Ask HN: Is this data startup idea viable? - <AUTHOR>

Sometimes I want to play around with some data but don't want to overcome the barrier of downloading it, cleaning it, and writing parsing code.
Our vision is to build a startup that makes it easier to do just that.  We store the data, you use a webapp to play around with it.  So, in a matter of a minute, you could load a time series of  Google's stock price, one of Apple's stock price, normalize each by the value of the Dow, and plot on top of them a time series of the consumer price index for urban consumers.  Or you could generate some quick scatter plots to see if there's a correlation.
The UI model is based on dataflow programming (like Orange, Weka, or Rapidminer).  If you don't know what that is, it looks like this:
http://mines.humanoriented.com/classes/2010/fall/csci568/portfolio_exports/sphilip/images/sample_workflow_border.png
You create "widgets" that do something, like loading data, or making a scatter plot, and you link them up to do things with them.
There's a splash page up at www.kemvi.com.
There's also a working prototype.  If you're interested in testing it out, please email firstname.lastname@example.com. <comment><USER2> Be sure to read about these startups which failed trying to do something similar:

Verfiable: [http://stuartroseman.com/post/619953720/out-with-the-old- bus...](http://stuartroseman.com/post/619953720/out-with-the-old-business-in- with-the-new)

<http://eagereyes.org/blog/2010/end-of-verifiable-com>

Swivel: <http://eagereyes.org/criticism/the-rise-and-fall-of-swivel>

I guess the takeaway is that the business model is probably B2B, and you need to fulfill a real need.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thanks! I knew of timetric, mentioned below, but not about these. I suppose there's a strong selection bias.

The business model probably should be B2B: I imagine the users would be companies that need to do business intelligence, journalists, universities, and research organizations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems like you are offering the same data manipulation people currently do either with desktop software or custom coded server apps. Your value here is turning it into a web service and making it easier to use. There is a very strong case for doing just that.

What I would recommend is to connect the dots and clearly position your service as cloud alternative to desktop / server data manipulation packages. Get very explicit about it and target similar customers. Do not limit yourself to just data on the web and allow file uploads. Make a feature-light free version and charge for a premium one, determined by data volume or number of manipulations or something like that.

I think there is a lot of room for cloud-based statistical service to undercut traditional players in this market.

<comment><AUTHOR> The freemium model is exactly what I was thinking. And, yes: Rapidminer, Weka, etc, are all on the desktop. Thanks for the motivation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Take a look at Tableau. It's super expensive and desktop-based. But it allows for some very powerful, customized data analysis.

Build a SaaS version of Tableau and you have a good starting point.

You still need to find the problem you are solving. Try to find one or two niches, like university labs or government research facilities.

Personally, I'd find the problem this solves well, then actually solve that problem (instead of helping others solve that problem). Take credit card interest rates; instead of building a tool tailored to credit card issuers or resellers, build a site that provides the data (using your tool) in a value- added way.

It's like you're creating your itch, so you can scratch it with your idea. A bit backwards, but crazy enough it might just work.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, I think it is, although I see a few challenges.

It is a huge amount of work to integrate disparate data sets and build a system that can efficiently handle many customers' requests.

It may be difficult to show customers how they can actually use it. Comparing two stocks isn't cool. You know what's cool? Comparing all stocks with realtime updates.

For the second problem, I mean that users won't use their imagination much to figure out what your product does. You have to spell it out in concrete, actually useful examples. This is a challenge between engineer-thinking, where general functionality is king, and user-thinking, where one particular goal and the path of least thinking/work is king.

</comment><comment><USER6> Have you seen <http://timetric.com/> who do something along those lines, although with less manipulation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had heard of these guys, but hadn't seen their site in months. Sounds like they're doing something pretty similar, which is exciting, because it means they've tested the business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are tons of data sets out there, most are in a great shape, and trivial to parse.

I guess maybe you need to provide some better examples of what your service will be. Now it all sounds like something I can do in Google Doc spreasheets or Yahoo pipes.

And how will you make money?</comment>


Distance Learning Isn't Working - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/just-give-distance-learning/610222/ <comment><USER2> Distance Learning Is Hard To Manage, the real problem is distraction and comfort level. McGregor's X-Y Theory applies here. Highly motivated learners would excel in distance learning while others would struggle.

<comment><USER3> A teacher friend of mine says that a few of her students are doing better now, because they don't have the same distractions - like associating with friends - as before.

That doesn't seem to be an X or Y framing. Rather, what little I know of McGregor's models is that they assume a workforce environment ... and school isn't a workforce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Alt title: Distance learning is a skill we need to help educators and students develop.</comment>


A little gender experiment confirms that Reddit is full of douchebags - <AUTHOR> http://manboobz.com/2012/04/22/a-little-gender-experiment-confirms-that-reddit-is-full-of-douchebags/ <comment><USER2> I'm an avid redditor, and while there certainly are douchebags on reddit, I would surmise that the ratio is roughly similar to the number douchebags on the Internet as a whole, or in the real world.

I'm going to use a term here that I rarely use, but I think fits this sort of conversation: butthurt. You all probably know what I'm talking about when I say that, and if you don't you can probably figure it out.

Anyway, it seems like there's a certain population of reddit[1] that very easily gets butthurt about a great many things. There are entire reddits devoted to butthurt, and the reality is that the subreddit system doesn't really cater to contrary opinions - if you disagree, you get downvoted. If you disagree often enough and get downvoted often enough, you just unsubscribe from the subreddit because there is literally 0% chance that your argument will be recognized as anything but trolling.

This creates an incentive for communities to be relatively one dimensional, which leads to groupthink.

In this particular instance, we have biased parties on both sides of the equation saying that there is/isn't a problem, but the entirety of the evidence is anecdotal, and one side is being exceeding inflammatory (even for the Internet).

Are there misogynists on reddit? I'm certain of it. Are there feminazis on reddit? Certainly. Do either of these populations make up even nearly an appreciable percentage of the site's population? Almost definitely not.

[1] I don't want to be one of those 'I have a four digit UID' guys, but it seems as though, as time goes on, the general maturity, intelligence, and acceptiveness of reddit goes down. I believe this is simply a testament to its popularity, but certainly not a positive one.

<comment><USER3> "Are there misogynists on reddit? I'm certain of it. Are there feminazis on reddit? Certainly. Do either of these populations make up even nearly an appreciable percentage of the site's population? Almost definitely not."

It's not the percentage that counts - after all, what is an acceptable percentage of commenters who will tell you you should be raped?

I don't know if there is a solution to this issue. Increasing verification and moderation leads to stilted, boring, stagnated communities (Facebook). Anonymous conversation with a large enough population will unavoidably attract anti-social individuals (4chan, Reddit, YouTube, Fox News, er, well, basically everywhere else that's popular).

Are online communities just doomed to a short cycle and inevitable decline as they get more popular? (see: Eternal September). This is certainly the case with every community I've been a part of since I first got online about 20 years ago.

<comment><USER2> Of course the percentage matters. To say anything less would be to not understand what a society is and how the Internet works.

You're making broad generalizations about the reddit community by calling them antisocial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The experiment seems flawed. Based on her description, it seems she knew whether she was going to be posting from her female-sounding account or her male-sounding account when she would write a comment.

She should have written the comment first, then used a random number generator to decide which account to post from. In fact, that step should have been automated so that she would not know, even after it was posted, which account it was posted from.

To check the responses, another script should have been used that would pull up her comments and the responses, but filter out her account name, so that when she judged how the comment had been received, she would not know if she was judging a comment from the male account or the female account.</comment>


Instagram Dropping Foursquare for Facebook Places - <AUTHOR> http://williamlindner.com/2014/05/13/instagram-dropping-foursquare.html <comment><USER2> The immediate result: a diminished user experience. Strategy tax in full effect.

<comment><USER3> Don't worry. Facebook will never do something like this to the Oculus Rift.

<comment><USER4> Love this quote!

But seriously, who didn't think this was going to happen?

<comment><USER5> I hold out hope every time someone claims such BS, I like trying to be optimistic.

I don't really -expect- them to follow through tho. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be interested in the views of people that _aren 't_ in the US, and especially not in Western countries. Foursquare's database is great in the US, but when I've traveled I've found it to be nowhere near as good - I wonder if - in those cases - Facebook Places is better.

<comment><USER7> It's pretty good here in London. It's very rare for me to find a place that doesn't already exist in their Database.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like a no-brainer. Facebook owning Instagram means this is just Facebook ditching a competitor's product for their own.

<comment><AUTHOR> After Facebook acquired Instagram they were really clear that they wanted them to stay independent. I wonder how "independently" they made this decision to switch to Facebook Places instead of Foursquare. Instagram ads are most likely just Facebook's new ad platform. Facebook just removed their Camera app from the app store ([http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2457866,00.asp](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2457866,00.asp)) because Instagram IS their Camera app.

<comment><USER9> I can't think of any recent acquisitions where the same type of lies weren't uttered.

"We're so happy to be joining Billion Corp. We feel that they will let us stay independent and stick to our goals. We will continue to provide the same awesome experience you all came to know and love before we sold out."

"We're so happy to be acquiring talent instead of finding it. We will totally not, not make their project theirs instead of ours, depending on our lawyers, and our shareholders. Frankly, we're just glad we didn't have to actually spend time building a good product and hiring people like these folks, since they would've never joined us in the first place."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They seem to be following the same course with Moves, the fitness tracking app they acquired recently.

You used to be able to tag locations with foursquare data, that feature was removed in the latest update. I assume facebook places will be replacing them.

<comment><AUTHOR> WhatsApp uses Foursquare too ([https://developer.foursquare.com/showcase/](https://developer.foursquare.com/showcase/)) so, I guess that will use Facebook Places as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Facebook dropping Foursquare for Facebook Places

<comment><AUTHOR> Bingo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not a deep user of Instagram, but I'm wondering if Facebook's places database is better (more meta data, better accuracy, more user feedback, etc) than Foresquare's location information?

<comment><USER13> No, they are not.

Foursquare has well-curated data that's easy for users to edit and update. Duplicates are removed quickly, closed or moved places are updated almost instantly. It's an excellent gamified system for building accurate location data.

Facebook, on the other hand, allows you to attach a freeform place to anything (photo, event, review, whatever). These freeform places are not managed well. In a cursory search for a common park in my city, there were 12 duplicates and 8-10 irrelevant only slightly related places returned. The correct place was at the top, but a duplicate was in the top 10.

It could be an Apple Maps situation. Bad now, but likely will get better as people use it more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, this seems like a big deal, but really it just means when you go to tag a place in your post ... the place won't be there and you'll skip the location tag on your post.

If anything, it'll improve Facebook Places because people will enter more venues, as I'd imagine more people tag locations in instagram than use Facebook's social checkin feature.

<comment><USER15> I'd like to see some data, but at least in my country Facebook has vastly more location data than Foursquare.

As many have said, Facebooks' data is not necessarily very good (especially lots of duplicates).

calinet6 said it best:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743917)

I do agree that this move will probably contribute better data to Facebook Places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Instagram Just Geotagged Us To Hell: When Politics Drive Product Decisions, We All Lose"

[https://medium.com/five-hundred-words/dad4c3736409](https://medium.com/five- hundred-words/dad4c3736409)

</comment><comment><USER17> Hopefully it will get better over time, with Instagram data feeding Places instead of only reading it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It definitely serves Facebook's location directory of Places the most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> To all the people automatically assuming that this is a result of facebook acquiring instagram, what if this actually _improves_ the user experience? What if instagram always wanted to integrate with facebook because they knew it was a better user experience and yet didn't because they knew facebook was instagram's #1 competitor? In that case the acquisition enables a positive.

I, for one, could not give a crap about foursquare and yet use facebook on a daily basis. I understand foursquare has its community of supporters but I don't think any objective person will argue that foursquare is on a solid trajectory. In that case, it'd make sense to go with a more established player.

<comment><USER13> The fact is, Foursquare has a truly excellent place database that's well- curated by users and is highly accurate due to the nature of their product.

Facebook does not. It has a mess of duplicate places and incorrect names due to the nature of their product. Hopefully this will be an impetus for improving their location database, but until then I don't see it being a better experience at all.

A contrarian "What if" question is fun and good to ask, but it's not automatically valid.

<comment><USER19> I can appreciated GP's optimism, but as someone who has actually utilized both data sets in various forms this is spot on.

Foursquare's data is vastly superior, something I attribute at least partially to the fact that they've built a service that incentivizes checking in, while Facebook is more heavily scrutinized for their questionable privacy practices. It'll be interesting to see if this continues to be the case when 4sq releases Swarm.</comment></comment></comment>


Ontario.ca hacked - <AUTHOR>

At the time of wrting the landing page for ontario.ca has been defaced.
It reads
HACKED BY DEVIN BHARATH
with an MC Hammer video below as well as a twitter handle. <comment><USER2> ontario.ca isn't resolving at all for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fixed already?</comment>


It Costs $50k to Hire a Software Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cgroom/it-costs-50k-to-hire-a-software-engineer-d06a0d051abf <comment><USER2> I hate this idea of "the best"

1\. there are multiple skill sets both soft and hard.

2\. you don't need fifty "alpha nerds" on one team.

3\. today's best practices are yesterday and tomorrows heresy.

4\. most engineers know there are trade offs which in one case is a great decision in another is horrible:

\- speed to market versus code quality

\- performance versus readability

\- perfection versus can live with it for 20-40% of the time and cost

\- also make a few bad career choices and your skills are so far out of date its ridiculous.

Do you code outside of work -> code for are you single with no kids.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does Europe not have any big tech companies? - <AUTHOR> Look at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_technology_companies_by_revenue<p>European countries are notably absent. Where did Europe go wrong, and is there any way to catch up? <comment><USER2> I believe it is a combination of things:

* the regulatory environment is tough on businesses: it's hard to start one and follow all the rules. The rules can also be different across EU states.

* poorer local market. Europeans generally don't have as much disposable income as Americans. It's harder to get a good amount of people to pay 20 EUR / month for a SaaS.

* different investor culture: if you failed once, you'll always fail thinking

* corporate and personal taxes are high, so there's little incentive to work like crazy to become a multimillionaire if you have to pay the bulk of it in tax.

* overall tougher social mobility, making it hard for top talent to get to the right people for funding, ideas, mentoring, etc.

* EU spends public money in attempt to create "unicorns". This feeds a certain class of exploitative business people and paper pushers who have optimized to leech off these programs by building useless things that technically check the boxes in rule books and regulations, in order to get even more public money.

<comment><USER3> As someone who has a small business in the UK I'd disagree with your first point, at least for the UK. The situation may be different depending on the EU state, but the UK has a fantastic regulatory environment. Clearing imports through customs for example is much more frictionless in the UK than the US.

I'd also disagree on the tax situation. They may be slightly higher than the US but then we also get health care included with that. This is amazing if you want to bootstrap a business, especially if you family or an illness. I have private insurance as well with BUPA but that only costs me $80/month with no deductible I believe.

I think your other points are true to varying degrees but for sure things are changing so they're probably less true than they were ten years ago.

The biggest reason is probably that the US has California and Silicon Valley.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's more difficult to scale in Europe, because of multi-language, multi- culture and regulations across the countries.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd guess, for a large example, military spending.

It's not the only one, but that's one huge investor that drives many others.

In the US, or China, you have one _huge_ budget, compared to what can be compared in terms of integration across european countries (each with their own politics, armies, capabilities, budgets, priorities; even if they do integrate & collaborate with each other).

</comment><comment><USER6> I got curious about ESET which is European company, from Slovakia, where I live. It could be probably easily unicornized, however the owners aren't interested in selling or IPOing it. A non-silicon-valley way of doing business :)

Source(in Slovak): [https://finweb.hnonline.sk/ekonomika/951768-spolumajitel- ese...](https://finweb.hnonline.sk/ekonomika/951768-spolumajitel-esetu-pre-hn- snazime-sa-byt-v-svetovej-top-trojke)

</comment><comment><USER7> EU Politicians, including Breton, cultivate this objective to build Unicorns and Large companies.

This is dangerous on several levels, from waste of public money to harm to smaller competitors.

</comment><comment><USER6> I guess there isn't such excess of easy money, VC nor govt spending?

ECB recently joined quantitative easing however (printing money), it is buying corporate bonds en masse, so unicorn-scale VC may happen too.

<comment><USER7> and ECB just started NIRP (Negative Interest Rates Policy) in order to tax our savings accounts.

Or let's move your savings to your current account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We have small companies who fulfill the needs of the people. In the Netherlands people don't use Google maps for public transport navigation, we use 9292.nl, whose service is much better than that of Google's spotty timetables.

</comment><comment><USER9> I assumed tax policy had something to do with it, the US taxes profit not revenue so companies like Amazon are financially incentivized to always reinvest in itself and grow. Many European countries have a pretty hefty ~20% VAT.

<comment><USER10> VAT is usually not paid by companies, only by consumers. The only way it might affect companies is via reduced sales due to higher taxation of private customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another factor is small tech companies can be bought by US companies easily.

The US tax system allows^H^H^H^H^H^Hencourages that: this is a good use to money that would be taxed if came back to the US.

Instead it comes back as sales, and better market position ;-).

</comment><comment><USER12> If you look at the most profitable technology companies, you could ask where the US went wrong...

[https://fortune.com/global500/search/?non-us-cos- y-n=true&pr...](https://fortune.com/global500/search/?non-us-cos- y-n=true&profits=desc&sector=Technology)

NB: Interesting that Accenture is counted as an Irish company...

<comment><USER13> The results explicitly exclude US companies due to "non-us-cos-y-n=true" in the query.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thomas Philippon argues a large factor is that the USA gave up on having free markets.

[https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237544](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237544):

 _"a leading economist argues that many key problems of the American economy are due not to the flaws of capitalism or the inevitabilities of globalization but to the concentration of corporate power. By lobbying against competition, the biggest firms drive profits higher while depressing wages and limiting opportunities for investment, innovation, and growth.

Why are cell-phone plans so much more expensive in the United States than in Europe? It seems a simple question. But the search for an answer took Thomas Philippon on an unexpected journey through some of the most complex and hotly debated issues in modern economics. Ultimately he reached his surprising conclusion: American markets, once a model for the world, are giving up on healthy competition. Sector after economic sector is more concentrated than it was twenty years ago, dominated by fewer and bigger players who lobby politicians aggressively to protect and expand their profit margins. Across the country, this drives up prices while driving down investment, productivity, growth, and wages, resulting in more inequality. Meanwhile, Europe—long dismissed for competitive sclerosis and weak antitrust—is beating America at its own game.

Philippon, one of the world's leading economists, did not expect these conclusions in the age of Silicon Valley start-ups and millennial millionaires. But the data from his cutting-edge research proved undeniable. In this compelling tale of economic detective work, we follow him as he works out the basic facts and consequences of industry concentration in the U.S. and Europe, shows how lobbying and campaign contributions have defanged antitrust regulators, and considers what all this means for free trade, technology, and innovation. For the sake of ordinary Americans, he concludes, government needs to return to what it once did best: keeping the playing field level for competition. It's time to make American markets great—and free—again."_

I know this is controversial, so I looked for negative reviews on this book. I can't find a convincing one.

[https://www.amazon.com/Great-Reversal-America-Gave- Markets/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Great-Reversal-America-Gave- Markets/dp/0674237544) has 13 reviews, all 5 stars, and positive.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44326237-the-great- rever...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44326237-the-great-reversal) has mostly 4 and 5 ratings, with a single one-star review, but that doesn't say more than _"rated it"_.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/has-america-gone- sof...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/has-america-gone-soft-on- competition/2019/11/10/8e80048c-026d-11ea-9518-1e76abc088b6_story.html) is the best critique I could find to critique it, which basically says _"Is he right? We can't tell"_.

<comment><USER15> Isn't that because US has higher median incomes? economies are a mixed bag, some stuff is more expensive in europe (e.g. food) , and europe is very different from east to west, so each country is a different comparison.</comment></comment>


Isaac Asimov Mulls "How Do People Get New Ideas?" (1959) - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531911/isaac-asimov-mulls-how-do-people-get-new-ideas/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of Walter Isaacson's biography on Steve Jobs and how it detailed his many eccentric habits and behaviors early on before starting Apple... how he never took showers while working at Atari, his odd dietary habits, his daily wardrobe, etc. But that's why he was able to "think different"...

"A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others. Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)"

Also very good is Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research" talk - [http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html)

<comment><USER3> I think things are a bit different in the age of the internet. Seeing into the private lives of others, their quirks and eccentricities, you might find that these traits are fairly common, and even desirable by certain sociocultural groups to be as 'odd' and 'quirky' as possible, as it seems to correlate with success and the capacity to think differently.

Self confidence, I agree is huge, but it can't be faked. It has to actually be known. Sometimes that seems to mean letting your mind go for a loop, coming back again, and realizing you can never know anything while also knowing something.

I just don't really think any of the side effects of being a percieved genius matter as much as the work actually done. Sometimes it means going against the crowd, sometimes it means going with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this mean Reddit is a more auspicious environment for new ideas to flourish? HN is way too confined of a place for "foolishness", that Asimov sees as conductive, to be permitted without things going haywire.

<comment><USER5> I would absolutely agree with that assessment.

One of the (potentially) negative sides of the same phenomenon is the acceptance of and tendency towards memes. They can certainly be annoying, but a strong flow of memes is indicative of a lot of culture and ideas bashing up against each other until some of the bits stick together in a novel way.

A cleverly applied meme comment on a Reddit thread can easily get hundreds or thousands of upvotes. Front page HN threads don't even get any meme comments, because people here know that their comment would be buried immediately, if not outright deleted (I admit to being much less familiar with the inner workings of HN than Reddit). Reddit threads are definitely a place of quantity over quality, but the sheer volume of creativity swirling around is bound to uncover a couple gems.

All of that said, I've never viewed HN as a place for ideas to be generated. This is a fantastic whetstone with some brilliant minds, but it can also be merciless.

<comment><USER6> I've always felt that a part of the problem on sites like reddit is that upvoting has essentially zero cost: just move your mouse and click the up arrow on whatever tickles you to do so. This means that a lazy comment which mildly amuses 1,000 people will get as many upvotes as an incredibly thoughtful comment which profoundly touches 1,000 people, and ten times as many upvotes as one which only 100 people appreciate, even if the appreciation runs far deeper.

If each account had a limited vote rate (perhaps tied to that user's activity), I think this might help to reduce this effect somewhat. Much the same analysis probably applies to downvotes: currently users will click the down arrow on anything they disagree with, rather than only downvoting comments that severely detract from the conversation. Of course you'd have to be careful about this system being gamed, but all voting systems can be gamed and it's not obvious that this approach is any more vulnerable than usual.

To some extent I think Hacker News' greater discussion quality is due to its poor user interface, as weird as that may seem. Upvoting/downvoting on a mobile device, for example, generally requires zooming in to hit a small target, whereas on reddit I don't need to do that on my iPad at all, and on my iPhone not as much. Commenting on Hacker News also requires visiting another URL, whereas on reddit it happens more effortlessly. These are small things but they can be the hurdle that causes someone not to bother to post that joke or upvote the 17th reply in a meme sequence.

I know this probably sounds like a technical solution to a social problem, and I don't mean to deny the important effect that cultural norms and community policing play. After all, subreddits have widely varying qualities of discussion depending on their community standards, and there's no question Hacker News' quality survives in large part due to community vigilance. But I do think the effortlessness of voting on reddit is a factor which contributes to the prevalence of lowest common denominator comments, and I'd be very interested in seeing reddit or other social forums experiment with imposing a scarcity of voting power.

<comment><USER7> Sites like Slashdot have this kind of system, however there are still a lot of comments that get buried, which means you have to browse at -1 or 0 in order to not miss something. Kind of like reviewing your spam filter periodically.

What I think could be a better system is for everyone to be able to mark what they like and don't like, then have the option of sorting by votes of other people that typically vote the same way you do. So people that like a lot of meme humor will see that more, and those that don't won't. Add in the ability to select from various "clusters", so you can also have the experience of reading comments based on alternative tastes, then I think you would have something that is immune from being gamed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > To feel guilty because one has not earned one's salary because one has not > had a great idea is the surest way, it seems to me, of making it certain > that no great idea will come in the next time either.

Feynman has a similar story about playing with ideas and just enjoying the process instead of worrying about the pressures associated with being great: [https://www.physics.ohio- state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html](https://www.physics.ohio- state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html).

<comment><USER9> From the same book, there's also his comment on Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study from which he refused an invitation:

"When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very disappointing. The author seems ignorant of the entire science of Psychohistory. Since it is now possible to predict human development hundreds of years into the future no idea is really new anymore.

<comment><USER11> May you elaborate ? How you claim that is possible to predict the human development ? In which way ? It to me seems a very over-simplification...

Anyway, from the wikipedia the first time the term "psycho-history" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#Emergence_as_a_di...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#Emergence_as_a_discipline)) is been used is 1958, it is a good guess to say that the article is been written no later than the 1960...

I guess we can forgive Asimov...

<comment><USER12> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29)

<comment><USER11> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am reading a short story collection of Asimov compiled in a book called Gold.

The second half of the book contains extensive commentary by Asimov on how to write science fiction. He delves into a lot of topics like writing style, grammer, ideas and many other things.

There is a whole chapter on a how to generate a story from an idea and how to get the idea to start with. In it, he stresses on thinking. As in real, solid literal thinking, what we would normally call brainstorming. As a science fiction author, he says that the brainstorming is not something that he used to do in short bursts like someone would normally do. He writes that a science fiction author has to think to a point where her/his head starts aching, literally.

</comment><comment><USER14> "If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate for that. It seems necessary to me, then, that all people at a session be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sound foolish."

This is something I've always felt, but remained unable to express as well as Asimov did here. I'm so grateful for those with a gold mine of information who resist temptation toward arrogance and scornful correction, and instead show patience and joy in teaching the foolish.

</comment><comment><USER15> Reading biographies about Einstein, I came to the conclusion that the man wasn't really a genius in the intellectual sense, but a genius when it came to ideas, and had the passion to pursue them.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting idea here:

Draw from a pool of people who wish to be involved in cerebratory pursuits, and who are willing to accept and give ideas freely to others. Out of this pool, some combination of 4 or 5 individuals within the same geographical region can be drawn randomly from this group for cerebration sessions following a few Asimov Cerebration Guidelines (ACGs):

-"ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness."

-"short reports to write, or summaries of their conclusions, or brief answers to suggested problems, [and be paid for that]"

-"educate the participants in facts and fact-combinations, in theories and vagrant thoughts."

-"meeting in someone's home or over a dinner table at some restaurant"

-"a session-arbiter will have to sit there, stirring up the animals, asking the shrewd question, making the necessary comment, bringing them gently back to the point."

After the session, the session can be given an evaluation by each of the participants:

A. did the session feel neutralized by any of the participants reputations?

B. was any insight gained?

C. was the session jovial?

I think I, as well as some others, would be interested in attending something like this if it could be organized well.

<comment><USER17> This is a very interesting idea. Perhaps taping a sample session with some extraordinarily easeful people and showing it to participants can help model the openness involved. I'd be game.

<comment><USER18> I am not sure that one can learn to have that kind of openness without practicing it oneself. An equally esoteric practice that might help to foster this is the Bohm Dialogue.[1]

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A bit offtopic, but a necessary interpretation from my perspective is how the so-called "corporate culture" with all its dresscodes and formal manners doesn't promote the ascent of new ideas - Asimov even goes on to suggest they could actually come from an informal dinner, etc.

I'll be sure to save this one to read periodically. Thanks for the submission.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Feynman's Rainbow" has a dialog on how to get new ideas, with some advice from Feynman. Chapter five I think.

</comment><comment><USER21>
       "It seems to me then that the purpose of cerebration sessions
        is not to think up new ideas but to educate the participants
        in facts and fact-combinations, in theories and vagrant thoughts."

For me the best meetings, conferences and conversations are the ones that come closest to this description.

</comment><comment><USER22> Just last month, I finished reading "Magic", Asimov's collection of small witty stories, which were NOT SF, but Fantasy.

Although the stories themselves were quite mundane, what struck me as I somehow forced my way forward in the stories, was Asimov's clairvoyant tone while writing. Most of the things he wrote, even in apparent jest, hold true today.

And never have I been so enthralled by a bunch of essays as Asimov has done it... Reading his second momoir and many more essays underline his wisdom more and more.

</comment><comment><USER23> This reminded me of Bret Victor's great talk Inventing on Principle[0].

0.[https://vimeo.com/36579366](https://vimeo.com/36579366)

<comment><USER24> Great talk. Do you know what tools was he demonstrating?

Are these tools available to use?

<comment><USER23> Though those exact tools are not really available, there are a couple of "alternatives" when it comes to live coding; a HTML5 canvas playground[0] and another similar one[1].

If you are interested more in live coding you might want to check [http://toplap.org/?title=ToplapSystems](http://toplap.org/?title=ToplapSystems)

0.[http://htmlivecode.com/canvas-animation- playground/](http://htmlivecode.com/canvas-animation-playground/)

1.[http://tnlogy.github.io/tnlogy/](http://tnlogy.github.io/tnlogy/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For anyone interested in this subject, highly recommend reading Steven Johnson's book "Where Good Ideas Come From".

To get a summary of the book you can also view his TED talk:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_com...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from?language=en)

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't come to HN looking to generate new ideas. I come to be exposed to things I might potentially be interested in, and to learn from those who might know more than me. If I generate any new ideas at all, it's outside of the time I'm engaged here (when things have time to percolate and my focus isn't so narrow).

</comment><comment><USER27> Permutation.

You take an old idea, and you pull out all the variables and you start permuting upon them.

<comment><USER28> Yes!

... but which variables?

Permutations grow exponentially as you add dimensions, so you can't have too many.

<comment><USER29> You want Systematic Inventive Thinking: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_inventive_thinking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_inventive_thinking)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Http://screenwipers.weebly.com/ - <AUTHOR> I'm stuck. I order a MOQ with Emma from Sczenchen on Alibaba for 3000 - 4000, but i've only sold 493. I've invested the past 6 years of my life in this idea.<p>Advice? <comment><USER2> The site is not very clear. The links to "our work", "about" and "contact" are empty. The header points to screenwipers.com that is a parked domain.

It's not clear at all what does they do. Do you have a video of one working?</comment>


Team Rocket Drops 'Breakthrough' Family of Consensus Algorithms on IPFS - <AUTHOR> https://www.ethnews.com/team-rocket-drops-breakthrough-family-of-consensus-algorithms-on-ipfs <comment><AUTHOR> Associated paper: [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUy4jh5mGNZvLkjies1RWM4YuvJh5o2FYopNPV...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUy4jh5mGNZvLkjies1RWM4YuvJh5o2FYopNPVYwrRVGV)

Please post any interesting suggestions on bitcoin related papers that appear to have some theoretical content, or present simple ideas that could be proved secure. PoS seems to be plagued with lots of 40-50 page whitepapers that are not very easy to read, with the above being a nice exception.</comment>


Students are demanding MIT fire a professor who visited Epstein in prison - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne8yvk/students-are-demanding-mit-fire-a-professor-who-visited-epstein-in-prison <comment><USER2> I don't think a professor visiting a sex offender in prison is grounds for firing him. Its too easy nowadays to say that someone's actions make you feel "unsafe" in order to ruin their career. I am reminded of Harvard removing law professor Ronald Sullivan from his position as housemaster supervising a dorm because he represented alleged sex offender Harvey Weinstein.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Two other professors with ties to Epstein, including Richard Stallman, the > famed founder of the free software movement, have resigned.

(From the article). Considering Stallman wasn't a professor and didn't have ties to Epstein, it doesn't give a lot of confidence in the article author to get other facts right.

<comment><USER4> > Considering Stallman wasn't a professor and didn't have ties to Epstein, it > doesn't give a lot of confidence in the article author to get other facts > right.

Even worse, IIRC Stallman was fired for intervening in a email flamewar where a random user was accusing a deceased colleague of Stallman of having committed crimes that didn't even matched the accusation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The subject of quantum computing is not changed by the professor's actions in visiting someone who has been accused, but not convicted, of crimes.

<comment><USER2> Epstein had been convicted of crimes and was jailed because of new charges. But I agree with your overall point.</comment></comment>


Machine Behavior Needs to Be an Academic Discipline - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/machine-behavior-needs-to-be-an-academic-discipline <comment><USER2> When you create a group of experts whose expertise lies in telling other people how what they're doing is wrong, you create problems.

The experts need to justify their position by coming up with more and more reasons that people need to listen to them. People who are actually doing the work quickly become convinced that said experts are ignorant asses who don't know what they are doing. This automatically sets up grounds for conflict.

I agree that the ethics of AI is important. However I expect the best work to come from people who are experts in AI first, and only secondarily in ethics. And I expect that the self-appointed experts in ethics won't recognize this. (Particularly not when faced with anything that makes their position seem less important.)

<comment><USER3> Your proposal has the exact opposite problem - the AI experts are incentivized to not make two much waves regarding the dangers, because that would endanger the field (and money invested in it).

Thus we get quotes from them like "overpopulation on Mars"

<comment><USER4> > _Thus we get quotes from them like "overpopulation on Mars"_

Context, please? :)

<comment><USER5> The point being that AGI is at least 50 years and probably 200 years or more away.

It is such a distant threat and yet such a focus, and all the while we sit in our lovely apartments 40 minutes from nuclear incineration.

<comment><USER6> yeah clearly Dr. Ng was addressing fears of AGI in that quote. Thing is that machine learning can be used for nefarious purposes, intentionally or even unintentionally, without AGI being a reality. Those are more realistic fears

the conflation of machine learning and AGI causes confusion yet again..

<comment><USER5> Agree - I think that your point of the use of the tool rather than the tool itself being of sole concern is really important. Clearly devices (like Nukes) that can kill thousands must be regulated tightly, but to extend the same level of control to the whole technology makes applications (like medical scanners using nuclear tech) that are of great benefit potentially untenable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We covered these topics in my Computer Ethics class. I took a bunch of philosophy classes on Ethics too. You can teach a person from a book all about Ethics. The problem is that people will make the decision to be ethical with their gut or in the moment.

For instance I was designing an app that would identify if the food had an allergen or not. Eventually I came to the realization that my program if deployed could actually hurt people. So I stopped working on the project. I wrote a blogpost about this (shameless plug) at [https://medium.com/@zitterbewegung/making-computer-vision- sy...](https://medium.com/@zitterbewegung/making-computer-vision-systems-that- dont-kill-your-users-2c98228d9032) . The core issue was I was giving people information that they could perform medical decisions. This gave me a bad feeling and a bunch of lawyers told me when I referenced this post.

I eventually pivoted what I learned into this (yet another shameless plug) : [https://steemit.com/twilio/@zitterbewegung/mms2text-let- your...](https://steemit.com/twilio/@zitterbewegung/mms2text-let-your- computer-look-at-your-message-pics-so-you-don-t-have-to)

which doesn't have the issue of harming people.

<comment><USER8> But not making your app killed people who didn't notice nuts in their food...

<comment><USER9> That is too strong a conclusion. People with nut allergies already have procedures for knowing if nuts are in food, for example, asking the restaurant or preparing food their self.

Without knowing if his app was accurate, we cannot say whether building or not building the app was the right decision.

<comment><USER7> The app was very inaccurate during my testing. Hiding almonds in a dish made out of pure chocolate (a Hershey kiss) would be an easy counter example.

Also, I have a nut allergy so I have a complicated set of procedures to figure out if nuts are in the dish (that was the main motivation for the app).

<comment><USER8> Humans aren't any better at determining if a kiss has invisible almonds. An AI could solve that (better than a human could!) by knowing memorizing ingredient lists form public databases and tagging foods that have nutty variants, often times that people wouldn't know about.

<comment><USER10> I think it's fair to say humans are better at reasoning about uncertainty and risk. If the food isn't in the database, or we aren't sure if it's a match, what does the algorithm say?

ML algorithms work on statistical performance against loss functions or error rates. They aren't (yet) good at understanding the difference between a mistake that causes a missed dessert and a mistake that might kill you. Maybe they can guess correctly a higher percent of the time if shown flashcards, but that's small consolation from the hospital bed. They also aren't that good at the limits of their own knowledge, i.e. saying "I don't know".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article seems really wishy-washy and confusing. What is actually being proposed?

A set of standards that automated algorithms should adhere to? What kind of standards are we talking about?

A new branch of philosophy that talks about the actions of automated algorithms? What would be the point? How do you actually turn that into something that progresses, and that people will act on?

More ethics classes in universities for CS students? How do you differentiate this from what's already happening? Is it just broader?

\---

To try to steelman this a bit, I figure there are two issues at play.

The first is making sure that AI is working in the way we designed it to; it's free of biases, it doesn't endanger people, it adheres to laws. We're doing horifficially on this metric when it comes to long-term superhuman AI alignment stuff, but most people are talking about next-decade issues. Those are raw technical issues, and though we're still working on robustness and detecting biases I really cannot see much need for external guidance outside of the natural technical progress that the field is already heavily invested in. These are problems we _want_ to solve already.

The second issue is use of these technologies as tools. This is where we talk about how large companies' algorithms affect public perception, or how automated militaries affects warfare, or how self-driving cars are litigated. These are not AI problems, they're social problems. Yes, the technology behind those examples looks kind'a similar behind the scenes, but these are distinct social, legal and economic problems.

This is kind of like seeing the advent of electricity, predicting its effect on society, and asking for people to study "ethics of electricity".

<comment><USER12> the first problem is one where CS researchers would likely benefit from more contact with outsiders, although I agree it's a pretty lively area of research already, at least for the shorter-term issues.

the second problem is one where social scientists could benefit from actually understanding how these systems work. yes, they are social problems, but the sociologists could do much better if they had a better understanding of the details of the technology.

The authors say they want "a consolidated, scalable, and scientific approach to the behavioral study of artificial intelligence agents in which social scientists and computer scientists can collaborate seamlessly". So, a new interdisciplinary category.

I get the sense they are especially concerned with the empirical study of behavior and social impact of big ML systems in the real world. In another post I compared this sort of thing to sociologists studying transit infrastructure.

<comment><USER11> > the first problem is one where CS researchers would likely benefit from more > contact with outsiders

Could you be more concrete about how you would like other fields to contribute?

> the second problem is one where social scientists could benefit from > actually understanding how these systems work [...]

> The authors say they want "a consolidated, scalable, and scientific approach > to the behavioral study of artificial intelligence agents in which social > scientists and computer scientists can collaborate seamlessly". So, a new > interdisciplinary category.

I don't really agree. You don't need to know how electricity works to study its societal effects, and the societal change from electricity-augmented manufacturing is a completely different problem to the health and safety regulation of indoor sockets.

The same is true for AI. You don't need to know what backpropagation is to work on the long-term ramifications of automated warfare, and that in turn is a largely irrelevant discussion for someone figuring out whether a company's hiring algorithms are racially biased. There is neither a clear need for top- down regulations to be grounded in the minutia of the systems, nor any obvious advantage of grouping these discussions under one umbrella.

There is a need for the disciplines already dealing with these problems to pick up more specialised knowledge as the systems get more common, but that is a far cry from what seems to be argued in the article.

<comment><USER12> > Could you be more concrete about how you would like other fields to > contribute?

In the world of fair machine learning, "What are the right criteria for fairness under [set of circumstances]?" is usually not easily answerable, and I don't think we'll find satisfactory answers without more involvement from non-CS researchers -- both people in economics, law, and the humanities who are sort of generally concerned with fairness in society, and people who know a lot about specific domains where systems are being deployed. This in particular seems like an issue of "machine behavior" as described in the article.

With regards to transparency/explainability of models, there's a problem of making sure the "explanation" is actually useful and intuitive to the user, where psychologists (and HCI people who are already in CS depts) may have a lot to contribute.

In both cases there is a little ad hoc communication and there ought to be more.

> I don't really agree. You don't need to know how electricity works to study > its societal effects, and the societal change from electricity-augmented > manufacturing is a completely different problem to the health and safety > regulation of indoor sockets.

I think electricity is not the best analogy, because it has a really subtle theory that few people understand, but we're so familiar with its use that many of its interesting properties are too obvious to see. It's also not at all autonomous -- it is often fruitful to think of a specific machine learning system as an agent, whereas this doesn't make much sense for electricity. Most importantly, I think it's just broader and more general than machine learning (trivially so!).

> The same is true for AI. You don't need to know what backpropagation is to > work on the long-term ramifications of automated warfare, and that in turn > is a largely irrelevant discussion for someone figuring out whether a > company's hiring algorithms are racially biased.

The commonality here is you care about understanding or predicting the empirical behavior of machine learning systems interacting with the real world, especially with humans. ("Long-term ramifications of automated warfare" might not qualify, but I think medium-term ramifications certainly could.)

I don't think CS researchers are trained or particularly interested in empirical studies of human behavior, the stock market, etc., nor should they be, so somebody else will have to help. That somebody had better know enough about CS to be able to collaborate with actual CS researchers, though, or the results are going to be poor.

<comment><USER11> > In the world of fair machine learning, "What are the right criteria for > fairness under [set of circumstances]?" is usually not easily answerable

There is nothing particularly machine learning specific about this. If I want to design an AI to detect bank fraud, you're right that I want to do cross- disciplinary research in its design, but I do not understand what _AI ethicists_ would add to that.

My disagreement is not that AI will involve itself in other fields, and in the process we need to learn about those fields. It's with the idea that either those people should be talking about the raw technology or that there should be a general field about how AI specifically relates to the sum of every other field.

> The commonality here is you care about understanding or predicting the > empirical behavior of machine learning systems interacting with the real > world, especially with humans.

Which is just the technical domain of AI research. Narrowing it down to the commonalities has removed all of the interesting points we were going to study!

I agree that when AI is added to the social systems or the stock market, we need to involve people versed in social systems or the stock market. I still do not see why they cannot collaborate in exactly the same way that they have already. The only difference visible to me is that that the hammers are bigger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> if a sociologist wanted to study the social impact of transit infrastructure, that would be perfectly reasonable, and we wouldn't expect them to know much going in about signaling systems, switches, or different types of rolling stock. likely a railway engineer wouldn't be all that successful trying to do the sociologist's job.

i think machine learning systems are different, and any researcher in a new field of "Machine Behavior" would have to know much more about how they work than in the railroad example. but there's no reason to suppose that work done by people trained outside of CS departments will be nonsense.

and as the authors say, there are real blind spots where CS researchers might just ask the wrong questions entirely.

<comment><USER13> > if a sociologist wanted to study the social impact of transit > infrastructure, that would be perfectly reasonable, and we wouldn't expect > them to know much going in about signaling systems, switches, or different > types of rolling stock.

Yes -- and a good sociologist would also learn a lot about that stuff once they started their research, I'd imagine :). Not enough to be a railway engineer, but presumably enough to be able to speak meaningfully & intelligently to railway engineers. Not unlike science journalists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The problem here, I think, is that although humans can be studied without knowing the structure of their brains, (psychology, sociology, etc...) machines of today cannot. The reason for that is that humans are humans and barely differ from each other biologically (the structure of the brain), but ANNs are very diverse and their behavior changes depending on their "biology," so machine psychology or machine sociology cannot be built on stable grounds

<comment><USER8> > although humans can be studied without knowing the structure of their > brains, (psychology, sociology, etc...) machines of today cannot.

why?

Or do you mean that study of some humans is _generalizable_ to most/all humans, whereas machines lack this consistency and generalizability?

Anyway, why would this concern prevent "feature detection" tests that apply to all machines?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "In our own work—being computer scientists ourselves—we've been frequently humbled by our social and behavioral science collaborators. " this part rings truer than any other phrase in the whole thing.

</comment><comment><USER15> AI is not yet complex enough to warrant such a discipline.

Obviously, like any other tool, AI systems are part of the purview of anyone studying how society works (and as a particularly complicated tool, deserve a particularly extensive examination.) But at this point, studying the ethics of a machine is like studying the ethics of a fruit fly.

</comment><comment><USER16> "We often cannot certify that an AI agent is optimal or ethical by looking at its source code, any more than we can certify that humans are good by scanning their brains."

What do people make of this claim? Is that a fair comparison?

<comment><USER10> It's fair to some extent. The human brain is vastly more complex, so I don't love the comparison. However, with very modern machine learning which is based on deep neural networks, even though the source code is simple, it produces a very complex neural network after training on data. That network is very hard to understand and predict.

Even with simpler algorithms, you might argue that in a complex environment they could have some emergent behavior that's hard to foresee based on the source code. For example, if one is not careful then even simple linear regression on some datasets can "learn" techniques like redlining -- using zip code as a proxy for race as a part of biased predictions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It sounds like the term they're looking for is "robopsychologist", I was hoping for a mention of the great Susan Calvin.</comment>


Smart battery connects your dumb smoke alarm to Wi-Fi - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/11/11/the-roost-smart-battery-is-now-available-to-connect-your-dumb-smoke-alarm-to-wi-fi/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have 12ft ceilings and hard-wired smoke detectors that like to go off at the slightest provocation. Needless to say, I've had plenty of opportunities to question why there isn't a mid-range option for a smoke detector with an easy way to get them to STFU. I love the creativity of going via the battery, although I wonder how they get around the back-up battery that most smoke alarms have. I've always thought building an alarm that includes a cheap infrared remote would be a massive leap forward without having to spend a fortune on Nest.</comment>


Unicorn's are real – you can be one too | Your path to being a 10x programmer - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/your-path-to-being-a-10x-programmer-unicorns-are-real-you-can-be-one-too-78d1ffa33cbc <comment><USER2> *Unicorns</comment>


Regulator warns Bitcoin buyers: Be ready to lose all your money - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42360553 <comment><USER2> The headline sounds like a threat: "we might take your money through regulatory action". The statement was actually that the value of cryptocurrency is volatile and it's risky as an investment or store of value.

This is sound advice for someone who doesn't know much about it and is only interested because they've heard about people making huge profits. It's not news at all to most of the HN audience.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well there's nothing new here.

Also, such poor headline. "Be ready to lose all your money" sounds like a threat. He really said "be prepared to lose all your money", which sounds more like sound advice.

<comment><USER4> Those sound the same to me

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Title: "The US Army: prepare to die! buahahhahahaha"

Article: The US Army says if you're facing imminent death due to natural or unnatural causes, the US Army is under no obligation to mobilize itself and somehow find the cure to cancer or perform other miracles to cure you.

</comment><comment><USER6> This seems pretty late in the game. BTC was whitepapered in 2008 and implemented (in code and network) the same year.

If the intention of central banks is to "protect peoples' investments", they should have warned about these concerns earlier.

At the risk of using Trump's favorite "ism", Wall Street and central banks don't exactly have a great reputation for "protecting peoples' investments" either. In fact, the EU and the US federal government are enablers of the same crappy behaviors that encourage financial swindling and speculation.

<comment><USER7> Granted, they have been warning about it since early days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I only have the pure profits that I've made off bitcoin invested in bitcoin nowadays.

<comment><USER9> This is a common investing fallacy. It doesn't matter "where" you get your money from, money is money.

If you have $30,000 today, be it from BTC or from Work, it doesn't matter. If you lose it all tomorrow to a crash, you lost $30,000.

If you have $50,000 in BTC, it doesn't matter if you "only spent $1000" a few years ago. Its $50,000 (minus capital gains taxes).

<comment><USER10> Yes but if I invested $1000 and sold 1/2 for ($1000 + any taxes/fees that might apply) some time later, if it crashes to 0 I am not at a net loss.

You can call it a fallacy all you want, it's one I'm more than happy to indulge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hoping to see a public statement about the uncertainty surrounding the foundational math of cryptographic hash functions instead it's the same volatility argument where the response is 'that's why I'm interested!'

<comment><USER12> Have you got any reference links for this? I can't find anything matching this cryptographic uncertainty

<comment><USER11> In a broadly abstracted sense: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem)

<comment><USER12> Thanks, well I guess if these encryption problems can be solved efficiently, then most of the modern world would collapse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _shrug_ , please get in the queue.</comment>


Microsoft's new business model for Windows 10: Pay to play - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-new-business-model-for-windows-10-pay-to-play/?ftag=TRE5575fdc&bhid=25696397469645606458680072209264 <comment><USER2> I don't think this is "new" at all. It's been the Windows business model for a while: separate SKUs for separate user classes. In-place upgrades from lower SKUs were added way back in Vista (which had two more SKUs even, Ultimate and Enterprise Ultimate!).

I guess the "new" item here is the Office 365-esque plan for Windows Enterprise, but that isn't so much a "new business model" as a better small/medium business proposition for the low end of Software Assurance and the other large enterprise tools for Windows Enterprise licensing.

<comment><USER3> Part of what the article suggests is new is moving some items to more expensive editions. For example, Deferring upgrades has moved from Home to Pro, and several Group Policy Options have moved from Pro to Enterprise only.

<comment><USER2> That also doesn't seem so new to me? Microsoft has constantly tweaked what is or is not included in each SKU since the very beginnings of Windows.

If anything, these two particular complaints sound to me more that some users (especially small/medium businesses, but also some "semi-pro" users) have been using the wrong SKU for years and this is a necessary alignment shift.</comment></comment></comment>


A Proposal for a Minimum Viable Model, the HW Startup's 3D MVP - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mkummer/create-an-mvp-3d-model-for-your-hardware-startup-in-an-hour-f1e0742af866 <comment><USER2> I think the best part of getting a basic 3D model done is to give you an idea of some physical constraints before spending big bucks on materials, e.g., you might realize that there's no space for a battery on your internet water bottle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely, both sizing and layout - On paper we thought we'd be able to design our current product in a reasonable form factor with a symmetric layout.

During the modeling phase we quickly switched to an asymmetric layout to maintain the form factor we were going for.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Rewind Conference – Every month a new curated list of JavaScript talks - <AUTHOR> https://rewindconference.com <comment><USER2> Cool idea! Bookmarked for future use. (and my ask, please keep an archive visitors can browse)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Your idea is added the our todolist.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Email signature editor with GMail/GSuite integration EmailSignature.org - <AUTHOR> https://emailsignature.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, I did a Show HN last time ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643557)), and realized that GSuite was not verified, since then I was making some other updates waiting for Google approves. I have fixed some tweaks in the editor and also improve the way you upload images, also added some videos that show you how to use the editor and other to show you how to update your gmail signature with a couple clicks, finally I change the delete process. Please feel free to send my your comments or recommendations. Best regards,

</comment><comment><USER2> Am i the only one who prefers plain-text signatures and emails in general?

<comment><USER3> I don't mind markup, but images and more-than-one line of content is usually annoying to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will be working on new templates, maybe you will find something you like. Thanks for the comment</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: OpenCV or OpenGL - <AUTHOR> Hi, I am a software developer based in Europe with significant experience in C/C++, Python, CMake, etc. I am currently working munich for a luxury automative brand.
I want to change my field to OpenGL or OpenCV. I have very basic knowledge about classical machine learning. I have worked in industry quality Qt application.
I am planning to dedicate 30 hours a week outside my work, should I choose OpenCV or OpenGL. <comment><USER2> For machine learning neither OpenGL and OpenCV will help you very much. OpenGL is a 3D graphics library, OpenCV is a Computer Vision Library. OpenCV handles things like detecting faces or objects in an image or video feed. Machine learning is the process of teaching a computer to detect specific types of objects in graphics, or to understand say how a tv or movie script is written. The goal of machine learning is to teach a machine to do something like write a movie script based on hundred of other movie scripts. If your end goal is to learn about Machine Learning then I would suggest you look at something like Google's Tesnsor Flow instead. OpenGL and OpenCV wont help you at all really. However they may be required to feed data into your Machine Learning system.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not really interested in machine learning.

I am more into industrial application in C++, not ECU programmers. I just want to do something interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Any chance you could lend me a hand with some C++ code? If so, shoot me a message: email@example.com. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> you should learn vulkan/cuda or deep learning at this point, in my opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> CUDA is HPC, I have worked in this, in Germany they don't care if you don't have a PhD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What are your goals?

<comment><AUTHOR> I work for a contractor, my work is mostly use ECU services to build GUI application for cars. Work is interesting, but I have lost interest due to working for a very long time.

I just want to come out of this and work in something which is more visible and pay is decent.

* Qt is too boring, there are too many old programmers and legacy apps. * C++17, TDD, CMake in job description, but work is in C++14 and BDD, with plenty of legacy code. I don't want to work. * I heard future belong to autonomous driving. So , I though I will go for OpenCV or OpenGL</comment></comment>


Did Positive Thinking Kill Your Career? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/id/225320

<comment><USER2> True, although I for one haven't bought a Kindle yet. Am I under the wrong impression that all the books I buy for the kindle are tied to the Kindle/Amazon? Yes, I buy a lot of books, and actually I wouldn't mind freeing shelf space by going digital. But if I buy a book, I also want to own it. I don't want to pay the full price of a book just for the right to read it for a while (the right to read it forever would be acceptable - I am not into physical ownership as such). (I don't want to buy the electronic readers from Amazon for the rest of my life, either). I am also not interested in Amazon recording my reading speed, bookmarks and notes (I seem to remember that they do that, or at least offer it as a service).

I do hope that a more acceptable business model will eventually emerge, so I agree that books are probably quite finished.</comment>


Signal intelligence 101: SIGINT targets - <AUTHOR> https://satelliteobservation.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/signal-intelligence-101-sigint-targets/ <comment><USER2> A good primer, but more like SIGINT 101 CIRCA 1970. No mention of China, Iran, North Korea, or the use of SIGINT against terrorist or insurgent networks.

<comment><USER3> As interesting as SIGINT against terrorist networks sounds, I assume most of this is classified -- since the cells are already known to operate smaller, and likely more difficult-to-intercept networks than nations, they'd probably adapt fairly quickly if it were revealed how they're being eavesdropped on.

<comment><USER4> I would imagine that since groups like ISIS aren't running their own cell networks, it would be very easy for government groups to locate anyone using those networks. Satellite phones can be just as easy to find too. The only way to really hide is just blend in with the normal cell noise of a city, use encrypted messaging, and hope no one is connecting the metadata dots to find you.

<comment><USER5> Mexican drug cartels have been found to be running their own cell networks, so the idea that ISIS or any other well-funded group could do the same is not outside the realm of possibility. Of course, from a SIGINT perspective, cell towers are pretty hard to hide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Your emails may not be as private as you think". When has email ever been private? Even if you're using PGP there is still the issue of metadata leaks and people who don't understand PGP and reply with the unencrypted text in the reply (botching your attempts at secure comms). Not to mention people storing their whole life in a single email account and making it easier to build up a dossier of the person over time.

[https://satelliteobservation.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/ech...](https://satelliteobservation.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/echelon07_15.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating read, but i'd be lying if the old Unix nerd in me initially thought this was about signal(3)

</comment><comment><USER8> Related: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/world/middleeast/isis- cyb...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/world/middleeast/isis-cyber.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Cool historical read. Thanks.</comment>


Ruby on Windows: Failure and Observations - <AUTHOR> http://djberg96.livejournal.com/180499.html

<comment><USER2> _It definitely let me know that the market for Ruby on Windows isn't anywhere near what I thought it was._

It's a story that goes back a long way too. Some people care about Ruby on Windows a _lot_ but in the main, nah, Ruby and Windows don't gel and there isn't the mass interest. As true now as when I wrote about this problem back in 2008: [http://www.rubyinside.com/is-windows-a-first-class- platform-...](http://www.rubyinside.com/is-windows-a-first-class-platform-for- ruby-823.html)

Back at Euruko 2008 I chaired a panel on the topic of Ruby + Windows after a few Windows advocates asked me to get a feel for the what the community though. You could have seen a tumbleweed go across the room of 300 developers! And Matz's opinion was pretty clear: [http://blog.flowdock.com/2008/05/29/ruby-release- compatibili...](http://blog.flowdock.com/2008/05/29/ruby-release- compatibility/)</comment>


New Secure-Filters NPM Module for Simpler Output Sanitization - <AUTHOR> https://goinstant.com/blog/new-securefilters-npm-module-for-simpler-output-sanitization

<comment><USER2> Always happy to see new input sanitization libraries, but most don't deal with the especially difficult problem of safe subsets of HTML. i.e. How to accept html from an untrusted source, apply whitelisted tag/attribute combinations, and ensure safe output.

</comment><comment><USER3> The github repo can be found at [https://www.github.com/goinstant/secure- filters](https://www.github.com/goinstant/secure-filters)</comment>


DeployMint: A Git based Staging and Deployment System for WordPress - <AUTHOR> http://markmaunder.com/2011/08/19/deploymint-a-staging-and-deployment-system-for-wordpress/

<comment><USER2> This is an exciting plugin but in terms of execution, I'd have preferred it based on 3 separate instances rather than MU.

With MU it is difficult to keep different versions of plugins, something which you might want to do during development, staging and production. But ultimately you might want to have the development version on a local machine and the staging on a different server.

(I'm also not a fan of MU unless you are truly building a 'network' of blogs, but that's just a personal preference)

Seeing as author mmaunder is reading these comments, I'm curious to hear whether he'd be interested in having this plugin developed to support multiple discrete instances, perhaps with community development? I might fork and do a pull request if he is.

</comment><comment><USER3> this looks very promising, how does this differ from the one click staging plugin by WPEngine?

<comment><USER4> That's a hosting providers proprietary method of giving you a sandbox. Not a plugin or version control.</comment></comment>


Google Plus: Is This the Social Tool Schools Have Been Waiting For? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_education.php#.ThC16wgGQZR.hackernews <comment><USER2> Earlier submission: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2724140></comment>


Ask HN: How often do you see duplicated work in your company? - <AUTHOR> I've worked at multiple companies and see duplicated efforts all the time. It's honestly good to some degree to have competing products, but I was curious how often some of the HN crowd has seen it as well? <comment><USER2> How large a company? This is a communication issue and thus should be very rare in a small company where no department is larger than a single 7-10 person team. It's undoubtedly extremely common in companies with departments of thousands.

</comment><comment><USER3> A coworker and I are working on the same feature "in parallel" as my boss put it. We don't communicate or exchange ideas. Not sure how the "winning" solution will be chosen.</comment>


Readtwit is closing shop - <AUTHOR> http://www.readtwit.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I loved this application - it would grab linked articles on Twitter, get the linked article and display it in my RSS reader, saving me a click hundreds of times per day.</comment>


The FDA Burns - <AUTHOR> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/08/the-fda-burns.html <comment><USER2> Is this supposed to convince us that the FDA is bad, and by extension, the rest of USA government is bad? Because it seems to me that all it says is "the FDA is probably underfunded, and we've let vested interests drive our health care processes".</comment>


Google App Engine Blog: Changing Quotas To Keep Most Apps Serving Free - <AUTHOR> http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/06/changing-quotas-to-keep-most-apps.html <comment><USER2> They've cut $120 a month from the free quota, and they cut it from the only two resources that really get used: Bandwidth and CPU.

I have an App Engine app that I wrote a while back but hadn't publicly released yet -- now I'm glad I didn't, because this quota change would have fucked me with a 100x cost increase.

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I reading that right? They're dropping from 10GB free outbound transfer to 1GB?

<comment><USER4> Yes. This reduction was announced back on Feb 24 when they allowed billing:

[http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-grow-your- ap...](http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-grow-your-app-beyond- free-quotas.html)

<comment><USER3> Do you accept the argument that this will not affect the majority of applications on App Engine? I had the impression that large numbers of apps were already exceeding the existing quotas.

<comment><USER2> I do accept their argument, but only because the _vast majority_ of 'apps' are abandoned and use <1mb per day. Fuck, probably at least half have never had code uploaded to them!

This change will affect _everyone_ that actually uses GAE free hosting, even the ones using much less than 1gb/day. The way the free quota works, it's throttled to keep you from using it up all at once -- which means that anyone without billing turned on just took a _massive_ hit to QOS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bradley Watch: How one entrepreneur changed his thinking about the blind - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/a-new-vision-how-one-entrepreneur-changed-his-thinking-about-the-blind/2014/01/10/25b615a4-794d-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html

<comment><USER2> Very relevant - [http://www.angadmakes.com/virtual- brailler](http://www.angadmakes.com/virtual-brailler)</comment>


Comparing Hashes in PHP the Wrong Way - <AUTHOR> https://eval.in/108854

<comment><USER2> So both works out to something that looks like an exponent value, and then the non-strct comparison evaluates them both as 0. The simple solution is ===.

A lot of luck having a hash with an 0e############ result.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://twitter.com/voodooKobra/status/534724855103774721](https://twitter.com/voodooKobra/status/534724855103774721)

Comparing /^0e[0-9]{30}$/ with /^[0-9a-f]$/ gives you a chance of about 2.939 x 10^-9 in 1 (or about 0.0000002939%) of occurring. This is a naive probability estimate.

Compared to a birthday collision, we can expect 6.28 * 10^28 0e############################## cases to occur for every hash collision.

Of course, there's also the possibility that 1e would act the same way, which effectively doubles the odds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is one reason that I don't regard PHP as anything more than a toy language.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your elitism is noted and disregarded.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. This 'toy language' has accomplished many millions of strong websites. It has some faults, but all languages has faults.

<comment><USER3> Just because something is popular does not mean that it's "good". However it is "good enough" for many things.

Much in the same way as BASIC was rubbish in the 8 but days. But the usage of BASIC was near universal because it was near universal. Php is on virtually every web hosting outfits web servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Better: hash_equals()

Best: use password_hash() and password_verify()

<comment><USER3> or use the "is this really equal" operator '==='

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://blog.astrumfutura.com/2010/10/nanosecond-scale- remote...](http://blog.astrumfutura.com/2010/10/nanosecond-scale-remote- timing-attacks-on-php-applications-time-to-take-them-seriously/)

For cryptographic secrets, password hashes, MACs, digital signatures, etc. use a comparison operator that runs in constant time. Ergo, hash_equals()</comment></comment></comment>


A distributed file system supporting disconnected operation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jeffpc/nx01 <comment><AUTHOR> Looks more or less dead?</comment>


3 Tesla workers die in E. Palo Alto plane crash - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/17/BA391C32O5.DTL

<comment><USER2> I see two possibilities: pilot loss of control due to disorientation caused by IMC conditions and subsequent powered flight into the ground or an engine failure. A loaded Cessna 310 has very poor climb performance with a single engine running. Probably an engine failure is the likely cause with the poor weather inhibiting the pilot's ability to make an off runway landing in the marsh.

<comment><USER3> I agree that those are the two likely possibilities. Given that the pilot was pretty experienced, and was a multi-engine instructor, I'd say that disorientation is less likely.

On a cold day at sea level, the 310 should be able to get at least 200fpm. The book number is about 300fpm. However, they may not have been going fast enough to get book performance, and a plane that old usually can't make nearly the book numbers. They hit at about .3nm from the end of the runway, significantly left of the extended centerline, and at an altitude of about 100 feet. That would be consistent with a climb rate of about 150-200fpm.

My guess is that the left engine failed. The left engine is the critical engine, and so the plane would have very strongly wanted to turn left. It would have been slow having just taken off, and so the pilot probably had to turn to keep his speed up and maintain a positive climb rate. He probably either forgot about the power lines, or was just hoping to clear them since he couldn't see them.

Sadly, this is probably just another instance of the second engine being just enough to get you to the scene of the crash.

<comment><USER4> Do pilots train flying 2-engined planes in emergency (ie, 1-engine) conditions?

<comment><USER3> Yes, they do. The supposed advantage of a twin engine plane is that you can fly if one quits. The FAA makes you demonstrate that you can handle the plane on one engine before they turn you loose with a twin-engined plane, but the unfortunate reality is that the fatal accident rate for twin engined (small, piston) planes is worse than singles. The problem is that the probability of an engine failure is twice as high in a twin as in a single. In a single, if the engine quits, you're a glider, and the plane is fairly straightforward to handle. As long as you don't hit anything too solid, you'll be OK if you keep the plane under control through the landing. In a twin though, you have to do everything just right, or you can end up out of control and hit the ground nose down and die.

In most light twin planes, both props turn the same direction, and so the plane has a natural left-turning tendency when climbing. If the left engine goes out, you're in a very bad situation, because now the plane really wants to go to the left. If you indulge it, you don't get to go where you want. If you don't, you may get a worse climb rate (which is already very bad.)

<comment><USER5> Why don't they spin the props opposite directions?

<comment><USER6> It would make props and many engine parts non-interchangeable, significantly increasing capital and maintenance costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What happened to the old article that was just here? It seems the points remain but the comments are all gone. Also, it's been reposted by pg...

<comment><USER8> The other article was tripe. People were upvoting based on worthiness of the story, not on the particular writing at the original site. Now everyone can read actual facts and come up with their own opinions.

<comment><USER9> So, I submitted the original story. When it was submitted, the article on the page was much different that what it appears to be now. I just came back from lunch to find my submission "overridden". In this case I don't mind because of the situation, and I would rather have an article with more journalistic integrity take center stage, but there were some good comment threads going on the original submission. However, it did seem odd that it happened.

<comment><USER10> I find your previous comment humorously prophetic in light of this :)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1132225>

<comment><USER9> heh.. yeah. which is actually why I'm not upset that it got reposted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Godspeed. Don't know if many readers here are also pilots, but it's always sad to see something like this happen to a fellow aviator. I've flown 310's quite a bit and they can be a handful on a single engine - although I will refrain from speculating about the crash further. Incidentally it's possible to track the investigation using the NTSB website: <http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/query.asp> The accident synopsis will be available online as soon as they update their database. My condolences.

<comment><USER12> FAA's AAI site will have the "just the facts" version of the report far sooner than the NTSB. (In all likelihood, it will be on the FAA site tomorrow.)

[http://www.faa.gov/data_research/accident_incident/prelimina...](http://www.faa.gov/data_research/accident_incident/preliminary_data/)

<comment><USER11> Interesting. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As sorry as I am for those who are affected, I just do not see the relevance for this site. People die every day. People in startups die every day. Is this special because it is in the news, because it was a spectacular death?

Actually I find it highly questionable to draw attention to these kinds of incidents.

<comment><USER14> Well despite being a very sad event, it affects many people here - Power is out all over Palo Alto.

<comment><USER13> Ah, now I get it. Palo Alto = Silicon Valley. Ok, that explains the attention.

<comment><USER15> And even if that wasn't the case Tesla Motors is followed closely by quite a few people here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not sure if its been posted, but the names of the victims have been released by Mercury News.

"The Mercury News has learned through sources close to the company that the deceased are: Doug Bourn, 56, of Santa Clara, a senior electrical engineer; Andrew Ingram, 31, of Palo Alto, an electrical engineer; and Brian M. Finn, 42, of East Palo Alto; a senior manager of interactive electronics"

[http://www.mercurynews.com/top- stories/ci_14425582?nclick_ch...](http://www.mercurynews.com/top- stories/ci_14425582?nclick_check=1)

</comment><comment><USER17> Better article:

<http://www.mercurynews.com/business-headlines/ci_14416855>

This is depressing.

</comment><comment><USER18> One of the people on video said it well "we're very vulnerable without power."

Coincidently, Elon Musk's focus has partly been addressing that.

<comment><USER19> I'm curious as to what you mean. I don't see Tesla Motors/Paypal/SpaceX as addressing that. Tesla Motors might be addressing, "we're vulnerable without gasoline or oil," but not electricity.

<comment><USER18> I'm mostly referring to his SolarCity business/investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Did anyone else see this and think "I wonder if it was a job?"

Maybe I have too much Reddit in me, but damn.

RIP and respect.

<comment><USER21> Huh? You think they were knocked off by big oil companies?</comment></comment>


Dan Meyer dissects the flaws of math textbooks (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlvKWEvKSi8

<comment><USER2> I'm a teacher of mathematics at a community college.

It appears to me that the crux of the problem is that people, including the guy in the video, confuse problem solving with mathematics. The utility of mathematics comes in the remarkable fact that a great deal of phenomena can be adequately modeled mathematically. The focus of an algebra class ought to be in learning the language of algebra. That is, in manipulating numbers in the abstract. The application problems ought to be saved for physics, biology, economics, etc. The result of an emphasis on so called real world problems in high school mathematics is a generation of students who are incapable of correctly manipulating algebraic expressions and equations.

I recently gave my college algebra class an equation. It was a simple equation and all of them could solve it. I then asked them for an example of an equation that had no solution. Not a single person could provide an answer. They can solve the word problems in the textbook but don't have the slightest clue about what these mathematical concepts actually mean.

Perhaps it isn't important that one need to manipulate algebraic objects. I won't argue with this. But let's not call solving word problems mathematics. If you want to learn mathematics then grinding through the minutia and having the patience to understand the symbols is necessary. You can't get around this. If the goal is to solve word problems then....go ahead and change things.

<comment><AUTHOR> In a world where Wolfram Alpha can do all the algebraic calculations for you, isn't learning to solve problems more relevant? I'd say that problem solving is the core of mathematics. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER3> The conceptual understanding is certainly essential, but if you want to use a computer to do symbolic/algebraic manipulation, how could you be sure to understand the results or even properly phrase the question without a thorough understanding of the symbols and the rules for their manipulation? The best I think that something like Alpha could do is to help elucidate the underlying principles or give you a quick answer for guesswork or estimation, like a calculator.

<comment><USER4> You contradict yourself. As you said, one does not need to be skilled in combinatorial _search_ , er I mean, algebraic manipulations to be able to solve problems; one only needs a solid conceptual grounding and understand the symbols and the _rules_ for their manipulation. I wouldn't be surprised if most students who pass college calculus courses with good grades are entirely unable to recognize the situations where calculus is applicable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> tl;dw summary:

you know you're doing math wrong if students display (1) a lack of initiative, (2) lack of perspective, (3) lack of retention, (4) aversion to word problems, and (5) the few who understand the math just want to jump to a formula.

Math textbooks encourage teachers to teach math wrong. The way they present problems is with a complex visual with mathematical structure already imposed, step-by-step handholding through the problem, and asking a question at the end (a question that can often be solved just by figuring out which number to plug into which part of the formula, without necessarily understanding why.)

Suggested method for teaching right: (1) use multimedia. (2) encourage student intuition. Students will argue with each other about what they see and buy in to the problem. (3) ask the shortest possible question. Don't begin with a page full of numbers, measurements, and individual steps. Let the detailed questions come out through discussion. (4) Let the students build the problem. Students will recognize the need for mathematical structure (labels, coordinates, measurements, etc.) as they decide what information they will need to answer the question. They'll go through the steps on their own. (5) Be less helpful. The textbook helps in all the wrong ways, taking you away from your obligation for developing patient problem solving and mathematical reasoning.

Example: he completely rewrites a question from a math book about filling a water tank. He produces a video of a water tank being filled from a garden hose, which takes excruciatingly long to complete. Students get uncomfortable, complain about how long it's taking, and then put in their guesses as to how long it will take. Then they decide what information they'd need to calculate the end result, ask for the measurements they think are important, do the calculations, and watch the rest of the video to see if their calculation was right and how close their initial guesses were.

<comment><USER6> Central soundbite: "The way our mass-adopted textbooks teach math reasoning and patient problem solving is functionally equivalent to turning on [a TV sitcom] and calling it a day."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the fresh thought here on how to best present problems to students. I wonder how much work it takes to redefine each problem in the textbook.

<comment><USER2> A great deal of work.

Some problems won't be easily changed to suit his paradigm. For instance, how does one go about redefining an equation like, sqrt(2x+1) = sqrt(x) + 1? I'd like to know what this guy does for these types of problems.

I've been teaching community college mathematics for 10 years and we simply don't have the time to do what he says. Maybe I'm bad at motivating students but my anecdotal experience is that most of the students are solely interested in getting a degree and not in learning. It's understandable that their focus is no getting a degree but focusing on learning makes it easier to get the degree. It's very hard to get this point across.

While I see many problems with the current system of teaching mathematics there simply is no cure to apathy. At some point one has to be willing to sit down and learn to solve problems like, sqrt(2x+1) = sqrt(x) + 1.

<comment><USER8> This doesnt make any sense: sqrt(2x+1) = sqrt(x) + 1

EDIT: Ahh I thought he was saying that he had factorized/simplified the left side into the right and it wasnt making any sense.

<comment><USER9> Solve for x: sqrt(2x + 1) = sqrt(x) + 1

      2x + 1 = x + 2sqrt(x) + 1
      x = 2sqrt(x)
      x^2 = 4x
      x^2 - 4x = 0
      x(x - 4) = 0
      x = 0 or 4

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Keep in mind that if you're posting on Hacker News then you're probably better at math than, say, 90% of the population. It's hard to come up with ideas for teaching math to people who are profoundly different from you.</comment>


Pay by cash? Not for long, report warns - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47456698 <comment><USER2> Well, we have Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum and a thousand other coins that work just fine.</comment>