Segway inventor on future technology – and why videogames aren't it - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jul/22/dean-kamen-interview

<comment><USER2> Dean Kamen has a track record that is typical of any serial inventor, some hits, lots of misses. He sometimes is way ahead of the curve and manages to get it right, most of the times it goes nowhere.

Still, he's better off than most of us and he's living proof that inventors don't need to die penniless.

Whatever he's saying, there is always some little gem in there that you probably hadn't thought of. The world is a -much- better place with him in it, an interesting and productive person and with a reasonably nice personality.

Truely an original and inspiring figure for anybody that likes to invent things or that dreams of improving the world.

Here is a picture of his house by the way, I've never seen anything quite like it:

[http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/119467546_72bf35b18c.jpg?v...](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/119467546_72bf35b18c.jpg?v=0)

<comment><USER3> That looks sustainable. I applaud what he's done but also wonder how "owns two jets, two helicopters and a private island" fits with deep concerns about sustainability. Mind you, I'm sure on the balance he's still ahead when it comes to giving back more than he's taken.

<comment><USER2> That's a good point. I think that very few people actually practice what they preach.

The way in which society rewards successful people is to give them lots of money, I suspect that the real equation is not just whether you've given back during your life more than what you have taken but how much you will have influenced the world for the worse or the better in the long term.

In that sense it is a lot harder to figure out how much a single individual can change things.

Two jets, two helicopters and an island sound a bit over the top, but I think I'd have to know more about the uses they're being put to before I'd make a call on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I made a lot of DK jokes after the Segway came out - I thought it was a solution in search of a problem, and its high price made it an expensive toy more than anything else. But I was impressed with his water purification machine last year, and I share his frustration* with much of our technological effort and spend going towards frivolous things.

* while recognizing that some of this stems from not being able to make even more money :)

Article ended just when it was starting to get interesting though.

<comment><USER5> His water purification system is really amazing. You would think that all of the 'help save the worlds poor' non-profits would be jumping all over it. Here's the Wired article from last year on it - <http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam/>

<comment><USER6> Here's why: <http://www.appropedia.org/Slingshot_water_purifier>

It costs WAY WAY too much. He "hopes" to get it below $2000, which means right now it's more than that. And after you read the $/L estimate, add in the cost of fuel and you'll see the device is not cost effective (when compared to other devices that do the same thing).

According to here: [http://www.ecofriend.org/entry/powered-by-cow-dung- slingshot...](http://www.ecofriend.org/entry/powered-by-cow-dung-slingshot- renders-potable-water/) the system cost is $5200.

<comment><USER7> It would come down in cost with economies of scale, and improved production techniques, and... in 20 years, it would be out of patent.

I think there is a moral dilemma when someone creates something immensely valuable, but wants to be paid for it. But... wouldn't a world in which people didn't get paid quickly become rotten? And is it any different from people needing money for life-saving surgery (because the surgeons, hospitals and suppliers all want to be paid). See also the pied piper.

Factual content: there's a camping device for purifying water with ultraviolet light <http://www.steripen.com/> but it just kills things, and won't remove salt or arsenic.

<comment><USER8> how is it superior to simple bleach based purification? [http://www.survivaltopics.com/survival/better-than-bleach- us...](http://www.survivaltopics.com/survival/better-than-bleach-use-calcium- hypochlorite-to-disinfect-water/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think Kamen is wrong for dismissing a video game (or any kind of software project) as frivolity. I'm not sure that giving a water purifier to a starving village is necessarily "better" than a video game that provides millions of people with a few hours of entertainment every day. I tend to be wary of people who rush to grab the moral high ground.

I think it's noble that he choose to dedicate his genius to helping people, but there's no need to belittle the work of others.

<comment><USER10> Video games are entertainment, but not the only kind and so not themselves essential. Water is the only water.

There is an actual value scale here for people, and belittling or denying it shouldn't be part of choosing to be a game maker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it me or is he basically saying: no one wants to spend the money to buy my products?

He talks about global changes and stuff, but he prices his things too high. I really wanted, and could have used, a segway - but I took one look at the price and just laughed.

I don't know how much the slingshot costs, but I bet he wants tons of money for it.

He is great at making stuff. He's great at selling (as in convincing) people. He's terrible at selling (as in moving product).

He needs someone to act as a reality check, AKA market research person.

<comment><USER2> The segway was a 'miss' pricewise and there are lots of other things wrong with it, but it is hardly the only thing Dean Kamen invented, chances are you know someone that uses his main invention (the 0 contact dialysis pump) regularly.

The segway would have certainly sold more if the price had been lower, I thought that given the parts in it it should not have cost more than an electric bicycle but I think it is fine for him to charge for it whatever he wants.

The market proved to him that it was too expensive, and that puts it right up there with the Sinclair C5 (another one of those characters).

I'm sure that lessons were learned.

Phenomenal pre-launch buzz around the segway by the way.

<comment><USER11> "The day we made the first Segway, the very first one, we drew pictures of enclosed ones. Going back and tweaking things to make them 5% better or 3% cheaper? There are whole industries who know how to do that very well. Our position is been there, done that, did it, _changed the world,_ move on."

He does not seem to understand that cost is the number one factor for all inventions. An immortality pill that costs 2trillion is not going to sell to anyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _"More than ever, the world needs good engineers. However, the pool of talent is shrinking not growing."_

 _That's not all. According to Kamen: "Today's children are the first generation in which it is highly probable that their average quality of life, and education level, will be less than it was for their parents."_

Are both of these statements really true worldwide? (I can see how they might be true in the United States, although I think the latter is too pessimistic even then)

<comment><USER2> Average quality of life could do with some definition.

It's a pretty broad statement. If it means getting a solid education I'm with Kamen, if it means having access to information then I don't. If it means getting food on the table then the jury is still out. It's hard to make such statements without further qualification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _In order to put them in volume production, you need a well-defined market and a distribution strategy_

Dean's frustrations with the realpolitik of the world are somewhat surprising.

A man of his intellect should have understood a long time ago that broken states are not going to be fixed by technology. But I suppose he's also a great idealist and that would color his view of the world.

The bottom line is no matter how great your technology for clean water or dung powered engines is, it can't fix a broken state run by thugs and criminals.

Truly fixing the world is much harder then building sterling engines. But it is possible. The proper reaction is not to get frustrated but to change strategies.

Dean is smart and while he may not be as experienced with 3rd world politics as he is with technology, his wealth and intellect could make a GREAT difference IF he truly looked at realpolitiks as an engineering challenge, rather then get frustrated and discouraged by it.

<comment><USER2> Technologists can have all kinds of disconnects from how things really work, when you're good at fixing and inventing machinery the temptation is to view everything as a machine and to 'fix' it in some way.

The worlds problems are not going to be solved by a single individual, no matter how gifted, but you can't fault a guy for trying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I respect Dean Kamen's intelligence and creativity, but it appears to me he is trying to solve problems that may not exist. His frustration stems for this idea that he needs to create a "sustainable" world. What if he is wrong? What if the world is "sustainable" without his inventions? I agree with his premise that there is too little long term planning, but long term vision is more educated guessing than science. Look back in history and see how wrong many of the predictions have been, especially ones of doom and gloom. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb> While things are far from perfect and could be improved, the sky isn't likely to fall.

</comment><comment><USER15> "In order to put them in volume production, you need a well-defined market and a distribution strategy. The problem is that most of our commercial partners - even the giants - do not do a lot of business in the underdeveloped parts of the world. This is not a shortage of technology. It's a shortage of courage, vision, awareness: a lot of human things."

Social and business processes are a technology in need of inventing too. The creativity behind Grameen Bank, Kiva, DonorsChoose, etc is just as important as the tech behind his Slingshot and motor.

I love Kamen but right now he sounds like a whiny engineer wondering why the world isn't beating a path to his door. The job isn't over once the technology exists.

</comment><comment><USER16> With his track record, I would hardly be willing to take his advice about the future.</comment>


RoboBrrd : Your DIY Educational Robotic Pet - <AUTHOR> http://robobrrd.com/learn/googleplus/ <comment><USER2> I think she's on to something with fun educational DIY robotics projects. I wished my sun was a bit older, but I'll probably chip in anyways.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just made my indiegogo contribution to get a kit. Looks really interesting.</comment>


SUN 9:00 Video - Likes Twitter, "Our business goes stale as soon as product is released." "Is technology a competitive weapon, or a cost?" - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=463 <comment><AUTHOR> "Teenagers have a higher chance of finding a buddy on the same street [via friend location software on their phone] than soldiers do."</comment>


What Went Wrong with Coronavirus Testing in the U.S. - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-went-wrong-with-coronavirus-testing-in-the-us <comment><USER2> Lets underline what is happening here.

When they get nervous, people want to see centralised control protecting them. I'm the same. But we have pretty solid evidence that distributed market systems can react much more quickly and comprehensively than a centralised body. Parellelise the response, essentially.

In this case, there was a crisis. Control was centralised into a system that statistically has to be supremely fault tolerant to work. The system wasn't especially fault tolerant and didn't work. There is no need to centralise _control_ in a crisis, centralising _information_ is what matters. If the CDC had a register of which tests it supported and let the market be a little bit confused then the situation in the US would be substantially better now.

Turns out a bit of nervousness was warranted. Extremely sarcastic well done to the people at the CDC who successfully kept everyone going on with their lives as normal while they found their feet.

<comment><USER3> Did any countries that handled it better do so via a distributed market response?

<comment><USER2> I dunno. I googled "south korea test kit production" and found:

> On January 16, Chun Jong-yoon, the chief executive and founder of molecular > biotech company Seegene, told his team it was time to start focusing on > coronavirus.

> "Even if nobody is asking us to, we are a molecular diagnosis company. We > have to prepare in advance," he remembered thinking at the time.

> Seegene is one of four domestic companies providing coronavirus test kits in > South Korea.

> But the company is also facing international demand from about 30 countries > -- including Italy and Germany -- some of which are using Seegene's products > on patients, Chun said.

[https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-south- ko...](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-south-korea- testing-intl-hnk/index.html)

These people exist. Let them do their thing.

I'm sure the government can help; but there is a role for them. But the CDC didn't fill its role and that is a serious risk that is _inherent centralised systems_.

<comment><USER4> I think it also explains how Korea could have a very different tactic compared to many countries - test a lot more people right away, drive-in testing, then announce where infected people had been to etc.

Here, since all test kits are imported and we might stop getting them, it makes sense to really minimize testing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> tl;dr: (I love the New Yorker most of the time, but their bury-the-reader-in- prose style is absolutely NOT an appropriate fit for this story)

1\. A technical messup led to the orginal batch of CDC tests being bad. This seems unavoidable. Stuff happens.

2\. A bureaucratic disaster in HHS led to delays trying to get private tests certified. This will forever be fodder for conspiracy arguments, as both the HHS secretary and president were issuing statements at the time pointing to low positive test counts as evidence for the virus not being serious.

<comment><USER6> This is not a correct summary of the article!

The article never suggests or discusses the potential of the bureaucratic problems at the HHS and the resulting delays to stoke or support conspiracy arguments. On the contrary, that part appears to be OP's own reflection on the subject and should not be attributed to New Yorker.

Source: Just finished reading the full article.

<comment><USER5> Did you miss the section starting "Yet flexibility was not what Jerome and his lab found when they tried to get an E.U.A. for their COVID-19 test." ? I don't know how else to read that. It's paragraphs and paragraphs of evidence detailing the bureaucratic mess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Trump said his thought is he handled it 10/10.

<comment><USER8> I thought that President Trump appointed Vice President Pence to lead the government response:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronaviru...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronavirus- china-live-updates/2020/02/26/f889693a-580e-11ea-9000-f3cffee23036_story.html)

But then I read that Jared Kushner was somehow involved/in charge:

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jared- kush...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jared-kushner- coronavirus-karlie-kloss-dad-facebook-trump-a9400291.html)

Either they are doing a great job and getting everyone involved, or more likely, they are doing a terrible job, and no-one knows what they are doing.</comment></comment>


Mountain Man - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi

<comment><USER2> > _Dashrath Manjhi (c. 1934 – 17 August 2007), also known as "Mountain Man", > was a poor laborer in Gehlaur village, near Gaya in Bihar, India, who carved > a path through a mountain using only a hammer and chisel. After 22 years of > work, Dashrath shortened travel between the Atri and Wazirganj blocks of > Gaya town from 55 km to 15 km._

Apparently he lived off the charity of people hoping for a 40 km reduction in the route.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Quora Answer does more justice to his story:[http://bhushan.quora.com/Dashrath-Manjhi-%E2%80%93-The- Man-W...](http://bhushan.quora.com/Dashrath-Manjhi-%E2%80%93-The-Man-Who- Moved-a-Mountain-The-Mountain-Man)

</comment><comment><USER3> > _Though most villagers taunted me at first, there were quite a few who lent > me support later by giving me food and helping me buy my tools_

I mean they could've helped him cut through the rock...</comment>


Just Another Wednesday At Ahalogy - <AUTHOR> http://www.ahalogy.com/2014/03/26/just-another-wednesday-at-ahalogy.html

<comment><USER2> The office looks great! Bit messy, but great!</comment>


Wavelets (1994) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cybertester.com/data/wavelet.pdf <comment><USER2> Something that blew my mind the first time I learned it:

You can think of a function f(x) as the limit of an infinitely big vector where the entries index the infinitesimal. Eg f(x) = [...f(-2 _dx), f(-dx), f(0), f(dx), f(2_ dx)...]. The dot product of two functions (f,g) is still the usual sum[f(x)*g(x)] but the sum is replaced with an integral. Sin and Cos of integer frequencies happen to have a dot product of 0 (check it) which means doing a change of basis into those functions (aka the Fourier transform) happens to work out really nicely. Other than that Sin and Cos are not really privileged. For example you can do a transform into the basis of polynomial functions if you wanted to (aka the Taylor series). Any basis you can cook up would do just as well so long as its a complete basis. Just like in linear algebra, you have a complete basis if you can use linear combinations to construct the vectors ... [...1,0,0...], [...0,1,0...], [...0,0,1...] ... (aka the dirac delta functions). Differentiation is a matrix with dx on the off diagonal and -dx on the diagonal.

<comment><USER3> What should I google to read more about this kind of thing?

<comment><USER4> These kind of heuristics are supposedly a prerequisite to the formal study, but sadly most textbooks don't spend the time talking about it (since logically it's not necessary). Instead of reading up on functional analysis (Banach spaces and Hilbert spaces), read bits of its history to get a taste. Here's one that's not too long [http://courses.mai.liu.se/GU/TATM85/FA- history.pdf](http://courses.mai.liu.se/GU/TATM85/FA-history.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wavelets were supposed to be a big thing like 15-20 years ago ... what happened? Do any mainstream modern codecs use wavelets? I'm not aware of any

Edit: looks like the Dirac video codec is based on wavelets. Good to know all of that research wasn't for nothing!

<comment><USER6> I attended a talk by Stephane Mallat a few months back about the work his lab is doing on wavelet scattering transforms. It seems they're making great progress in developing deep neural networks based on them that don't need to be learned.

It's not as hyped as mainstream deep learning methods but I think it holds a lot of promise since it cuts down on learning time, is mostly unsupervised, gives you control over the network's features and is a more theoretically principled way to build networks than just defining the loss and crossing your fingers while it's optimizing as we're doing right now (bit of an hyperbole).

I could go on, it's absolutely fascinating. More info (in english & french): [https://edouardoyallon.github.io/thesis.pdf](https://edouardoyallon.github.io/thesis.pdf)

<comment><USER7> I'm not familiar with this particular research direction.

On the more general area Mallat has a good and approachable (not very technical) book on the area: "A Wavelet Tour of Signal Processing". Worth a look for anyone intrigued by wavelets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gilbert Strang is a delightful writer.

" _What do you say to a thesis student you don 't remember? In that position I suggest something very short: 'Tell me more.' The most amazing part was his thesis topic. 'I am designing the filter bank for MIT's entry in the HDTV competition.' Some days you can't lose, even if you deserve to._"

</comment><comment><USER9> i wrote my master thesis on wavelets! a few years back they morphed into shearlets and contourlets.

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

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

<comment><USER7> They didn't really morph, these were approaches to deal with a fundamental issue in signal representation in higher dimensions that comes up when you use tensor product representations. Simply put, wavelets are not good at capturing edges in signals of dimension > 1 (although they are great at it for dimension 1)

The fundamental (functional analysis) research in this area split in a few directions. One as you mention, mostly driven by imaging research, but also frame theory and non tensor-product basis, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My thesis defense was about wavelets and it was in 1995! Had to implement my own FTT and rendered 3D charts in Excel...

</comment><comment><USER11> JPEG2000 uses Wavelets [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000)

</comment><comment><USER12> I love how you can decompose one image in wavelets and edit just some layers of it (in GIMP), and those retouches end up as subtle improvements of the image.

</comment><comment><USER13> The 2017 Abel Prize was awarded to Yves Meyer (no relation) for his contribution to the theory of wavelets. This is worth a read: [https://www.quantamagazine.org/yves-meyer-wavelet-expert- win...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/yves-meyer-wavelet-expert-wins-abel- prize-20170321/)

</comment><comment><USER14> We explored using fast wavelet transforms to compress EKG samples for an ambulatory cardiac monitoring device, but the risks of regulators not understanding the math behind the compression meant we walked away from a ~3:1 compression of the sampled waveforms and attendant bandwidth savings.

<comment><USER15> I'm surprised bandwidth was a consideration at all given the slow signals involved. What's a typical Nyquist rate used when sampling an EKG?

<comment><USER16> Probably 500 Hz. Haha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Worth reading, but boy is that font painful. Looks like one of the older bitmapped latex CM font?

</comment><comment><USER18> Implemented FDWT as part of a coursework project many many years ago when it was hip :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Who gets taught wavelets now?

Are they supposed to displace Fourier decompositions, or did that fizzle?

<comment><USER20> They accomplish different things. Fourier decompositions break signals down into a frequency based representation, whereas wavelet decomposition yields a sort of hybrid frequency/temporal representation. Wavelets have their uses, but I don't know that anyone studying them thought they would replace Fourier decompositions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> how does this compare to Fast Fourier transform ?

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

Or the Discrete Cosine Transform ?

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

Or the Gabor Transform ?

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

<comment><USER22> A wavelet naturally gives a spectrogram. The Fourier transform taken on a signal will give you only frequency content, but no idea in time where this frequency occurred. A wavelet naturally gives both time and frequency information. Of course, if you take the Fourier transform at discrete time intervals in blocks, you can also construct a spectrogram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anyone know good sources on shift invariant wavelets?

<comment><USER24> The dual tree complex wavelet transform is approximately shift invariant [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_wavelet_transform#Dual...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_wavelet_transform#Dual- tree_complex_wavelet_transform)</comment></comment>


Made of 100% Cotton; It's Sales are 99% Ironic - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/21/AR2009052104472.html?hpid=topnews

<comment><USER2> The really strange thing is that reviews of wolf shirts have been a meme on Reddit for months (years?)... then a few days back I saw it on Digg with something like 6000 diggs. As far as I was concerned it was an old and tired meme which had reached its peak who knows how long ago, but it looks like it somehow got revived and amplified.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it began with reddit or digg. I do know that I had an irrational degree of anger when the real deal "born to roam" wasn't mentioned in these stupid MSM pieces

<http://www.birkoph.com/Wolf_tshirt.htm>

"Born to Bone" more like it.

<comment><USER4> Oh I agree. It's like when you hear some teenager saying how much they love the new, lame remix of some old song.

Current offender: "Right Round" by Flo Rida.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only person who wants to stab my eyes out whenever I see the word 'ironic'? I count two appearances in the article, and one in the title.

<comment><USER6> You're probably not the only person, but I do think that irony has its place.

The ability to imply one meaning by saying its opposite is definitely part of the verbal toolkit that I'd have problems living without.

<comment><USER5> Irony is fine. I'm just tired of its current popularity: [http://www.google.com/search?as_oq=ironic+irony&as_sites...](http://www.google.com/search?as_oq=ironic+irony&as_sitesearch=stuffwhitepeoplelike.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Apostrophe's and they're use's

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I'm a science/math guy. I can do triple integrals in my sleep but proper english grammar is a whole other ball game.</comment></comment>


Google Play Pass bundles 350 Android games and apps for $4.99 per month - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/23/20878843/google-play-pass-bundles-350-android-games-and-apps-for-4-99-per-month <comment><USER2> I wonder if the apps that are offered will remain consistent from month to month or if Google plans to change them or simply add to them. I wouldn't want to get in the habit of using an app that I get through this only to have it removed at some point and then I'm stuck not being able to use it without paying for that app. This seems like a good avenue to let users try out software on a "shareware" basis until they eventually decide it's worth the purchase. Not sure how that would work when the app is eventually added back in but it might turn some people off to be double-charged for something like that.

</comment><comment><USER3> How do stardew valley or terraria do for mobile? I played both on PC and enjoyed, but seems like mobile would be too squished. Is this mostly targeting tablet users?

Which other included games should make me consider getting this? $1.99/mo for first year promo seems interesting, but I'm skeptical I'd be able to get $60 of value at full price.

</comment><comment><USER4> For someone who is not well versed in Google Android, is this completely out of the blue, or was this well known within Android circles?</comment>


A new Regular Expression Matching paper (Philip Bille) - <AUTHOR> http://www.philipbille.org/news/regularexpressionmatching <comment><USER2> To save time for those after the paper itself (actually an extended abstract, but that's good enough for me for now):

<http://www.philipbille.org/files/c10.pdf?attredirects=0>

Executive summary (from me, a hasty reader and a sloppy thinker): It matches multiple characters at a time by taking advantage the fact that, typically, more than one character its in a machine word. This quickly becomes hairy, leading to over 50% of the remaining text written in the LaTeX math environment.

Less jokingly, in order to understand what's going on, I think you need to have read+understood Myers' regex algorithm first, which speeds up the straightforward Thompson NFA O(nm) matching by using a table scheme, which they then extend to support performing transitions for multiple characters at once.

Finally ... I'm not sure how much practical use this improvement really is, given:

> "Today, regular expressions have also become a shining example of how > ignoring good theory leads to bad programs. The regular expression > implementations used by today's popular tools are significantly slower than > the ones used in many of those thirty-year-old Unix tools."

From <http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is about as awesome hackery piece of theoretical computer science as you can get, the first asymptotic improvement to regular expression matching in at least 17 years!

<comment><AUTHOR> to quote from the paper's abstract, the improvement is We show how to solve this ubiquitous task in linear space and O(nm(log log n)/(log n)3/2 +n+m) time where m is the length of the expression and n the length of the string. This is the first improvement for the dominant O(nm/ log n) term in Myers' O(nm/ log n + (n + m) log n) bound [JACM 1992]. We also get improved bounds for external memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Mind boggling work!</comment>


Vietnam's contact tracing app broadcasting a fixed ID - <AUTHOR> https://vnhacker.blogspot.com/2020/04/vietnams-contact-tracing-app_26.html <comment><USER3> The app is open source now: [https://github.com/BluezoneGlobal/bluezone- app](https://github.com/BluezoneGlobal/bluezone-app). The id generation code is in this library: [https://github.com/BluezoneGlobal/react-native-bluetooth- sca...](https://github.com/BluezoneGlobal/react-native-bluetooth-scan)

</comment><comment><USER4> Vietnamese here, no one in Vietnam cares about this app. Hence the creator also doesn't care about app security.

<comment><AUTHOR> In less than a week, 77K people have installed the app, according to the official tally published by the developer.

The growth rate is 2x-3x every day, faster than COVID-19.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> deleted in the interest of a fellow hacker.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote the article. I agreed. It's a bad joke. I have no intention causing harm to this system.

<comment><USER5> >I have no intention causing harm to this system.

I took that intent from the article, but 'professionals' aren't always as kind in their reading of things like that.

Interesting article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

I have no strong evidence, but it seems that Force 47 is actively monitoring my blog [1]. I've never got so many personal attacks and smear comments like I did since I published my findings. I bet one of them will cite your comment as an evidence of my "immaturity".

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

<comment><USER5> >I bet one of them will cite your comment as an evidence of my "immaturity".

I have no clue whether or not your hunch is valid, but in the interest of good will I edited the comment; too late for a delete from me.

Good luck, I hope your voice gets heard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, appreciate it! Check out this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22991028](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22991028).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Contract tracing is a disaster. I've secured a forensic RF shielding bag for my phone. I refuse to participate

<comment><USER7> That's fine, then stay at home. You're a liability to the rest of us. It's fair if you don't want to use it, but then you cannot go anywhere near any other person, because you're putting everyone at risk.

<comment><USER8> By going out you're already putting people at risk, tracker or no tracker attached. You and people like you, thinking this is a perfect solution, are actually a bigger liability to public health.

<comment><USER7> "By going out you're already putting people at risk, tracker or no tracker attached"

This is completely false because, with contact tracing, we can probabilistically determine who has likely to have had contact and therefore be infected, which is a proven technique for the suppression of COVID.

Korea has implemented this solution, it works, and their economy is open.

By venturing outside _without_ contact-tracing - we know the results: Italy, Spain etc..

Just the opposite ... it's the 'privacy fanatics' who are having difficulty grasping a situation that hits at their preconceived sensitivities.

'Just go outside' will kill is quickly.

'Shelter in place' will kill us slowly.

'Contact tracing policy - (followup, quarantine for those affected) means we can go about our business roughly as normal with only the slight inconvenience of having an 'app' on our phones and possibly wearing masks.

I'm sorry but it's the anti-contact tracing people that are the tip of the anti-science community right now.

Anti contact tracing people are the new 'anti-vaxxers'.

<comment><USER8> > suppression of COVID.

Exactly __suppression __, not prevention. If you 're immunocompromised, old or in a risk group, which most americans are, you're s* out of luck, even with the app, you can't really go outside.

People thinking contact tracing is the silver bullet are just delusional or outright dangerous. Especially if those people also think contact tracing can't be done privacy-friendly.

<comment><USER7> "People thinking contact tracing is the silver bullet are just delusional or outright dangerous."

Your ad-hominems are inappropriate, especially since you are misreading the point and inventing your own interpretation.

Nobody is indicating that 'contact tracing' is a 'silver bullet' and nobody is indicating that 'people won't' die - obviously, dangers exist.

However, here are the results of the 'contact tracing' policy here: [1] are extremely effective.

There are less than 250 deaths in South Korea a population of 24 Million - <USER2> they do _not_ have 'shelter in place' orders.

This is very clear scientific evidence of an outstandingly effective solution against COVID, by far the best approach for those nations that cannot hope to eradicate it / keep it out like Taiwan.

America has 10's of thousands dead and an economy that is hurling towards death with millions unemployed, trillions in bailouts, the worst existential calamity since WW2, and everyone is locked in their homes.

The Koreans have very effectively dealt with the problem, kept harm way down their economy is mostly functional.

Privacy is obviously a concern but it's nowhere near the threshold for contemplating existential collapse.

Given the choice between 'stay at home' and 'contact tracing' \- over 99% of people would choose 'contact tracing'.

[1] [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south- kore...](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. One interesting aspect that I've learned is the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of public opinion brigades, aka Force 47.

They tried hard to discrete me. My initial report had an error, that is I didn't know that Bluetooth on Android needs ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION permission. A person pointed this out in a comment -- he posted and rewrote it three times. I said thank you and thought that's that, but then he and a bunch of new people commented that since I made that basic mistake I'm immature and inexperienced, therefore the rest of my findings have no merit.

Someone then posted a super long comment, raising a lot of questions about my credibility and intention. The interesting thing is they claimed that they're a student, haven't installed the app, have no intention to do so, but care a lot about privacy. Essentially they want to show that they're merely an underdog bystander standing up against my wrongdoings. I thought this is a very subtle psychological trick, aiming to amplify their attacks.

Other attacks are more direct. For example, a person pointed out that since I don't have many followers on Twitter, I'm not a good engineer. They said I didn't really contribute anything to my public research, but I just took credit from my coauthors. That I am only cleaning toilet at Google, there's nothing proud about that.

After I posted a rebuttal to the developers' rebuttal, a guy [2] dropped this one-line comment:

>cái vụ này bắt đầu thấy nhảm rồi. Lập luận của anh Thái cũng không còn chặt chẽ như trước nữa.

Which translates to "This is getting nonsense. Thai's argument is not as strict as before".

The title of the guy's blog [3] is, I kid you not, "There's always only one truth: Communist Party of Vietnam.

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

[2] [https://www.blogger.com/profile/17567201928186857755](https://www.blogger.com/profile/17567201928186857755)

[3] [http://phichnuocnong.blogspot.com/](http://phichnuocnong.blogspot.com/)

<comment><USER10> If I remember rightly, requiring ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION for certain uses of Bluetooth on Android is a relatively new thing and the two used to be completely independent of each other, so it's not even that surprising a mistake to make.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you prepare for design interview questions? - <AUTHOR>

I've been interviewing with several "A-list" companies and I've made it to the final in person interviews, but then I'm asked to design some system, like orbitz, monopoly, a cache for some web service or a library computer system, which is something I have very little direct experience with (my participation has always been second hand/passive in architecting), and I end up stammering and just not doing well on it in general. I'm sure my last rejection was primarily because of this.
So, interviewers, what are you looking for when you ask these questions?
And in general how can you prepare for these questions?
Also, any advise for in person interviews where I do well or good even, but not great. How do I get that little performance bump I need to get the offer? <comment><USER2> 1\. Don't be afraid to show real enthusiasm. Stammering or not.

2\. For the design question, they're looking at your architecture skills. You already have a list of these questions, so just try to solve them in your own time. Look at how existing ones are architected. Try to design them cleanly etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I suggest you read the book from the Heads First series "Design Patterns". It opened my mind when I read it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? I generally stay away from the head first series, but they also use the head first design patterns in our undergraduate design patterns course here. Is it actually that good?

<comment><USER3> I do not like the whole series. But the design specially was very nice, i believe it does a good job on explaining design principles and patterns for begginers. (if you are not a begginer in the design world maybe you should read another book)

<comment><USER4> Of course it's publicity, but some of the "big names" they got to write promotional blurbs (what do they call those quotes that appear on the cover or inside the cover?) about the text -- and the degree of praise they contained -- were surprising, when I saw the book.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Podchaser (IMDB-like site for podcasts) enters public beta - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Podchaser/floodgates-swung-forth-podchasers-open-beta-begins-today-c41f70726bf4 <comment><USER2> I'll review your project/ app/ startup live on periscope. I know stuffs about things so... post what you're working on and I'll try it out/ test it live :D.

Periscope username: dannymullan Streaming info: 2:30pm-4:30pm CST. Twitter: DanE_Beats</comment>


Crimes in Concrete - <AUTHOR> https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/06/crimes-in-concrete <comment><USER3> It's fascinating how neatly being politically conservative or progressive lines up with the corresponding architectural view. I like brutalism, but I disagree with the removal of Scruton from that position, it seems political. What annoys me about articles like the above is that they seem to ignore the possibility that aesthetics involves a lot of subjectivity. The argument seems to boil down to, "of course it's ugly, just look at it". But you look at what young travellers and photographers actually spend time appreciating and sharing images of, the modernist parts of Chicago, London and New York seem be appreciated at least as much as other cities and districts with well-regarded pre-20thC buildings.

<comment><USER4> More to the point, look at what people choose to live in. Good modernist and brutalist homes sell quickly and at a significant premium over prevailing market rates.

Modernism got a bad name in many Western countries, because it was used as an architectural and philosophical justification for cheap and shoddy system- built housing to fill the post-war housing gap. That doesn't make rectilinear forms and bare concrete inherently bad; we don't blame vernacular architecture for characterless mock-Tudor estate houses and vulgar McMansions, we blame bad architects, profit-hungry developers and philistine houses.

[https://www.themodernhouse.com/](https://www.themodernhouse.com/)

[https://vimeo.com/93963469](https://vimeo.com/93963469)

<comment><USER5> > Good modernist and brutalist homes sell quickly and at a significant premium > over prevailing market rates.

I admit I wouldn't be asking if it agreed with my biases, but how do we know this? Seems hard to control for all the other variables.

<comment><USER6> There are definitely some confounding factors other than architecture to account for. At least in Boston, new construction isn't replicating the century-old triple decker (of course, truly doing that would take a century of wear and tear). So I have to wonder how much of that price premium comes from having brand new stainless steel appliances and on-site gyms instead of creaky floors and questionable wiring. And then it seems to me, just wandering around town, the "modern" new construction is priced well above market price (lots of units sit vacant for a long time, with many eventually adding deal-sweetening offers like a month or two of free rent).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The only pre-20thC buildings that remain are the ones that survive. The ones that survive are the ones we like and that are able to survive (not plywood and well built). Survival is the real measurement of how much we like it - <USER2> is the ultimate arbiter of aesthetics/beauty/cultural significance/engineering excellence, and it trumps all the chatter of self-appointed critics. If it's garbage, we tear it down or stop maintaining it until it comes down on its own. Darlyrimple is right, "it's ugly, just look at it." These buildings may continue to fall because people don't like to use them. I'm just worried that people will adapt to like the buildings .

<comment><USER8> > The only pre-20thC buildings that remain are the ones that survive.

This has become a cliché talking-point, but it isn't entirely true. Or, at least, it doesn't fully apply here.

The best contrast to "modernism" would be the episode directly preceding it, namely Art Nouveau or Jugendstil.

There are lots of European cities both large and small that were predominantly built in this style, because it coincided with the rapid growth of cities as industrialisation swept (parts of) Europe. While British cities and Paris are somewhat older, everything east of France saw a major growth spurt in this time.

Because construction was rather centralised, a great many houses of rather similar style were built.

My city, Berlin, is a prime example of this. The core city centre is somewhat older, but about 80% of the housing stock were built within 25 years around the turn of the 20th century.

Here's a street view of my house: [https://goo.gl/maps/NRhfef2KEdx7yAET8](https://goo.gl/maps/NRhfef2KEdx7yAET8)

If you walk around a bit, you will see newer, mostly ugly buildings. But essentially no houses were ever demolished for aesthetic reasons. Every new house owes its existence to World War 2.

Here's a map showing building age on a block-by-block level: [https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/so-alt-wohnt- berlin/](https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/so-alt-wohnt-berlin/) (click on "Karte aktivieren" to the right). If you hover over different blocks, you will note that for the vast majority, houses were built around the same time. The same is true for wider areas, generally becoming younger as one leaves the centre (as expected for a growing city.

For the "survival of the pretty" theory, one would expect more within-block heterogeneity, with one house surviving and it's direct (ugly) neighbour having been demolished and rebuilt.

Go to cities that weren't bombed, such as Budapest, and you will find entire quarters unchanged since they were built about 120 years ago.

<comment><USER9> Tangential, but what's with the censorship on that street view? Freedom of panorama issues?

<comment><USER8> Privacy. There were some complaints about street view when it was introduced, and Google allowed any resident to block their house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a former architect I agree with most of this. For those not familiar, this quote is the gist:

> Making Dystopia is much more than a very detailed critique of a building or > two here or there. It is an angry criticism of an entire worldview—the > worldview of the type of person who much prefers his worldview to the world, > and in so doing causes untold ruination.

Specifically the modernists ala Le Corbusier, Robert Moses etc. were prone to a view that everything that had come before was garbage and that we needed to tear it all down and start over.

> While claiming to be continuators, the modernists also claimed to be > revolutionary, wanting to rebuild the world from a blank slate. Considering > what they actually achieved, this was a more accurate representation of > their activities; and Le Corbusier hardly saw a city that he did not want to > knock down and build again, as if no one had ever thought of anything before > him.

So the book (and this review) aren't talking so much about a particular style of building (and hence the lack of photos) but rather the cultural phenomenon of the modernist movement in architecture and how remarkably well they stamped their oppressive worldview on the world.

It's a long read, but worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm no architect, but I feel it's absolutely crazy to throw completely different styles of buildings into the same box, label them modernist and blanket reject them. I absolutely love some [1], but hate others [2]. I'm sure most people feel the same.

[1] [https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/g8674077/modern- ho...](https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/g8674077/modern- houses/?slide=1)

[2] [https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/g8674077/modern- ho...](https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/g8674077/modern- houses/?slide=3)

<comment><USER12> Glass houses are a thermal crime. I'm from south of France, suck kind of houses are stupid here, but I think also anywhere. There is a typical architecture here, for countryside houses, that of the "Bastide", which is adapted to the climate. In hot climate, it's too much opening during summer, in cold climate it's too much opening during winter. Maghreb, spain and all countries around the Mediterranean have their own architecture adapter to hot climate with nearly passive cooling during summer (with an adapted way of life, i.e. work early and do nothing in the middle of the day during summer).

We don't need styles, movement or whatever, we need forms evolved for a long time by normal humans (on this point I'm a fan of Christopher Alexander position on architecture, see A Pattern Language or The Timeless Way of Building). Modern architecture is just a fraud based on nothing.

Look at those : * [http://www.hugues-bosc.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/M...](http://www.hugues-bosc.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/Mas-et-Bastide-en-Provence-Architecte-01.jpg) * [https://sunnyspainholidays.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/05/su...](https://sunnyspainholidays.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/05/sunnyspainholidays.com-top-12-bech-holiday- destinations-in-southern-spain-720x380.jpg)

<comment><USER11> > Glass houses are a thermal crime.

I don't think this is true. Some of the most energy efficient houses are passive solar houses that use large glass surfaces for heating that are covered using shades in the heat, but also use high thermal mass materials for heat/cold storage.

From an aesthetics perspective, many people like natural light, I wouldn't want to live in the houses you provided as examples for that reason.

<comment><USER12> Go outside, people living in those houses lived outside for most of the colder hours (morning/evening), they were sunny enough (but maybe you come from a northern country).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's always been kind of amazing to me that people will get all upset over a building but that often changes with time. Same thing with a piece of art. Locally here there was a most controversial design for a parking garage. People just hated it but now its almost adored.

[https://foursquare.com/v/the-habitrail-parking- garage/4eb994...](https://foursquare.com/v/the-habitrail-parking- garage/4eb994f1775b7ec2973dc0c6/photos)

Same thing with the new Broad Art Museum by the late architect Zaha Hadid. Totally looks out of place in a Big 10 college town. Yet inside the light is the most fantastic of any art museum I've ever visited in the world.

[https://www.archdaily.com/293358/eli-edythe-broad-art- museum...](https://www.archdaily.com/293358/eli-edythe-broad-art-museum-zaha- hadid-architects/50a2aa0ab3fc4b4ec200003d-eli-edythe-broad-art-museum-zaha- hadid-architects-photo)

Course sometimes something is built with zero redeeming value. I'd wager that something built from concrete can be beautiful.

<comment><USER14> I'm familiar with both those buildings, and can attest to the fact that sometimes the boldest and inscrutable design decisions eventually become the most well-loved. High risk, high reward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pretty much spot on - the "architects" of the world colluded in driving humanity to misery and despair by encasing people in hollow concrete spaces.

What I don't understand is how this came to be?

In the Soviet Union, for example, all resources come from the single source, so the distribution of funds becomes politicized and all kinds of crazy shit can fester simply because the group promulgating said shit was better at politicking (see: Lysenko). All universities then have to teach the same stuff. Groupthink. Monoculture. I get it.

But how did the western world succumb to this? Surely there are different architectural schools? Different funding sources? What is going on the minds of the people who are writing checks for all these modern Paris buildings [1]?

[1] By the way, the author forgot to include the Mitterrand library in his list of peace crimes in Paris: [https://www.20minutes.fr/societe/diaporama-7866-bnf-20-ans](https://www.20minutes.fr/societe/diaporama-7866-bnf-20-ans)

<comment><USER16> It's cheaper to build undecorated boxes. Calling it high art is just a cover. There is also a skill shortage since nobody has paid for quality in generations. The craftsmen that meticulously laid intricate art deco brickwork don't exist anymore and no modern mason can seem to do as good a job. Instead we get uninspired generic concrete and glass prisms designed to maximize square footage for the landlords.

<comment><USER12> Also work and time was cheaper then, they could spend centuries building the same cathedral with nobody complaining about the ballooning price.

<comment><USER17> If it took centuries there is a reason.

<comment><USER12> Mostly one: they were patient.

<comment><USER17> I imagine (but I have no real information on this, so I might be wrong) that cathedrals were always works in progress, on which you could throw a small percentage of your surplus in the good years, and keep idle in the bad ones (or maybe also a bit the opposite, in anti-cyclic fashion). See how the Sagrada Familia is being built in Barcelona (and has been, for 137 years): with an annual construction and maintenance budget of around 25 million, a very small yearly amount for such a huge project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be helpful if the author provided examples of modern buildings that he considers beautiful, or modern architects who he thinks are doing it right.

<comment><USER19> There's also (on desktop at least) a lot of open space on the sides of the article that would've been a great place for, you know, some pictures of "good" v. "bad" architecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me of this article, "Why you hate contemporary architecture": [https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate- contempo...](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary- architecture)

</comment><comment><USER21> Was just at Umass Amherst for my son's graduation. It's an open air museum of brutalism.

Breuer's student center building: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_D._Lincoln_Campus_Cente...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_D._Lincoln_Campus_Center)

The nearby parking garage is better, actually.

The Fine Arts Center: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Arts_Center_(Amherst,_Mas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Arts_Center_\(Amherst,_Massachusetts\))

<comment><USER22> > It's an open air museum of brutalism.

I am not sure how to interpret your comment. Was this meant to be in a negative sense or in a positive sense? Or without any judgement?

<comment><USER23> Brutalism is an architecture style common in the mid 19th century

<comment><USER24> 20th century.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > This is so self-evidently true that I find it hard to understand how anyone > could deny it, but modern architects and hangers-on such as architectural > journalists do deny it, like war criminals who, for obvious reasons, > continue to deny their crimes in the face of overwhelming evidence.

That's a very convincing argument right in the second paragraph.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think the thing a lot of people overlook when critiquing any kind of architecture is that for every architectural style there are good and bad examples. Sometimes, we focus too much on the bad to the detriment of the good.

I have often felt that a lot of the hate for 60s/modernist/brutalist architecture comes from the stand out bad examples. For example the works of John Poulson, an inept architect who landed loads of massive and lucrative contracts because he was really good at bribery. His practice churned out building designs at a ferocious rate and while some are considered decent (e.g. Leeds International Pool) the vast majority are just bland, soulless blocks designed and built to a price point. Many also had serious structural issues too.

There is a lot of modern architecture to love and appreciate if you can filter out the bad.

</comment><comment><USER27> In the past 5 years or so, there has been a bit of a building boom in my city.

The dominant architectural style reminds me a lot of the style discussed in this article. None of it has a concrete facade, but otherwise it would fall right in line. It's ugly, depressing, and distressing.

<comment><USER28> Are you talking about the colored concrete fiber side?

[https://www.allurausa.com/blog/17-fiber-cement-siding- color-...](https://www.allurausa.com/blog/17-fiber-cement-siding-color-ideas)

<comment><USER27> That's the look, yes, but I'm not sure (as in I don't know) if that's the actual construction method.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Medellín (Colombia) is a city wich tends to modernism and is a great example of a place with no architectural value. I think the problem has a cultural dimension as citizens praise "Coltejer building" (2nd in the image) as the icon of the city even when it replaced a much pretty theather. Maybe humans get eclipsed with novelty and can't notice the impact of their creations on early stages. [https://www.elcolombiano.com/documents/10157/0/620x410/20c0/...](https://www.elcolombiano.com/documents/10157/0/620x410/20c0/580d410/none/11101/SBKW/fotos- medellin-1302042014_\(6\).jpg)

</comment><comment><USER30> No pictures when writing about architecture?

<comment><USER31> Is a literary review of a book about architecture, so has quotes from the book. I assume the pictures are one level down.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure James Stevens Curl is a good person to go to for compelling images of architecture. Check out his website: [http://www.jamesstevenscurl.com/james-stevens-curl- architect...](http://www.jamesstevenscurl.com/james-stevens-curl-architecture- drawings)

He can sort-of draw buildings and architectural details but basically he doesn't really have a great eye for architecture. If he did, he would think twice before making the tedious old right-wing arguments in the book. He's an example of someone who is conservative in way that's not grounded in practicality. Disliking the way 20th C architecture played out is one thing, trying to convince us to return to pre-modern architecture is something else.

By the way, it sounds odd to describe the content of a book as "one level down" from a review of that book.

<comment><USER31> Thank you for the link, I read some more of the reviews for his book on there. A. It appears that you are talking nonsense and B. I'm probably going to buy a copy.

<comment><USER24> I probably can't convince you of anything, but there are definitely two sides to this story. You can choose to listen to Stevens Curl if you want to. You can choose to listen to Theodore Dalrymple as well. Like Stevens Curl he is a blowhard with very iffy politics.

As a trained architectural historian (who has spent years in the UK) it's very clear to me where he is coming from, and it's not a rational place. HN is a terrible venue for discussions of architecture because it's full of people who think their own blinkered opinion is the law. Stevens Curl is just like that.

Edit: even the conservative Spectator has Curl's digits: [https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/08/modernist- architecture-i...](https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/08/modernist-architecture- isnt-barbarous-but-the-blinkered-rejection-of-it-is/)

<comment><USER31> >I probably can't convince you of anything

You might be able to, but if you claim someone is making tedious old right wing arguments, when it according to the reviews he spends his time commenting on Corbusier's fascism and the Spectator lumps him in with Vonnegut, then I can't take your critique all that seriously. Do you think Vonnegut's architectural critiques are also tired right wing arguments?

<comment><USER32> And Orwell, apparently he is now a right-winger too.

<comment><USER24> The point Bayley is making is that there is a motley crew of people of all political persuasions who think modernization in the 20th C was a disaster. The mechanization of war was the big shock. Obviously there is everything from e.g. socialist environmentalists on the left to the libertarian rejection of organized society on the right. There's a huge spectrum.

<comment><USER31> The way it played out in architecture has been pretty bad. Corbusier in particular should have just stuck to chairs. He was much better at chairs than he was at buildings.

As far as this kind of thing goes, I love stuff by Altair Alto and Shigeru Ban, whereas I'd happily bury George Marsh under his own concrete. Norman foster I am 50/50 on. Some of his stuff I like, but the tulip and the gherkin are basically just giant tumescent cocks sprouting out of the centre of London.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> lots of good Brutalism / Modernism accounts on Instagram if you're into that:

[https://www.instagram.com/thisbrutalhouse/](https://www.instagram.com/thisbrutalhouse/)

[https://www.instagram.com/themodernhouse/](https://www.instagram.com/themodernhouse/)

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't fully understand why architecture is so bitterly divided between its factions. I am the son of an architect (loyal to his faction) and I like a lot of that stuff and a lot of other styles, including much made of concrete. It seems like something built into the culture at an early stage. Some of the Bauhaus practitioners saw their work as an expression of a Socialist agenda and Classicists are taught that only the traditional styles of design and building are acceptable.

There is (or ought to be) a common enemy to all factions, which is cheap disposable architecture. Long-term structure that are also climate change adaptable seems a decent common purpose, for example.

Somehow, however, the capital A Architect class seems to exist above the buildings designed for and by people who do not care about aesthetics, so the cheap and disposable seem to slip under the radar. Perhaps because Lennar Builders and their ilk don't care what academics think of them?

</comment><comment><USER35> I thought this was going to be about poor concrete construction.. For example ... [https://portal.ct.gov/DOH/DOH/Programs/Crumbling- Foundations](https://portal.ct.gov/DOH/DOH/Programs/Crumbling-Foundations)

</comment><comment><USER36> The author fails to acknowledge the enormous expense of building anything else. Traditional forms require a considerable amount of on-site highly skilled labor which is often just not available in sufficient quantities, on a sufficient time-table, at an acceptable price.

<comment><USER12> It's non-sense, past has a lot of example of simple architecture done by people without many resources acommodating the mass. Rome was already 1 million people during the first millenia, there were buildings with 6 or 7 floors, they were not all covered with classical friezes and statues costing extra-labor.

<comment><USER36> > done by people without many resources

[Waits]

> Rome was already 1 million people during the first millenia, there were > buildings with 6 or 7 floors,

Did you really choose an example of a society that used slave labor extensively?

It's hard to make a comparison due to opportunity cost. Imagine you are a person with the innate competence and dedication to eventually become a master craftsman. Do you learn woodworking, stonework, etc. and labor inexpensively for years as a apprentice to eventually top out at being paid moderately well doing work that benefits a single project .... or do you learn to develop cellphone apps that get used by tens of millions or billions of people?

As we create more jobs which are highly leveraged-- where one unit of work potentially produces an enormous amount of benefit all less leveraged jobs are squeezed by the competition.

In cases where high skills and years of training don't matter the effect isn't so great because skilled industrial production jobs don't compete as much for that labor pool. But for these construction jobs, they do.

<comment><USER12> Are you trying to compare cellphone app development with woodworking or stonework ? It needs more time to be a good woodworker but I think more people can learn the job (you don't need to be literate). Any actual construction worker (and there are a lot more than cellphone app developers) could build with ancient building techniques like vaulted ceilings given time and instructions. It's not a problem of craftsmanship or leverage, it's more a problem of standardization without benefits (I do not think concrete flat ceiling are really less expensive than vaulted for one or two floors buildings, Christopher Alexander reports that they still build houses like this in Mexico, doing vaults with simple crossed wood splines[1]).

[1]: [http://www.flyingconcrete.com/vaults.html](http://www.flyingconcrete.com/vaults.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Honestly, puke. I've been watching "Grand Designs", great show about people building their own places in Britain. Many shows feature local "councils" who mandate all sorts of restrictions to "maintain the beauty and aesthetics of the town". Honestly they're protecting "old crap", that's an eyesore, eco disaster, ugly and it should be torn down. These people are doing everyone a favor. Very irritating to see the hoops the builders have to jump through.

<comment><USER38> Why have you put council in scare quotes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I couldn't find a reference in the text -- is the title a riff on "Sermons in Stone", a fictional book written by the antagonist of _The Fountainhead_?[1]

(Yes, I read it, go easy on me.)

[1] Link has SPOILERS, so you were warned: [https://www.shmoop.com/the- fountainhead/ellsworth-toohey-tim...](https://www.shmoop.com/the- fountainhead/ellsworth-toohey-timeline.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> It's interesting how architectural modernism works in pop culture (Hollywood films, for example) where the buildings play the bad guy: an arrogant, oppressive or cruelly indifferent character, a stand-in for totalitarianism, for places of extreme wealth or poverty.

Now we're here I can't think of many active celebrations of the form in painting, literature, comics or games either. You?

</comment><comment><USER41> Modernists and their apologists are like flat-earthers. All criticism can be chalked up to your ignorance of the _secrets_ that _only they_ are willing to confront.

</comment><comment><USER42> San Francisco is undergoing exactly such a crime wave. The new apartment buildings are just glass and steel, with no redeeming features whatsoever. Compare these new buildings to the Flood Building or the Hobart Building, and you'll shed a tear or two.

<comment><USER43> The Hobart building is pretty to look at. But if I'm actually going to spend my time in the building, I would much rather have the floor-to-ceiling windows of a generic modern steel-and-glass tower.

I wonder how much of this design trend is due to the development of better materials (e.g. more insulating glass).

<comment><USER12> Why ?

<comment><USER43> Natural light. View. The illusion of space rather than confinement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Half of the article is how fascist nazi communist those architects were, with some sprinkling of islam references. Utterly tasteless.

</comment><comment><USER45> Then there are the bunkers at the University of Washington. The rest of the campus has all these beautiful buildings, one wonders how the bunkers ever got approved.</comment>


Ask PG: Quick tips on creating a successful online forum? - <AUTHOR>

I'm sure this is great material for an essay, but I'm wondering whether you could say a couple sentences about why you think HN's been quite above the mean for courteous, rational debate online?<p>I suspect the biggest factor is karma being relevant for applying to YC. <comment><USER2> Stay under the radar. Kill the kind of fluff stories that attract stupid people. Ban trolls and spam. Have explicit policies and tell new users about them when they sign up.

</comment><comment><USER3> _I suspect the biggest factor is karma being relevant for applying to YC._

That has a lot to do with it I bet. HN members know that they might be applying to YC someday, and they don't want the YC founders to see a year's worth of 4chan-worthy drivel. In effect, your HN body of submissions and comments make up an additional application component.

<comment><USER4> I disagree with that strongly.

I'm estimating the size of HN's 'real' userbase (not counting spammers) at around 23000 accounts, there is absolutely no way those are all thinking of applying to YC one day, maybe 10% of them do. Even if the churn is 50% and there are only 10000 accounts left that would still not explain the phenomenon. I think that it has more to do with local culture and indoctrinating newbies through the votes than anything else.

I'm fairly sure that Karma does not enter in to it in the mind of the posters once they reach that stage.

And I'm not sure if it would be a factor in applying to YC even though I read that 'making thoughtful comments' would make a difference (as opposed to making inane ones I guess).

I know for a fact I'll never apply to YC, and with me probably many others. On any other forum I would not behave much different than from how I behave here, as long as the culture stays the way it is there will be a lot of 'happy hackers' hanging out here, the majority of them will probably never apply to YC.

<comment><USER3> _there is absolutely no way those are all thinking of applying to YC one day_

I said _might_ apply. If each of those 23000 members thought that there was even a 1% chance they would apply to YC someday, I'm sure they would think twice about posting that Admiral Akbar ascii and a funny quote in a comment on HN when they probably do it all the time on Digg and Reddit.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple: 514,000 US Jobs Created - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/

<comment><USER2> why not include the farmers who raised the cattle that fed the hamburger to the truck driver.

seriously, this is PR out of control, yet there are those who will look at this and say 'Apple employs 1/2 million americans'.

Note, they include the people who 'build the planes and trucks' (I didn't realize the page scrolled at first).

<comment><USER3> Standard accounting practice, developed by the US govt explicitly for this purpose.

Seriously, if you're a multinational getting static for your global manufacturing organization from miscellaneous congreesspeople who don't understand economics, what tabulation methodology would you choose to make your point?

Edit: note, obviously that they don't include all employees of the corps that make planes and deliver boxes, just the share of employees that exist to serve the volume of business that Apple creates. This is not RIAA style accounting.

<comment><USER4> >what tabulation methodology would you choose to make your point?

Having a headline about "Creating jobs" next to a map with a number that isn't actually the number of jobs created is misleading.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. The volume of business that Apple creates for UPS, etc, literally creates these jobs. That's neither dishonest nor misleading, in my opinion, but I agree that the first time I saw an "economic impact assessment" that included such a large number of jobs, I assumed the implication was that the company in question had these people directly on payroll.

It's more complicated than that.

<comment><USER4> >The volume of business that Apple creates for UPS, etc, literally creates these jobs.

By the same logic Foxconn could argue that it's creating jobs because it makes things that get shipped around as well.

<comment><USER3> That's simply not correct. Foxconn creates zero consumer demand. Consumer demand creates jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to see the research supporting these numbers.

I'm curious as to how they determine the number of jobs created via their app economy.

Many of the jobs they list do not belong to them and they may actually play a small part in the job itself. Unless they own the transportation company they can't lay claim to the truck driver's job since he's probably delivering stuff for other companies at the same time.

How did Apple create or support healthcare jobs?

People working to build their stores is a short-term deal. Similar to the truck driver example, unless they own the construction company they can't take credit for the entire job.

I'm not saying they cannot lay claim to a great deal of success because most of what they say is probably true. But unless they break the numbers down to realistic examples of jobs created and jobs supported then the numbers they provide is misleading. Especially when they just lump them all together into one big number that makes them look good.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is beyond pathetic. Who exactly are Apple trying to impress with this?

To summarise, they highlight 514k __US jobs created of supported by Apple __. Now the two operative word in that sentence is _"US"_ , and _"supported"_.

1\. Direct jobs created for US citizens who are on Apple's payroll is a fraction of this. (47k), so about 9%.

2\. They say US jobs, because do you realise how much they outsource?

I personally don't have a _major_ issue with outsourcing. Go where ever the labour is cheap. (And in Apples defence they do try and stay as transparent as possible with Foxconn and employee treatment ethics).

Obama asked Jobs directly once, "what will it take to bring Apple manufacturing back to the States". That is never going to happen. But again, I don't have an issue with that, but spinning their profiteering into philanthropy is utter crock-shit.

Do you realise the jobs they are listing within their "supporting" grouping?

\- Business Sales

\- Healthcare

\- Customer Sales

\- Transportation

Who are they including in this? BestBuy employees? The 40% of private Doctors that now say they use as iPad professionally and the FedEx employees who ship the goods on overnight freight?

I'm just suprised they left off the pilots who carry the cargo. They could have squeezed another 400 jobs into that number for sure.

Ultimately, 99% of these people all had jobs before Apple. The truck driver delivered his goods. The healthcare professional was still practicing and the salesmen were still selling. (How by the way does Apple create healthcare jobs?)

Don't read this for anything more than it is. PR bullshit.

Do you know what Apple doesn't want? Some campaign runner trying to decrease US unemployment numbers by saying that the largest US technology company needs to start employing more people. This is a pre-emptive PR measure.

<comment><USER3> You are not making sense. Apple sells more product outside the US, too, so who's to begrudge them having a large percentage of employees overseas?

The rest of your accounting complaints are simply not true. If Apple represents 1% of UPS delivery business, they can rightfully claim to have created 1% of the UPS delivery person jobs.

And of course it's PR. It's PR designed to counteract some clueless congresspeople asking for economic impossibilities from a very visible US success story. But it's honest PR. Such things do exist.

<comment><USER7> You are right that its PR, but please don't argue about it being "Honest". The common use of the term "Creating Jobs" is only those "directly employed" by your company (i.e on your company's payroll). In this context, including other indirect jobs is misleading and hence dishonest.

( I would also argue that perhaps the right way to present information to congressmen requires one to have the patience to sincerely explain to them what the situation really is rather than deliberately misleading them)

<comment><USER3> This is the point, though.

I agree that the layman's interpretation of "created or supported" isn't necessarily the same as the formal definition of the terms by the US govt, but criticizing Apple for using the formal definition isn't reasonable.

The intent of the formal definition is to answer the question "what would be the impact on US employment if this business were to cease operation tomorrow?", and I believe that Apple has made an honest effort to compute that number, probably rather conservatively.

Perhaps you disagree, but you seem to be arguing against semantic interpretation of the terminology, instead of being skeptical of the results.

In response to your point about how to present this data to congresspeople, I'd argue that while there are some legitimate economic dunces in elected office, there are few that don't comprehend the cascade effect of business activity and therefore employment. Furthermore, I doubt that any congressperson would consider Apple's use of "create or support" to be misleading, because it is absolutely the standard usage of the term in these sorts of assessments. That does not, of course, mean that some senator who smells television coverage won't take notice of the confusion and grandstand his or her condescension for his or her electorate. It might even be a successful strategy, but we don't have to help.

Obviously I haven't audited the numbers. That's a valid line of inquiry, but history shows Apple to be fastidiously circumspect in such matters. There's a new sheriff in town in Cupertino, but if anything he seems to be even more careful.

<comment><USER7> >Perhaps you disagree, but you seem to be arguing against semantic interpretation of the terminology, instead of being skeptical of the results.

That's _precisely_ what I'm saying. I don't doubt Apple's contribution to the US economy in terms of the indirect jobs that it has created, but placing it in the same category as creating direct jobs is what I don't agree with (especially since the layman usually interprets it as the latter).

<comment><USER3> I think the message Apple is trying to get across is identical to the standard usage of the terms, which is to measure the effect of Apple on US employment. Do you really think they are trying to trick people with (standard) terminology? Direct employment numbers are in every quarterly report, do you think they were hoping the lazy Apple press would overlook a huge employment increase?

And, if you read the page (which is a hundred times more detailed than the average "create or support" release), Apple makes it pretty darn clear how the numbers break down, direct/indirect. If Apple was less clear, we wouldn't even be having this conversation because we'd just be wondering about it without enough information to form opinions.

Forthcomingness is the new dishonesty, I guess. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One Jobs was enough, this is a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER9> "For example, this figure also includes... FedEx and UPS employees."

Well, I'm sorry to hear that FedEx and UPS are responsible for creating far fewer jobs than I previously thought.

</comment><comment><USER10> Apple doesn't want one of these presidential hopefuls to start campaigning on the platform that the second largest US company needs to start creating jobs in the US.

</comment><comment><USER11> Americans should be thanking Foxconn for supporting more than 50,000,000 American jobs. Way to go foxconn!

</comment><comment><USER12> how many jobs do they create oversea?

<comment><USER13> FoxConn has (apparently) about 920,000 employees. Assuming 1/3rd of them work only making Apple products then triple that number based upon the ancillary jobs supporting those employees (any sub manufacturing) like how Apple's website calculates I think it would end up being 920,000 people have jobs in China because of Apple.

[http://www.outsaurus.com/2011/08/01/outsourced- apple-500000-...](http://www.outsaurus.com/2011/08/01/outsourced- apple-500000-jobs/)

<comment><USER14> 1/3rd seems really high. FoxConn makes lots of other things besides Apple Products.

<comment><USER7> Besides, the disparity of labor costs makes it difficult to make a comparison between "number of Jobs"

<comment><USER13> But the employees labor 60 hours a week, you can essentially count them as 1.5 employees.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Brief Overview of Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> http://yyue.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-brief-overview-of-deep-learning.html

<comment><USER2> I found this to be insightful:

> ... human neurons are slow yet humans can perform lots of complicated tasks > in a fraction of a second. More specifically, it is well-known that a human > neuron fires no more than 100 times per second. This means that, if a human > can solve a problem in 0.1 seconds, then our neurons have enough time to > fire only 10 times --- definitely not much more than that. It therefore > follows that a large neural network with 10 layers can do anything a human > can in 0.1 seconds.

<comment><USER3> This seems wrong. My understanding is that the ~200 spikes/second limit derives from the cell needing to "reload" before firing again, rather than some built in latency. Relaying a spike can be very quick indeed. A better conclusion would be that we don't have time for too many recursions in that short a time. Also, I can't think of any particularly hard problem that humans can solve in 0.1 seconds (see e.g. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick%27s_law))

<comment><USER4> > Also, I can't think of any particularly hard problem that humans can solve > in 0.1 seconds

Recognizing someone is a hard problem that most humans can do efficiently (except me maybe)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good article, but I still don't understand why they're suddenly popular again. So processing is faster, but is there some development in processing which has improved this domain especially? Developments in "big data" processing? Concepts like mapreduce? What's with the resurgence :S

<comment><USER6> There are a myriad reasons why they're popular again.

1\. Hardware has caught up, and is cheap. When Backprop was invented back in the 80s, you couldn't train networks with more than a couple of 1000 nodes tops. Today, with GPUs, you can train networks with billions of parameters.

2\. More data is available. Back in those days, you had a few dozens (maybe a few 100s) of examples in your training set. Today, people play with sets larges than 1TB.

3\. Dramatic successes. For a while, the ImageNet competition was seeing slow and stead progress. Then DL comes along, and there's a 20% jump in performance (I'm too lazy to look up the exact numbers...). If you've ever competed in such competitions, progress is painfully slow (see, for example, the Netflix competition). So a jump of that magnitude in performance in 1 step is mind- blowing. On top of that, every year since then, the performance has increased significantly.

These are just 3 that come to mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been playing with Caffe for recognising images. It's kind of mind blowing how well it works. Yet the networks I tested could "only" recognise photos, not drawings or anything abstract.

A human could easily attribute meaning to a drawing, even if the drawing was very abstract or she had never seen a similar drawing before. Whereas a deep networks seem to rely on visual similarity to things it has seen in the past, on a pixel level. The networks I tried could tell something was a cartoon, but not what the cartoon depicted, even if it's something simple like a face.

The deep networks I tried also really struggled with recognising different textures. Like closeups of sand, water etc, things that a human would instantly recognise. They could classify it as a texture but not what kind of texture.

<comment><USER8> NN's have been able to represent fairly abstract art, e.g. [http://i.imgur.com/HU66Vo7.png?1](http://i.imgur.com/HU66Vo7.png?1)

They can also generate abstract images when the images are optimized to be recognized by the NN: [http://i.imgur.com/Mixk96V.png?1](http://i.imgur.com/Mixk96V.png?1)

I think it's likely that cartoons contain a lot of meaning and symbols that is specific to human culture. Imagine a stick figure in the simplest case. It's not obvious that a circle and sticks should be a person. Same with a lot of other cartoon features that look nothing like reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > therefore follows that a large neural network with 10 layers can do anything > a human can in 0.1 seconds.

very funny ... as if ANNs are sufficiently comparable to actual neural activity. also I think it is naive to assess the "powerful"-ness of the brain to what is going on in a single neuron - it is certainly the parallel interaction which creates the human intelligence.

> And if human neurons turn out to be noisy (for example), which m...

it is pretty naive to consider noise as something of only handicapping nature - a lot of algorithms are as powerful as they are by utilizing noise and stochasticity

> What is learning? Learning is the problem of finding a setting of the neural > network's weights that achieves the best possible results on our training > data.

Wrong - this is memorizing ... learning is the process leading to a low _out- of-sample_ error.

<comment><USER10> This post is written by Ilya Sutskever, who has co-authored some of biggest breakthroughs in machine learning the last five years. Which do you think is most likely: a) That he has a naive understanding of machine learning and neuroscience, or b) that this was written informally, and without guarding against every possible way it can be misinterpreted. Please be a little charitable when interpreting other peoples writings.

<comment><USER9> just curious - can you give an example for a big breaktrhough he co-authored?

nonetheless - some of his remarks are very specific and I don't see how informal style applies here to excuse them.

<comment><USER10> He was second author on the AlexNet paper, wherein Alex Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton blew everyone else out of the water on the ImageNet competition [2]. Their error rate was about 10 percentage points lower than others. Relatively speaking they had about 40% fewer errors than anyone else. This is possibly the biggest result in computer vision the last five years. So it seems a little silly to educate him on the basics of machine learning :)

[1] [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~fritz/absps/imagenet.pdf](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~fritz/absps/imagenet.pdf)

[2] [http://www.image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/results.html](http://www.image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/results.html)

<comment><USER9> well thanks for the info - but then I shift my critique to that I find it unnecessary to distort ML and biological concepts just to simplify the subject, when an accurate depiction wouldn't be much more difficult. Especially to not differentiate properly between memorization and generalization/learning is odd b/c this is one of the most prominent mistakes - it is specifically not the goal to minimize the in-sample-error! that would lead to very bad results most of the time

<comment><USER11> Actually, Ilya explains his statement regarding minimizing training errors in his comment exchange with Bengio:

"Although I didn't define it in the article, generalization (to me) means that the gap between the training and the test error is small. So for example, a very bad model that has similar training and test errors does not overfit, and hence generalizes, according to the way I use these concepts. It follows that generalization is easy to achieve whenever the capacity of the model (as measured by the number of parameters or its VC-dimension) is limited --- we merely need to use more training cases than the model has parameters / VC dimension. Thus, the difficult part is to get a low training error."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "so I implemented a small neural network and trained it to sort 10 6-bit numbers, which was easy to do to my surprise"

Does anyone know what the inputs and outputs of a neural network that sorts numbers would look like?

<comment><USER13> Input: a 60-dimensional vector that is the concatenation of 10 6-dimensional binary vectors encoding the binary representation of the input numbers.

Output: the same, sorted.

At least that's one dead simple way to formulate the problem, multiple other solutions would work as well, and some would probably work better.

<comment><USER14> I started playing with this. I take each digit and normalize it by dividing by 9. Then use each normalized digit as an input:

Example sorting 987654 and 123456

      Input: 1, .9, .8, .7, .6, .5, .2, .3, .4, .5, .6, .7
      Expected output: .2, .3, .4, .5, .6, .7, 1, .9, .8, .7, .6, .5

You can then encode/decode the inputs and outputs accordingly. if (value <= 1) digit = 9; if (value <= 0.9) digit = 8; ... if (value <= 0.2) digit = 1; if (value <= 0.1) digit = 0; etc.

I'm able to get 100% accuracy on a limited training set with 2 hidden layers of 10 nodes. 33% accuracy on the test set (but likely need a lot more data to train with).

<comment><USER14> Update: I was able to train the network to sort sets of two 3-digit numbers. I used a neural network with 2 hidden layers of 25 nodes. The training/test accuracy after 10 minutes is 78%/74%. Not bad. [https://github.com/primaryobjects/nnsorting](https://github.com/primaryobjects/nnsorting)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Has anyone had experience training deep nets for domains in which examples are large heterogenous collections (as opposed to speech, or text, or images), like say transactional or click-stream data?

</comment><comment><USER13> This post, while very interesting, attempts to draw a completely unwarranted parallel between deep nets and the human brain, as if layers of artificial neurons running on a GPU and the cortical layers of your brain were two interchangeable things.

So far, there has been no evidence that the brain works anything like an artificial neural network. Maybe it does, and there are several theories in that direction, but at the moment we have no solid reason to think so.

<comment><USER16> The point of drawing comparisons to the human brain is that we know how quickly humans can perform visual recognition tasks and speed of signal propagation between neurons. Combining these two properties implies that the human brain is able to solve these tasks without feedback, i.e. no loops. Thus, a DNN should be able to perform similar tasks if it can be trained (which it can).

Recurrent neural nets add feedback and are are whole different kettle of fish.

<comment><USER17> The brain also appears to have dedicated network structures that are not trained, but constrained, i.e. programmed to one transformation, say, the equivalent of feeding both an image and it's edge enhanced version to the same DNN.

Current approach of feeding raw bitmaps to DNN falls short of that and is very sensitive to training data[1]

I remember an old paper I cannot find now about how to normalize image for NN processing in face recognition. Software extracted the face, centered it on a square and projected that square on a circle around the center to make face orientation irrelevant (hard to explain without images)

Anyway, it is unfair to expect a DNN to perform vision recognition tasks from raw bi-dimensional image points.

[1] [http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial- intelligenc...](http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial- intelligence/8064-the-deep-flaw-in-all-neural-networks.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Whatever happened to shallow learning (or you know the regular learning) everyone did before deep learning.

Anyone still doing that?

Is this like BigData. As soon as someone mentioned BigData, anyone in the world who touched data all of the sudden did BigData.

So is this something coming out of Google and Facebook and such and everyone else in Academia is happily building SVMs and 2 layer neural networks or some new discovery happend and overturned the whole ML and AI field on its head?

> Crucially, the number of units required to solve these problems is far from > exponential --- on the contrary, the number of units required is often so > "small" that it is even possible, using current hardware,

Number of units is not what's important. There are "only" what, 10B (100B?)neurons in the brain? But isn't the trick in the connections. And there are orders of magnitudes more connectsion (hundreds of trillions). Not exponential but even quadratic at those numbers is still quite large.

<comment><USER19> _Whatever happened to shallow learning (or you know the regular learning) everyone did before deep learning._

Deep learning happened, and it pretty much always beats other approaches. Saying that sounds unbelievable, so here's a quote from Pete Warden:

 _I know I'm a broken record on deep learning, but almost everywhere it's being applied it's doing better than techniques that people have been developing for decades_ [1]

There's a great paper from a group of researchers who set out to prove that their technique, which they had many years of experience in (SVMs?) was just as good as deep learning (I can't remember their field). They ended up proving the opposite, and switched their whole lab over to doing deep learning. I can't find the paper (!!) so I'll refer you to [2] instead.

[1] [http://petewarden.com/2015/01/01/five-short- links-76/](http://petewarden.com/2015/01/01/five-short-links-76/)

[2] [http://petewarden.com/2014/06/10/why-is-everyone-so- excited-...](http://petewarden.com/2014/06/10/why-is-everyone-so-excited- about-deep-learning/)</comment></comment>


ReactOS now has support of RAM-disk. This allows PXE-booting without HDD\CD\DVD - <AUTHOR> https://code.reactos.org/changelog/reactos?cs=65903

<comment><AUTHOR> More information [https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Building_PXE- ready_ReactOS](https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Building_PXE-ready_ReactOS)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> hpoussin committed 65903 9 hours ago [RAMDISK] Set correct device object in drive extension This allows booting ReactOS livecd using PXE. Welcome ReactOS to the world of computers without harddisk/cdrom.</comment>


Uber, Lyft Charge More for Riders Going to Non-White Neighborhoods, Study Shows - <AUTHOR> https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/06/26/uber-lyft-charges-more-for-riders-going-to-chicagos-non-white-neighborhoods-study-shows/ <comment><USER2> This article is missing many key details, such as how they determined which areas had which demographic, where did the data come from, how was the study carried out? At its basic level this article says Uber and Lyft cost more to go to certain areas of a city, then it makes the leap that it's because of racism.

<comment><USER3> The article also states that "People are also being charged more when getting picked up in areas with more expensive homes, according to the study."

It's likely an article focused on this correlation and headlined 'Rich people pay more for Uber rides' wouldn't get the same traction in the current US political context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "What this study shows aligns with what many people across social sciences > find, which is — in a world characterized by structural racism — market > mechanisms are often going to reflect and reinforce structural racism," she > said.

Exactly.

> "It's important not to equate correlation for causation, ..." an Uber > statement said.

It doesn't matter. No one is claiming that Uber or Lyft are intentionally factoring race into pricing. It's an artifact of structural racism. Still, it re-enforces the existing system. We know that it's expensive to be poor. And we know that Blacks are disproportionately poor due to centuries of racism.

So what could Uber and Lyft do about this? They'd could for example use a progressive pricing model where wealthy riders subsidize poor riders. I have no idea how you'd go about doing that. It's hard to piecemeal address systemic problems. Or they could just use taxi pricing.

<comment><USER5> If Uber or Lyft wanted to help solve generational poverty they'd probably be better off donating cash to organisations like GiveDirectly instead of distorting the taxi market (which will always be less effective per $). Not that they could afford to do either. Last I heard they were both still losing money...</comment></comment>


Why News Junkies Are So Glum About Politics, Economics, and Everything Else - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/why-news-junkies-get-are-so-glum-about-politics-economics-and-everything-else/492989/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Because the media reports on unusual, often negative events as if they're the most common thing in the world, and makes things look worse than they really are.

Which isn't surprising. People care more about bad news than good news, hence the former gets the most clicks/reads for journalists.

And so it makes those who read more news into more negative people.</comment>