PowerShell vs. Unix shells - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/573623/powershell-vs-unix-shells <comment><USER2> The main difference between the two, in my humble opinion, is that PowerShell is a nice (and powerful) addition to a Windows system, whereas the Shell is a fundamental component of Unix.

Of course, the two shells may be equivalent in terms of _power_ or number of features, and any contest a la "Can your shell do this?" would be futile. To me, it's a matter of cultural differences. Think of it this way: a shell operates in two mode, script or interactive (the new fancy word now is REPL). How much time does your average PowerShell user spend in REPL mode?

In comparison, a Unix hacker spends all his time in the shell, even for doing the most trivial tasks. As you practice more and more, the shell becomes a favorite way to operate a computer. Even tasks that may seem easier on a point-and-click interface (like selecting a few files from one directory and copying them into a new one) come more natural to me on the command line than with a mouse. The day I discovered that you can run 'for' loops from your interactive shell as naturally as a script, I almost uninstalled X :)

My only point is that the shell fits in the overall philosophy. You probably heard of the famous McIlroy vs Knuth story (legend?), where a pipe of a few commands turned out to be more efficient than a Knuth data structure. That's beyond my point. What I want to show is more the ending paragraph of this story, what McIlroy had to say about it:

> Very few people can obtain the virtuoso services of Knuth (or afford the > equivalent person-weeks of lesser personnel) to attack nonce problems such > as Bentley's from the ground up. But old UNIX hands know instinctively how > to solve this one in a jiffy.

That last sentence. Unix hands know how to solve these problems because of all the time spent on their command line.

Overall I'm glad that Microsoft is developing PowerShell, and I absolutely agree that it is far more adapted to their Windows platform than the old "all- is-text" mentality of bash and the POSIX tools. However, PowerShell is still treated as a second class citizen in the Windows eco-system, and that is, imho, its biggest weakness.

<comment><USER3> > PowerShell is still treated as a second class citizen in the Windows eco- > system

This is so completely wrong it's not funny. The majority of Microsoft's server GUIs are now built completely on PowerShell. This includes basic products like IIS, Exchange, etc. Where I work, most consultants who implement or maintain these products have learned PowerShell and use it regularly. Windows Server 2012's default option is "headless" install (Powershell only), and that's been an option since at least Server 08 R2. Powershell is certainly not an afterthought - it is at the core of Microsoft's server administration GUI plans. MS have completely committed to it.

<comment><USER4> Interesting - babarock is incredibly wrong from the windows perspective, but from the unix perspective entirely correct. (I work in IT and handle things on both sides.)

Comparatively, the recent and steadily increasing reliance on PS is evidence of microsoft's recognition of the utility of a shell for managing their more complex software.

On the other hand, the fact that PS doesn't have it's own readline yet (it's just a wrapper for the cripplingly ancient CMD) and its incredible lack of basic features (just try managing AD users in PowerShell - sure its easy once you've written your own custom script or mapped it to a web interface or something, but there's no built in equivalent for adduser or about a billion other basic UNIX commands).

It all depends on your perspective. I'm glad to see MS moving away from their decade of GUI dependence.

<comment><USER5> _just try managing AD users in PowerShell - sure its easy once you've written your own custom script or mapped it to a web interface or something, but there's no built in equivalent for adduser or about a billion other basic UNIX commands_

It's not that bad. Adding a new AD user is a built-in command. From the docs:

New-ADUser GlenJohn -OtherAttributes @{title="director";mail="email@example.com"}

I'm not a UNIX admin; maybe the adduser command is easier. But managing AD stuff in PS is pretty easy (especially if you have to do it in bulk).

<comment><USER6> me@my_server$ useradd -G director glenjohn

glenjohn@my_server$ vi .forward

:a

firstname.lastname@example.com

:wq

And there are at least a few other ways to do that. But you certainly don't have to be an admin to specify an alternate email address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> PowerShell compared to Cygwin bash, in my experience:

* Powershell is more capable than bash, straight up.

* bash is easier to use; writing ad-hoc pipes etc. in PowerShell has never seemed pleasant to me, the commands are verbose and the contractions non-obvious; getting help is tedious, and options are often very long.

* Object orientation works well when you're dealing with meaningful objects. But often you just want to deal with a singular list of items, and it can make things more awkward. It's a bit like the OO - relational dichotomy.

* Interaction between PowerShell and Unix utilities is very clunky, because by default PowerShell will include column headers and formatting characters as part of the output. Something else that's unpleasant: PowerShell doesn't have a simple mode that can work well inside a terminal. I mean, just running PowerShell inside Cygwin mintty results in a copyright notice and an apparantly hung program. That's because it's using ReadConsole rather than ReadFile for I/O, but ReadConsole only works in Windows' horrible console windows. You can work around it with 'powershell -', but then you don't get a prompt. Similarly, running a PowerShell script requires echoing a return character to the PowerShell process to get it to exit! Literally: "echo | powershell -file <script file>". It's a bit ridiculous.

* Deeper Windowsy things like WMI or COM automation work infinitely better with PowerShell. In practice, the only time I use PowerShell is when I need access to something in this area; and then I'll take some arguments, do the PowerShell work, then output the results as text so I can do the main work in bash.

Powershell doesn't really feel like a shell to me. It's more like a SQL query command line and scripting language REPL hybrid. For example, something as basic as job control is almost non-existent. Forget about carefree application of '&' and 'wait'; that style of working, doesn't.

<comment><USER8> > getting help is tedious, and options are often very long.

This is what bothered me the most when I last worked on MS systems (maybe 7 years ago now). As much as people complain about manpages, having a quick reference, with some verbosity, right at hand is immensely helpful. Maybe not knowing my way around the MS ecosystem handicapped me, but it was always so much more difficult to find a useful quick reference for what I needed in windows.

<comment><USER9> Get-Help has proven useful at times for me, though sometimes not as detailed as I'd like (even with -full).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Powershell creator's deep UNIX background is evident in its design - they have actually fixed many important problems with most UNIX shells. Some of which are:

\- Moving from a text stream manipulation to structure content. No more worrying if separators need to be escaped within the content each time.

\- More powerful programming constructs like: Lambda functions, parallel assignments

\- Signed scripts

Even though it might not be superior to other shells in every aspect, Powershell's tighter OS integration and OOP approach makes it one of the best shell available on the Windows platform.

<comment><USER11> I fail to realize why any of these features were "important problems" of Unix shells. Passing byte streams between programs is a very powerful idea and transfers the responsibility of interpreting what the input is to the program parsing it. I realize, from a programmatic point of view, that being able to get a series of objects and to invoke a specific method on them is an intriguing idea, but it breaks the simplicity of the Unix approach of each utility doing one thing and doing it well.

The tight integration into the OS is another weakness - I can grab my Linux scripts and run them on OSX, BSD, AIX, Solaris and pretty much every Unix-like OS around. Your PowerShell scripts will never run on anything other than Windows.

<comment><USER12> a) I fail to realize why any of these features were "important problems" of Unix shells.

b) Passing byte streams between programs is a very powerful idea and transfers the responsibility of interpreting what the input is to the program parsing it.

b) is an important problem. It means that there are zillions of implementations of various parsers. That inefficiency costs money. Worse, not all of them are without bugs. For an example consider the problem of searching by file name in a script. I guesstimate that a large proportion of Linux installations has a buggy version of it somewhere. Doing it reliably (file names can have spaces, may contain control characters or slashes) involves, IIRC, setting $IFS.

<comment><USER11> > It means that there are zillions of implementations of various parsers. That > inefficiency costs money.

Most of them (if you are referring to command-line utilities) are open-source. I see this variety of implementations as a good thing - evolution relies on diversity and the openness makes it possible for software to "reproduce sexually", making evolution easier.

<comment><USER12> And yet, after 40+ years, the (AFAIK) best this evolution has produced is <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xargs>, which, if I follow [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/896808/find-exec-cmd- vs-x...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/896808/find-exec-cmd-vs-xargs), still lacks an all-important -- argument. Or maybe we should follow [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7039130/bash-iterate- over...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7039130/bash-iterate-over-list-of- files-with-spaces)?

I think the Unix world needs something that stands to the combination of find and xargs as ack (<http://betterthangrep.com/>) stands to grep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "closed as not constructive by Bobby, Kev♦ 20 mins ago"

This despite 111 upvotes on the question, 249 upvotes on the accepted answer, and 43 upvotes on the HN link (0 mins ago).

\----

Dear Stack Overflow Moderators,

Seriously, what is it that you find to be so objectionable about interesting topics?

Love, bunderbunder

<comment><USER14> There is no plausible objective answer to this question, thus its not for StackOverflow.

If you want to just talk about interesting topics, use a forum (so says the SO masters).

<comment><USER13> "There is no plausible objective answer to this question, thus its not for StackOverflow."

The first half of that sentence is absolutely true. But judging by the enormous number of upvotes, StackOverflow itself (i.e., the people who make it up) disagrees about that second bit.

I fall on the side of Stack Overflow at large. Programming is, among other things, an art. Like in any art, there are sometimes situations where there is no objective answer, and the artisan needs to make a judgment call. And in those cases, a wise artisan may still wish to consider the opinions and experiences of other skilled artisans before deciding on an approach.

Stack Overflow has an excellent format for facilitating this, since it allows some people to share their opinion or experience, and for others to indicate whether they have a similar opinion or experience by simply upvoting that answer. The only thing in Stack Overflow that doesn't actually fit this use case is the green checkbox, but that can be ignored easily enough.

A forum, on the other hand, is a terrible fit for that use case. Forums are for having a conversation, not for getting a quick pulse of what other people are thinking. They leave no way to contribute other than adding an additional post, and they leave no way to get a quick idea of what everyone else is thinking other than reading every single item in the resulting mountain of posts and manually tabulating it all.

It's just possible that the SO masters have fallen out of touch with the SO community. To the extent that they have done so, they are a detriment to that community.

<comment><USER15> >The first half of that sentence is absolutely true. But judging by the enormous number of upvotes, StackOverflow itself (i.e., the people who make it up) disagrees about that second bit.

That's a very dangerous thing, look at what happened to Reddit once there was an influx of people from Digg and 4chan. In fact it is critical that a site's focus is maintained _in spite_ of people's opinions.

>It's just possible that the SO masters have fallen out of touch with the SO community. To the extent that they have done so, they are a detriment to that community.

Not really, SO is just maintaining their site's USP and doesn't want to generate flamebaity discussions. I appreciate them for it.

<comment><USER13> Tens of thousands of views and many answers and comments later, most everything that's happened in response to the question has been edifying.

There's simply no evidence there of a flamewar having been averted. The closest thing I've seen to an unreasonable insult that I've noticed in relation to the topic is an unfounded comparison to 4chan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One problem with PowerShell is that it uses too much resources for a shell. I believe it to be superior in some ways to Unix shells, but I was never able to get (psychologically) past the 15 second or more startup time needed on my machine (Windows 7 netbook). Given that languages like Python have less starting times, I am likely to use the command prompt and/or scripting language every time.

I guess server people would not encounter this problem.

<comment><USER17> As a .NET application Powershell needs to be JITed before execution starts.

However in most systems I never had more than 5s startup time.

<comment><USER18> I have had some long start times like the parent. Typically it's pretty short. I do agree, though, that not having that instance start time is a bit psychologically confusing... it's a shell, how could it not start instantly! However, typically if I'm developing I'll just leave one open at all times and it's not an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> PowerShell was clearly tailored for system scripting, sysadmin, filesystem manipulations, etc... and it does a very good job at that.

Where I find it lacking is in the manipulation of large (10s of GBs) text files, which is what I do most of the time. If I try to _cat_ a large file to _wc -l_ I have to kill the shell because it starts eating all my memory. Even when the memory is not a problem, it is considerably slower than Cygwin or MinGW. I think that the lines are converted to System.String and cached in memory; if this is the case it might be very hard to solve this without an architectural change.

I haven't found any good equivalent of _less_ or _grep_ , things like _head_ and _tail_ are unnecessarily verbose, etc..

Also, the text input is not nearly as advanced as readline-based shells (no Ctrl-K, Ctrl-Y, Alt-Backspace, history search, decent completion...).

I sincerely hope that someone (MSFT or others) comes up with a better solution. Cygwin/MinGW are a reasonable trade-off but PowerShell proved that a much better integration with the system is possible.

<comment><USER18> cat is an alias for Get-Content which is notoriously slow. If you do some googling people suggesting using System.IO.StreamReader instead. Have you tried that?

<comment><USER19> When I say _cat_ I mean _cat.exe_ , the unix utility. My usual workflow is

         <exe writing to stdout> | <filtering/manipulation> | <exe reading from stdin>

Whenever I run this inside PowerShell, whatever flows through the pipeline seems to be cached in memory, and it is orders of magnitude slower than when I run the same pipeline inside bash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow. I love it when the developer of the tool answered the question. And he gave a superb answer. Make me want to try out PowerShell.

</comment><comment><USER21> How much can you do with powershell regards system configuration?

For example, could you put a Windows Server with PS behind SSH and login and config everything that way without having to touch the GUI?

<comment><USER22> Kind of, but you're doing it wrong.

The bash way to remotely administer a server is to SSH into the server, then run your commands there. While that's technically possible with PowerShell in recent versions, it's not how PowerShell is designed to work with remote machines. Instead, your _local_ copy of PowerShell is designed to grab the remote server's management objects, and use _those_ to administer the remote server.

For example, say I quickly want to shut down a service on ten boxes. On a Unix system, I'd use a tool like Fabric/Ansible/whatever to quickly SSH into those ten boxes and run "/etc/init.d/whatever stop" (or equivalent). I guess you _could_ do this all on one line with something like

        echo box1 box2 box3 ... | tr " " "\n" | xargs -L 1 -I BOX ssh BOX /etc/init.d/whatever stop

but that's really rare, in my experience, compared to using a tool like Fabric.

On PowerShell, in contrast, I'd grab the remote service objects, and pipe them into the Stop-Service cmdlet, _locally_. For example (written verbosely; there's a shorter way to do this):

        @('box1', 'box2' ... ) | ForEach-Object { Get-Service -name "whatever" -computername $_ } | Stop-Service

Note what's going on: I'm passing an array of box names in, grabbing out handles to the actual services running on the remote box, and then stopping those, using the _local_ Stop-Service cmdlet.

Other things work the same way.

But my favorite part is that Windows servers actually vend a lot of their resources as PowerShell mounts. Changing the configuration of Apache on your server farm? Break out Puppet and some templates on Unix, but on Windows, use the IIS snapin to "cd" right into the IIS configurations on those boxes and use your normal cat/echo magic to change the configurations. Need to change registry settings? You can "cd" into the registries, too. Same for SQL Server. And because this is all through PowerShell, doing things like redirecting a SQL Server database name right into an IIS configuration file (e.g., configuring your website on which DB to use) becomes easy--again, across a pile of machines.

So: yes, you can remote in. But that's not how PowerShell is designed to work, and you're losing a lot of the magic if you do things that way.

<comment><USER23> This approach most likely requires that the script runs within the same trusted local network, correct? So, technically you'd still have to "ssh" into at least one box, and run all admin scripts from it.

<comment><USER22> "It depends."

Generally speaking, your servers will be bound to the same Active Directory domain, so if you're logged in via AD, and AD says you're an admin on the boxes you're trying to hit, you're good. This is called trusted authentication, and is similar to forwarding your SSH agent all over the place.

That opens up what happens if you're not in the domain (say, you're on your home laptop). Many commands take a -Credential parameter, which takes an authentication token available that you create via Get-Credential. If the command you want to use takes -Credential, then you can still avoid actually logging into the remote machine in the way you would for, say, SSH.

If, on the other hand, the command you want doesn't take -Credential, you do either need to use Invoke-Command, or genuinely log onto the remote PowerShell service via New-PSSession/Enter-PSSession, which is an extremely direct analog for SSH.

<comment><USER21> Would this not mean that to do administrative tasks you need to be using a Windows 7 Pro computer and could not do it from a Windows Home, Mac or Linux box?

<comment><USER22> You would need to RDC into at least one machine and run the scripts from there, in that scenario--so no worse than where you are now.

Note that Windows 8 removes the distinction between Pro and other editions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> After a few years working on a OSX machine I arrived at a new job and had to work with a windows machine. I had the idea to try Powershell so I could share scripts with my colleagues, as I always done. One year later I am still using it, no one ever had any interested on learning them (but they always ask me to run that "dark magic script that load that excel spreadsheet").

Even if my primary goal was not achieved I am still happy that I learned a few tricks with it.

</comment><comment><USER25> I used powershell pretty comfortably for years when managing Windows boxes, it does the job superbly. It's a bit weaker as a general-use scripting language (a la Python/Ruby), but I believe it never promised to be that kind of tool. It's just always tempting to use it as a REPL for when whipping out a throwaway C# project in VS is too much of a hassle. It works as one, I'm just not a huge fan of its syntax.

</comment><comment><USER26> > _"What I think you'll find is that there will be lots of occasions when > text-processing won't get you what you want on Windows. At that point, > you'll want to pick up PowerShell. NOTE - it is not an all or nothing deal. > Within PowerShell, you can call out to your Unix tools (and use their text > process or PowerShell's text processing). Also you can call PowerShell from > your Unix tools and get text."_ [Jeffery Snover - Top Answer]

In other words, besides performing many useful tasks, _Blub Shell_ is highly portable. In fact it is so portable, that it may be incorporated into _MoreAbstract Shell_.

There is of course a bit more to the story. _MoreAbstract Shell_ only runs on OS _W_ , but _Blub Shell_ runs on OS _X_ , _L_ , and _U_. Furthermore, _Blub Shell_ has an extensive collection of utility features which have been added on over the years, so there is much more plug and play code.

On the other hand, why wouldn't one choose the more abstract shell, if it was available?

</comment><comment><USER27> The fact that not everyone is using fish instead of the ridiculously inflexible, unintuitive and underpowered bash means that the shell mustn't matter that much. I'm just glad I found out about fish.

</comment><comment><USER28> UNIX shell is not only Bash... Did you guys try fish? I recommend it!

<comment><USER11> I didnt like it, but a lot of friends love zsh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you cannot make this decision yourself you shouldn't be in this business.

</comment><comment><USER30> When writing shell script, try to develop an awareness of how much you use sed, awk, tr, `` and so on to munge the output from one command into the format or value you want for the next. If it's a lot then something like PowerShell (or equiv on Unix) may be what you're after.

<comment><USER31> I used to do that a lot, but now, I very much try to avoid those for modifying command output - at least for scripts: it can be quite fragile. Usually utilities have options to output exactly what you need instead, or you can get the information another way (another utility, something in /proc, etc).</comment></comment>


The Future Google Rackspace Power9 System - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/06/inside-future-google-rackspace-power9-system/ <comment><USER3> _TheNextPlatform_ is a pretty bad site. They rehash - badly - <USER2> available elsewhere, and add a hyperactive spin on it all.

Here's the truth:

Google uses lots of compute power (insightful!)

Google isn't shifting to Power.

Google does have an active R&D program looking at Power.

 _TheNextPlatform_ misses the whole point here: That Zaius board has 32 DDR4 slots (commercially available servers from eg Dell max out at 24) and it has _2 NVLINK slots_! (!!)

Those NVLINK slots are what Intel should be worried about, because that's where Google is prepared to pay money. They are building computers that lock themselves into NVidia and doing it gladly.

Intel better find a way to compete with NVidia on deep learning.

<comment><USER4> For anyone else wondering what NVLINK is, some links to save you a Google search:

[https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/11/14/what-is- nvlink/](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/11/14/what-is-nvlink/)

[http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-nvlink-boosts- perfor...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-nvlink-boosts- performance,28989.html)

I'd be curious to hear what Intel is developing to compete with this.

<comment><USER5> To add to the above, From Wikipedia[0]:

NVLink is a communications protocol developed by Nvidia. NVLink specifies a point-to-point connection between a CPU and a GPU and also between a GPU and another GPU. NVLink products introduced to date focus on the high-performance application space.

and [1]:

NVLink – a power-efficient high-speed bus between the CPU and GPU, and between multiple GPUs. Allows much higher transfer speeds than those achievable by using PCI Express; estimated to provide between 80 and 200 GB/s.

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

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce#PASCAL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce#PASCAL)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the current state of Power development in the Linux kernel like? I thought it was only IBM holding the fort (via ozLabs) but this could be a big boost.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why does Facebook's Open Rack use a nonstandard rack size? That seems like an obvious barrier for adoption of hardware that was designed to be a commodity.

<comment><USER8> Racks were designed to fit telecom hardware originally. The Open Rack size is designed around common computer hardware sizes.

It isn't a barrier for adoption because swapping racks out of a datacenter is easy, and they fit on standard datacenter floor tiles.

What _is_ a barrier is that damned 48V.

Disclaimer: I run a hosting company.

<comment><USER9> > What is a barrier is that damned 48V.

Interesting what is the issue with 48V, I saw equipment for it seemed to be overpriced. Remember pricing out some stuff and as soon as 48V option for power came into play then price rose quite a bit.

Or is it that voltage is not high enough to be efficient for a large data center?

<comment><USER8> The voltage is high enough. The way Facebook's solution is, is you have triplets of racks: left, right racks hold computers, middle rack holds network, power distribution, and UPS.

The computers have extremely simplistic power supplies that basically can't fail, and just DC->DC transform from 48v to 12, 5, and 3.3; and the large scale power supplies that convert three phase 240v (or whatever you're supplying it with) from the datacenter to 48V are much higher efficiency than the ones that would have been in the server (which you would have fed them, usually, something like single phase 208v).

Redundancy is supplied by just hooking multiple transformers in the middle rack to the + and - terminals on each PSU, instead of a convoluted multi- module redundant PSU (which always uses a single backplane, and backplanes in redundant PSUs fail surprisingly frequently).

The total round trip efficiency of this system is about as high as you can realistically get. 80Plus Titanium is 90-95% efficient (depending on load), but has efficiency losses in rack level distribution which 48V tries to correct.

However, 48V DC can be very dangerous to work with, and a lot of tech workers refuse to work with it. Now, if you believe it is dangerous or not (I've seen arguments stating that it is no more dangerous than single phase 208v) is immaterial, this is the opinion of a lot of workers.

The cost of 48V gear is expensive if you're not in a datacenter already setup to handle it. Facebook obviously doesn't have this problem because they build entire datacenters from scratch.

I personally don't believe in it because it doesn't buy me anything that single phase 208v doesn't give me, I do not pay enough in electricity to have the overhead of dealing with it.

<comment><USER10> 48V danger is debatable, but it might be a good idea to start adding RCD protection to the power sources (yes, this will bring your rack down (or just one output), but better than having people getting stuck to wires or tools causing short circuits)

<comment><USER11> Is this possible? Fault currents are much more obvious at a higher voltage than lower, and I thought most RCDs would not be made to be sensitive enough to catch what might be a dangerous DC leakage.

<comment><USER10> Yes (not sure if there are existing products), because they work based on the difference of currents leaving and returning. (between 48V and 110V there isn't an insurmountable difference in detection capability needed)

Theoretically you should have zero leakage, and you should also trip on bigger currents (but a rack wouldn't use more than 10A maybe?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They are going up against the coming Xeon E5 Broadwell + FPGA. Power9 do offer more memory per Rack. But I dont see how Intel cant adopt with better memory controller.

To simply put, what are the incentive to switch over to Power9 platform?

<comment><USER13> So this raises all sort of questions: Can Intel can be fast enough in integrating Altera(sw+hw+corporate...) ? What is the better FPGA development environment, with more developer share, etc ? FPGA's can be cannibalistic to Intel's business - will they have an incentive problem ? Do some companies(say in china) prefer an open processor, like POWER, and this will create some ecosystem advantage ? Are there any advantageous startups to buy like kandou- bus(faster interconnect) and who will buy them ?

So it's not certain Intel will win.

<comment><USER14> Fpga is trash compared to asics

<comment><USER15> Only to the extent that you can afford to spend $1 million+ and a year every time you change your algorithm. For bitcoin mining or encryption or decoding popular video formats then yes, ASICs are absolutely the way to go. But there are many cases where the algorithms you're using aren't so fixed or where you're not willing to put up with such large lead times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if the inclusion of NVLink in Power 8+ will cause Power to excel in ML applications. It could well be quite a bit faster than x86 just due to the memory/interconnect bandwidth.

<comment><USER17> NVLink and CAPI[1] both have _huge_ potential for machine learning. However, a lot of the benefits of NVLink for ML come from GPU-to-GPU NVLink, which doesn't require CPU support.

1\. CAPI doesn't seem to get mentioned to much around here, but imagine an FPGA directly accessing some shared system memory. It's neat.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, it's neat. (I work on stuff that exploits this). We open-sourced the software side of our first flash IO accelerator last year. [1]

You can do some pretty cool things from a HW designer's perspective inside the accelerator, and in the main application. Since the accelerator is cache- coherent, and able to map the same virtual addresses as a given process (and attach to multiple processes' address spaces) the device can do "simple" things like follow pointers, which used to require building a command / data packet, DMA'ing it to the device, and then waiting for a response packet. This, effectively, frees up the main CPU to do other things, rather than wrangle data. It also means that bottlenecks move.

[1] [https://github.com/open-power/capiflash](https://github.com/open- power/capiflash)

<comment><USER19> So the idea is to present nand a memory device rather than a block device?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> IBM reps love to throw around the "Google is switching to IBM" line. Can they possibly compete with IBM on price? Why isn't AMD trying to reach this market?

<comment><USER9> AMD would still have an AMD64 architecture though? Or are you thinking they should come up with a new competing architecture.

<comment><USER21> These POWER chips are an open design; thus, anyone who wants Google as a customer and has a chip fab ready to go (like, say, AMD) _could, in theory_ just fab some up to sell to Google.

<comment><USER22> AMD doesn't have a chip fab - they are fabless now.

<comment><USER23> Oh wow. Is there a good reason for this?

<comment><USER24> Maintaining a fab when you can't justify enough orders for chips to keep it running around the clock is expensive. As part of the spinoff they had penalties because they weren't purchasing enough wafers from GF anyway, but it resulted in less bleeding than owning and managing it as a subsidiary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wasn't Google at one point all about commodity/consumer level hardware for their servers? Seems a huge turnaround.

<comment><USER26> This is still largely at commodity prices / performance points. It's been quite some time since any of their hardware has looked consumer-oriented, but comparing this to what enterprises buy, it's apples and oranges.

[1] [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920041528.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920041528.do)

[2] [http://research.google.com/pubs/pub35290.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub35290.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am surprised. I thought 64-bit ARM was the newness headed to the server farms.

<comment><USER28> It will be there eventually. It is definitely not there now, despite what some may have you think :)

<comment><USER29> Do you have some data to back this prediction? What is the biggest advantage over x86 server processors?

<comment><USER28> Which, that it isn't there now? Or that it will be there eventually?

The x86 server processors have too much legacy they can't get rid of, and that limits how far they can push it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Kinda amazing that they can fit 2 Power9's as well as 2 FHFL PCIEx16 slots, along with 15 drives and 2TB of memory in 1 rack unit.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hey Google, sell these to other companies :)

<comment><USER32> Well, these are not power9, but in theory... :P

[http://www.penguincomputing.com/products/rackmount- servers/o...](http://www.penguincomputing.com/products/rackmount- servers/openpower-servers/)

<comment><USER33> Anyone have any idea on the rough prices of these systems?

Or is it the "if you have to ask, it's too much for you" as seem to be the case with the IBM power systems?

<comment><USER34> Talos plan to, if demand allows, sell you a bare bones POWER8 (CPU, heatsink, and mainboard) for $3,700 USD. [https://raptorengineeringinc.com/TALOS/prerelease.php](https://raptorengineeringinc.com/TALOS/prerelease.php)

<comment><USER33> Sadly that's $1000 more than they were originally talking about; still low compared to IBMs prices, but much harder to justify for most applications.

<comment><USER34> Yes, very hard to justify when a high-end 4-core Xeon outperforms on some benchmarks[0] and costs half as much or less. Not to mention vastly mature open source floating point, compiler, etc, support. As well as existing (invalid, but still) programs that assume x86isms.

[0]: [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=talos- wo...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=talos- workstation&num=3)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Play Store's Algorithm Quietly Changes, Tanking Some Apps' Rankings - <AUTHOR> https://www.xda-developers.com/developers-huge-drop-new-installs-play-store-algorithm-changes/ <comment><USER2> > _We do not know if the changes are permanent. Regardless, this should be a > clear wake-up call for indie developers that any slight change in the Play > Store's ranking algorithm can significantly impact your app's success. > Developers are encouraged to proactively improve their app's quality._

1\. People use a platform controlled by others to get free marketing.

2\. It works and people love free marketing.

3\. Platform owner changes the rules of the platform, free marketing is heavily impacted.

4\. People feel entitled to their free marketing and complain a lot.

 __*

The conclusion is so wrong: people should actually invest in other marketing channels, preferably in platforms they control, instead of relying solely on the platform owners goodwill.

"Platform" applies to Play Store, App Store, Facebook, Google Search Results, Instagram, Twitter, ...

<comment><USER3> Free marketing? Apple takes a 30% cut from purchases and charges $99 a year. Google charges a $25 flat fee and also takes a 30% cut. This is not free!

That being said, I see your point that app developers are beholden to the platform. I kind of side with the platform here; the play store has a lot of shitty apps that probably deserve a ranking shakeup.

If it turns out to be a bug, that would be unfortunate, but if it's just a couple of knockoff apps complaining about google cleaning up the store, then good riddance.

<comment><USER4> The marketing is free, the "package manager" is not. While the fee is way to big in my opinion, i fully understand why they take this fee. Storage and bandwidth is not free, even when you have a peering contract.

<comment><USER5> Yes, let's pretend that Apple and Google infrastructure is provided 'at cost' after you've paid your 30%.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nearly two-thirds of Uber customers don't tip their drivers, study says - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/21/20925109/uber-tipping-riders-drivers-percentage-gender-nber-study <comment><USER2> I still prefer to carry cash on me for in the event I need to tip I just give the driver or person cash directly.

The other day when I was on a business trip to Florida my driver in pouring rain, loaded my travel bags into the trunk, opened and closed the door like a chauffeur and was very nice talking about various local things I may find interesting. Sure this may be the norm in order to try to get good ratings, but I hardly have to use an Uber to know how common this is.

Ride was $28, paid in app and then handed the gentleman $10 cash after her handed me my bags and he seemed very surprised. He said I could just tip him in the app, which I replied, "I don't want uber getting a cut of your good service". The smile and genuine thank you he gave back was easily worth that 10$.

Even through I agree that the culture of tipping would be better if it didn't exist, I am not going to fight the system by boycotting this individual who is just trying to make it.

Now after reading this article, to me what I assumed was a normal interaction/typical tip was a lot more uncommon than I realized which is probably why he seemed so caught off guard with cash.</comment>


Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/technology/turing-award-hinton-lecun-bengio.html <comment><USER2> Geoffrey Hinton's tech-talk in 2007 (!) at Google is a great watch (with a heavy dose of technical jargon [0] plus some dry British humour interlaced throughout). He explains digit recognition (vs SVM) [1], document classification (vs LSH), and breifly summarises image classification [2] problems and how they were solved: [https://youtu.be/AyzOUbkUf3M](https://youtu.be/AyzOUbkUf3M)

You could instantly see the results he presents were way better than what was state of the art at that time. Amazing.

\---

[0] Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) started a youtube-series covering Neural Networks (4 episodes, so far) that helps gain an intuitive grasp on the topic: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_6700...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi)

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database)

[2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlexNet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlexNet)

<comment><USER3> Although 3b1b's videos are awesome, his NN videos are heavily inspired by this: [http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/). Even the code on his github page is taken from there.

<comment><USER2> Yes. I think Sanderson does mention as much in one of his videos that he's borrowing the course and structure from Michael Nielsen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a more balanced view of the history of deep learning see Schmidhuber's review [http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning- overview.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-overview.html) and [http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who-invented- backpropagation...](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who-invented- backpropagation.html).

<comment><USER5> No invention occurs in a vacuum, most creations are recombinant effects.The pieces of the puzzle might very well have existed, but Hinton deservedly receives credit for putting the various pieces together for backprop IMHO.

<comment><USER6> Various researchers, e.g. Werbos, Linnainmaa, Bryson and Yu-Chi Ho have been doing backprop in neural networks before Hinton et al. Hinton was merely a popularizer of the idea.

<comment><USER7> Wright brothers were most likely not the first to achieve heavier-than-air powered flight. But they made the first controlled, sustained flight. Controlled flight was the real breakthrough in aviation.

It's the same with Hinton et. all. They were among many other pioneers, but what really sets them apart is that they made it all work. They also analyzed why it works.

<comment><USER8> Schmidhuber's take on the Wright brothers:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/421689c](https://www.nature.com/articles/421689c)

[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00491-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00491-5)

<comment><USER9> > In 1890 Clément Ader made the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air > flight, of 50 m, in his bat-winged monoplane.

Seems disingenuous to not mention that this device only worked due to ground effects and "flew" 8 inches off the ground (according to Wikipedia).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is well deserved, but IMO it also signals an upcoming AI winter. This cycle has happened several times before:

1) Some scrappy researcher on a low budget develops a new AI technology that shows promise in a specific area.

2) More researchers take that idea and successfully apply it more broadly.

3) Massive investment in research happens, pushing PhD candidates into extracting every possible nuance out of that technology.

4) Researchers, encouraged by the broad success, begin to think we've found the one true key in the quest towards general intelligence. Suddenly all the researchers are Neats. The research funding is now mostly businesses instead of governments and non-profits. They grow overconfident that it can be used for virtually anything, funding everything in sight.

5) Starry-eyed futurists start lionizing the founders of the new revolution as geniuses, publishing flowery bullshit about how the world will be forever changed and how the General AI revolution is only 5-10 years away.

6) Surprise! It actually can't be used that broadly. Improvements stall, and CEOs start to realize that they can't just dump data in and get money out. It becomes a commercial disappointment, triggering disinvestment.

7) The Neats, disappointed that their glamorous and simplistic theory of general intelligence, start to disappear. Newspapers begin to make fun of all of the visionaries, comparing them to the people that said flying cars were 5-10 years away.

8) A handful of Scruffies take over the now low-funding AI winter, working hard on minimal budgets until a new breakthrough is found and we return back to #1.

This article is showing that we're solidly within stage 5, and we're already seeing signs of stage 6. When everybody is buying, it's time to sell.

<comment><USER11> There's good reason to think that the AI Winter / AI Spring cycle is done. AI techniques are now creating so much real world value (more so than in the 80's / 90's) that there may well not be any more "AI Winter" events. Or perhaps they will be, but they'll be less pronounced. Maybe an "AI Fall" instead of "AI Winter".

Part of that too, is that I think people now realize that narrow AI is sufficient to create tremendous value, and that it doesn't necessarily matter if the "AGI breakthrough" happens anytime soon or not.

It's hard to be sure, but I don't see the kind of collapse that happened in the past happening anytime soon.

<comment><USER10> AI winter doesn't mean people stop using it. AI winter and spring aren't a phenomenon specific to AI...in essence it's the same dynamic found in economic bubbles. In almost every economic bubble we see actual economic benefit underlying the hype, but the hype grows bigger than the benefit can account for, triggering eventual collapse of the hype. The thing that you should notice is that when the bubble collapses we don't stop buying, we just stop _over_ investing.

We haven't stopped buying tulips, trains, stocks, technology, or real estate. And just as well, we haven't stopped using symbolic AI, single-layer neural nets, ensemble models, expert systems, or logic programming languages. The new topological enhancements to Neural Nets won't ever go away either...but that doesn't mean we won't see a drop in investment once the general public realizes that your neural nets aren't going to learn how to do double-entry accounting any time soon. The AI winter isn't characterized by the technology going away, it is characterized by lofty idealism being shattered and investment dropping back to reflect reality.

<comment><USER11> _AI winter doesn 't mean people stop using it. ... The thing that you should notice is that when the bubble collapses we don't stop buying, we just stop overinvesting._

Right, but that doesn't match the way I feel the term "AI Winter" has been used. Now I could be mis-interpreting things, but I've always looked at an "AI Winter" as a period of _under_ investment, created as an over-reaction to the mechanics you're referring to.

 _but that doesn 't mean we won't see a drop in investment once the general public realizes that your neural nets aren't going to learn how to do double- entry accounting any time soon._

Right, but again, I don't think most people use "AI Winter" to mean a simple "drop in investment". If it were something that straightforward, there would be no need for the "Winter" metaphor.

And that's why I say there may indeed be a drop... an "AI Fall" if you will, that still represents a pull-back of sorts, but perhaps just a less pronounced and extended pullback like we've seen in the past.

<comment><USER11> D'oh. Too late to edit, but this:

 _less pronounced and extended pullback like we 've seen in the past._

should read:

 _less pronounced and extended pullback than we 've seen in the past._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Chinese must be furious.

I was at a local government plenary session at Chengdu (long story) a couple of year back. The lead speaker kept waxing about how China invented and contributed AI to the world.

I mentioned some points about about China's AI contributions/influence :

0\. Algorithms -> The OGs as celebrated by this Turing Award (Canadian, but mostly led by American universities. On thing I did mention was due to the sheer factory production of Chinese PhDs, there is a lot of stuff arxiv from China )

1\. Frameworks -> Tensorflow, PyTorch (American)

2\. Hardware -> Nvidia (American)

3\. Distribution -> Github (American)

4\. Education -> Medium, Github, Youtube, Fast.ai (American)

5\. Cloud -> AWS, Google, Azure (American)

China has some equivalent for all of them, ie. PaddlePaddle by Baidu, AliCloud, etc. but none of them have the reach, influence or domination of the American counterparts.

Suffice to say that my points weren't taken too well and have been disinvited since then.

<comment><USER13> Do you really think China has done anything on the level of these three? Basically every new neural network architecture in recent memory is underpinned by Hinton's work on back-propagation.

China has done some fantastic work in ML, but I think the award was a long time coming for these three.

<comment><USER14> It's obvious he doesn't think China has done anything on the level of these three. Literally everything about his comment says that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think Schmidhuber should be up there. LSTMs are everywhere, not just NLP. The latest Starcraft 2 bot from Deepmind uses LSTMs extensively in its architecture.

<comment><USER7> Schmidhuber's significance in the field is not at the same level. He invented one type of neural network, but the "Canadian mafia" launched the whole Deep Learning revolution with multiple breakthroughs and theoretical understanding.

LSTM's are clever and they were bleeding edge up to 2014, but once they were understood better as a bypass mechanism, attention, context vectors and averaging networks and causal convolution are starting to replace them.

<comment><USER15> Schmidhuber did way more than LSTMs. And they still are SOTA on many tasks. You clearly are not very familiar with the field.

<comment><USER16> Whoa. Personal attacks will get you banned here. We've warned you about this more than once before. Please review [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and follow the rules when posting here. When you do, don't miss this one, since it should have changed your assumption about the GP:

" _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to criticize. Assume good faith._"

<comment><USER17> Just a note, I did not find it any more rude than other comments that get a free pass. Commenting that more familiarity with the literature is necessary can be a very factual claim.

<comment><USER16> It was an obvious violation of HN's rules. If you see other comments that violate the rules going unmoderated, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see them; we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted. In that case the thing to do is to flag the comment (described at [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)). In egregious cases, you can email firstname.lastname@example.com as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Extremely pleased to see the weird feud with Schmidhuber sparking up again, completely pointless feuds like that are very entertaining, especially since all involved figures have done good work and don't seem to be sabotaging each other's students. It's like pro wrestling for nerds.

</comment><comment><USER19> 30% of Google ML workload is LSTM. Only 5% is CNN. [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth- look-...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth-look-at- googles-first-tensor-processing-unit-tpu) Schmidhuber should have gotten the award too.

</comment><comment><USER20> Well deserved!

Imagenet challenge and 2012 has been an inflection point but few have slogged through the AI winter and made it through to the other side.

<comment><USER21> was this the year Relu became mainstream? the paper itself was out there few years before too right

<comment><USER22> I believe he's mentioning this:

> On 30 September 2012, a convolutional neural network (CNN) called AlexNet > achieved a top-5 error of 15.3% in the ImageNet 2012 Challenge, more than > 10.8 percentage points lower than that of the runner up. This was made > feasible due to the utilization of Graphics processing units (GPUs) during > training, an essential ingredient of the deep learning revolution. According > to The Economist, "Suddenly people started to pay attention, not just within > the AI community but across the technology industry as a whole."

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Congrats! Absolutely well deserved. Simons' Foundations of Deep Learning seminar this Summer 2019 will seek to illumine some of the issues around reproducibility, failure modes, etc

[https://simons.berkeley.edu/programs/dl2019](https://simons.berkeley.edu/programs/dl2019)

</comment><comment><USER24> Companies should jointly give CIFAR a big fat award too. :-D Without CIFAR's 10 million dollars back in 2003 to the research groups of 15 people, led by Hinton, the research groups may have dissolved due to lack of funding, and our history would be different.

</comment><comment><USER25> And we still don't know if/how biological brains perform backpropagation. Perhaps we should consider calling NNs "weight networks" instead.

<comment><USER26> That was pretty much hashed out in the 70s when NN interest got going again. I'm not sure there is much value in recapitulating the discussion....

<comment><USER27> Well, we do have new perspective after 50 years.

Also, there is educational value in conversation.

What is the value to you in shutting down a conversation someone else is interested in having?

At least cite the answer to the question if you feel it's settled scholarship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Tbqh schmidhuber absolutely deserves a spot here. Not just for LSTMs, but also predictability minimization, various interesting intrinsic motivation concepts etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> Well deserved. I was thinking maybe it's a bit too soon (the Turing Award isn't exactly timely awarded) but remembered it's 2019...

If you wanted a first-rate CS education, you could do a lot worse than to go through the winners of the Turing Award[0] and review their seminal works. I've only sampled maybe half of them but every time I pick one I learn something interesting.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award#Recipients](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award#Recipients)

</comment><comment><USER30> It's interesting to me that most comments are confusing Deep Learning with the whole field of AI in general, when it is actually a subset of Machine Learning. Well deserved anyhow!

</comment><comment><USER31> I somehow associate Hinton with Terry Sejnowski more than his later collaborators. They are all pioneers and this is well deserved regardless, even late!

</comment><comment><USER32> Do you think (HN) that this incentive boost will mean more people who're working on fringe risky ideas will get the energy and persistence to keep going? Will we see a bump in 10 or so years of innovations coming from people who would have otherwise given up (had this award not been given)? Hard to measure of course, but what's your hunch?

<comment><USER33> If anything it's demotivating. Other people that have also contributed greatly were just ignored by this award. While those that received the award were mostly represented by big corps Facebook(LeCun) and Google(Hinton) -- even though these three are deserving as well, especially Hinton. Awards like this are quite stupid. The award isn't even based on a single breakthrough, but on their "collective achievement." This was just a PR thing. Who does science for awards anyway? I thought that was an athlete thing.

<comment><USER2> > Other people that have also contributed greatly were just ignored by this > award.

Curious: Apart from Jurgen Schmidhuber, who else do you think were left out and why do you think so?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would love to hear a long form podcast with all three (and a CS knowledgeable interviewer)

<comment><USER35> This is the closest I could find. [https://www.thetalkingmachines.com/episodes/history- machine-...](https://www.thetalkingmachines.com/episodes/history-machine- learning-inside-out)

<comment><USER34> thats is a great interview. the right level of detail. The interview starts ~10 minutes in. Thanks for the recommend!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> as a non-specialist, it seems like several important and distinct areas of inquiry are just lumped together in the celebration of a "winner" for ML

Text, language, human chat

Image recognition from blurry, multiple views, multiple lighting conditions photos

formal patterns with large numbers of variations

These are not at all the same, yet the praise seems to want to declare "the best" and "beating competitors" .. why is something so multi-faceted, reduced to the logic of a sports event ?

<comment><USER37> The achievement is mainly about the fundamental techniques they developed, not the application domain. The techniques have been applied to many things since, hence the large impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wake sleep algorithm baby! Long live the Helmholtze machine!

</comment><comment><USER39> Academic geopolitics. The "deep learning mafia" has striked again, excluding the guy from the other side of the Atlantic, Schmidhuber

</comment><comment><USER40> they are great, but deep learning is not AI, is not science. I doubt independence of Turing Award committee.

</comment><comment><USER41> how much is changed since those geniuses started to work in this particular field? Me coming from web full-stack dev and see how things change fast and I find myself jumping from A way to B way very quick these days. I just need to know your perception of how fast thing goes and changes on ML.

<comment><USER42> You change frameworks and tools pretty frequently but they are still all built around the same building blocks: html, css, javascript etc.

It's pretty much the same in ML. These people built the building blocks that we still use in ML everyday (e.g. backpropagation, ConvNets etc). But the fine-tuning, packaging and tooling of these techniques also changes all the time and it can be hard to keep up. Having moved from full-stack web to ML I have a similar feeling about the pace of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have a browser extension that replaces the phrase "Artificial Intelligence" with the phrase "A bunch of if statements". This might have been one of the top results.

<comment><USER44> I'm also quite dismissive of AI overuse. My preferred substitution is s/Machine Learning/Machine Guessing.

However, these are 3 people who overcame a lot of nay-sayers to prove some something could actually work. I remember back in university the lecturer said that neural networks couldn't scale because of the vanishing gradient problem.

It was actually very easy to be critical, you want fit a massive number of parameters which are not-very-orthoganal to an under constrained problem? Sounds pretty dumb to me!

I think these 3 deserve recognition for their tenacity and the new world of "under defined gradient decent", sometimes called DL, which they opened up.

<comment><USER45> Computational Statistics is probably most accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> its about time :)

</comment><comment><USER47> I have the feeling this got so many upvotes because people think this is related to the turing test. And that we have a chatbot now that can trick the average person into thinking it's a human.

It's not.

It's about some incremental progress in making neuronal networks classify stuff.

<comment><USER48> Pretty sure the Turing award is at least as well known as the Turing test.

<comment><USER47> "Pretty sure" how?

Google trends seems to indicate the opposite.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=turing%20award,tu...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=turing%20award,turing%20test)

But it's not about "well known" anyhow. It's about significance. A turing test winning chat bot would be a much bigger breakthrough then an incremental improvement in image and text classification.

<comment><USER49> Depends with what bias you want to read the data.

It could mean no one needs to Google turing award because everyone knows what it is and don't know what the Turing test is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think NVidia deserves part of the award, as they have been a major factor in the progress of NNs.

<comment><USER33> Is this a meme? No they have not. Sure they are a popular hardware provider, but NN have been around before they were even a company. I think Fukushima deserves a spot here too, before giving it to Nvidia, but there are so many people that have contributed to NN, so I guess those in the spotlight take the glory if it must be taken.

<comment><USER50> ...Fukushima? Is it a typo for someone (or some company)?

<comment><USER33> He's credited with first introducing the CNN architecture (Neocognitron) and a way to train it with unsupervised learning, inspired by the neurological research of Hubel and Wiesel and his earlier work in training neural networks with unsupervised learning (backprop is now used instead). Probably one of the most famous neural network papers. [https://www.rctn.org/bruno/public/papers/Fukushima1980.pdf](https://www.rctn.org/bruno/public/papers/Fukushima1980.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


LastPass Releases 2FA Authenticator Mobile App - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lastpass.com/2016/03/lastpass-authenticator-makes-two-factor-easy.html/ <comment><AUTHOR> Currently using Authy + LastPass. Would switch but don't feel like resetting all my 2FA secrets to move them to LastPass.

I hope they don't make this a "feature" for their browser extensions as that would undermine the point of 2FA. Likely to stick with Authy for fear of this alone.</comment>


The Skylark of Space - <AUTHOR> http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20869/20869-h/20869-h.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Summary: The Skylark of Space is considered to be one of the earliest novels of interstellar travel and the first example of space opera. Originally serialized in 1928 in the magazine Amazing Stories, it was first published in book form in 1946 by the Buffalo Book Co. The novel was followed by three sequels, beginning with Skylark Three.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skylark_of_Space?wprov=sft...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skylark_of_Space?wprov=sfti1)

</comment><comment><USER2> When reading this, compare also Smith's writing style - fast-paced and rarely even pausing to slow down - with older, more plodding SF styles. Verne could go for pages listing fish species or minutia of scientific apparatus. Wells was more ponderous, with Significant Questions about Man.

A couple of comments:

""What's happened, Doctah?" asked the dusky assistant. ... Here he lived alone save for an old colored couple who were his servants. ... the colored man who had been secured to take his place"

The lovely systemic racism of the era.

"If it were done instantaneously it would probably blow the entire world into a vapor, and might force it clear out of its orbit"

That didn't seem right at all, so I worked it out: 100 lbs of copper, assuming pure antimatter, is equivalent to a gigaton of TNT, or about 20 Tsar Bomba explosions.

"I gather that an ounce or so will be plenty. ... Ten thousand tons of nitroglycerin"

60 megatons, according to the earlier estimate.

</comment><comment><USER3> "one of the great space flying stories"</comment>


Smart Contracts Land on Wall Street - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/08/05/bitbeat-smart-contracts-land-on-wall-street/ <comment><USER3> I'll bite.

I still don't understand what "Smart Contracts" are and what benefit they provide over the existing settlement system.

Can someone help me out with an explanation?

Every time someone tries to explain it to me the explanation seems to be "We embed contracts into the blockchain so there is no counterparty risk." and then they stare at me like they're Eminem at the end of 8 mile.

 __EDIT __I should point out, I get the speed of settlement argument, though as I 've said in other comments T+3 is a feature not a bug to many funds. I just have no idea about the mechanics of it.

<comment><USER4> Securities and exchanges professional here, although based in Europe (no affiliation with T0 or any related platform).

Settlement is the process by which securities are delivered against payment, from one counter-party to another (the seller delivers the securities, the buyer delivers the cash).

What happens today is that both clearing and settlement are necessary because the speed of trading is much faster than the cycle time for completing an underlying transaction (delivery versus payment), usually in T+2 or T+3 days.

At the middle is the CSD - Central Securities Counterparty - <USER2> intermediates the delivery versus payment transactions and guarantees that when shit hits the fan (when one of the parties fails to deliver) the money is on the table for the other.

Settlement is costly: the CSD charges both parties for this "matching & insurance" service; sometimes the settlement operation represents the largest share of the costs involved in a transaction (trading + clearing + settlement; and after that you have also custody costs).

And usually settlement is only available for very liquid, exchange traded securities. Because the CSD my have to put money on the table they can do it only in securities they know they can get their money back. If you are a broker and there is no CSD you have to trust in the counterparties you deal with to minimize fail-to-deliver risk. Which brings a lot of inefficiency to these markets.

With smart contracts, if "the trade is the settlement" (which is a very neat way of expressing it!) it seems you no longer need to use traditional settlement services. The trade only occurs when you deliver the securities. And you have no limitation in the number of securities you can trade. Less costs, less time to deliver, same level of risks as in with a CSD.(EDIT: broader, unfulfilled markets). Seems like a wining proposition to me.

<comment><USER5> I completely understand settlement and grasp how the blockchain can be used to make the paper work more efficient and transparent.

What I don't understand is how it reduced the counter party risk to the trade? The counter party risk isn't mitigated until cash has traded hands. This is the expensive part of being the CSD (and the reason big firms want to self clear).

How does an open ledger help this problem without someone to guarantee the step between block chain acceptance and "cash in my hand with which I can use at the club".

<comment><USER6> Most (all?) open ledgers are marketing scams. The blockchain reduces counterparty risk because it escrows value, is immutable, etc. Private blockchains do none of this and are typically attempts by huckster Bitcoiners to sell software to decision makers at large companies who want to buy into a buzzword.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I dont see how counterparty risk is reduced... especially if these products are OTC products with regularly scheduled payment legs, you will always have counterparty risk. It is an inherent part of trading.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, its really risk shifting from a single counterparty to the bitcoin network.

<comment><USER6> Once you're confirmed on the Bitcoin network - you're immutable. This is completely unlike incumbent systems. Even in the case that Bitcoin 'went down' the account information isn't changing. Risk is normalized under a huge swath of actors from across the world who are burning energy to attest to truth. As opposed to a single company who has complete authority over the data and/or value.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.coindesk.com/double-spending-risk-bitcoin- network...](http://www.coindesk.com/double-spending-risk-bitcoin-network- fork/)

etc

<comment><USER6> These issues are fairly rare, and in this case, it was due to some miners who did not upgrade their bitcoind (when everyone was made very clear that there were a number of large changes). Bitcoin is a WIP. If you're not a wizard, use a bank such as coinbase or circle who will happily insure you against such rare events.

<comment><USER8> I highly doubt Coinbase can insure $5-10 million dollar transactions which is what the OP is used for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://t0.com](http://t0.com) is the subject of the article.

I don't really understand what they are proposing...

 _" Settlement of securities is a business process whereby securities or interests in securities are delivered, usually against (in simultaneous exchange for) payment of money"_ [1]

How are the securities being managed here? Is some entity holding them in trust for whatever party controls an entry in the bitcoin ledger? What is the form of that entry?

Are bitcoins being used as the medium for payment?

[1] I copied the description from wikipedia for expediency: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(finance)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_\(finance\))

<comment><USER6> Bitcoin can transfer any tokenized scarce resource, just like Amex can transfer any fiat currency. In these cases, the bitcoin network is transferring bearer bonds. (arguably registered securities)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how exactly it works. t0 are not very specific about implementation details. If they are using the bitcoin blockchain it should be possible to point out the actual transactions there.

</comment><comment><USER11> No mention of [https://codius.org/](https://codius.org/) ?

<comment><USER12> Codius was discontinued: [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/20985/ripple- discontinues-smart-...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/20985/ripple-discontinues- smart-contract-platform-codius-citing-small-market/)</comment></comment>


US Military's Microwave Weapon Can Fry North Korean Missile Electronics - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/us-militarys-microwave-weapon-can-fry-north-korean-missile-electronics-and-735044 <comment><USER2> There is not any proven tech that can take down an icbm reliably.

This is reassuring propaganda plain and simple.

If the US and allies could take down a rocket they'd shoot down every NK test missle just to make a point.

Absolutely delusional saying this system can take down consumer drones and then extrapolate that out to a missle that is travelling at speeds measured in machs.

Even with drones I don't see how this is more effective than radio signal and gps hijacking which can control a malicious drone rather than destroy it in place. Various companies already do this incredibly well, shoutout to D13.

<comment><USER3> Not arguing about the propaganda point, but there are legitimate reasons for not shooting down test missiles.

If you always shoot down test missiles, then NK just has to keep firing test missiles until they build one that doesn't get shot down.

<comment><USER4> or until they run out of money

<comment><USER5> Money for what ?

As long as they don't rely on foreign supply for their missiles[1], they can manufacture them forever without having to pay anything to anybody.

[1]: it may sound like a bold hypothesis, but I doubt anyone would ship missile materials to North Korea. China could, of course, but that would be _a bit risky_ diplomatically.

<comment><USER6> > it may sound like a bold hypothesis, but I doubt anyone would ship missile > materials to North Korea.

Historically, Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan cooperated on nuclear and missile tech, though I think that was engineering rather than parts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This story is meant to make the American public more willing to support an attack on NK. Americans are generally happy to support strikes that we view as high tech and not targeting/harming civilians directly.

But in reality any strikes with RF weapons will be accompanied by significant conventional strikes.

I think there is still zero chance that there will be any sort of war between the US and NK. NK holds all the cards and has played them quite effectively. The only question is how much longer our president will continue to bluster embarrassingly before he realizes his actual strategic reality.

One other possibility is that the US would be willing to undertake a strike on NK even if there was a decent chance of NK launching a successful attack on Seoul. In that scenario, the goal of the PR is to help Americans feel that every "high tech" thing possible was done to stop NK and that the casualties were sad but ultimately worthwhile.

US bluster over NK reveals both the failure of power projection toward China and China's full knowledge that the US has more to lose from failed negotiations than China does. China will let this play out slowly and let our leaders act foolish as long as they wish.

It's funny how even in spite of the widespread mockery of our president, there is much less mockery of the foolishness underlying US "tough talk" aimed at NK. I think we believe that the tough talk is aimed at NK and not at the American people.

</comment><comment><USER8> This story has been all over the news in the last 24 hours, but it's sending my bogometer well into the yellow because Faraday cages are a simple and effective defense against any electromagnetic interference. (That's why you can safely peer into your microwave oven while it's pouting 1500 watts into your leftover lasagna.) So this feels like a Saddam-has-WMDs-style disinformation campaign to me. It also has a whiff of desperation to it since we really so seem to be pretty helpless to stop NK from developing the ability to deliver nukes to the continental U.S. without more collateral damage to Seoul than the American public is likely willing to accept (to say nothing of the residents of Seoul!)

I fear that the ethos of tell-a-lie-often-enought-and-it-becomes-the-truth has permeated very deeply into the U.S. government. That approach often works in politics. In physics, not so much.

<comment><USER9> I love the explanation I got from my high school physics teacher for why microwaves aren't dangerous to be near; anyone comment on whether it's actually accurate? Or whether I may be misremembering it?

'You can look into the microwave safely because the holes in the grate are smaller than the amplitude and thicker than the frequency of the microwave.'

<comment><USER10> That can't be right because the amplitude of EM waves has nothing to do with spatial displacements (unlike guitar strings). The way it works is that every point in space has an E (electric) and B (magnetic) field vector which can oscillate around a 3D space. The vectors _point towards_ other places in space, but their meaning is a field strength and direction at _a single point_. So this diagram[1] is actually describing the EM fields along a _single line_ , not in the volume of space that the (purely illustrative) arrows are drawn in.

The correct understanding of Faraday cages is that their holes must be small relative to the wavelength: this is easy to remember because on a very large wavelength scale you would expect the tiny holes to not be very noticeable, and on a very short wavelength scale you're essentially talking about the light that you can see your food with.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#/media/File:Light- wave.s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#/media/File:Light-wave.svg)

<comment><USER9> Huh, interesting; thanks. The more you know...

...the more likely you are to misremember things and mislead people, apparently. Leadership, hooo!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> well don't tell them that they'll just wrap their missiles with microwave doors.

<comment><USER12> Don't worry we passed sactions limiting their microwave imports

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe the world should support any country with nuclear weapons in their efforts to build domestic ICBMs. If a nuclear power attacks a country, having it arrive on the tip of an ICBM leaves no doubt where it came from and who is responsible. Using a submarine, shielded shipping container, 4x4 across the Mexican border, etc. to plant and explode a nuclear weapon in the USA or other country would cause much greater long term harm to global political and social systems.

On the other hand, one does not want North Korea armed with hundreds of atomic weapons and the ability to end civilization single-handedly. How about this as an opening offer to North Korea? We will accept you with 10 warheads and end the embargo. You allow full inspections of any location at any time, so the number of warheads can be verified. Seems like new approaches to the North Korea problem are needed as they now have detonated a ~100kT device.

<comment><USER14> Your response to NK is IMHO exactly what NK wants. They think that having nuclear weapons will get them a seat at the table. Which table I'm not sure. What they want from that point I suspect is more than just elimination of sanctions.

<comment><USER15> Would it be so terrible to end sactions against North Korea? Trade should rise the middle class North Koreans up, and the last thing a wealthy middle class wants is war. A well fed and housed middle class seems the best insurance against war possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This N. Korea standoff is a tough situation. I cannot help but wonder if satellite weaponry exists that the U.S. could use to laser beam their dear leader? [Edited for clarity]

<comment><USER17> The weaponization of space is generally outlawed by the Outer Space Treaty of which both the United States and North Korea are signatories.

<comment> barry-cotter Yeah, and the US doesn't spy at the UN because it signed treaties saying it wouldn't, like all the other members of the UN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I suspect that North Koreans have heard of Faraday cage and shielding. The missile has no need to communicate with the outside world, it can use astro and inertial navigation systems.

</comment><comment><USER19> FELCMSMRCS <\- you are welcome, even if you never said thank you per our agreement.

</comment><comment><USER20> Most of North Korea's ICBMs are deep underground in elaborate fortified tunnel systems. Can this technology really pierce deep into mountains?

<comment><USER21> Is this true? Everything I've read says they use mobile launchers (that they bought from China on the basis they had been de-militarized and converted for "logging").

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow, so the weapon fries Nork electronics and _only_ Nork electronics? Weaponry from other nations as well as domestic electronics and infrastructure are completely unaffected?

Hmm. Somehow, I doubt it.

<comment><USER22> I don't seem to be able to edit this comment anymore, but since it's being downvoted so much, perhaps I need to clarify the tone:

Isn't it interesting that this article is written to imply the microwave weapons will specifically target Nork military hardware when it could be used upon other "enemies" and civilian populations too?</comment></comment>


Essential business skills for programmers - <AUTHOR> http://www.singhrahul.com/2013/02/essential-business-skills-for-programmers.html

<comment><USER2> Great little write up, and I totally agree. I am not a great programmer, not even good, But I find that communicating with people, being pleasant, driven, concise, helpful, and professional have given me opportunities that programming skills never would have alone. Not even if I WAS a good programmer. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Bryan. I too have the same experience.</comment></comment>


18% of GitHub Projects Have CI - <AUTHOR> https://maxmautner.com/2020/02/02/continuous-integration-adoption.html <comment><USER2> 18% seems like a huge number to me!</comment>


Language Acquisition Triangle - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/language-acquisition-triangle-bf7763a7fe20#.5gty22uzz <comment><AUTHOR> Want to master many languages? Find out which two languages help make your ideal language triangle and learn them first.

Language Acquisition Triangle (one corner is your native language, the other two corners are the most grammatically and writing-system different, learn those languages that are the corners of your triangle and all other languages you'd wish to learn are closer-by-proxy/relevance/triangulation).

A theory I have been working on for a few years based on my language learning experiences.</comment>


Signcryption standard to shake up security - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com.au/signcryption-standard-to-shake-up-security-339329461.htm

<comment><USER2> Article completely fails to even attempt a somewhat technical explanation or provide an obvious link to one.</comment>


VersionPress goes open source - <AUTHOR> https://blog.versionpress.net/2016/04/going-open-source/ <comment><USER2> Helpful info for me:

 _VersionPress is a free and open source version control plugin for WordPress built on Git._

 _We increase major version numbers quite rapidly, e.g., VersionPress is at 3.0 at the time of writing this, but that does not mean it is production- ready._

<comment><AUTHOR> We try to be very clear about the project status. We would love it to be magically stable soon but unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Relational databases and (sometimes) crazily coded WordPress plugins do not fit well into the version control workflows, but we're already quite far in terms of the core technology and I'm confident WordPress will be a fully versioned platform one day.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py The 'merge databases' feature sounds like either a sweet victory of immutable data that makes life easier all around OR something truly horrible that never should have been born.

If these guys have solved the WP devops problem, they will be millionaires and candidates for canonization.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're still in the process of solving it but I would be against the rest of the sentence :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What is your business model now that you're not charging for the software?

<comment><AUTHOR> Charging for a GPL'd software (all WordPress plugins have to be GPL, at least in practice) is tricky and most companies in the WordPress space focus on services. Which is what we'll do as well. The technology itself, however, will be free and stay free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check out the [https://roots.io](https://roots.io) project, not the same thing, but relevant to "modern" Wordpress dev practices.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a problem that's bugged me for a long time - it's good to see people working on it. Deploying and managing most traditional CMSes is a nightmare, IMO.

MODX has had something similar for a while with Gitify[1] for the site structure and VersionX[2] for content, but I haven't had much of a chance to use them.

[1] [https://github.com/modmore/Gitify](https://github.com/modmore/Gitify) [2] [https://modx.com/extras/package/versionx](https://modx.com/extras/package/versionx)

<comment><USER6> It's bugged me too, almost to the point of me thinking I was crazy. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how people were handling these problems with WordPress. And frankly I'm still baffled. I'd get these looooongggg schpeles about workflows tangential to the actual problem and then finally the admission that you just write down or remember the changes you made on staging, and make them on prod as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. VersionPress tries to automate that :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I put a client's site in a git repo once, but I never figured out how to safely and effectively git the database too. Kudos to VersionPress! I've only learned about them today but they seem to be doing a really solid job.

<comment><USER8> sql's _mysqldump_ CLI command locally or _phpmyadmin > export_ produce a text based db backup in SQL and version that file in git.

If it is a huge site split the tables into separate files but 1 file is pretty good for most medium sized clients.

Git merging db's can be gnarly if changed significantly, (rollbacks are trivial).

This looks very useful and GPL just like Wordpress - excellent!

<comment><USER9> basically do the same with drupal also.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I manage hundreds on WP sites and this tool is exactly what our company needs. Im looking forward into trying it out and contributing the project.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've used revisr for this in the past:

[https://github.com/ExpandedFronts/revisr](https://github.com/ExpandedFronts/revisr)

<comment><AUTHOR> There are some important differences between VP and revisr: [https://blog.versionpress.net/2015/01/versionpress-vs- revisr...](https://blog.versionpress.net/2015/01/versionpress-vs-revisr/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Im not sure if versionpress is having load issues. But Im not able to load any docs.versionpress.net links.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, docs.versionpress.net had HTTPS issues, should be fine now.</comment></comment>


Trump legal wants IPs of anti-trump website visitors - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/17/anti-trump-site-us-government-surveillance?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other <comment><USER2> So - what if the hosting company decides to hand over the data because the higherups are very patriotic and find it distasteful that anyone would disrupt the presidential inauguration? There is no law that prevents it, same as that there's no law against refusing to host neonazi websites.

Why did we cheer when the skinheads lost their domain and webhost, and why do we support the other hosting company in keeping their data away from the government? In both cases it's private companies making their own laws, and that is really worrying. When it comes to it, money will support only itself, and there won't be public oversight.

<comment><USER3> > So - what if the hosting company decides to hand over the data because the > higherups are very patriotic and find it distasteful that anyone would > disrupt the presidential inauguration?

I don't understand the reasoning that prompted you to ask that question. This issue is not that Dreamhost willingly handed the information over to the DoJ, the issue is the government is trying to force them and Dreamhost doesn't want to.

> In both cases it's private companies making their own laws, and that is > really worrying

What do you propose? All companies and citizens have to ask the government every time they make any kind of decision?</comment></comment>


Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/ <comment><USER2> If you go to Google Scholar and search "Tai's model," you can find that this from 1994:

"Tai's formula is the trapezoidal rule"

[http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1224.short](http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1224.short)

As well as Tai's response: [http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1225.2.short](http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1225.2.short)

As a fellow academic, it seems to me like Tai wasn't really claiming to have reinvented the wheel here (or maybe I should say the area under the wheel). It looks to me like she took what my psychologist friends call the "Least Publishable Unit" (LPU) too much to heart. She claims, in the response, that she was asked to publish it by some colleagues so that they could cite her in a paper of their own; it's unclear to me why they would _need_ to cite such a thing, but most likely it was just the typical explanation - where you cite your friends at any possible opportunity, even when they recapitulate Isaac Newton ;)

Granted, I think it's a weak rationale, but I suspect it's not so much that no one involved knew calculus; it's more that they wanted to drum up more citations for people inside their field rather than outside. In fact, I see that even the people who wrote in to protest managed to rack up 7 citations.

</comment><comment><USER3> Beyond being a feel-good piece for math-inclined folks to finally have one to hold over those arrogant doctors, this basically reveals all the worst parts of credit distribution in academia. Until "knowledge" can be quantified and catalogued in an exhaustive database such that new contributions can be evaluated instantly for novelty, this kind of thing will occur because there are lots of inter-academic communication barriers to intermediate.

Also, the context of citations is important and isn't quantified by anyone. My guess would be that this paper has been cited more as a cautionary tale than in actual practice, and those two citations should not be treated equally.

<comment><USER4> Academia is just one of those ancient industries that is tough to crack because of how traditional it is. I just know there's some hungry entrepreneurs waiting to pounce on the idea of a "Modern Peer Review Journal" startup, but you will not be 'disrupting' this industry anytime soon I'm afraid.

Just by the way Tai's Method was invented in 1994. Nothing has changed since then in terms of peer-review credibility or reliability. You will need to be a genius or a miracle worker to change up academia.

<comment><USER5> >"I just know there's some hungry entrepreneurs waiting to pounce on the idea of a "Modern Peer Review Journal" startup, but you will not be 'disrupting' this industry anytime soon I'm afraid."

What would they add beyond sci-hub?

<comment><USER6> one (far-fetched) idea would be peer-reviewed experimental research videos. See how the authors did the steps in their study. When an author writes up their experimental steps as a reader we are told the best version of events, however, the map is not the territory. Writing up research tells us little about the quality of the work, which is inferred from the publication, quality of writing, lab group, funding body etc.

Also, it would give the people doing the grunt work and gathering the experimental data some visibility rather than just the lead author.

<comment><USER7> The Journal of Visualized Experiments [0, 1] publishes peer-reviewed videos of experimental research. You should check it out if you're interested.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Visualized_Experime...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Visualized_Experiments) [1] [https://www.jove.com/](https://www.jove.com/)

<comment><USER6> thanks, super cool - I feel like this should be part of the peer review process, especially for high impact journals with novel findings

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> integrate-this From the paper:

In Tai's Model, the total area under a curve is computed by dividing the area under the curve between two designated values on the X-axis (abscissas) into small segments (rectangles and triangles) whose areas can be accurately calculated from their respective geometrical formulas. The total sum of these individual areas thus represents the total area under the curve. Validity of the model is established by comparing total areas obtained from this model to these same areas obtained from graphic method Gess than ±0.4%). Other formulas widely applied by researchers under- or overestimated total area under a metabolic curve by a great margin.

Absolutely hilarious!

<comment><USER8> Sorry, I'm not very smart or something, I don't get why it's hilarious, can you explain?

<comment> integrate-this She rediscovered part of a first semester calculus course and named it after herself, then had it published, and literally nobody stopped this from getting into a medical journal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Presently cited over 300 times according to Google Scholar:

[https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?cites=18129095207210817294...](https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?cites=18129095207210817294&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en)

It's like an academic equivalent of a software patent on an existing idea.

<comment><USER4> Someone pointed out that most of them probably cited as a joke, like in the legal field where they cite ridiculous lawsuit names ("The United States of America vs Satan")

<comment><USER10> Yeah, they're not serious citations. They're either criticisms or jokes. I've heard that it's become a bit of a meme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ha!

For whatever it's worth, physicists aren't necessarily up on everything written by the medical community. Take for example, these letters to Diabetes Care written in 1994 criticizing Tai's article soon after it was published:

www.math.uconn.edu/~kconrad/math1132s14/handouts/taicomments.pdf

<comment><USER12> _> For whatever it's worth, physicists aren't necessarily up on everything written by the medical community. Take for example, ..._

I'm confused. While I definitely believe that you are correct in that assessment, the example you gave doesn't seem relevant.

Mary Tai was an EDD (doctorate of education), not a physicist. and the reply was from the mathematical community, not the medical community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is knowledge knowledge if unknown?

This is similar to founders/creators getting kicked out when mass marketing kicks in - who generated the wealth?

In terms of human good, unfortunately it's the latter.

And if the definition of the Scientific Method includes sharing with a community. If so, you cannot do science alone. But how big does the community need to be? Does sharing it with one other person enough? A small community? A large community? _Everyone_?

I think, if we're going to include sharing, it has to be with all humanity (broadly, to include other imtelligences). Wartime science _isn 't_ science.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is sad because it shows that general enducation standards have dropped dramatically across the board given that this sort of stuff really should be (and used to be) known by every high school student..

<comment><USER15> What country or state are you guys in? We've never touched on calculus in Pennsylvania high schools. The advanced math courses focused on trigonometry.

<comment><USER14> Australia in the 70's

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Previously on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1964613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1964613)

And again: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17250073](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17250073)

</comment><comment><USER17> I made top dollar in college tutoring bio majors in calculus. It just wasn't their core competency.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone have a reference for 'cutting it out and weighing it'?

</comment><comment><USER19> Has she applied for a patent yet?

</comment><comment><USER20> That's incredible.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's a trap(ezoid)!

</comment><comment><USER22> Don't judge a paper (solely) by the number of citations.</comment>


San Diego Hacker News Meetup 57 This Friday (10/24) - <AUTHOR> http://anyvite.com/rslnxea35f

<comment><USER2> Excited that things like this are starting to surface in the SD area, can't wait to get out of SF. Been here 10 years and ready to leave.

Yes, I'll be giving up a rent-controlled apartment 50% under market value. But SD is that awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been a few times now and really enjoy them.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are really 57 of you?

By the way, is it really as expensive to live in San Diego as I imagine?

<comment><USER5> SoCal is expensive. LA/OC/San Diego..

I moved to OC from Oklahoma. 1400 sq ft. home in OK = 130k, in OC, 500k. With variations depending on area, of course, but in general, yes very expensive. Taxes feel about the same -- I think CA has higher state income tax, but the difference wasn't terrible. Then there is gas prices...and traffic. And the toll roads are stupid expensive.

BUT, at least it's not San Francisco expensive :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Any in the OC/LA area?</comment>


A closer look into the RSA SecureID software token - <AUTHOR> http://www.sensepost.com/blog/7045.html <comment><USER2> If you've got a rootkit on the machine, an easier way is to simply read out of memory? I presume the key would be in the clear, in memory at some stage.

<comment><USER3> Lsadump, a tool they mention in the article, does just that for the Windows machine key. The other token input data is protected with that key.

Reading a single token code out of memory from the soft token process while running would certainly work if the targets computer was on and the soft token was in use, but having a completely independent cloned instance gives the attacker a lot more flexibility when impersonating the user.</comment></comment>