Overuse of the Phrase "Big Data" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fliptop.com/blog/2013/03/07/big-data-can-kiss-my-big-yellow-arse/

<comment><USER2> Big Data is real. It's coming. There's no coincidence that the buzz is entering the feedback loop of our community consciousness. And it can do marvelous, marvelous things.

<comment><USER3> The author is not saying big data isn't "real" - he's saying the term is overused. I agree completely, it's a technical term referring to datasets so large it's difficult (or impossible) to work with using conventional database tools. But lately it's become just a marketing buzzword used by people/companies that are dealing with data that is anything but "big" by technical terms.

<comment><USER4> In addition to being overused, I think some use the term to refer to anything that's hard to extract and analyze. The datasets may not be that large or numerous, but after all the slicing, dicing and analyzing, they don't understand what they're looking at. "I don't understand" = "big".</comment></comment></comment>


NIST Releases Version 1.0 of Privacy Framework - <AUTHOR> https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2020/01/nist-releases-version-10-privacy-framework <comment><USER2> Link to framework document: [https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2020/01/16/NIST%...](https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2020/01/16/NIST%20Privacy%20Framework_V1.0.pdf)

NIST had a number of workshops dedicated to creating this framework. NIST was very hopeful they could receive the amount of quality feedback which made their prior Cybersecurity Framework so wildly popular and successful.

I had the good fortune of attending the second workshop, and it's quite fascinating to see the changes since their initial working draft.

The biggest changes I see come in the Core Functions. There have always been five, but some of them were significantly altered from the draft to v1.0:

1) Identify -> Identify 2) Protect -> Govern 3) Control -> Control 4) Inform -> Communicate 5) Respond -> Protect

If I remember right, much of the feedback NIST received at the workshop centered around the difference (or lack thereof) from the Cybersecurity Framework. The Venn diagram on page 7 of the Privacy Framework absolutely demonstrates that they recognized this lack of difference, made modifications, and show how the frameworks complement each other.

Overall, kudos to NIST for producing these frameworks. Issues of cybersecurity and privacy are fraught with nuance, and these documents are quite useful in providing "laypersons" with an informed way to reason about these issues.

\----

Prior workshops:

[https://www.nist.gov/news-events/events/2018/10/kicking- nist...](https://www.nist.gov/news-events/events/2018/10/kicking-nist-privacy- framework-workshop-1)

[https://www.nist.gov/news-events/events/2019/05/drafting- nis...](https://www.nist.gov/news-events/events/2019/05/drafting-nist-privacy- framework-workshop-2)

[https://www.nist.gov/news- events/events/2019/07/getting-v10-...](https://www.nist.gov/news- events/events/2019/07/getting-v10-nist-privacy-framework-workshop-3)

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of enterprise / financial compliance processes require adhering to an ISO or NIST framework.

Has anyone created a tl:dr checklist of these, like Sqreen has done with their "Startup CTO Checklist?" [https://www.sqreen.com/checklists/saas-cto-security- checklis...](https://www.sqreen.com/checklists/saas-cto-security-checklist)

<comment><USER4> Within the US, SOC2 is the enterprise security compliance program of choice, although the reality is that ISOs, NIST, SOC2, HITRUST are largely overlapping. Because these security frameworks are already checklists, there aren't any tl;dr checklists that I know of. The closest thing is Comply: [https://github.com/strongdm/comply](https://github.com/strongdm/comply) which has the rules for SOC2 and pre-written policy templates

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've used and greatly appreciate their security related standards. For privacy, there needs to be a lot more legislation upon which standards can be built. Security is in the interest of companies but customer privacy most of the time is not, they need legal mandates with real repurcussions.

</comment><comment><USER6> GDPR <> checklist</comment>


Show HN: AlbumColors.js - iTunes 11 Style Background and Text Color Generator - <AUTHOR> http://albumcolors.chengyinliu.com/examples/lastfm/?lastfm=willowm

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. The source code is up on github: <https://github.com/chengyin/albumcolors>

</comment><comment><USER2> Very cool. Nice work.</comment>


Telerik buy Fiddler - <AUTHOR> http://www.telerik.com/automated-testing-tools/blog/christophereyhorn/12-09-10/here-we-grow-again-telerik-acquires-fiddler-what-s-next.aspx

<comment><USER2> I hope Fiddler benefits from the backing. It is a great tool. But will it remain free?</comment>


US Government releases email conversation between Snowden and his bosses - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/05/29/us-government-releases-email-conversation-between-snowden-and-his-bosses/

<comment><USER2> > Those who believe that he did the right thing will herald it as proof that > he tried to go through other channels before leaking documents. Those who > think him a traitor will use it as proof that Snowden didn't really raise > concerns with the NSA's activities until after he shared those documents > with the world.

Or maybe we could say, "It doesn't matter." When evidence of serious long-term criminal behavior is given, I find it reasonable to concentrate on the accused, not the accuser. This release is, of course, an attempt to get us to think more about the accuser, to argue about him, to make the debate about him.

From the beginning of this article, it seems that Mr. Mott has fallen for it ...

> That ambiguity doesn't change the effect that revealing these programs has > had on national discourse. It doesn't change the fact that intelligence > agencies, from the NSA and beyond, are compromising our fundamental right to > privacy and justifying it with half-hearted mentions of "terrorism." And it > doesn't change anything about the argument we are having about the NSA's > freedom to do seemingly whatever it wants. In the abstract, it's an > interesting email thread. But not that interesting.

... or perhaps not. But I fear that last paragraph will be ignored. So: Let's not ignore it.</comment>


Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1837332/exclusive-google-google-plus-ghost-town-weak-engagement-data-rj-metrics-study

<comment><USER2> (disclaimer: I work at Google)

It is impossible to make meaningful statements about Google+ user engagement by looking at only public posts.

In 2012, I've created eighteen public posts, often spaced apart by weeks. According to my public history, I barely use Google+. In the same time frame, I've posted hundreds of private posts. My posts are for my friends, and I see no reason to let random internet people read my posts.

Many of my friends have absolutely _no_ public posts, or maybe one when they first join saying "well, I'm here". To an outside observer, it looks like they posted once and left. But if you're in their circles, you'll see that they're posting often, sometimes up to several times an _hour_.

Unfortunately, the only entity that can provide concrete numbers of active users is Google itself, and they aren't telling.

<comment><USER3> So as a Google employee and by using private posts, you prove that people use Google+

I am no Google employee and with the same logic, I can prove that people don't use Google+.

Private Google+ posts are what people call Emails. I have not yet received a single Google+ private post, nor have I sent any.

<comment><USER4> Well, I guess there are multiple ways to use Google+ and your way certainly differs from mine.

I use private posts (limited posts, really) to post to, say, my "developers" circle. My non-techy friends don't want to read about Ruby interpreter bugs or the like and it's a way for me not to spam them.

Likewise, my "developers" circle probably aren't interested in reading in- jokes/links/whatever between my friends and I.

It's definitely not like email for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like the strategy (especially given the revised privacy policy) is to converge every other service so that you're using G+ no matter what.

Google Contacts is now focused on circles, circles show up in Gmail, and you can control Google Voice activity based on circles. And I imagine this is just the start.

I wonder if getting people to publicly post is really even on the critical path for them at all. If they change their services to be circle-centric and get enough people just to put people in circles, that gives them a ton of social graph data to mine even without posts.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm always skeptical as to how you can truly, accurately measure engagement on something like G+ or Facebook. Sure enough, this study only measures "public" activity. If you're just measuring engagement by how frequently someone posts, I think that's a bit misleading. As cryptoz and RobAtticus alluded to, I rarely post to Facebook, but that doesn't at all say I'm not "engaged" through reading my friends updates, viewing photos, checking out articles they read, etc. Just because I'm not outspoken (or even narcissitic, ha) enough to post to Facebook every 5 minutes certainly doesn't mean I'm not engaged with it.

What intrigues me more about the article, is the picture of "waning interest" in G+. My interest in G+ is certainly fading. I might log in one every week or two, and even then it's the same routine; I'll log in, see that it's still the same ghost town it was last week, and then move on.

If I were Google, I'd be much more concerned about keeping people interested in G+, not focusing on how many posts people make or how many millions of people have "upgraded" to G+ only to never return.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted the story and I also think FastCompany's headline is bogus, but I wanted to leave it there for others to judge it.

Publishing such a report (and those conclusions) by just looking at public posts makes no sense at all. No wonder according to the study very few of those posting public updates never came back. They were probably users trying the service for the first time and had no people in their circles at that moment.

</comment><comment><USER7> I really like Google plus but the reality is that I use it less than Twitter or Facebook. I think it is only a matter of time, though before it takes off because they will continue to lower the barrier for entry and look for new ways to integrate to their other products. If nothing else, one day a lot of people may be communicating with each other on G+ without even realizing it.

</comment><comment><USER8> The study by RJM is fundamentally flawed. It has taken a metric without any point of reference, accumulated some raw data and made some pretty wild interpretations from there. I have rebutted it here: <http://goo.gl/nDAVQ>

</comment><comment><USER9> This is just ridiculous. G+ may be a ghost town, but I know than for me and all of my friends, 99% of our activity is non-public. If Google's goal is to get a lot of public activity, then yeah, they're not doing so hot. But this article doesn't do much to convince me that it's actually a ghost town.

<comment><USER10> Google should release numbers around this then if they want to stop articles like this. I recently signed up for a new GMail account and it automatically enrolled me in Google+, so I am highly skeptical of their number of new users metric since they seem to be inflating it by tying unrelated things together. It may make sense for them to try and tie things together into one cohesive identity, but it is hard to deny it also conveniently inflates Google+ numbers, at least the only numbers they seem willing to talk about publicly.

<comment><USER9> Sure, I can agree to that. I have a feeling that the numbers aren't good enough to release. Again, I don't want to imply that I think G+ is as active as Facebook/Twitter, just that I think the study is pretty much useless. After all, if I was using my friend group as a metric for how well a product was doing, Wave would still be alive...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is dating/relationship advice a big niche? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> What type of advice? User submitted content and advice ([http://www.reddit.com/r/relationships](http://www.reddit.com/r/relationships)), or a site where you write articles about 'the top 10 secrets to dating every guy should know'?

It is a big niche, but it's also highly competitive, and you would be competing against people that are already well connected and established in the industry. I would say the chances of success are extremely slim.

</comment><comment><USER3> Simple pickup are examples of guys who did it recently.

The darker, and more dollars, can be found at /r/seduction and darker still is /r/TheRedPill/

Every few years there seem to be a fad about these things, HN used to have these pick up artist posts pop up regularly until about 2 years ago. I got the impression that there was a large SV contingent involved in the pickup artist scene which eventually spawned the brogrammer movement, though no-one openly discusses it.

Wild speculation ofc...

</comment><comment><USER4> I know people who make $1 million+ yearly in affiliate commissions in this niche. There are many info products, membership clubs and networks with 7 figure revenue and few with 8 figure revenue.

Example: [http://www.pauljanka.com](http://www.pauljanka.com) makes 7 figures. Source: [http://mixergy.com/dan-caron-member-mouse- interview/](http://mixergy.com/dan-caron-member-mouse-interview/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm guessing it's all in the marketing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Judging by the advertisements on porn websites and lifestyle magazines online, as well as Cosmo and whatnot offline, yes.

It's one of the most reliable sources of trouble for people, one that transcends language, culture, and time.

As long as you have somebody who is lonely or getting less action/attention then they think they should, you have a potential customer.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it's so big a niche that it doesn't qualify for the term niche.

It's one of the biggest industries around. Large mainstream magazines are centered around it. TV shows are centered around it.

Not that there aren't ways for individuals to make a lot of money of differentiating themselves.

</comment><comment><USER7> As others have said, yes, it's big. But it's also crowded. And it's hard to be clearly better than the existing players. (Or at least, hard to be clearly better in the eyes of those looking for advice.)

<comment><AUTHOR> But as with all existing players, there's always room for competition. Just look at Tinder disrupting the dating scene when there were already big names like POF, OkCupid, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reddit and StackOverflow exist.

What would you do differently?

<comment><USER9> Stack Overflow has relationship advice?

I can figure out my code and my gf in one stop?

<comment><USER8> I meant to say "Stack Exchange". And it was an Area51 proposed site but it failed for not enough activity.

[http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/44577/relationship...](http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/44577/relationships- and-dating)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How so?</comment>


Spotting Psychopaths in the Workplace - <AUTHOR> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/06/30/spotting-psychopaths-in-the-workplace/

<comment><USER2> "Using business buzzwords a lot to appear like they are in the know" is the sign of a psychopath? Holy crap, I'm totally surrounded!

</comment><comment><USER3> Some of those "red flags" on the check list are so incredibly grave, just two or maybe just one alone should be more than enough to set off the "psycho alarm". (cruelty towards animals and kids and bragging about it? Come on?)

> _Still, people loved her_

The more interesting point here would be: who and WHY??? Analyze how she did that. From what we learned about her before, almost everyone should have hated her guts.

> _After she killed my professional advancement in that company_

And it would be interesting how she did that and why the author could not counter it, obviously, AT ALL. He should learn from that experience and share it.

It is great and a first step being able to identify those psycho predators but even more satisfying would be ultimately turning their own torpedoes against them - this is all about politics and certain soft skills, typically things that the average hacker despises with a passion.

Also, when they attack you directly, it does not always pay off to become defensive and explain yourself in detail; instead give just as outrageous and short a reply or do not even acknowledge how they attacked you and instead as a "reply" shift focus onto other/important matters.

> _Instead use it to know if you need to put special guard up_

Instead of just raising shields and becoming defensive, you absolutely need to make friends and allies long before that, preferably but not only in high(er) positions. Those psychos know who they can fuck with, who is an easy target. Make yourself a very difficult target because you are well connected and people love you.</comment>


Why All The Daily Deal Hate? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/why-daily-deal-hate/ <comment><USER2> I ran a small business and ran a ton of Groupons. We are on track for another record breaking year thanks to Groupon. Like anything with small business, you can take the good with the bad and mitigate risk, or you can just crash and burn by making poor choices.

Groupon is amazing, and not very cheap marketing that WORKS, unlike a lot of other not very cheap marketing that does not work. And we sold a LOT of Groupons. Some days 80% of customers are Groupons. When you get 2x your normal business walking through the door it's kind of hard not to make money. Cross sales, up sales, post-experience contact, word of mouth... It's not as easy as just setting up a Groupon and watching money roll in, you have to think about it and work hard to turn it into a positive experience.

But then again, this is business, right? Who said it was going to be a safe, easy bet? Groupon is just another way to market your business.

And it happens to be very consistent and effective.

<comment><USER3> Please do a write up on your experience, the more details the better. Your results sound great compared to what we've been hearing about recently and I'm certain HN would like to hear your story.

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2654788>

here you go :)

<comment><USER4> So, skydiving.

This is interesting but I'd say you're in the minority compared to most businesses that try Groupon (like restaurants, cafes) and have high fixed costs and slim margins.

Thanks for the write up though.

<comment><USER5> Restaurants pay about 40% for food. The rest is payroll, rent, etc. In total, they make about 4%, but they lose money hand over fist if the restaurant is empty.

Also, that margin is very rubbery, depending on the dish. They might make a pasta dish for 20% of the cost, and a steak for 70% of the cost.

Also, drinks can have crazy mark-ups.

If the groupon is limited to high-margin meals, then they won't lose money. And they might make a profit on the drinks, or people who change their mind and go for a full price dish.

And they might get some repeat business. Also, it looks good for them to look full - passers-by might assume that the restaurant is packed because it's a good one.

The thing is, owners have to be very careful about the deal they give. Groupon seems a little unpredictable (for non-experts), so it can be very dangerous.

Of course, all marketing has its costs. And restaurants and cafes rarely rely on marketing (fast food excepted).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the flip side (i.e., not from the perspective of participating businesses) - I hate daily deals because, as a customer, they are _almost never relevant_.

It's like signing up for a crappy mailing list full of spam in the hopes that once in a blue moon something useful would show up. Except, the signal to noise ratio is so poor you only ever find out about the really good deals after the fact.

If I didn't want a spa Groupon yesterday, I sure as hell don't want one today. I don't _want_ your stupid emails clogging up my Inbox - if they were smarter about it they'd get something in my news feeds - so I can just briefly glance at it and go on with my day, instead of deleting all of these emails.

If Groupon had actually a variety of deals of interest to me (or anyone I know, really), then it might be a compelling proposition to me as a consumer. But as it is it's just a bunch of crap that few people want (or a ludicrous overload of things people want).

<comment><USER7> The truth is many customers (oddly) will buy something just because it's discounted! This is how sales can generate sales and compel people to buy non- relevant stuff.

Those of us who recognize that we're spending in net more irrespective of getting good deals shy away but there's always been the coupon-crazed folks out there who've never understood this logic. It's the same logic that propels Costco to sell you way more than what you need.

I suspect you don't use coupons or shop at Costco, but many do :) This makes me, while extremely anti-daily-deal-sites, begrudgingly acknowledge that they do have at least some viability. (note that "some" does not necessarily mean the valuations they've been receiving...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article eerily parallels a conversation I was having just last night about Groupon and Square: Groupon's a bunch of bottom-dwelling parasites whereas Square has already done so much to make it easier to accept credit cards, and their products are poised to add more and more value for small businesses.

I remember the first time I walked into an Apple Store after the iPhone had been released. Apple employees were using Win CE based handhelds with Symbol barcode scanners. It struck me as odd — and as something that was going to change. And when Apple figured out how to do it for themselves, with the iPhones or later the iPod Touch or iPad, then someone, maybe Apple, maybe someone else, would figure out how to make something that seemed like science fiction — employees able to check you out while you stood there, without going to a cash register — into something that _anyone_ could do. It might only be 90% as good, but it probably only cost 10% of what those specialized Symbol devices cost.

Square has become that thing. I would have thought Intuit would've gotten there first. PayPal might have gotten their first. Or VeriPhone. All of them _should_ have gotten there first, but I think there were probably huge Innovator's Dilemma style cannibalization and ego issues at work.

In the end Square was the company. I think these guys, as the author does, are the good guys. They're earning their keep. The people who work there are entitled to be proud of themselves, because they are very much poised to do _very_ well by doing good.

</comment><comment><USER9> "I'm tired of seeing small businesses get screwed."

I really don't understand this as a rationalization for the somewhat skewed portrayal of Groupon that this guy has been giving. I'm sure some small businesses have been screwed by choosing to do a poorly thought out Groupon. Groupon's business plan does not rely on them screwing over small businesses, in fact, they're heavily reliant on small businesses having a positive experience with the company. From all of the stories I've seen, it seems like there have been some nasty Groupon sales guys that may have took advantage of a small business owner, but it seems like Groupon is not encouraging that behavior in the long term. It's obviously not in their best business interests to do so, and Andrew Mason, being neither a fool nor a monster would not allow the business to lose sight of its longer term goals. Also, the fact that he took a very low payout tells me that he may be in it for the long haul.

<comment><USER10> What's a little bit hard to swallow is seeing a company _get big_ by employing those tactics, and the penalty is "well, we had a few bad apples, and we're disciplining them now".

Whether right or wrong, all we heard about for a while from real users was the horror stories, giving the impression that most deals were bad for the small businesses using them. My gut reaction is "sure, _I_ could make money hand over fist by lying (or misrepresenting things) to customers - making money by being honest is much harder".

In some ways it's a bit like the old MS stories. "They just did good business!". Well, no, they quickly established a monopoly then proceeded to abuse the hell out of it with several partners, which kept them entrenched and on top far longer than they would otherwise have been there.

"Hey they don't do that anymore!" That may be true, but the damage is done, and they get to reap the rewards for a long time with relatively minor punishments.

There'd be much more expense in doing long term education and one-on-one counseling with the small businesses that use groupon, and probably a MUCH higher satisfaction rate with them from a merchant standpoint, but they wouldn't have nearly the marketshare they do by going that route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There seems to be something of a disconnect between the tech community and everyone else when it comes to Groupon. Investors clearly love it, it seems plenty of businesses are using it, and equally gazillions of people are buying them. I suspect, popular HN stories to the contrary, they'll successfully IPO later and won't collapse as fast as some hope.

Sure it's not for all businesses, and some will have a bad experience. Some business owners can't do math - some just aren't well suited to a group on model. Does that invalidate the whole company? I think not.

Sure, as a Groupon buyer you'll get plenty of deal offers for stuff you're not interested in. Well duh! I'm guessing that's been the case since day 1 anyway and it seems to be working regardless.

So why all the hate on tech blogs and commentaries? Might it be just a little bit of sour grapes? After all Groupon raised over a billion in capital (so if _I_ can't get a lousy million for my idea, what does that make me?) Worse most of the billion was not so much capital raised as a straight share sale. The reaction to other VC spends lately (notably the 40 million for Color) seems to fuel my hypothesis that most techies hate the success of others. They're playing this as some sort of zero-sum game.

It's also hard to get excited about someone else's success when it seems like such a simple idea. After all anyone can enter the same space - the barrier to entry is low (as plenty of clones will attest to.) But while clones always exist there is only one eBay, one Amazon, one Facebook, one Twitter. I suspect there will be one Groupon. As with most of these things, they're simple ideas, but require a lot of traction and good implementation to do well.

I say good for you Groupon. I say, let the seller of Groupons do the math before doing business, and let the buyers take advantage of what appeals to them. And maybe, just maybe, us techie folk could stand up once in a while, and say "well done" without begrudging them their success.

Of course Groupon might fail. Of course their IPO might suck. That can happen to any company. But we're acting like spoilt children, stamping our feet and complaining that life is unfair.

</comment><comment><USER12> companies pay millions of dollars for a spot in the superbowl to reach customers and they aren't able to quantify them, and obviously million dollar spots on tv aren't for every business. But, like Groupon, that isn't to say they don't benefit businesses that use them right. And it can be used as a way to build awareness. Maybe the restaurants and coffee shops that offered groupons didn't get anything out of it because their patrons didn't like the product enough to come back when there wasn't a discount. I don't think restaurants/coffee shops are inherently bad targets, you can be prompted to try someplace new and become a regular if the food is any good. Seems like bad decision making on the part of the business owner.

</comment><comment><USER13> It drives pageviews?

</comment><comment><USER4> His first sentence really sums it all up:

"I'm tired of seeing small businesses get screwed."</comment>


CodeWarrior shipped for PS4  - <AUTHOR> http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Metrowerks+Ships+CodeWarrior+for+PlayStation+Release+4+-+Demo+at+Game...-a020542372

<comment><USER2> This document dates from 1998. A more suitable title would be "CodeWarrior 4 shipped for Playstation" (14 years ago).

Modern Sony development tools come from these people: <http://www.snsys.com/>.</comment>


Google Launches Library For iPhone Application Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.betadaily.com/2008/03/29/google-launches-library-for-iphone-application-development/

<comment><USER2> Anyone working on iPhone apps? Do you think it'll be the next gold rush?</comment>


British divers make contact with missing Thai football team - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/02/twelve-boys-missing-in-flooded-thai-cave-found-after-nine-days <comment><USER5> This is great news, but sadly their lives are still very much at risk. They are too deep to drill down to, there is a lot of rain to pump out (and the rain can continue), and they can't swim (even if they could, this is a hard dive for those that can).

Found this from a Bill Whitehouse:

Bill Whitehouse, vice-chair of the British Cave Rescue Council which is helping the rescue efforts, played down speculation the boys could be taught to dive.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme he suggested they could be guided through the water in "packages".

Asked how feasible it would be to teach the children to dive, he said: "It is certainly not easy. The other alternative is that you literally bring them out in packages. In other words you fit them with diving equipment: a full face mask, instead of having a gag in your mouth like a lot of divers use; package them up; put the correct weights on them so that they are neutrally bouyant and are not going to get stuck again. It has been done before."

He also explained how the British divers reached the trapped group.

        They were diving upstream in the system so they were having to swim against the current,
        or pull themselves along the walls. Some of the cave is fairly constricted and other points
        aren't. I gather the actual diving section was about 1.5km, about half of which was
        completely flooded and about half of which was open.

        They estimated that a round trip to where the party was and back again is probably about three hours.

Whitehouse was sceptical about the prospects of pumping enough water out of the cave to allow the boys to walk to safety. He said: "They are trying to do that with pumping, but pumping a monsoon away is not that easy."

<comment><USER6> As an experienced cave diver, I agree with Mr Whitehouse that bringing them out as "packages" should be considered an option. It would be easier than allowing them to swim by themselves in murky waters with no vision. The diving training spoken of might be getting the boys to be used to being towed under water while being packaged up, rather than about teaching them about buoyancy control like adult divers.

<comment><USER7> You can't be serious. Taking 13 people, with an absolute maximum of Open Water level training (if that), back out through hundreds (or thousands?) of meters of low or zero visibility diving, including (apparently) tight restrictions, without risking the lives of all concerned? Aint gonna happen - unless the water level drops to the point where they can just float back out.

<comment><USER8> What I don't understand is that surely there must be a wide enough passage for them to have got in in the first place. It may be flooded but if one can walk into them vertically, surely they should be fairly accessible to a diver horizontally. Can't they just follow / be attached to a string or something like that?

<comment><USER9> It's a 2.5 km (a bit less than 2 miles) underwater swim. Right now they've been without food for 10 days and are barely able to stand. At the moment they wouldn't be able to walk the distance, much less spend many hours (it was about four hours for the experienced divers, so more for the boys) swimming underwater in unpredictable currents with no visibility due to silt, so if they get confused and let go of the string for a moment in those hours then they die.

As one of the rescuers said, "When it starts raining the flow is so hard you can barely swim against it." \- and that's a pro diver, imagine how would it be for a boy who didn't even know how to swim and thus doesn't have the relevant muscles trained. It's also narrow enough so that only one person can fit through, so you can't have the divers guide them by hand, only accompany them behind them.

<comment><USER10> Fortunately the current is in the direction that they need to go to get out.

<comment><USER9> Not really - from the plan ([https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng- interactive/2018/jul/03...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng- interactive/2018/jul/03/thailand-cave-rescue-where-were-the-boys-found-and- how-can-they-be-rescued)) it seems that it's about 50/50; first they need to go ~700m against the current and only then ~800m with the current.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does cave oxygen supply work? Would they not run out of oxygen by the time they can get out?

Also, one detail that CNN got that I didn't see in this article: it seems the cave is _one kilometer underground_! [1]

EDIT 1: The CNN article partially answers my first question: _" Rescuers will also pump air into the cave to improve conditions."_

EDIT 2: Another important bit here [2]: _" It won't be anything like diving that most people recognize. It will be diving in what is effectively muddy water, possibly fast flowing, with no sense of direction," Moret said. "You can't tell what's up, down, sideways."_

[1] [https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/02/asia/thai-cave-rescue- intl/in...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/02/asia/thai-cave-rescue- intl/index.html)

[2] [https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/03/asia/thai-rescue-next- phase-i...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/03/asia/thai-rescue-next-phase- intl/index.html)

<comment><USER12> _> How does cave oxygen supply work? Would they not run out of oxygen by the time they can get out?_

Most cave systems are relatively permeable. Even if you can't see a route out, there are likely to be paths for air movement.

The immediate threat is the accumulation of carbon dioxide rather than a deficit of oxygen. Fresh air is about 0.04% CO2, but most caves have ambient CO2 levels of over 1% and some as high as 6%. You'll start feeling quite unwell above 4%, violently ill above 7% and there's a risk of seizures, unconsciousness and death above 10%. Normal air is about 21% oxygen, you can cope perfectly well on about 16% oxygen and survive on as little as 10% oxygen.

The boys seem alert and in reasonably good spirits, so I'd say that the air in their section of the cave is fairly good.

<comment><USER13> Even if the cave was closed from a gaseous perspective, there is flowing water. Gases dissolve in water, although not necessarily very quickly. Would the flow of water allow for CO2 to be removed from the space given a sufficiently large surface area?

<comment><USER14> Generally caves have elevated CO2 levels not because of human respiration, but because of outgassing - they're generally eroded out of carbonate minerals, and so the water flowing in carries CO2 inside at higher concentrations than the outside world. The smaller the subsystem the human is isolated in, the faster they perturb that equilibrium toward an even higher CO2 level.

The ESA, of all groups, has a pretty good write-up on this: [http://blogs.esa.int/caves/2014/11/19/the-science-of- caves-e...](http://blogs.esa.int/caves/2014/11/19/the-science-of-caves- environmental-science-co2/) They use cave exploration for astronaut team- building, process/workflow training, and acculturation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Those divers are super brave. This was done under extremely difficult circumstances, they risked their lives with a reasonably high chance of at least one of them not making it back.

<comment><USER12> It's skill rather than bravery. Rick Stanton and John Volanthen were the divers who first made contact with the missing boys. They are both hugely experienced cave divers and cave rescue divers; as a team, they have broken multiple records in depth and distance. This was a difficult and complex diving operation, but that's business as usual for divers of this calibre.

Bravery is fundamentally incompatible with cave diving - if you're taking risks in such a hostile environment, you won't survive. What keeps you alive in an underwater cave is training, caution and meticulous attention to detail.

[https://youtu.be/qNX5eo2Ja1g](https://youtu.be/qNX5eo2Ja1g)

<comment><USER16> I fundamentally agree with where you are going, but like another responder, I think that we have different understandings of the word "bravery." Hollywood's idea of "bravery" is really recklessness. And that is absolutely incompatible with cave diving, as it is with racing automobiles, fast and light alpine climbing, and other activities where training and judgment keep you alive.

But as this is not a Hollywood movie, we can use the proper definition:

      > Courage (also called bravery or valour) is the choice and willingness
      > to confront agony, pain, danger, uncertainty, or intimidation.
      > Physical courage is bravery in the face of physical pain, hardship,
      > death or threat of death, while moral courage is the ability to act
      > rightly in the face of popular opposition, shame, scandal,
      > discouragement, or personal loss.

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

Cave divers are absolutely courageous. And brave. They just aren't reckless. Or foolhardy. To borrow a phrase from mountaineering:

"There are old cave divers. And bold cave divers. But no old and bold cave divers."

<comment><USER17> It seems to me that the "Hollywood bravery" you nicely describe really is bravery - Oxford Dictionaries says the word comes from French _braverie_ or Italian _braveria_ (boldness), based on Latin _barbarus_ (c.f. barbarous). Alternatively it may be from _bravo_ (wild, savage).

Courage on the other hand comes from Old French _corage_ , from Latin _cor_ (heart).

I think based on this the divers are courageous, not brave.

<comment><USER16> It's true that the word comes from those roots, but the Oxford dictionary you cite says plainly that the definition of the word as it is used today is:

      > Courageous behaviour or character.

[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/bravery](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/bravery)

Just as long as we all agree that cave diving is not about being that ridiculous Hollywood stereotype dude who deliberately breaks all the rules for no damn reason and it works out because he broke all the rules for no damn reason.

<comment><USER17> I was agreeing with you. You wrote yourself that modern usage is synonymous, so I thought it would be interesting to look at the etymology too.

For the record the full OED favours the latter root for bravery ( _bravo_ < Old Italian _braido, brado_ (wild, savage)). Strange they don't say the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm pleasantly surprised to see that they've been able to survive this long without access to food and possibly clean water. I can't imagine what it would feel like to be stuck in a cave for nine days and then suddenly see two divers show up as part of the rescue effort!

<comment><USER19> > rescuers have said they may have to wait several weeks for the water to > subside before they can be taken out.

Ouch

> Trying to take non-divers through a cave is one of the most dangerous > situations possible, even if the dives are relatively easy. That also begets > the question: if the dives are difficult then supply will be difficult, but > the risk of trying to dive them out is also exponentially greater

<comment><USER20> >have to wait several weeks

A BBC article said it could be months, much less weeks. It's the beginning of the rainy season.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44692813](https://www.bbc.com/news/world- asia-44692813)

<comment><USER21> It's interesting, I wonder what the pros and cons are for drilling to retrieve them or send supplies. In the mine collapse situations that I'm aware of, there was already infrastructure on hand for heavy equipment and drilling.

I have to imagine that the dangers of cave diving are multiplicative - <USER2> don't get enough skill-based improvement from any given trip into/out to make repeated trips a safe option.

<comment><USER22> I'm sure I don't understand the scale of this. I would however think that you can bring huge industrial pumps and do some plumbing to a suitable place to dump the water and turn them on. Holland once send 7 million ton a day of pumping capacity to England to help them out. Could that not make a serious impact on the water levels in the cave?

<comment><USER23> Also, the pumps have to be at the lowest point, _pushing_ the water up - <USER3> siphon has a maximum height that a vacuum can draw water up of around 10m.[0] You can't just stick the pump at the entrance and then shove a pipe hundreds of meters down the cave system, you need to take the pump down there and run the hose back to the outside.

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

<comment><USER22> I did not think of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There's an interesting parallel here to the incident in 2013[1] where a Nigerian ship's cook survived for 60 hours in an air bubble 30 meters under the surface in a sunken capsized tugboat.

That was also a case where someone with no prior experience as a diver had to be extracted from a situation otherwise requiring some fairly advanced dive training. From the article:

> The rescuing divers fitted Okene with a diving helmet so he could breathe > while being transferred into a closed diving bell and returned to the > surface for decompression from saturation. Okene lost consciousness during > the transfer.

According to the BBC[2] they'll probably end up doing something similar to extract those kids. They'd need to drag them over a long distance (probably one at a time) as "dead weight", but this method wouldn't require them to learn any diving skills.

> The Thai authorities have appealed for donations of full-face scuba diving > masks small enough to fit the boys in order to reduce the risk of their > breathing apparatus coming loose as they travel through flooded passageways.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquanaut#Accidental_aquanaut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquanaut#Accidental_aquanaut)

2\. [https://www.bbc.com/news/world- asia-44692813](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44692813)

<comment><USER25> The actual video shot by the rescuing divers shows how calm and control the leader of the expedition acts after they encounter Harrison alive. Starts around 5:50

[https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=51e_1385934620](https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=51e_1385934620)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Earlier reports was that the water in the cave is like cold coffee and it is easily one of the worst environment to try get non-divers through several km of cave diving. The technical details will be interesting to see once they hopefully solve the problem of getting everyone out.

<comment><USER27> Sounds like they aren't going to try and solve that problem. It's going to be wait for several months or possibly learn rudimentary diving skills

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world- asia-44692813](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44692813)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Assuming the divers will have to shuttle supplies to the trapped team: is there a way to make repeated dives less risky, such as stringing a guide line that divers can follow?

<comment><USER12> Guide lines are absolutely essential in cave diving. At almost any point in a cave dive, there's a risk of disturbing silt and losing visibility. Cave divers have developed a sophisticated set of tools and techniques for navigating in conditions of low or zero visibility.

Many underwater cave entrances are marked with a stark warning sign bearing an image of the grim reaper, imploring the diver to "prevent your death - go no farther". Underwater caves can be enticing to divers, but entering one without the correct training and equipment is extraordinarily dangerous. Hundreds of scuba divers have swum into an inviting-looking cave with crystal clear water, then turned around to see a wall of darkness from the silt they have kicked up; very few have lived to tell the tale.

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

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp- content/up...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp- content/uploads/sites/21/2016/10/grim-reaper.jpg)

[https://youtu.be/PVmqK5YZuxM](https://youtu.be/PVmqK5YZuxM)

<comment><USER29> Top quality video. Thanks for sharing, man.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Could they use a long rope as a track/guide with the "packages" tethered to it?

How realistic would it be to drill a more convenient entrance from above?

</comment><comment><USER31> but how did they survive the initial 10 days? That's a lot of kids to care for. Why were they in there in the first place if it had a warning sign?

<comment><USER32> They had some snacks with them when they went into the cave.

Basically, there is a warning sign for cave flooding during July and October. Monsoon season is not likely to start at the end of June so they might thought it is still be fine to go into the cave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm curious about why they aren't using robotics to driver food - seems like it would be safer than having human divers go back and forth

<comment><USER34> You can't drag 1km of tough power and control cable behind a little robot, and autonomous robots aren't up to the job yet.

<comment><USER35> This thing has a 2km long fibre optic tether and is battery powered. Been in use since 2001. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seafox_drone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seafox_drone)

<comment><USER34> Cool. But that vehicle is open underwater only. These caves are a mixture of swimming, walking and climbing. Lots of power required, and very tough to teleoperate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "None of them can swim"

Great idea to take them down into a flooded cave in rainy season. Even though now found, they will still be very lucky to get out alive. How? I think it is the case of learn to swim and dive right down there or die.

Whatever was their coach thinking?

<comment><USER37> Personally I think the coach should be commended for keeping all those boys safe and alive in such conditions. He couldn't have known the cave was going to flood, the signs say don't go in in between July and September - <USER4> entered in June. Without a strong leader this probably would have been a very different outcome already and they'd be dealing with retrieving corpses.

I actually find comments like yours really grating. Blaming people for situations largely beyond their control is not productive or helpful, especially when ended with inflammatory questioning designed to provoke.

<comment><USER38> Actually, it was irresponsible to take them on a cave tour this time of year because the rains often start in June, regardless of when the official start of rainy season is called. It's been like that as long as I've lived here, and there have been quite a few cases of cave tourists getting trapped during rainy season. So he did a good job of taking care of them once they were in trouble, but he should have not taken them in there in the first place.

<comment><USER39> If the rains often start in June, why do the signs say July?

There may be plenty of blame to go around, but I don't think blaming an inexperienced caver is very useful.

<comment><USER38> He lives in Thailand so he knows it often rains in June. He entered the cave only one week before the official start of rainy season. He took a rather large group of kids, not adults who could assess the risk themselves and decide whether or not to take the risk. I would say that adds up to being very irresponsible.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Need your feedback before I pitch it to the world - <AUTHOR>

Rime (https://rime.co) as a platform helps you to connect multiple social media platforms, and brings contents (NOT feeds) of all platforms to one unified timeline. Rime collects your publicly shared photos, videos, blogs, almost everything and puts in to one place that describes you completely. Whilst there are similar apps out there (e.g. HootSuite, Buffer), this is the first time a platform has been created, to bring all contents of users to one platform. Down the line we are looking ourself as Google for social search(content and people). Currently we support only single keyword search and constantly developing search through scrapping, RSS feed and APIs. <comment><USER2> Not without potential, but not something I would use. Admittedly, I'm not your target audience as I am not an avid user of social media. If this were somehow able to validate accounts were of specific people, I might find utility there. i.e., if it could reduce ambiguity in accounts for people with the same name. I'm not sure how that could be done.

As an aggregator, I would never use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok.. so in current form you can say it's kind of aggregating the content from multiple platform. We are constantly improving it to make feed in rime better than any existing platform. User will have better control over the feed. They will be able to follow the particular #tags, RSS feed and more.</comment></comment>


A Theory of Sequence Memory in Neocortex - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/10/23/why-neurons-have-thousands-of-synapses-a-theory-of-sequence-memory-in-neocortex/ <comment><USER2> One of the key points of this theory is that its learning rule is _hebbian_. A variation of "If it fires together it wires together." Individual synapses make or break connections based on if the input neuron firing immediately proceeds the firing of the next neuron in the chain.

This is distinctly different than say a recurrent neural network where all neurons have outputs at each timestep and weights are updated based on the derived contribution of each weight to the quality of a final output.

The first rule is very local, both in time and space, and the second is in some senses "global."

Backprop has obviously had _much_ more success in ML than any Hebbian learning rule. However we're pretty sure biological learning is essentially Hebbian. The merger / reconciliation of both these rules is one of the most interesting areas of research right now.

<comment><USER3> Sounds interesting, any papers that I/we should read..?

<comment><USER2> I might start with this paper from Bengio et al. and then read more recent papers which cite it. The problem hasn't been solved though so don't be surprised if you're not fully convinced by the arguments :)

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04156.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04156.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To distill down the article:

Most of what we're seeing now with neural networks was pretty well understood 20+ years ago. The hard part is forming hierarchies or clusters of networks that are only active in certain scenarios, so that we can scale learning beyond simple pattern recognition (which is effectively a solved problem today).

I've read very few satisfactory articles on how to go about teaching large neural nets to learn multiple distinct patterns and know which networks to engage in different scenarios. This article is suggesting that dendrites form that orchestration layer by waiting for enough specific patterns to happen in close enough proximity that the neuron becomes engaged and goes to work when the rest of the pattern arrives. This gives the network some ability to predict what is coming, whereas the simple neural networks we model would only fire when the whole pattern matches.

There is a bit of hand waving here and I probably missed something so please add any insights of your own thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> I am working on a hierarchical predictive spatio-spectro-temporal pattern model, which uses convolution-like patterns that use time and frequency of spikes, where each spike indicates a pattern 'match'. Patterns evolve over time from weak, non-specific (in space, time and frequency) preferences to strong, specific preferences. I think this approach has the potential to become the substrate on which we could build general AI.

I am very curious to know what labs/companies are using this approach.

<comment><USER6> Could you point to some papers about that model?

<comment><USER5> No papers yet, still in (early) implementation/experimentation phase. Currently surveying research about minimal sentience/consciousness exhibited by animals and corresponding neural correlates. If there is enough data to isolate functional basics of minimal consciousness, I would like to implement that as the first "function" of the HTM model.

See this blog post for why I chose consciousness as the primitive to build (instead of say demoing the model's characteristics on common tasks like mnist digit recognition) - [https://medium.com/creating-artificial- consciousness/the-cas...](https://medium.com/creating-artificial- consciousness/the-case-for-artificial-consciousness-1aed97ba1670)

<comment><USER7> Something like a small rodent or sufficiently intelligent cockroach wondering around in OpenAI?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The neuronal model used in most artificial intelligence networks contains > few synapses and no dendrites.

Does anyone understand why this is true?

In a typical multi-layer network, doesn't each node in a lower layer connect to every node in a higher layer? All the {L(i, n-1), L(a, n)} edges going from the nodes in layer n-1 to to a particular node (a) in layer n would constitute a dendrite.

<comment><USER9> In this article they're using the word "dendrite" to mean a bit more than just an input to a neuron (which does exist in NN models) - one of the often criticized simplifications of most neural net models is that they don't account for the structure and function of the entire dendritic tree. Specifically, in the image you're referencing in the article they point out that synapses very near the soma directly cause action potentials, whereas further out they will cause some depolarization but not actually cause the cell to fire.

The way some authors explain it is that you can think of a neuron as _really_ having an entire neural net embedded inside of it (based on the structure and function of the dendritic tree), that does some non-trivial amount of information processing even before you consider the connectivity of neurons to each other. Exactly how non-trivial that is is a deeper question, but it's worth noting that these structures are extremely plastic, and change over timescales of seconds to minutes, so it's not hard to imagine that these details are significant.

<comment><USER8> Ah, thanks. So another way of wording it would be to say that the activation function of nodes in a neural network is a gross oversimplification of the amount of logic that happens via dendrites in actual neurons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This theory is very intriguing and intuitively makes sense. I read Hawkins' book way back in 2004 but there haven't been any successful implementations by Numenta. Mostly toy examples AFAICT. I would love to be wrong and see some great applications come out of this (much like the AI spring 2011- using conv nets etc.)

<comment><USER11> I think cortical.io has had success with Numenta.

I also read Hawkin's book and loved it. I'm still hoping that they'll get something going.

<comment><USER12> Do we need a background in neurobiology to understand Hawkin's - "On Intelligence"?

<comment><USER13> No - it's actually pretty straightforward. I think I should read it again :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A very interesting model. It aligns with that general principle of biology that dictates biological systems should do as little work as necessary. The robustness to cell death exhibited in figure B near the end is reminiscent of our own brain's robustness.

<comment><USER15> Knowing not much, I wonder if randomly disconnecting neurons during training would make the resulting network more robust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not convinced that the function of the brain is prediction: it seems that prediction is subsidiary to defining an action policy.

Prediction is only useful for an organism inasmuch as it allows it to calculate expected future utility for actions. And these actions are the only things that lead to different outcomes in terms of evolutionary fitness, thus the actions that are ultimately output by the brain are the only things that determined its evolution.

If the purpose of prediction is to calculate expected future utility of different actions, then it does not follow that a _general-purpose_ prediction device will be useful, because the prediction device might use all its energy predicting aspects of the environment along dimensions that are irrelevant to utility. A useful prediction device would only predict along useful dimensions, and may be very different in behavior from a generalized autoencoder. As an example of this difference as it comes up in the field of deep learning, consider the case of machine translation: you could either train a sequence model (LSTM or whatever) to autoencode sequences---i.e., to be able to predict them---and then use the resulting representations to do translation, or you could train end-to-end where the objective function is translation quality. It turns out the latter yields better results.

Maybe the brain, or part of the brain, is a prediction engine and another part does action selection based on the predictions. But then why would we identify intelligence with the prediction engine part rather than the two parts combined? Searching for an optimal action is a very different task than prediction; it seems you need both to have what anyone would call intelligence.

<comment><USER17> There's a danger here in getting too caught up in words (where what they're trying to capture is what matters), but can't "searching for an optional action" accurately be seen as a kind of prediction?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think that Hawkins has a great summary on some things that are necessary for intelligence [0]. Personally I think the tie between motor actuation and sensory detection is one of the most important -- did a project on that in 2010. Motor-sensory link is essentially how all intelligence evolved. Even c.elegans has neurons to determine whether it should wiggle one way or another.

On the surface he seems to be cramming a whole lot of "solutions" into his HTM (hierarchical temporal memory). HTM is an interesting implementation and the sparse coding is definitely a benefit. However I think he is focused too much on his baby and not on other techniques that may fulfill the necessary components more efficiently.

That is just on the surface. With a product / research balance maybe we just aren't seeing all the cool things going on underneath in research, but it does seem like that research will be shoe-horned into HTM whether or not it is the best architecture.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y43qwS8fl4&app=desktop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y43qwS8fl4&app=desktop)

Starting at ~8m20s

</comment><comment><USER19> _> By firing earlier it inhibits neighboring cells, creating highly sparse patterns of activity for correctly predicted inputs._

This part is so vague. It seems to lack an explanation of how interneurons inhibit other neurons nearby. Also, wouldn't sparsity even occur without the early firing enabled by distal pattern matching?

 _> When relatively few neurons are active relative to the population, then such pattern recognition is robust._

Why?

<comment><USER20> It's true that the columnar inhibition is not the best supported part of the theory but seems a very strong deduction based on many papers that don't directly support but show the same behavior as this part of the theory. We know that minicolumns exist and cells in minicolumns share receptive fields. But they aren't always active together and HTM theory provides a hypothesis for why. This very recent preprint paper out of Michael Berry's lab at Princeton shows almost identical behavior that HTM sequence memory would predict and I'm not aware of other theories that would have predicted this behavior:

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/10/03/197608](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/10/03/197608)

As far as sparsity supporting robust pattern recognition, this paper details the math that shows this:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07469](https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07469)</comment></comment>


A webpack starter kit for your basic web-dev needs - <AUTHOR> Want to make a production ready splash page? Onboarding page? A phaser game? Something that does not require dozens of plugins that result in obscure webpack configuration files?
This starter kit provides minimal set of plugins and readable webpack configuration for these kind of jobs.<p>https://lifenautjoe.github.io/webpack-starter-basic/ <comment><USER2> Nice! KISS at work :-)</comment>


Justin.tv's Newest App Now Broadcasts Live Video From Your iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/justin-tvs-newest-app-now-broadcasts-live-video-from-your-iphone/

<comment><USER2> Does/Could this app locate or detect a user is at a particular event?

If Justin.tv could sort by event, other users could watch events like outsidelands music festival and flip through all the different view angles of the concert.

I understand event based results can be found by searching, but the idea of a collection of event streams intrigues me. Just an idea..

<comment><USER2> anyone from JTV on here? I would love to see/help make this happen. steve at stevederico dot com

<comment><USER3> Caleb of JTV here. This is a very intriguing idea. We think location will be a big part of live broadcast discovery. Nothing to announce yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How long until Google releases a similar thing for YouTube and Justin.tv starts to suffer? :(

<comment><USER5> Not convinced Google could hurt Justin.tv the way you're imagining; the Justins have too many deals, too much traction.

<comment><USER6> Can you be more specific here, minus the buzzwords, what "deals" and "traction" does justin.tv have that google/youtube can't hurt them? HN tends to go gaga over YC funded company for no obvious reason and often (but maybe not in this case) rationality and reason goes out of the window.

<comment><USER7> I agree: <http://www.google.com/trends?q=justin.tv%2C+ustream>

Their problem is branding. When you think "realtime video streaming online" does the word "justin" even enter your mind?

<http://www.google.com/search?q=stream+online> \- nowhere to be found; <http://www.google.com/search?q=video+stream> \- over halfway down the page

It's quite sad. justin.tv's infrastructure is better than their more popular competitors, but performance doesn't always win the mindshare war.

<comment><USER8> I think the results if you add 'youtube live' to the comparison are interesting.

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=justin.tv,+ustream,+youtube+l...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=justin.tv,+ustream,+youtube+live)

I don't think they'll have much trouble establishing market share once they launch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Qik.com (in addition to having a 3 letter domain) has had that functionality for a while. I've used it on my HTC Incredible to record video and have people watch, and also auto-upload to youtube.

Not as well known as Justin.tv though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Qik's iPhone broadcaster doesn't access the hardware video encoder, which unfortunately means that the output of their app is more like a slideshow than a real video stream.

We deliberately waited until the platform could support an app we would be proud of.

<comment><USER10> Do you have HW encoding on Android? Does it vary by device and/or OS version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and yes. We detect and use a hardware encoder on Android whenever one is present. It isn't always there, so we fall back to software encoding if we have to.

<comment><USER9> Well that's pretty cool then. I'll check out the app. Thanks for the reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> LOL @ the pic. iPhone in the night? hahaha The distortion would make my ears bleed too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Proud beta tester here: works quite well. :-)</comment>


Evaluation of C, Go, and Rust in the HPC environment [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://octarineparrot.com/assets/mrfloya-thesis-ba.pdf <comment><USER2> The author has a "lack of equal experience in the three evaluated languages", especially C, but is comparing them for development time and SLOC based on a sample size of one developer and one very small program.

He rewrites a distributed program as a threaded one, because Rust and Go didn't have a distributed computing library, but says Go and Rust have "similar performance" in HPC.

He says he was surprised at the C performance, but there's no investigation of a cause. Maybe just because C is slow...

I don't mean to be overly critical, but these results in the paper mean absolutely nothing. It's a waste of time.

<comment><USER3> pretty sure all programs were multithreaded.

I do agree that the advisor should have pushed back lots harder on the methods; it's a weak paper, even as an experience report.

<comment><USER4> > I do agree that the advisor should have pushed back lots harder on the > methods; it's a weak paper, even as an experience report.

I agree - this seems to be mostly the advisors fault, by the looks of it it's not that the student didn't put a lot of work into it but methodological problems are what advisors are supposed to be there to address; I saw a lot of this back in college, at least with technical papers it's easy to tell what's wrong, with the humanities it's just a complete disaster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem with reading this in BS thesis form is that it hasn't gone through the wringer enough. Most of the performance comparison results vs C are bogus because (to its credit, as noted), the author accidentally compiled some important support libraries for the C version _without optimization_ and used those on the cluster. Oopsie.

 _As briefly mentioned in the previous chapter this performance regression might have been caused by the two unoptimized libraries that were compiled on the development laptop and copied to the cluster._

<comment><USER6> Hey author of the thesis here.

You are correct this was definitely an oversight and I would have redone the measurements if time allowed for it. However I just want to state that the libaries were built with optimizations just not on the target platform which might not have been clear from the qoute.

<comment><USER7> Hey Floya, I'm writing this here hoping you'll see this comment. You're getting a lot of unjust responses in here. The commentors are reading your thesis with the eyes of a trained skeptic expecting peer reviewed, collaborative work that takes years of experience to produce. They're nitpicking flaws and mistakes _we all make_ when we first start researching.

Your thesis is in fact really impressive and very nicely written! Your conclusions and future work section is _excellent_. Really very well done. Congratulations on finishing it. I hope you don't let the irrationally negative feedback here dissuade you from continuing your work, you certainly have a bright future ahead of you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Keep in mind, this is a bachelors thesis. It's not a peer reviewed research article in a respected systems journal or conference. I mean this in both a positive and a negative sense. Positive in sense that the purpose of a bachelors thesis is to introduce undergraduates to an extended, self directed project with an element of research to it. As someone who has supervised many such projects, I think that this is a pretty good one. Great work! At the same time, since the author is an undergraduate, presumably with a full coarse load, this is not a high quality research publication. The results are probably a bit shaky and the methodology is perhaps a bit off. But that's ok. Every excellent piece of work has to start somewhere.

<comment><USER9> Given the comments in this thread, I think the author should be thrilled! What great feedback!

<comment><USER8> Agreed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> GitHub repo with all of the code: [https://github.com/mrfloya/thesis- ba](https://github.com/mrfloya/thesis-ba)

Most interesting part of the thesis, for me, is page 42:

> In this case it was even an advantage that the Rust version was developed > last since it revealed a critical error in the other implementations.

Null strikes again!

<comment><USER10> He would have found the problem in Go too if he was using the comma-ok form:

        n1_idx, ok1 := g.nodeIdx[n1]
        n2_idx, ok2 := g.nodeIdx[n2]
        if !ok1 || !ok2 {

When you do not use the comma-ok form, you are specifically asking the map to return the zero value for non initialized elements (which is something fine to do in many cases).

<comment><USER11> Well, you're implicitely asking for it. In Rust you have to explicitely specify your intent, i.e. not by omitting something, but rather by specifying that you want to ignore it.

<comment><USER10> True. I agree it could be better if omitting the check looked like the exception and not the other way around. You could also argue that encoding non-presence on the type is more powerful/elegant/whatever than multiple return values. But what I wanted to point out is that the problem is not that "Go indicate[s] this error case with a return of zero". The language has an easy way to check this and he ignored it (he eventually used comma-ok in his code, although he makes the check first and the assignment later in different operations for no apparent reason).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel that it's a shame to test C rather than C++, because the latter offers so many advantages to developer productivity -- the paper cites memory management and type-related errors as being major causes of developer unproductivity, and C++ has automatic memory management and templates and such.

Also, it doesn't restrict the use of C libraries, so even if you've been writing C for HPC code all these years, there should be minimal technical difficulties in switching over, except for the time it takes to learn C++, which shouldn't be long if you know C well.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looking through the links, and methodology makes me question a lot of things, most of them regarding his choices in how he allocated memory. First and foremost, he was using the glibc malloc, which belongs in a museum, not in a running system. One of rust's big advantages in performance comes from that alone, given all the memory that's being allocated and destroyed. Which leads to the second question of how he did allocate objects. He knew he was going to allocate a number of objects, yet he didn't pre-allocate a large chunk of memory ahead of time to make it so he wouldn't have to call malloc and friends as often. I wouldn't be surprised if spending a bit of time just tuning memory didn't cut significant time from how long execution takes. I really wonder how much time was spent in the system context of all three of those; I'd be willing to bet that the final part of the examination would probably fare much different had he used the same malloc for the C program that rust and go already use.

</comment><comment><USER14> Any HPC language evaluation that doesn't include vs FORTRAN is pointless. It's still king of computation for a reason.

<comment><USER15> Experiments aren't usually written in FORTRAN.

The programmer is by far the slowest part of HPC. It often makes sense to use the language you're fastest at instead of the language that will run the fastest.

It's very common for experiments to be written in languages not know for their performance (Java, Matlab, Perl, and Python for instance).

For reference, here are some of the packages commonly used in experiments[1]:

        BLAS        Fortran                 http://www.netlib.org/blas/#_software
        NCBI BLAST  C++                     ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/executables/blast+/LATEST/ncbi-blast-2.2.30+-src.zip
        BFAST       C                       http://sourceforge.net/projects/bfast/
        BioPerl     Perl                    https://github.com/bioperl/bioperl-live
        Bowtie      C++, C                  http://sourceforge.net/projects/bowtie-bio/files/bowtie/
        Clustal     C, C++                  http://www.clustal.org/omega/#Download
        cp2k        Fortran                 https://github.com/cp2k/cp2k
        Gromacs     C                       https://github.com/gromacs/gromacs
        HTSeq       Python                  https://pypi.python.org/pypi/HTSeq
        MUSCLE      C++                     http://www.drive5.com/muscle/downloads.htm
        MrBayes     C                       http://sourceforge.net/p/mrbayes/code/HEAD/tree/
        OpenFOAM    C++                     https://github.com/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-2.3.x
        SAMtools    C                       https://github.com/samtools/samtools
        SNAP        C                       http://korflab.ucdavis.edu/software.html
        fftw3       C                       https://github.com/FFTW/fftw3

[1]: I went down this list and picked some of the ones I remember using (been out of the HPC world for a couple years): [https://portal.tacc.utexas.edu/software](https://portal.tacc.utexas.edu/software) It'll be a bit skewed towards genomics.

<comment><USER16> The list is not just skewed toward bioinformatics; a majority of them is bioinformatics software. I would not call BioPerl or HTSeq high-performance- computing software. Some of the software are written by academic programmers with all attendant baggages. I am not aware of any bioinformatics software written in Fortran, which is not popular in the bioinformatics community. But this is not to say Fortran might not be a good fit. The Broad Institute is rewriting some of its tools in C++ with help from Intel to leverage vector instructions. Who is to say if they had started with Fortran they might not have gotten vector instructions for free earlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm a bit surprised that the author didn't mention julialang.org in the report - it's much more suited for technical / scientific computation, while Go and Rust seem better for systems-level concurrency/design.

<comment><USER18> I'm willing to cut the auther some slack here. A bachelor thesis is limited in scope and a bachelor student can't know all languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My biggest criticism of this work is that it does not consider C++. Most of the big HPC projects today are written in C++, not C, and to the best of my knowledge this transition happened in the 90s.

<comment><USER20> Not Fortran?

<comment><USER19> I have not done a census of the various libraries around, but all of the free finite element libraries in common use (deal.II, libmesh, and FEnICs come to mind first) are written in C++. I suspect Fluent and Abaqus are written in C (maybe Fortran?) but they are a bit older.

Trilinos is another C++ example, while PETSc and HYPRE are written in C.

My tentative conclusion from this is that newer projects tend to use C++ and slightly older projects use C.

Yes, there are things like ODEPACK, QUADPACK, and FFTPACK, but those are not under development anymore (as far as I know). The only widely used Fortran library still under development I can think of is LAPACK.

I did not count the occasional 'bespoke' code. There are still some Fortran applications in development for particular purposes (like MOM), but those are harder to survey.

<comment><USER10> I do not think free finite element libraries are representative of commercial software. They usually include a mix of different languages, and that includes lots of Fortran, which is used both in the core (in solvers and linear algebra libraries, for example) and at the highest level for user subroutines. I have seen people using either Fortran or C++ with Abaqus, LS-Dyna or MSC, but nobody writting C (except for some very experimental solvers).

Most users are usually fine with whatever the GUI allows and a bit of Python, but for those of us developing new models, Fortran is probably the most useful language, followed by C++.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> An interesting case study, though not really HPC or scientific computing related. It would be good to see some profiling to understand exactly why each implementation was slower in particular ways. From a HPC context, linking with Fortran and C codes, and exchanging data with them, is very important.

</comment><comment> semi-extrinsic Would've been nice with some internal links in that pdf, especially in the table-of-contents (links to sections and subsections). This is simple with hyperref.

<comment><USER22> Has the link has changed since your post? The ToC is linked for me.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Ah, sorry, it's just Quickoffice's pdf viewer (on Android) that somehow manages to not understand the links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "In times where compilers are smart enough to basically rewrite and change code for performance reasons it is completely inexcusable that the order of source arguments to process is still that relevant."

After reading the comments on C and the difficulties the author had in the compilation process.... All I can say is Garbage in garbage out. I have worked in the HPC enviornment for a number of years using both Fortrash and C. The errors the author encountered would have been avoided by someone with any experience developing large softwares. I learned these things after working on my first project and now they barely, if at all, factor into my development time. Make sure you build and keep a dependency graph while you are developing and this becomes a non issue.

<comment><USER24>
        Fortrash

Why the hate? One could misuse any tool, but that doesn't make the tool bad at what it does.

<comment><USER23> I don't disagree. Fortran is brilliant at what it does.... but I find many of its object oriented features to be very obtuse compared to C and C++. The way it uses pointers drives me insane. Building certain datastructures in fortran just takes too much time.

I kind of wish I could find a good way to make Fortran and C play nicely together. (There are some compiler dependent peculiarities that I have encountered that make it difficult.)

Fortran's intrisics and file handling capabilities make it indispensable in the work I do.... So it is really a love hate relationship.

<comment><USER25> > I kind of wish I could find a good way to make Fortran and C play nicely > together.

Fortran can call C and vice-versa, at least since Fortran 2003 there is a standard way to call C.

<comment><USER23> Oh yeah? I have looked and looked for it but been unable to find any reference to how to do so. Would you mind linking a resource to me?

edit: Nevermind I found a few. When I looked for this a few years ago I just kept hitting dead ends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting work.

It has some pretty basic flaws that are pervasive that the reader should be aware of. First off is the "productivity" measure: the last time I looked around, this was nearly impossible to quantify for software development. The author chose SLOC and development time as stand-ins for productivity. SLOC has a connection with code quality and time of development, but development time is well known to vary[1].

In particular, development time in this thesis is linked to results in a pretty classic "Psychologist's fallacy"[2]; the author generalizes their experiences as conclusive. This implies in particular that "development time" in this thesis should be thrown out for meaningful conclusions, as the sample size is 1. It is, however, an interesting experience report.

Another basic flaw is the connecting of 'modern' with 'good'. The author remarks the main disadvantage of C and Fortran are their age; this crops up here and there. Workflow tooling in Go and Rust are major focuses by the developers: C workflow tooling is usually locally brewed. This does not make C-the-language worse.

More on a meta level, my advisor in my Master's work drummed into me that I should NOT insert my opinion into the thesis until the conclusion. So I found the editorializing along the way very annoying.

And finally, and very unfortunately, the experience level of the author _appears_ to be low in all three languages; this is significant when it comes to implementing high performance code.

\---

Now, for the interesting / good parts of this experience report.

Standout interesting for me was the Rust speedup on the 48-core machine. I did not expect that, nor did I expect Go to make such a good showing here as well.

In _general_ Go performance/memory made a surprisingly good showing (to me) for this work. I shall have to revise my opinion of it upward in the performance axis.

I am both surprised and vaguely annoyed by the Rust runtime eating so much memory (Would love to hear from a Rust contributor why that is and what's being scheduled to be done about it).

Of course the stronger type system of Rust catching an error that C and Go didn't pick up is both (a) humorous and (b) justifies the type community's work in these areas. I look forward to Rust 1.0!

One note by the author that is worth calling out stronger is the deployment story: Go has a _great_ one with static linking, whereas C gets sketchy and Rust is... ??. I believe Rust has a static linker option, but I havn't perused the manual in that area for some time. For serious cloud-level deployments over time, static linking is _very nice_ , and I'm not surprised Google went that route. It's something that would be very nice to put as a Rust emission option "\--crate-type staticbin".

Anyway. I look forward to larger sample sizes and, one day, a better productiv

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Works- Believe/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Works- Believe/dp/0596808321) The situation is actually far worse than just varying developer time.

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychologist%27s_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychologist%27s_fallacy)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Would love to hear from a Rust contributor why that is and what's being > scheduled to be done about it.

I haven't spent time with the code yet, so I can't comment. It shouldn't be the runtime, though, as our runtime is about as big as C or C++'s. My first thought would be that Vec's growth factor may be poor in this instance, but without reading the code, who knows.

> Rust is... ??

Rust statically links everything but glibc by default. Experimental support for musl was added last week.

<comment><USER26> I read more than once that rust has no runtime. Could you please clarify whether it has a runime, and if it does, what it consists of?

<comment><AUTHOR> So, basically _every_ non-assembly programming language has a runtime. Even C and C++. But not all runtimes are created equal. Languages like C, C++, and Rust have a very minimal, no setup required runtime. Other, higher level languages often have something significantly more heavy. People will sometimes say "no runtime" to mean the class of languages which have very small runtimes.

Rust's runtime is here: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/tree/master/src/rt](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/tree/master/src/rt) and [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/tree/master/src/libstd/rt](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/tree/master/src/libstd/rt)

As you can see, it's very, very small. It mostly handles things like unwinding, at_exit handlers, and the like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well, Go and Rust can do better threading on this problem than a not-really- optimized C code with OpenMP. Thats a start. Message passing has to be shown next, and then one can decide whether the installation and runtime of Go/Rust/Python/Julia on something like an IBM Blue Gene/Q with its custom compute node OS is easier than a link flag.

</comment><comment><USER28> 80 pages for that, with one user and one implementation of one algorithm ? Sorry but the rate knowledge/size is very low, so don't be impressed by the page number, it harms the paper more than anything else. Even for a bachelor thesis, it's mostly "filling"

</comment><comment><USER29> Why are there so many bold terms and phrases throughout the text? It's extremely distracting.

<comment><USER30> I often find bold text helpful for key points, or for the first mention of key terms to help orient me in a document. There was something about the mix in this document that felt inconsistent. I found myself pausing to try to figure out why the author wanted my attention on this particular word or phrase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder what would've happened with the results if biicode would've been used as deps/package manager for C.

<comment><USER32> Yeah it would of been nice to see the dev time split up into setup and actual programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wildly offtopic- reading papers like this bring to mind for some reason, that the next evolution of CPython, the one that deals with the Python2/3 rift should be written in Rust.</comment>


Need Canadian health care? Too bad you're not a dog. - <AUTHOR> http://www.macleans.ca/science/health/article.jsp?content=20080501_103008_103008

<comment><USER2> Not sure why this is here, I'd really expect to see it on Reddit instead.

That said, this is only true if you're lucky enough to live very close to one of these few animal hospitals and have the money to spend on immediate service(not cheap).

Medical treatment is always great for the wealthy no matter where you are. The advantage of socialized medical care is that pretty good care is also available to the disadvantaged and middle class.</comment>


Clutch, the Open-Source Platform for Infrastructure Tooling from Lyft - <AUTHOR> https://eng.lyft.com/announcing-clutch-the-open-source-platform-for-infrastructure-tooling-143d00de9713 <comment><USER2> This is very interesting. Is there a plugin model for tools not covered or tools that come up in the future?

Is it strongly tied to AWS or is that abstracted away?

</comment><comment><USER3> Can Terraform work alongside this?</comment>


Michigan Musician Faces Child Pornography Charge For Digital Editing Job - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08muskegon.html?_r=1&hp <comment><USER2> I didn't hear about this case. I can understand the parents of the kids featured in the video being upset, but charging him with child pornography I think is way too much. Even this part is ludicrous, "While out on bond, he is restricted from having contact with children or performing music."

I don't understand why a judge would grant those conditions. "You edited a video to make it look like you were singing an adult song to children. From now on you are forbidden to contact children or sing any more songs."

Definitely a knee jerk reaction. I hope for his sake he can raise some money to mount a case against this. I think the courts need to decide stuff like this...about time they got with this thing called the "Internet".</comment>