

<comment><USER8> Jest. I couldn't resist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's ok, but I was more intrigued recently by

25840^2 + 43776^2 = 2584043776

which led me to Numberopedia. [https://sites.google.com/site/numberopedia/](https://sites.google.com/site/numberopedia/)

<comment><USER11> Meh, this is cool and all but is just a coincidence of base-10 notation, not some fundamental theorem about the integers.

<comment><USER12> In fact, searching for x such that 1+4 _x_ 10^(Ceiling[Log10[x]])-4x^2 is a perfect square gives you tons of integers that make up half of a pair that has this property. 123288,328768 is my favorite pair, for arbitrary reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~vrn20/Waring_longer.html](https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~vrn20/Waring_longer.html)

Here is a good beginners explanation for people that don't quite understand what's going on (like me).

</comment><comment><USER14> Super cool! Changing my password to this number everywhere. :)

<comment> martin-adams Me too. Huh, what are the odds of that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can any one who is more familiar with mathematics explain to me the context of this paper? The authors describe some prior research into cubes and non- negative integers. But what was motivating this research? Is it just interesting in general while not necessarily solving a problem? What are the implications of this discovery if any?

</comment><comment><USER16> _A group of humans united in perverse study of totally abstract formalisms had the idea that somewhere in a theoretical world, utterly disconnected from any known mode of physical or experiential reality, something truly obscure that, temporal /philosophical zeitgeist permitting, may have 'always' been true may in fact now have finally been noticed, or, on the other hand, may not... it may just be a dream_

Meanwhile, in a flash of brilliance leading to a derived work of equal philosophical substance, I posit that the sum of the digits of the largest integer which cannot be expressed as the sum of four nonnegative integral cubes is exactly 60, and that this _may_ be evidence of a relationship between the sets of signed integral dervied multi-dimensional primitives and the sum of their maximum component digits.

Ahh, how I wish I had studied maths.

<comment><USER17> Not to quibble, but it should be _the maths_.

<comment><USER16> Genuinely curious as to your reasoning there. Why use a definite article when discussing a body of knowledge or field of endeavor? Sure, people say "the social sciences" but they also say "social science", "carpentry", "cleaning".

Therefore, if your comment was serious then I think this is a red-handed example of the maths field being snooty. :)

<comment><USER17> I was joking. You know, he's doing this purposely rambling, intricate (satirical) talk, for the purpose of mocking what he finds to be the irrelevance of the subject mathematical discovery.

Then someone (presumably from the math camp) comes along and unwittingly responds only to a tiny trivial detail, in a manner that is as meaningless as the parent believes the discovery itself to be.

Ahem. So...I guess it's not a very good joke if it has to be explained, but I got a kick out of it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there any use to this knowledge? Does it tell us anything else other than for this specific problem? (Just curious)

<comment><USER19> There can be very long periods where number theory advances are no more useful than say string theory or literary theory. Then every once in a while you hit something big. Much of encryption rests on what was formerly ivory tower papers on prime numbers.

This isn't to increase or diminish the importance of the accomplishment. I actually don't know where this belongs in the annals of math.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Stalker – Arduino–based door stalking device - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/petervojtek/stalker

<comment><USER2> For native English speakers 'stalker' means roughly the same thing as 'sexual predator.' I love Tarkovsky too but I suggest you pick a different name unless you are prepared for a lot of negative reaction from non-programmers who think you're making software for rapists or something. Sorry :-/

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for feedback. to be honest, I was aware of the connotation, but no better word came to my mind at the time. feel free to suggest a better "brand name", if I will identify with it, I am open rename the project (and mention you in credits :)

<comment><USER2> I know how it is! Offhand, the best thing I can think of is that Janus, the Roman god that surveyed past and future is also a guardian of doors ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you for proposal, I was not aware of this interesting deity. But i decided to keep Stalker alive, I believe its name fits better the purpose despite its negative connotation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Doctors and decision fatigue - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/opinion/dont-visit-your-doctor-in-the-afternoon.html <comment><USER2> The author uses the Israeli parole board study as an example supporting his case, but doesn't mention that the study failed to account for other factors that might affect parole decisions.

When other researchers took a closer look, it turned out that in each session, prisoners without attorneys (who are less likely to be granted parole) were scheduled last, just before the breaks. After accounting for this and several smaller factors, the original conclusion could no longer be supported. [1]

[1] [https://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/E833.full](https://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/E833.full)

<comment><USER3> I'm about halfway through "When, The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing" and it references many studies and topics relating to, obviously, timing. Many hospitals have implemented mandatory break schedules to combat this. An interesting read so far, recommended if you enjoy the linked article from the HN post.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35412097-when](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35412097-when)

And direct from the author some insights from the book:

'Afternoons are the Bermuda Triangles of our days. Across many domains, the trough represents a danger zone for productivity, ethics, and health. Anesthesia is one example. Researchers at Duke Medical Center reviewed about 90,000 surgeries at the hospital and identified what they called "anesthetic adverse events"— either mistakes anesthesiologists made, harm they caused to patients, or both. Adverse events were significantly "more frequent for cases starting during the 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. hours." The probability of a problem at 9 a.m. was about 1 percent. At 4 p.m., 4.2 percent. In other words, the chance of something going awry was four times greater during the trough than during the peak. On actual harm (not only a slip up but also something that hurts the patient), the probability at 8 a.m. was 0.3 percent — three-tenths of one percent. But at 3 p.m., the probability was 1 percent — one in every one hundred cases, a threefold increase. Afternoon circadian lows, the researchers concluded, impair physician vigilance and "affect human performance of complex tasks such as those required in anesthesia care."'

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/youre-more-likely-screw-up- af...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/youre-more-likely-screw-up-afternoon- heres-how-stop-daniel-pink)

<comment><USER4> The next step though would be individuation of results. Are these consistent, or is there some minority that has the opposite results?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want the attention of a crowd, speak at 10am.

Any earlier, the night people won't be well-rested.

11am, the morning people become hungry for lunch and impatient.

After lunch, anyone who overate will be sleepy.

By the time everyone's digested their lunch, the older morning people are fading for the day.

10-11am is the golden hour.

<comment><USER6> This is surprisingly poorly understood by everyone from consultants and sales people to speaking coaches.

It doesn't matter what you say or how you say it (within reason) if you're battling against your audience's metabolism the whole time.

<comment><USER7> My favorite is half-day or all-day meetings where they always plan out 10 minutes for a break every hour and it just slips and slips. You end up being lucky if you can get 10 minutes of an "official" break in a 4 hour window.

I've taken to just getting up and walking away for my 10 minutes. I have to piss. I need a coffee, or some water, or just the opportunity to go and breath some other stale air in some other corner of the office (I work full-time remote, so it's generally my own stale air, but the point remains). How is this lost on so many people? It strikes me as being so basic and so obvious and I feel like I invariably end up looking like an asshole because I can't sit in a chair and listen to people fill a volume of space with their words for 2 hours straight.

<comment><USER8> > people fill a volume of space with their words for 2 hours straight.

And those are the run of the mill self-lovers. Real pros like Fidel Castro and others of the ilk could go solo for up to 7 hours.

(The other day heard from someone who attended one of those speeches. Not a happy memory, for some reason.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My colleague recently recommended the book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. While I was expecting it to tout the benefits of good sleep, I was surprised at the evidence around the inverse: __not __getting a full night 's sleep is alarmingly bad for you.

The evidence suggests that this extends far beyond cognitive and psychological health impacts. For example, the author notes that there is a 24% increase in heart attacks the day after we lose an hour of sleep during daylight savings. This is just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion.

Given these mental and physical risks, it is insane that we allow physicians to routinely work shifts that endanger themselves and lead to measurable drops in their performance.

<comment><USER10> I believe we need to do away with "the Kaiser's trick hour" and restore a truly reliable, truly American sense of time

<comment><USER11> There's talk of doing away with it in Europe: [https://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2019/mar/26/when-do-the-...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2019/mar/26/when-do-the-clocks-go-forward-change-2019-daylight-savings- time)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've long advised my family and friends: "always take the 1st appointment or flight of the day. Never book the end of the day's schedule" for doctors visits and airline flights. Chaos, delay, and error compound themselves throughout the day and then get reset to baseline overnight.

<comment><USER13> That, or after a break or meal is the best to meet the judge.

"They found that the likelihood of a favourable ruling peaked at the beginning of the day, steadily declining over time from a probability of about 65% to nearly zero, before spiking back up to about 65% after a break for a meal or snack."

[https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges- lenient-b...](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient- break)

<comment><USER14> Debunked. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19915540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19915540)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe doctors should work less?

 _Hospitalization with acute myocardial infarction during Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics meeting dates was associated with lower 30‐day mortality, predominantly among patients with non–ST‐segment–elevation myocardial infarction who were medically managed._

[https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.117.008230](https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.117.008230)

<comment><USER16> For some reason, society has this observational attitude about these practices. It's not clear to me at all while medical institutions think doctors and nurses need to work excessive amounts of hours in a row with no rest.

<comment><USER17> I guess real doctors can be more precise than me here.

However, at where I live only doctors working with trauma/ER work long hours. From what I understand, that's mostly to work around the overhead of context switch and patient hand over. For my friend, a lot of stress came from the responsibility, which might not be well distributed across specializations (hence the insurance premiums, etc).

<comment><USER16> It just doesn't seem to me that having a doctor who has been awake for 22 hours straight is preferable to handing the patient over to a doctor who has slept within the last day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm one that likes(liked) to schedule doctors appointments in the afternoon. My experience has been a bit negative. I've had doctors that rush because they are running late, inattentive because they are tired, cancel because they have other appointments, doctors that seem to want to discuss their previous cases, and they have plainly told me that they can only give me a few minutes because they have other things to do. I suspect that even the ones that are attentive are thinking about other things than my situation.

It turns out that doctors are people too. So I completely agree an AM appointment is your best bet if you want to get the best service from the doctor.

</comment><comment><USER19> Related quasi-counterpoint: [http://m.nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry- judges](http://m.nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges)

</comment><comment><USER20> From the reference JAMA study: As the clinic day progresses, clinicians may fall behind schedule and experience decision fatigue

I wish the paper tried to differentiate which of these two it was. My guess is that it would have more to do with falling behind schedule than decision fatigue. When you are already behind schedule, you at least subconsciously try to do stuff that minimizes your time. Having a long talk about required screening or arguing about antibiotics may not feel very worthwhile to you when you have 6 patients that have been waiting an hour for you.

<comment><USER21> I always try to get the first appointment of the day. The thing that annoys me to no end is that doctors are already running late by that time. Sometimes I think there's a basic lack of respect for their patient's time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Imagine having the purest ideals of helping people when entering medical profession, only to end up burned out, going through motions, knowingly but hopelessly harming your own patients, leading you to substance abuse to cope with that as the system is set up to drive you to the brink of collapse. I am wondering what kind of sociopaths designed medical profession guidelines, maximizing unintended damage, depriving doctors of any quality off-time for their own recovery.

</comment><comment><USER23> For those who need to take a driving test, it's always best to try schedule it for the earliest morning time slot. The examiners typically don't want to start off their day by being a prick and fail someone.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think we need a push up toward a simpler and slightly denser monitoring culture across the whole board. Just enough so everybody can keep the rate but decrease the errors.</comment>


Ask HN: Learning Korean - <AUTHOR> What are HN's favorite resources for learning Korean?
I've picked up a 2 year Rosetta Stone subscription, installed Korean keyboards on everything, and ordered a keyboard cover. I live with somebody that speaks Korean so I have people I can practice with both written and spoken.
I've found r/Korean and the beginner's list (https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/rq3th/the_ultimate_beginners_resource_thread/).
What else would y'all recommend for developers and entrepreneurs learning Korean? <comment><USER2> _> I've picked up a 2 year Rosetta Stone subscription_

I would advise anything but RS. RS is huge because they blasted their marketing everywhere. The only two I've _ever_ seen good reviews for are Spanish and French. Having tried the Japanese version - it was _beyond_ terrible. I do not see the Korean version being any better.

One of my favorite polyglots has some [0] resources that may be useful for you (may need to scroll down a bit to find the video).

The #1 thing you can do is _practice_ as much as possible. Work around small vocab by describing things. Forget the word for "plane"? Say "air car" and have your friend remind you of the word. Learn how to say "How do I say [__] in Korean", in Korean. Avoid English as much as possible.

Learn connecting words. "And", "or", "because", etc. A small vocab (100~ words) can go very far if you get creative enough.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/user/laoshu505000/search?query=Korea...](https://www.youtube.com/user/laoshu505000/search?query=Korean)

</comment><comment><USER3> Read many children's books.

It may be of use, just because of the farness of the language from English and of the effort you will need to expend to learn anything, to get formal schooling, and to use formal textbooks. Yonsei University's materials are best in both these cases, with Seoul National close behind.

</comment><comment><USER4> My friend liked going to Korean Language meet up groups.

He also stuck cards with Korean he's trying to learn outside his shower glass so his shower thoughts will be Korean.

He now has a Korean girlfriend and is moving there in a couple of months.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've always liked how this was formatted for a start: [http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/](http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/)</comment>


My Dream College Won't Accept Me Because I'm a Woman - <AUTHOR> http://m.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/my-dream-college-wont-accept-me-because-im-a-woman/267290/

<comment><USER2> Mens only colleges are not acceptable, but these are okay?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_colleges_in_the_Unite...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_colleges_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER3> And there are "historically black universities". But if someone even mentioned the idea of a "historically white university", they would get laughed at and immediately branded a racist.

<comment><USER4> HBUs accept people of all races. And, certainly, no one would argue that Harvard or Yale were NOT historically white, unless they were blind to history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One shouldn't place so much of their identity/desires on getting into a school; if you want to learn, knowledge is always there.

<comment><USER6> Agree with this 100% - we need to get past the consumer-oriented "dream school" thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Diversity of academic institutions is accomplished by being unique on a huge number of axes. I sympathize with this woman, but at the same time, the same- sex restrictions at Deep Springs probably deeply influence the culture there-- there's probably not nearly as much point in getting drunk and partying every night if there's no chance of hooking up with someone at the end of it.

It's not "fair" that no similar all-girl or co-ed institutions exist. But I think some level of status-quo bias and knee-jerk conservatism is actually necessary to preserve the uniqueness of an institution like this.

<comment><USER8> No, it's not "fair", but ya know.. none of us were ever promised that life would be totally "fair" and clearly it would be unreasonable to expect it to be. It's not fair that we all have to die at some point, that some of us come down with crippling health problems in the middle of our lives, that we weren't born into great wealth, or born with better genetics, etc., etc., etc. It's not "fair" that we can't find the perfect mate, get married, settle down and live a fairy-tale ending. It's not "fair" that I can't have a career in the NBA because I was cursed by fate to be white, short, fat, slow and lack anything resembling ball-handling skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> All I could think in reading this was "Brokeback College". Going to an all male college as a straight guy sounds just awful. Plus, cowboy hats.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm sympathetic to her plight to a degree, but I can't help but think that organizations _should_ be able to set themselves up as "all male", "all female", "all black", "all white", "all gay", "all straight" or whatever. As long as it's a private institution that's not funded using public dollars, that is.

I'm no fan of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia or any other form of bigotry, but free individuals should be free to form groups where they choose to interact with - or not interact with - others on whatever basis they choose, as long as they aren't initiating force or using violence to violate someone else's rights in the process.

Of course, people should also be (and are free) to use public pressure, shame, and all their other free-speech rights, as well as market forces, to try and effect change when they are unhappy with the status quo. Again, as long as they aren't using force or violence to achieve their end, it is fine.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm just going to put this here, re: trust law:

"I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self evident, "_that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living_;" that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by an individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, and reverts to the society."

(Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789, <http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/lit/jeff03.htm>)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, Deep Springs sounds pretty awesome. I would've applied if I'd known about it when I was in high school.

</comment><comment><USER11> Deep Springs is an awesome college. They should reconsider.

</comment><comment><USER12> What a horrifying reflection of anti-affirmative action screeds.</comment>


Wikipedia pages have overlay in the text area: GNAA Notice – over Bumble app - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com <comment><USER2> Hmm, I wonder if Wikipedia intentionally allows users to add HTML or if they just missed some input sanitizing. Or could it just be clever use of the content editor - maybe the editor allows you to specify image dimensions? Still not sure how they would get the fixed-position wrapper div in there, though, without typing in the HTML.

View source, line 795:

<comment><USER3> Seems like someone edited that into a template: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Finance_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Finance_links&curid=6936928&action=history) (the actual content of the revision has been hidden though, so no way to check)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.gnaa.press/](http://www.gnaa.press/)

This link opens when you click anywhere on that page :(

</comment><comment><USER3> See it too. Very very strange...</comment>


Computing 10,000x More Efficiently (slides) - <AUTHOR> http://web.media.mit.edu/~bates/Summary_files/BatesTalk.pdf <comment><USER2> I'm about to head out the door, but here's what I see. He's got two fundamental changes to the way a modern CPU is designed:

* Internal representation of floats is logarithmic

* Small processing elements are connected in a mesh network _that is made explicit to the programmer_

The outcome of the second is that there is more work for a programmer, as details of the hardware are no longer hidden. The tradeoff is that none of the overhead to hide those details is required in hardware anymore. This is not new in other application areas, I'm sure DSP folk (and probably GPU folk) can tell us all about it.

The first gives us very fast arithmetic. What I think he's describing is, instead of working with x and y, you would work with log(x) and log(y). If `x * y = z`, then `log(x) + log(y) = log(z)`. (Additionally, the logarithm of exponentiation is multiplication, so square roots are just bit shifts!) Addition can be done in an approximate manner as well, using a bit more work. This is all from slide 5.

Releasing the hardware from the requirement that it be extremely accurate (he sets up his logarithmic representation to allow for ~1% error) allows him to make all this much smaller. He's shown that it can work "well enough" in some cases, and is working on finding more applications for the tech.

This _isn't_ a free lunch (and isn't proposed as such), and not applicable across all of general purpose computing. But I would think there are lots of areas it could improve; whether it's huge datasets and customers that can afford expensive, custom hardware, or low power application areas that would benefit from approximate methods only a full-blown desktop can handle now (pattern recognition or noise reduction on phones and cameras, for example).

<comment><USER3> The other issue will be the I/O bottleneck. A practical application would need to have on-chip memory to buffer data (not mentioned here, I think). Even so, the applications will be severely limited by having data with enough processing needs.

I spend most of my time working on FPGAs, and I would imagine that in the end, a practical implementation of this chip would involve a good deal of similar work. Data would have to be piped from one core to adjacent cores, to keep the inter-chip bandwidth tractable. This could result in portions on the edges left unused because the data can't get there.

In summary, the applications for such a chip are limited, and will require a different skillset from what we usually ascribe to a programmer, but in those constraints these chips could be incredibly high-performance.

EDIT: I haven't played with log-scale arithmetic yet, but I think that adds / subs will be much more computationally complex--probably more so than multiplies in the current linear-scale numbers. Just a thought.

<comment><USER4> I don't think addition and subtraction are too bad in this model. The slides mention that there is a simple circuit computing F(t):=log(1+2^t). So if you have two numbers x and y, represented by their logarithms log(x), log(y), the log of their sum can be computed using F as follows: log(x+y) = log(x) + log(1 + y/x) = log(x) + F(log(y) - log(x)).

Whether this is better or worse than multiplies in the current linear-scale representation depends on how hard it is to compute F, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> It's not especially obvious, the way his site is laid out, but there's a more conversational article at <http://web.media.mit.edu/~bates/Summary.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> An interesting piece of hardware that I have seen was used in ray tracing where high speed reduced precision FP was used to find polygons that were not visible, those where the low precision hid a change and those that were otherwise visible Conventional high precision processing was needed only for those with changes. The overall performance improvement was 100x.

We are probably close to hitting the wall for general purpose solutions on general purpose hardware, but the future is wide open for application specific hardware.

<comment><USER6> are we actually going to see application-specific hardware, or are we going to see something like an FPGA as a coprocessor in consumer hardware?

<comment> Tuna-Fish FPGAs really wouldn't help much. The theoretical gains sound good, but frankly, the practical speed of a cpu is measured by how fast it can run crappy code. FPGA in a cpu would just be a pointless waste of silicon that almost nobody would program for.

Application-specific hardware is already being added to the cpus -- the newest Intel ones have a hardware RNG and hardware video encoders and decoders.

<comment><USER3> There's a team at UC-Berkeley which is working on compiling C++ to a combination of CPU/GPU/FPGA code right now, which might change things. I think you need a special architecture to take full advantage of it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Scaled integers give you an instant and very significant boost in performance. And, what's best, in most cases the error is far smaller than 1%. I've done tons of real-time image processing work on FPGA's where you almost never use floating point hardware due to how resource intensive (and slow) it is.

Another construct that is extremely fast, cheap and can even represent nonlinear and discontinous relationships is the good-old lookup table. In hardware (FPGA) you get one result per clock cycle.

Now, of course, if you can deal with the error and name the tune with just a handful of transistors it could be a good tool to have.

It might make more sense to have a hybrid. Build a CPU that includes a traditional FPU as well as a "physics-based" FPU. Then the programmer can decide which way to go by trading off between accuracy and deterministic behavior against speed and errors.

<comment><USER8> How does fpga+scaled integers compare with a gpu ?

<comment><USER9> An FPGA can't compete with a dedicated chip. The additional hardware switches and routing layers needed to make an FPGA programmable means that there's a limit to how fast it can go and how much logic you can pack per square millimeter. What you can do is use an FPGA to validate the design and then convert it to an ASIC if the market can justify the costs involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Now each instruction (increment, load register, occasionally multiply) > invokes >10M transistor operations_

This was the most interesting statement in the slides to me. Can someone explain why so many?

<comment><USER11> He seems to be writing about floating point operations. Considering instruction pointer logic, buses, cache, branch prediction and all that jazz, not so surprising, but it still seems a lot to me.

<comment><USER12> According to Wikipedia the Alpha 21264 was 6M transistors not counting caches and the Pentium Pro was 5.5M total. 10M doesn't sound far off for today's processors. Since these are some of the earliest out-of-order superscalar processors, they may give an idea of the minimum cost of those features.

<comment><USER13> A quad core i7 has 1.16 billion transistors, for reference. The question posed was whether each instruction might touch 10 million, or .86%, of these.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Invocations of massive parallelism are always exciting and often convincing because of the huge speedups you can get for niche applications. But historically, SIMD has not been successful (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMD>). Or, as a NASA program manager in the area of parallel computing once remarked more colorfully in the mid-90s, "SIMD is dead".

You could argue that GPUs have been a successful back door pathway for SIMD. This seems analogous to the offboard processors that are used in medical imaging or military signal processing (radar) -- there is a SIMD unit, but it is controlled by a general-purpose computer, and the whole thing is in a peculiar niche.

<comment><USER15> _But historically, SIMD has not been successful_

Then why does Intel keep adding larger, more expanded SIMD instruction sets with every new CPU?

Why did ARM invent NEON and place it on all the high-end ARM chips, taking up more space than the entire main ALU?

Why are so many DSPs, for so many purposes, basically dumb SIMD machines? Broadcom's VideoCore, for example, is just a specialized 512-bit SIMD chip with insanely flexible instructions and a gigantic, transposable register file.

OpenCL/CUDA _are_ SIMD languages -- controlling them with a "general purpose computer" isn't any different from your typical Intel chip, which is also a big SIMD unit controlled by a general-purpose computer.

It's rather difficult to call something that is an integral part of billions of CPUs "not successful". Without SIMD, much of modern computing would be crippled by an order of magnitude -- more for GPUs, whose shader units are basically SIMD engines and little more.

<comment><USER16> \- Because SIMD is 'easy' from the processor's point of view. Basically the compiler it tasked to bundle parallel computations together. SIMD died out back in the 90s because no one could get that magical parallelizing compiler to work. Similar story with VLIW ISA.

\- Modern GPUs are not your 80's SIMD. Programs are written with very fine granularity. Lots of processor real estate is dedicated to scheduling/task switching, basically bundling fine-grained computations where possible. Modern GPUs are more like the 80's experimental dataflow machines than the SIMDs.

<comment><USER15> _SIMD died out back in the 90s because no one could get that magical parallelizing compiler to work._

That "magical parallelizing compiler" does work, and is known as a "human being". This curious type of compiler has been used for over 20 years to produce countless lines of SIMD code, ranging from Altivec to SSE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This concept - trading accuracy for efficiency - has always made intuitive sense to me, it's great to see someone building it out.

</comment><comment><USER18> This blew my mind. It seems such a simple idea to "move the instruction set closer to hardware". I am amazed no one thought about it before, because it seems so obvious.

The author provided convincing examples that 1% floating point accuracy is sufficient in many domains.

</comment><comment><USER19> Here's the patent: [http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/docservicepdf_pct/id0...](http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/docservicepdf_pct/id00000012558385?download)

</comment><comment><USER20> People should look into neuromorphic engineering, which has been around for a while, which is basically computations using analog VLSI circuits (aVLSI). <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromorphic>

As a first approximation these are the analog computers our fathers and grandfathers used.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's a fun fact. There are approximately 365 * 24 ~ 10,000 hours in a year. If he can pull this off, then problems which currently take a year of CPU time could be solved in _one hour_ with the proviso that your results can be off by up to 1% (assuming that the error can be tracked and doesn't compound over the lifetime of the calculation).

I can think of a lot of data mining/machine learning applications for which that would be a huge benefit.

</comment><comment><USER22> Any news since 2010?

<comment><USER23> No, but the author is CEO of Singular Computing, LLC: <http://singularcomputing.com/>

(not that there's anything there)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So it's basically a digital slide-rule. Am I the only one picturing a million guys in neckties moving a slide rule at a rate of 1 billion times per second?

</comment><comment><USER9> Raise your hand if you want the product liability exposure caused by your code potentially having 1% (or whatever) errors in calculations.

<comment><USER25> This isn't for general purpose computing. This would only be used for specific domains where 1% errors don't matter. No one's going to be using this for financial transactions.

<comment><USER9> Is this the reason for the downvote?

First, I'd ask you to name, say, 1,000 applications where this would be acceptable. Games might be an obvious one.

OK, what else? Because, you see, without a significant ecosystems of applications that can tolerate these kinds of errors the business case to fire-up a foundry and make chips just can't be made.

Military? I don't know. You can justify even the most ridiculous things under the cover of military spending.

I would venture to say that the vast majority of the applications that can deal with a 1% error will work just fine using integer math which, if done correctly, can be far more accurate as someone else pointed out. And, I would further venture to say that they already use integer math.

In other word, in the context of the vast majority of applications this is not a problem needing a solution.

I've done lots of analog circuit designs (yes, analog...scary) where you creatively make use of the physics of the junctions to produce various non- linear transfer functions. It works well and can produce amazingly compact circuits that do what would require lots of digital circuitry. The errors, potential thermal drift and process variations can kill you though.

To give it a different spin, an FPU required an external chip 20 or 30 years ago. Today you have processors smaller than a fingernail running a multi-GHz with pipelined FPU's. My vote is for further development in the direction of faster and more accurate FP calculations rather than faster and less accurate (and full of other liabilities) FPU's.

<comment><USER15> _To give it a different spin, an FPU required an external chip 20 or 30 years ago. Today you have processors smaller than a fingernail running a multi-GHz with pipelined FPU's._

GPUs have so many FPUs (literally thousands) that their silicon footprint is quite large. Large SIMD FPUs, like those in the Sandy Bridge, are also large and power-hungry, so much that Intel actually has an (undocumented) feature where the Sandy Bridge powers down half of of the FPU if it hasn't been used recently.

With regard to the importance of accuracy, even Intel realizes the importance of being able to improve power and performance with lower-accuracy FP calculations: see for example their demo hardware here: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/19/intel_isscc_ntv_digi...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/19/intel_isscc_ntv_digital_radio/) .

 _"The FP unit can do 6-bit, 12-bit, and 24-bit precision and, by being smart about doing the math, it can cut energy consumption by as much as 50 per cent and - perhaps more importantly - you can do the math a lot faster because you only operate on the bits you need and don't stuff registers and do calculations on a lot of useless zeros."_

<comment><USER9> Sure. Makes sense. The question really is about whether or not some of these applications can tolerate errors in the order of 1%. I contend that those application are few and far between, particularly in this day and age. People don't want to go backwards.

For example, I can do photorealistic rendering of mechanical models from Solidworks. A 1% error in the output of these calculations would not be acceptable. The quality of the images would not be the same. Play with this in Photoshop and see what 1 1% error means to images. I would have zero interest in a graphics card that ran faster, used less power but offered a 1% error in calculations. That's an instant deal breaker.

I can see the competitors' marketing: "Buy the other brand if you want 1% errors".

Does a radiologist care about the processing of an MRI happening faster? Sure. Can he/she tolerate a 1% error in the resulting images? Probably not. He probably wants more detail and resolution rather than less. I wouldn't want him/her to be evaluating MRI's with a baked-in 1% error. I think it is ridiculous to think that this sort of thing is actually useful outside of a very narrow field within which errors would be OK.

I'm still waiting for someone to rattle-off 100 to 1,000 applications where this would be actually acceptable. Without that it is nothing more than a fun lab experiment with lots of funding to burn but no real-world utility.

Let's check in ten years and see where it's gone.

<comment><USER15> _Sure. Makes sense. The question really is about whether or not some of these applications can tolerate errors in the order of 1%._

I think the idea here is threefold:

1\. The vast majority of computations do not need extremely high precision. A billion times more floating-point operations go into rendering video for games every day than for MRI processing (made-up statistic). Even now, we have double-precision floating point for this reason: most operations only need single-precision.

2\. Applications that need a particular level of precision can be written with that level of precision in mind. If you know the ability of a particular operation to provide precision, and you are aware of the numerical properties of your algorithms, you can write faster code that is nevertheless still as accurate as necessary. Most of this isn't done by normal programmers, but rather by numerical libraries and such.

3\. Many performance-intensive applications _already use_ 16-bit floating point, even though it has very little native support in modern CPUs. AAC Main Profile even mandates its use in the specification. The world is not new to lower-precision floating point, and it has gained adoption _despite_ its lack of hardware support on the most popular CPUs.

The entire idea that this is "let's make ordinary computations less accurate" is a complete straw man and red herring that nobody actually suggested.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What cool stuff have been built with JavaScript? - <AUTHOR>

Looking to learn Javascript and build some cool stuff for my startup http://www.traction.vc<p>Before  learning it though, I'd like to get inspired about what's possible. Thus collecting a list of cool stuff built with Javascript. What cool apps/websites/experiments that you know of have been built with Javascript? List them here. <comment><USER2> I wanted to learn JavaScript, so I made a few small programs.

Fallout Hacker Helper [http://faehnri.ch/fhh/](http://faehnri.ch/fhh/) \- a utility to help with the hacking mini game in Fallout 3

WRAP [http://faehnri.ch/wrap/](http://faehnri.ch/wrap/) \- Web Register Assembly Programming, a browser version of Daniel Dennett's RAP machine, a simple register machine and language he uses for some theory of mind concepts (read his Intuition Pumps)

Disrupt Inspiration [http://faehnri.ch/disrupt- inspiration/](http://faehnri.ch/disrupt-inspiration/) \- something I made quick after a friend and I were joking about startups. Generate startup ideas in the form of "X, but for Y." Submit ideas!

<comment><AUTHOR> very cool little programs. like it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Vector map rendering ([https://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-gl- js/](https://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-gl-js/)) editors ([https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/)) data visualization ([https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery](https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery)) compressing data ([https://www.npmjs.com/package/gzip- js](https://www.npmjs.com/package/gzip-js)) image manipulation ([https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=jpeg](https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=jpeg))

My point is: almost anything can be build with Javascript.

<comment><AUTHOR> Point made. Im inspired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> SilkJS is neat and much of it is written in JavaScript (the rest is C++) -- [http://silkjs.net/](http://silkjs.net/) "SilkJS is a command shell built on top of Google's v8 JavaScript engine, highly optimized for server-side applications"

</comment><comment><USER5> I made a jQuery plugin for drawing really sweet donuts: [https://github.com/matixmatix/sweet_donut](https://github.com/matixmatix/sweet_donut)

</comment><comment><USER6> StatsD[0] is pretty awesome and probably the only server side JS tool I would ever use.

0 - [https://github.com/etsy/statsd/](https://github.com/etsy/statsd/)

<comment><AUTHOR> tnx for sharing

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Picozu www.picozu.com/editor/, HTML5 image editor built in Js with the help of some 3rd party jQuery libs.

<comment><AUTHOR> wow that looks pretty sophisticated.</comment></comment>


Authentic hacker speak - <AUTHOR>

i'm a screenwriter who's writing a lead character that is a high level hacker. I've done my research but want it to be as authentic as possible and not embarrass myself with his dialogue. Any help? <comment><USER2> I don't know if you're likely to get many useful responses here, but I'll offer a few specific pieces of advice on tropes to avoid:

1) films often use the "aha, now I'm _really_ serious" gimmick, wherein the "hacker" is now talking about some technique that he hadn't used before. There are rarely authentic justifications for this in reality. See, for example, the last 20 minutes of "Swordfish" ... "That's _2048_ bit RSA... not even _I_ could crack that!". Please don't do that.

2) Anecdotal: the best hackers I know shun jargon. Jargon-heavy dialogue always feels condescending. Anywhere you feel tempted to use impressive- sounding jargon, consider that the hacker would consider such a thing commonplace and would consider it implicit in any conversation with another hacker. Another analogy: you wouldn't write Bruce Lee in a role where he expounds in detail about his punches and kicks as he's fighting; apply the same aesthetic and you'll do fine.

3) The technical details of "Hacker Speak" are almost impossible to make authentic to your audience because there are so many different specializations. I could wax on about, e.g., high performance numerical computations but wouldn't know how to synthesize authentic talk about cryptography. On the other hand, I would probably be able to pick out inauthentic talk about cryptography pretty easily. Spotting fakes is _a lot_ easier than creating plausible technical dialog. My recommendation would be to elide as much of the technical story as possible, and focus any programming- related dialog on the "three chief virtues" of a programmer: "laziness, impatience, and hubris" (coined by Larry Wall, I believe). To put it in more accessible terms: your hacker should always be thinking "How can I accomplish this task with the least human work possible (laziness)? How can I engineer it to go faster (impatience)? Is there really any reason why I couldn't write a program to solve problem X (hubris)?"

Anyway, I've had some experience with the film/TV industry (lived in LA for many years) so if you have any specific questions I'm happy to expand in email (see my profile for my address).

Good luck!

<comment><USER3> A good vehicle can be a non-technical character to whom the technical character provides a brief -- not disrupting flow -- and particularly lucid explanation.

You will need a fairly exceptional consultant for the brief and lucid explanation.

Your job, as the screenwriter, is to fit that explanation into the screenplay in a manner that seems natural and furtherw the storytelling.

Then, you get an audience that learns a bit, and experts who say to themselves, "Hey, they actually got that bit right." (Maybe they're even quietly impressed at that. And when their friends ask them what movie gets "X" right, they're more likely to cite yours.)

<comment><AUTHOR> agreed. thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I say the emphasis should be on technical accuracy, not on the affected hacker slang adopted by some silly people. There are a lot of different sorts of people who love working with computers. Some are intensely mathematical, some are nerds who are driven by intellectual challenge (think of the NASA engineers with skinny ties and slide rules who loved nothing more than to tear into an impossible engineering challenge with lives on the line), some are annoying hipsters for whom hacking is some sort of fashion statement complete with special slang to, like everything else, show how hip they are, some are malicious cracker vermin who brag about their toxicity, some are conscientious craftsmen who take great pride in doing good work.... The thing they almost all have in common when they talk to each other is that they know the real names of things and they are more precise in their use of technical terms than the general public. If you don't want to embarrass yourself with the dialog, first priority is factual correctness.

<comment><USER5> May I suggest that self-taught practitioners of the art might not know the names for things? Names tend to be a function of classrooms and degree programs. They might know a way to do something which has a name without knowing that name because they independently recreated it out of necessity.

Or, failing that, perhaps they used something before it had a name which made it popular. See also: design patterns and anyone who predates their popularity.

<comment><USER4> Classrooms and degrees aren't required, but significant exposure to the words of experts is almost always a prerequisite to genuine expertise. If you don't know what experts have to say about a topic, it's very unlikely that you are an expert. If you do know what they have to say, you know how they say it.

If the OP is interested in portraying "hackers" who aren't highly skilled, having them misuse terminology would be a good approach, for example portraying a later mastermind in his early, naive days. But portraying a world-class expert who uses hacker slang but can't get the technical terminology right would be a classic Hollywood error.

<comment><USER3> One of the brightest people I know taught himself a good deal of what he knows. Nonetheless, he is a very precise speaker on these topics. He learned the language along with the topic. And he uses it to communicate -- exceptionally clearly, by the way.

The language is an important component of functioning effectively in the domain. And it serves as a thinking aid, as well; it's very difficult to manipulate complex fields without the use of abstractions. Language is part and parcel of those abstractions.

I am in agreement with SiVal. Accurate communication is a clear measure.

Perhaps somewhat akin with the current "brogramming" fettish, one... "Hollywoodism" is to apply some sort of slangy techspeak "bravado" to "elite hackers".

That's B.S.

P.S. I should add that "taught himself" means a combination of reading, _doing_ , and collaborating with others in his fields of interest.

He might have entered some of those fields kind of sideways, but once people within them observed and learned that he really knows what he is doing and what he is talking about, that doesn't matter. (And that he quickly and thoroughly learns things he doesn't already know, when needed. Or... as often as not, before "needed", because of his driving interest.)

<comment><AUTHOR> i agree with most of what i've seen here and am VERY thankful for the responses but there is something to the language of coding that is extremely specific that i'm looking for.

to the person who uses: LAMP servers, python script,ubuntu machines, etc. these items are matter of fact tools for what they do and are as sexy or dramatic as a hammer, saw or vice grip to a construction worker BUT to people being invited into a world they're not familiar with they become a welcome mat on the floor to a journey.

<comment><USER3> I also meant to say that you may face in part what budding programmers face: Find that 1% of books and materials that are really a class above in their clarity -- and, being so effective, often in their brevity, as well.

I don't have a list at hand and may not be the one to provide one. But... you might look around and cross reference comments to find the "quintessential" works on these topics.

One exceptional book can be worth (more than) a car load of the alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What your hacker can and cannot do is far more important than what he/she says. Your hacker can have perfectly written dialogue, but if he hacks into the GPS system of a Cadillac and turns it into a remote-control car it's not going to matter.

A lot of Hollywood screen-writers use computers as a form of magic to get around plot difficulties. Say your heroes meet a bunch of aliens and you don't want to dedicate a 30 second montage to the months or years-long process of a team of linguists learning to communicate (badly) with them. Have your hacker set up a nice translation program on his special unobtanium-core uber-computer and, presto! When those aliens turn out to be not so nice, again the hacker can save the day by slicing into their mainframe and blowing up their mother- ship with a mac virus!

You get the idea.

You can pick up all the hacker language you want, but if you don't pick up some real knowledge (or run your plots past real hackers) you're going to make the same mistakes practically every other Hollywood screenwriter does.

<comment><USER7> _hacks into the GPS system of a Cadillac and turns it into a remote-control car it's not going to matter_

There's actually been quite a lot of success demonstrated with hacking automotive control systems. [http://www.pcworld.com/article/196293/car_hackers_can_kill_b...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/196293/car_hackers_can_kill_brakes_engine_and_more.html)

The steering isn't drive-by-wire, but everything else in a modern car is (including accelerator and brakes).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, first off; I have to ask which definition of "hacker" we're running off of here:

From the Jargon File ("Around 1988"[0]):

HACKER [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.

2\. One who programs enthusiastically, or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.

3\. A person capable of appreciating hack value (q.v.).

4\. A person who is good at programming quickly. Not everything a hacker produces is a hack.

5\. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; example: "A SAIL hacker". (Definitions 1 to 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)

6\. A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker".

If were talking one through four, you can probably just look at talks by open source project leaders at various conferences. Take a look at various bulletin boards, etc.

If were talking 6, then I would like to add that in my experience the speech used generally changes with skill and age. The security experts I've met, who seemed worthy of the title, seemed to have a very sophisticated sort of tone, almost formal. But I don't have very much experience in this area.

Though I agree with SiVal, minute for minute, research spent on technical accuracy will translate into more believable dialogue on stage than anything else you could do. If you want to hear a phreaker talk about how he became a phreaker for three hours, these tapes will be perfect for you:

ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/HowBPhreak1HQ.zip

ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/HowBPhreak2HQ.zip

ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/HowBPhreak3HQ.zip

ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/HowBPhreak4HQ.zip

ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/HowBPhreak5HQ.zip

ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/HowBPhreak6HQ.zip

What year is the story taking place? That's relevant because the terms you might hear today are not the terms you would hear in 1975, or the terms you would hear in 1988.

[0]: <http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> Sean and I are co-founders of an IT security startup, Cyberia Labs: <http://cyberialabs.coldstream.ca> Sean has 25 experience doing IT security work for Alcatel, the Canadian Military, and Sears, among others. As far as blackhats go, he was instrumental in helping the FBI catch "Hipcrime" (Google it). As far as whitehats go, we ARE whitehats. We've got the patents, years of 2600 magazine issues, and <http://hacklab.to> memberships to prove it. ;) My dad is also a screenwriter, newbee40, so we'd be glad to help you make your character seem authentic. Visit our website, send me an inquiry via the web form on our website, and we'll see if we can arrange something. Warmly, Kim

<comment><USER10> Let Sears know that their store machines in Puerto Rico (the ones employees use to clock in and customers use to browse their catalogs) are not quite secure. Plus they insist on having the USB ports uncovered, and load anything that is plugged into it.

:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can find endless hours of hacker/data security conference presentations on YouTube. Defcon and Shmoocon are perhaps representative, especially the older ones.

To see hackers in action, look for footage of "capture the flag" type events. In practice, it's usually just a bunch of guys typing on keyboards and scratching their heads without saying much.

</comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps you could find a high level hacker and spend some time speaking with that individual to see how they describe things and what sort of language they use. Of course, that means identifying a high level hacker, and that is typically bestowed upon an individual by the community.

Unfortunately, now you have two problems. Sorry.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this is worth mentioning: The best way, of course, is to BECOME a hacker (yourself). The 'speak' should come naturally.

Now, if you only have a day to spare for the project, that's a different story altogether.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER12> These have all been non-answers. The best advice I can offer is to watch "The Social Network". Its hacking scenes are about as authentic as any movie has ever been.

<comment><AUTHOR> hah! i agree and i have that opened when i'm writing to NOT STEAL from it but i'm actually more interested in having my protagonist relate to the one other programmer in the story differently than he does to everyone else.

thanks for your time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 17 \|/0|_||_|) 83|-|00\/3 _|00 70 \/1$17 |-|77P://\|/\|/\|/._|4`/$$173.(0|\/|/$7|_||=|=/|_337/|_337_7.-4|\|$|_470.-.|-|7|\/||_.[1]

[1]<http://www.jayssite.com/stuff/l33t/l33t_translator.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> The authenticity of the dialogue depending on other aspects of the character (and which hacker stereotype) you're going for and of course.. depending on what hacker means to you

</comment><comment><USER15> The correct answer is, "I bet I could do that," followed by four hours of typing and reading logs.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think you meant a low level hacker. :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Tweet the Anonymous group - maybe you'll get someone who would be willing to speak over Skype. Also, ping some Internet Security firms and see if you can speak to some of their consultants. They might be willing to spend time with you to add a "film mention".

</comment><comment><USER18> You say you've done your research, but you still clearly don't get the concept. Any authentic high-level hacker worth the name that you might contact will hack your script by deliberately giving you wrong information. For the Lulz.</comment>


The Multiverse of 1686 - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/the-multiverse-of-1686 <comment><USER2> It is really a stretch to say that Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" argument means he believed in the existence of a multiverse. The centerpiece of the argument is that, of all the _potential_ worlds, this is the _one_ that has to be the best, because it's the one that God created. If the actual set of possible worlds were all created, then there is no reason to believe that the one we exist in is special in any way, which defeats the purpose of the argument in the first place. So the multiverse exists only in the metaphysical sense of "we can imagine a universe where gravity is repulsive instead of attractive," not in any physical sense of "the universe where gravity is repulsive exists next door."

A second point to bring up... Leibniz's theodicy hasn't really gone over well with anyone, particularly any notable theologians. The core argument really boils down to "evil exists because God thought that a universe where it exists was the best one," which is more of a dodge than an answer. Most theodicies instead present evil as somehow necessary to appreciate good or a necessary component of human agency and free will.

As someone else said, Nautilus loves their multiverse theory. Even if they have to twist the words to make it seem like other people believe it.

<comment><USER3> I don't know... some days I find gravity repulsive just on principal!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nautilus loves their multiverse. Every other article seems to be about possible worlds :)

I've always been a fan of Leibniz (and never liked Spinoza when I studied him), but I've recently started to have a change of heart. Modal logic, which is based on Leibnizian metaphysics, seems very clunky. Specifically, I take issue with the metalogical concepts of _necessity_ and _contingency_. It may seem easy to say "I'm an engineer, but I could have been a musician" \-- but it doesn't seem straightforward (and in fact it isn't) showing that that statement is true.

But at the same time, I find myself between a rock and a hard place. I can't be an existentialist either, as Plantinga's anti-existentialst argument[1] is, I think, pretty knock-down.

[1] [https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2009-10/93507/_HANDOUTS...](https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2009-10/93507/_HANDOUTS/existentialism.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> One philosopher that isn't mentioned is Malebranche who tries to solve the interaction problem in a way that also relies on God, but in this case by having God facilitate the correlation of events in mind and body. This position is called occasionalism.

</comment><comment><USER6> Really wish this link worked, looks like a cool article!

<comment><USER7> Google Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jvoc1Ku...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jvoc1Kua_aQJ:nautil.us/issue/49/the- absurd/the-multiverse-of-1686+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I swear, philosophy is just throwing arbitrary labels on things without truly testing them. What the fuck is a "substance"

<comment><USER4> You are, in fact, right; but "substance" is a terrible example as it's been a technical term for the two-and-a-half millennia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      "All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden."

<comment><USER10> Candide replied, smugly and derisively, to the man who was cultivating his own garden of metaphysical insights.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a phrase for this kind of development - <AUTHOR>

Hi.
I am doing front end JavaScript work that uses ajax calls as a means to send objects to PHP where they are decoded/encoded and stored in MySQL. The same pattern is used to retrieve them. I don't use PHP for anything else other than as a 'mailman' to store data in MySQL. I write the front and back end (PHP).
I am curious if their is a common phrase used to describe this form of development.
Ok.That is all. <comment><USER2> Rich internet application, client-server, or fat client/thick client development, or more generally, service-oriented architecture

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client- server_model](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-server_model)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_client](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_client)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service- oriented_architecture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service- oriented_architecture)</comment>


All of the World's Money and Markets in One Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://money.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one-visualization-2017/ <comment><USER2> Relevant xkcd[1].

[1] [https://xkcd.com/980/](https://xkcd.com/980/)</comment>