The phone-makers bringing back buttons - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47364932 <comment><USER3> We need more buttons. What is the deal with flat design these days? I cannot figure out where to click. Have you used Windows 10 recently or a trendy website lately? It's a disaster in terms of UX.

The same problem exists with hardware as well. I'm specifically thinking of the kitchen, but I've encountered it in many places. I recently moved into an apartment with 'modern' appliances have substituted buttons for flat surfaces you press or knobs that are difficult and unintuitive. For the first time - <USER2> had to read the manual to figure out how to work my refrigerator, range, and microwave.

Buttons are intuitive, easy to use, and when they do not work it becomes apparent that something is broken or faulty. Why are we getting rid of them?

<comment><USER4> Steve Jobs answered this question back in 2007[0]

> Now, why do we need a revolutionary user interface. Here's four smartphones, > right? Motorola Q, the BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Nokia E62 — the usual > suspects. And, what's wrong with their user interfaces? Well, the problem > with them is really sort of in the bottom 40 there. It's this stuff right > there. They all have these keyboards that are there whether or not you need > them to be there. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in > plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application > wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of > buttons, just for it.

> And what happens if you think of a great idea six months from now? You can't > run around and add a button to these things. They're already shipped. So > what do you do? It doesn't work because the buttons and the controls can't > change. They can't change for each application, and they can't change down > the road if you think of another great idea you want to add to this product.

> Well, how do you solve this? Hmm. It turns out, we have solved it. We solved > in computers 20 years ago. We solved it with a bit-mapped screen that could > display anything we want. Put any user interface up. And a pointing device. > We solved it with the mouse. We solved this problem. So how are we going to > take this to a mobile device? What we're going to do is get rid of all these > buttons and just make a giant screen.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ&t=323](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ&t=323)

<comment><USER5> That's cool, but I think that most people here agree that mice are a pretty terrible method of interfacing with a computer. Every time you use a mouse, you have to re-orient your self to the state of the mouse (its current location and its use within a given application). That is why we spend so much time optimizing applications for use with a fixed controller (a keyboard).

A touch screen is a bit better than a mouse for lots of stuff and it preserves the discoverability of a mouse-based UI. Unfortunately it retains the drawbacks of a mouse based ui. Worse is that there is no fixed controller on a smartphone that might allow faster interaction w/ apps. This is where I think we are getting in trouble. In a traditional computer setup, you interact with the mouse when you are learning new software, and eventually transition to using a keyboard more and more. With touch based stuff, it seems like when an app is first released it has a simple, discoverable UI. But over time, as people become comfortable w/ the app, its UI becomes less approachable to suit the needs of more expert users and new users are left behind (snapchat for example).

In my opinion a touch screen is fine for consumptive devices where many different UI elements are required and input is light. Creative devices should have a fixed controller like a keyboard, joystick, etc.

<comment><USER6> Want to play an FPS game against me? you will use any combination of keyboard, joystick, touch screen you prefer.

<comment><USER7> Better stock up on mice to get through all the FPS games you have to play during a normal workday.

<comment><USER6> Jokes on you, I was an Esports "athlete" (World of Tanks)! :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bold prediction: it will be a total flop. A tiny minority of people want a keyboard at the price of a bulky device

<comment><USER9> Not that bold of a prediction.

Motorola was leading the way with Android-based phones with physical QWERTY keyboards, but they stopped making them in 2012, with the Droid 4 being the last one. I had one and I loved it!

The sad thing is, I saw polls at the time showing over 50% of smartphone users said they wanted a physical keyboard, yet most people hadn't even HEARD of the Droid 4. It sold poorly and was the signal that people didn't actually want physical keyboards, they just thought they did.

<comment><USER10> The only thing that killed the Droid line was Google buying Motorola. A Droid 5 was in development right up until Google bought it and decided that everyone should have the same form factor of phone. You can find pictures of the 5 online.

<comment><USER9> They still produced phones with the Droid name (I replaced my Droid 4 with the Droid Turbo), but they lost the keyboard.

And IMO, Google failed to market the Droid phones. In a world where everyone's crying for better battery life and stronger screens, the Droid Turbo came out with a whopping 3900 mAh battery when everyone else was in the 2000-2,500 mAh range, and a screen that was damn near indestructible, probably the top two most asked for features from a phone...yet nobody ever heard of it. Meanwhile people flock to iPhones and Galaxy phones which would crack their screens if you sneezed.

<comment><USER10> By "killed the Droid line", I was referring specifically to the keyboard slider line Droid/Droid 2/Droid 3/Droid 4. And I think that happened almost solely because Google did not like the keyboard slider form factor.

A surprisingly large contingent of consumers liked keyboard sliders too. Silicon Valley folks pretend that users didn't want them, but the truth was that at the time, phone technology was moving much faster, and keyboard sliders usually came out running a year older chipset, and were the last to see software updates. People didn't want to give up their keyboard sliders, but the OEMs just weren't serving the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used to be able to type in a lightning-fast way, while looking ahead (not down!) and walking quickly, on the Sidekick. I had every Sidekick model including a big bag of parts since, well, the older ones weren't super reliable. That said, I'd give anything for that experience again. In fact, as I typed this on an Android phone, I probably hit backspace at LEAST 50 times, corrected about 10 words due to typos (wprds showed up, with words as an option, etc.)

The size of my thumb covers about 8 keys.

The lack of physical keys may be amazing from a UI perspective, but for people who type quickly it absolutely sucks.

What's a shame is there's no choice.

<comment><USER12> The one that gets me is that there isn't an easy way to get to the center of a word, you always miss then tap again but if you are too quick it thinks you want to select and bleh, it's just unpleasant, I'd happily give up the predictive word bar on Android for arrows and cut paste buttons.

<comment><USER13> This annoyed me too, until recently. I found the solution to this on my phone. It's a moto G with a physical volume button on the side. It has Lineage OS on it and I found this: settings -> buttons -> Volume buttons -> Keyboard cursor control (Volume up/down moves cursor left/right). I can now easily control moving the cursor one char left/right and am slightly more comfortable typing on my phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They'll never do so but I would love it if Apple would add a physical sliding keyboard like the Pro 1. I really really dislike the virtual keyboard, always have. It's so inaccurate. Granted that's because I'm a touch-typer and probably move too fast.

</comment><comment><USER15> Please do this. Slide out keyboards are really something I miss. The touch screen keyboard never respond properly and I have so many typos, the autocorrect suggest things that aren't even words... with a qwerty keyboard 99% of those issue are null and void.

</comment><comment><USER16> You can learn to type very quickly on a touchscreen keyboard and work within and be helped by the autocorrect. If you're typing a couple of sentences why does it even matter that you're not up to full keyboard typing speed? Sure, if you're typing an essay, but why would you be doing that on your phone anyway?

<comment><USER17> For some peiple their phone is tgeit obly ximouting sevice, so it isoften necessary to type 'an essay'.

Combuninh autocotrection with a ohyscial keyboatd wouuld be verybpowerful and would probavly have avoidwd most of the wrrors I made whilat typing this in a touchscreen keyboard.

\-- I deliberately disabled autocorrection for that post. I am a keyboard touch-typist so hopefully that shows how inefficient and error-prone are soft- keyboards.

Basically, removing physical keyboards makes the manufacturers' job easier by outsourcing a little bit of inefficiency onto every user every time they type. We're paying for it with seconds of our lives.

<comment><USER18> That's misleading and you know it. Nobody suggested that we type without autocorrect. What the GP said is that you can learn to type efficiently without looking on a touch screen keyboard because autocorrect is good enough. Yeah, I had a Motorola Milestone (EU version of the droid) and I could type without looking. It was pretty nice being able to type that way. But in no way would I want to go back to such a brick in my pocket.

<comment><USER19> I haven't done any formal experiments but it sure feels like autocorrect hurts newly as much as it helps. I'm constantly having to stop and retire words that it gets wiring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I quite like the design philosophy behind the Punkt phones. It looks like the MP01 is 2G only which would disqualify it for U.S. use. For the MP02 they say

> "Please note that some mobile phone service providers in the USA have not > yet finished registering the MP02 for their networks.Because of this, some > carriers currently require users to temporarily disable VoLTE on the MP02 > (use 4G or 3G calling instead), and Verizon's network is currently unable to > accept the MP02 at all. (This is an admin issue, not a technology issue.)"

Anyone who has actually used this device in the U.S. who can share experience? It sounds like you would still be able to use it as an LTE hotspot, but for voice you'd fall back to 4/3G.

</comment><comment><USER21> When the first smartphones were released with a distinct lack of buttons, I was dismayed mainly because you needed to look at your phone before you could answer it. I just assumed that somewhere, someone would be developing a tactile feedback system so that you could feel buttons on the screen. I'm still waiting for that day...

For all that, I'm using swipe to write this message, faster than I could on a mini qwerty. I don't see this article's development as, _development_.

</comment><comment><USER22> I aleays loved these qwerty phones. Ever since I had an Xperia X1 I was hoping for a more modern tske on something like thst with s similar design, a metallic all-screen keyboard slider with something more modern than Windows Mobile 6.

Here's hoping for at least a small-scale trend of these devices this year.

</comment><comment><USER23> Five row keyboard, slide-tilt screen, and two-stage camera button? If that thing has anywhere near the build quality of its Nokia inspiration, I can't throw my money at them fast enough.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there a case that has a slide-out mini bluetooth keyboard?

Maybe Blackberry could make one, their keyboards were awesome. I might even pay $50-100 for some such thing if it is designed right.

<comment> frosted-flakes You could try one of the BlackBerries with an integrated keyboard, not slide- out. The Key2 is pretty great, though you do lost a little screen real estate. The keyboard is also touch sensitive, so you can choose predictions and move the cursor with it, as well as scroll the page. I like the backspace word gesture (swipe left across the keyboard) on my Key1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> BlackBerry phones have buttons and their software is quite nice.

<comment> frosted-flakes BB phones use almost stock Android, if anyone's wondering.

<comment><USER26> There's currently a $10K bounty to crack BlackBerry's Android protections so you can root the phone. It's been ~3 years and no one's managed it yet...

Fortunately, there's minimal Google presence on the phone. The native BlackBerry apps have worked great. The camera on the KeyOne even has fully manual controls--focus distance and everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hope we do see some of these models come back. I know that it will probably be a small market segment, but I really liked my Samsung captivate glide.

</comment><comment><USER28> Here's what I'd rather have: Two independent devices that can be yolked together for use. Physically, metaphorically, or both.

The keyboard section on some of those devices is almost as big as the phone, and those phones don't look much thinner than current generation phones do.

Let me use two phones or a phone and a tablet or a phone and a TV. Give me something that is at least the sum of its parts.

<comment><USER29> Can anything every be (physically) less than the sum of its parts? In terms of mass or volume, for example?

If you're saying "an accessory that only works as an accessory is sometimes just dead weight (when you're not using it)" then I think you're trying to overturn a lot of precedent in how devices have been made, since long before digital times.

<comment><USER30> Things that fit together can be less than the sum of their parts. A phone case and a phone can take up more space individually but fit together and be compact.

<comment><USER29> That's true if one considers the convex hulls of the two objects, but not if one sticks to thinking strictly about their volume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> As a long-time owner of HTC TyTN II and Sony Xperia Pro, both with sliding keyboard which I absolutely loved, I don't think we need them anymore. Back then, it made sense. Displays were smaller and less accurate. But now with larger displays and smarter autocompletes, I'm not willing to trade sliding keyboard for additional weight and higher price.

</comment><comment><USER32> The HTC Tilt 2 is still my favorite phone ever. Superb keyboard and the slide/tilt mechanism was rock solid and quite pleasing to use too. WinMo, being as hackable as it was, allowed me to remap keys at will, which made it a great mini ssh device.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm just gonna say it. The G1 was the best phone I've used. Not had, _used_.

</comment><comment><USER34> The article says the prototype was inspired by the "Nokia 950" \- I'm assuming they mean N950? I had two N900s - I hope the keyboard is far more robust than that as the labels on the keys wore off in weeks / months.

</comment><comment><USER35> My first smart phones something like 15 years ago had these, and I would love to have that functionality back without a doubt.

</comment><comment><USER36> I would love a slider keyboard phone again.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd buy a phone with a horizontal slider so hard, if it wasn't running Android. As badly as I'd like to have a proper successor to my Droid 4, that other trait makes this a problematic sell for me. :/

<comment><USER37> Would you actually buy it if it ran _anything_ other than Android (say, somebody somehow managed to ship a new phone running Symbian)? Or do you actually have a preferred OS?

Actually just curious to see if you're specifically avoiding Android (in which case I'd be a bit curious about specific reasons), or if you prefer something like iOS. (Both seem like valid positions for me)

<comment><USER10> I'm currently hanging onto a Windows Mobile phone, though support ends in December, so I have to start looking for a replacement. I once swore I'd never own an iPhone, but if nothing else shows up, I guess I'll have to. My hope is that the Librem 5 launches on time and is capable of supporting a Verizon compatible radio (the radio is supposed to be replaceable).

My primary interest is security and privacy, so Android fails out entirely as an option. I also expect my phone to have current and regular security updates, so the operating system must be something presently supported.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> History is going in circles

</comment><comment><USER39> nope nope nope no thanks</comment>


Load testing? Try to take down your app for $1 with blitz.io - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/mu-dynamics-blitzio-app-load-testing/

<comment><USER2> $1 ph is only for Heroku apps - link is here [http://blog.mudynamics.com/2011/08/11/blitz-io-scaling- out-h...](http://blog.mudynamics.com/2011/08/11/blitz-io-scaling-out-heroku- apps-for-1hour/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's because they pro-rate add-ons by the second. If you sign up with Heroku, you immediately get 500 concurrencies as part of the free plan. Signing up directly with blitz.io, OTOH, gives you blogging and referral credits - see <http://blitz.io/invite>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is beeswithmachineguns on github and that will cost some EC2 bucks.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's not what their pricing page tells us. It's actually very expensive.

<comment><USER5> Their price points are fine for enterprise customers, but I can't see smaller shops using this. There's definitely a hole in the market for a good load- testing service, but I see more a $50/month price point than $300/month.

<comment><AUTHOR> One more thing. An m1.small instance on EC2 (on-demand pricing) will cost you around $60/month + bandwidth costs. So you need a multi-tenant load testing solution to amortize the costs and drive hourly price down, which is what we are doing.</comment></comment></comment>


USB Product ID Allocations for Free Software / Open Hardware - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/openmoko/openmoko-usb-oui <comment><USER2> I wish either (a) USB-IF would stop being evil and start assigning small PID blocks for a reasonable price, or (b) someone would sue the fuck out of USB-IF for antitrust violations.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's also [http://pid.codes](http://pid.codes)

</comment><comment><USER4> But can I apply before my project is published under a FOSS license?

<comment><USER5> > Do not apply before your project is published under a FOSS license!

Well, you could of course try to apply before your project is published under a FOSS license! Who knows!

<comment><USER6> That's what people do with [https://www.eff.org/awards/coop/rules](https://www.eff.org/awards/coop/rules) (we continue to get claims regularly that ignore every single required element, warning, and instruction).

<comment><USER7> _> that ignore every single required element, warning, and instruction_

I suspect it isn't that they've read and ignored the instructions. More likely it is _complete_ ignorance: that they have not even bothered to read that document properly, if at all.

It is easier to throw out an attempt and hope for the best, than to make an actual effort to be compliant. After first refusal people will either give in ("it was worth a try, but I really don't care that much"), make more of an effort second time around ("the lazy way didn't work, so maybe I'll make some effort") or bitch & moan about how unfair the system is like a child who isn't allowed more cookies until he tidies his room.

Very few people care to take the time to read the rules on public facilities. They even openly admit it: hence all the forum posts that start "please delete if not allowed" which basically means "I don't care if this is allowed or not, I want to post it so I'm going to whatever your rules say so fuck you".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can also just squat on one. As long as you avoid using the trademarks ("usb" and the logo) there is nothing that can be done to you even in the US. This is basically what most Chinese products do.

<comment><USER9> What is the advantage of applying for one as a FOSS project as opposed to squatting?

<comment><AUTHOR> You will get your product name visible in _lsusb_ that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are also the free shared PID/VID numbers from [https://github.com/obdev/v-usb/blob/master/usbdrv/USB-IDs- fo...](https://github.com/obdev/v-usb/blob/master/usbdrv/USB-IDs-for- free.txt). They don't have any licensing requirements.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if either openmoko or pid.codes actually check that the open hardware in the applications actually exist and work as advertised.

Like, I could create a stub project and publish it under an FOSS/OSHW license, but nothing in it actually works yet. Wouldn't it be a waste to allocate a PID to such project?

<comment><USER12> Of course it would. But the truth is that while 65000 is a small number cryptographically, it's still a _lot_ of throwaway toy open source projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know of a low cost way of getting a Product ID for a commercial product? I've been working on software for an embedded board and am using the USB port as a debug port. It works fine now as a USB serial link, but it would be nice to have our own PID, just not worth $5000 for a single product.

<comment><USER14> Many IC manufacturers provide free sub-licensed PIDs from their own VID allocation.

[https://www.nxp.com/support/developer-resources/software- dev...](https://www.nxp.com/support/developer-resources/software-development- tools/lpc-developer-resources-/usb-vid-pid-program:USB-VID-PID-PROGRAM)

[http://www.microchip.com/usblicensing](http://www.microchip.com/usblicensing)

[https://www.silabs.com/products/interface/request-product- id](https://www.silabs.com/products/interface/request-product-id)

[http://www.ti.com/en/download/mcu/application_for_sublicense...](http://www.ti.com/en/download/mcu/application_for_sublicense.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> USB IDs are idiotic and should 100% be just squatted on. There is no reason such a stupid design should be enforced by any open source organisation.

If you want to have an identification for a device, standardise capabilities tags and provide some free form fields for perhaps at least manufacturer and description.

<comment><USER16> Do you even know what USB IDs are ? You can not identify an USB device without them.

<comment><USER10> Sure you can - you can look at the manufacturer / product strings. And for standard device classes (eg mass storage or CDC ACM, aka USB serial) you can just use interface descriptors to identify them.

Would be nice if more systems used the strings embedded in the device, like eg FreeBSD does, instead of looking up PID/VID in a static table.

<comment><USER17> > Sure you can - you can look at the manufacturer / product strings.

Sure, you can. Does not mean that the vendors will. If I had a dollar for each board identifying itself as "To be filled by O.E.M."...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Mistrust of Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-mistrust-of-science <comment><USER3> One thing not touched on in this article is how much distrust in science is generated by bad journalism. Journalists routinely overstate and misinterpret results willfully to sell more copy, and all too often they just get things plain wrong. Even if their error is so egregious that they feel compelled to print a retraction a week later, the damage is done. A lot of people will remember the original article as "Truth" for decades.

The current decline of paid jobs in journalism suggests that insisting on more qualified journalists to report on science may not be an achievable goal. What we should be doing instead is encouraging scientists to make greater efforts in explaining their work directly to the public.

Universities routinely employ publicists to write "plain English" articles about the accomplishments of their researchers to promote their University's brand. These articles, despite being created in collaboration with the scientists, are frequently full of all the journalistic excesses I've described above. If you show errors in such articles to the scientists the article is about, they'll just laugh nervously and shrug, because the final copy was out of their hands.

If you speak both French and English, there's no need to communicate to another English speaker using French put through a bad translator. Most scientists are capable of writing well enough to communicate with other humans. It's time to cut the translators out and have scientists communicate directly with the public. Yes, give them editorial feedback to weed out jargon and simplify things adequately, but leave them with full control of what is actually published. The results may be less impressively bombastic and poetic, but they should at least not be hopelessly _wrong_ or outright dishonest.

<comment><USER4> The article goes into the area of ideologies but perhaps in not enough detail. The Internet accelerates the existing situation where any broadly popular position, whether religion or New Age Healing or whatever, can create self- contained, self-reinforcing network of self-defined experts.

And even more, even if journalists correctly report scientific results, the real challenge is correctly conveying the "skeptical and imaginative (but not too imaginative)" quality described in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The nearly unbelievable level of rigor achieved by particle physics gives a harmful level of credence to numerous other fields, especially nutrition & medicine. Studies done across 8 people are given the same authorial credibility as studies done across 8 million protons, by lumping them all together as "science".

<comment><USER6> > Studies done across 8 people are given the same authorial credibility as > studies done across 8 million protons

The number alone doesn't tell us how reliable the conclusions are.

This doesn't necessarily invalidate your point, though.

<comment><USER7> Six orders of magnitude does give a little bit of an insight into reliability.

<comment><USER8> reliability, yes, extrapolation beyond the original 8 test subjects, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This speech has a lot of valid points with which I mostly agree but it seems to argue for unquestioned acceptance of the current conclusions of mainstream science. Although it's very much in mode right now, this has been proven repeatedly to be a bad idea. Unless you believe that we now finally have everything right you only have to look at history to see that consensus among scientists has been repeatedly incorrect.

I don't make this argument to justify bad science or to argue for even less well supported conclusions. We don't know the answer to some questions and logically, some of the questions which we think we know the answer to, we do not. Therefore it is wise to remain skeptical _while_ stamping out pseudoscience.

<comment><USER10> Unquestioning acceptance of science is definitely not a conclusion of this piece nor is it alluded to.

The main argument of this piece is how "an understanding of what real truth- seeking looks like" can allow you to reject claims when they are scientifically proven to be false. While he does not directly state that one should be skeptical of the scientific community he also never states that there should be unquestioning acceptance of it either. It is however made clear that skepticism is a key trait of being a scientist.

He begins by pointing out the seeming contradiction of being a scientist who is "supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much" while "gathering facts and testing your predictions" before you "either affirm or reject the ideas at hand". Even then you still must "accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge." Establishing early on that a scientist must be willing to accept that "a contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge" while still advancing our collective understanding.

"Knowledge has become too vast and complex for any one person [...] to convincingly master more than corners of it". You therefore must rely on the collective of scientific knowledge and those who practice it, the "scientific community". He points out the difference between this group and one of pseudoscientific thought is that the claims of the latter can be demonstrably rejected using the scientific method.

A scientist must remain skeptical, but in order to be productive you also need to rely on your community, no one person can verify all claims. Being skeptical is inherit in being a scientist, and therefore part of the scientific community. Relying on the scientific community is not akin to unquestioning acceptance. Questioning established beliefs while backing it with scientific evidence is the key difference between the scientific community and the pseudoscientific one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fifty years ago, an academic told the world: "think for yourself and question authority" (T. Leary, 1967: how to operate your brain). The second part of the phrase has been repeated on everything from bumper stickers to toddler's clothing, but the first part has largely been put aside, for, while the academy has continued to tell people that authorities are to be mistrusted, it has at the same time ignored its mission of helping young people learn how to think. Top grades are awarded to students who struggle with simple mathematics, sentence construction, and the elements of logic.

Fifty years is a long time. The vast majority of high-school teachers were taught in todays watered-down system, so there is little hope at that location on the educational conveyor belt. There is some potential at the university level, because university professors are largely self-made people. But it is hard to hold to standards, when universities regard students as clients and professors as service providers, and where the path to promotion is paved by good "metrics" (bums in seats, enthusiastic course reviews, etc.) that are bought most easily by grade inflation.

The commencement speech is wonderful. But these words don't need to be heard by students at Caltech, regularly ranked the top university in the world. And replaying them in the New Yorker magazine doesn't exactly get them to the ears that need to hear them. Maybe social media will help, so thanks, HN, for this.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would love to see these studies repeated, but asking whether the public believes _different_ reliable, well-studied conclusions of science. For the most part, all these studies ask is whether people trust scientific results that contradict _conservative_ ideology.

But there are a variety of reliable scientific results that contradict other ideologies. What would happen if they were included?

Examples:

\- Variance in female intelligence/math ability/other traits is smaller than for men, at roughly the rate Larry Summers famously speculated about.

\- Different races within the US have different intelligence levels, and that intelligence is highly predictive of adult outcomes.

\- Demand curves for labor are downward sloping.

\- In the nature vs nurture battle, nature won.

\- Teacher performance can be reliably evaluated with statistics (e.g. VAM).

\- There is no scientifically demonstrated benefit to organic food, and no harm from GMO.

<comment><USER13> The problem is most of those aren't even true, e.g. c.f. my notes on VAM:

[http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam- efficacy](http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-efficacy)

[http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical- prob...](http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-problems)

[http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam- implementation](http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-implementation)

Most of which are from the primary sources referenced in Diane Ravitch's book:

[https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School- System/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School- System/dp/0465036589/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465651203&sr=8-1&keywords=diane+ravitch+the+death+and+life+of+the+great+american+school+system)

<comment><USER12> Diane Ravitch, such an unbiased source. Lets assume the counterfactual - <USER2> teacher performance has no measurable effect. The logical conclusion is that since quality is irrelevant, we should focus on cost. I assume that you support this conclusion? Diane Ravitch certainly doesn't.

The bulk of your notes show simply that variance is high, that the effect of teachers fades over time, and that the effect of teachers is small. None of this implies VAM doesn't work.

Many of your sources don't even agree with you. For instance, the Mathematica evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate!

Some years back I recall we discussed this, and I suggested you go learn about the difference between variance and bias. Have you done this?

Incidentally, you do bring up yet another solid scientific conclusion that cuts against non-conservative ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all.

<comment><USER13> > The bulk of your notes show simply that variance is high

There is a lot in there about bias also, that's what all the stuff about standardized tests not being on an interval scale is about. Gifted vs mainstream vs special ed students show wildly different rates of progress on standardized tests that's completely divorced from how much they're actually learning, which means that the scores of teachers are largely determined by which populations they're teaching.

> None of this implies VAM doesn't work.

High variance absolutely implies that VAM doesn't work. If you are firing good teachers at random then only morons would go into teaching, especially given the barrier to entry.

> the Mathematica evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate!

In this context, 74% accurate means 100% useless for the above reason.

> another solid scientific conclusion that cuts against non-conservative > ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all.

I would say that most of the research using standardized tests to 'prove' that teachers matter is wrong, but that's not the same as proving that teachers don't matter. Any research purporting to 'prove' that teachers don't matter is going to be flawed for the same reason, because you can't reliably measure teacher quality by using tests meant to evaluate students.

<comment><USER12> _High variance absolutely implies that VAM doesn 't work. If you are firing good teachers at random then only morons would go into teaching._

So only a moron would trade stocks, speculate on real estate, or take a job as a salesman?

Of course, we just agreed that even if this is true, it doesn't matter. Morons are nearly as good at teaching as anyone else, and the results of good teaching fades over time anyway. So what would be the harm?

It's a simple fact of statistics - the bigger the effect size, the easier it is to measure. It's simply innumeracy to claim large effects sizes and also impossibility to measure them. Why all the left wing mathematics denialism?

(Another example of left wing mathematics denialism applies to the pigeon hole principle. If you have N houses and K > N people, K - N people won't have a house.)

<comment><USER14> The risk vs. reward profile for these jobs is very different. A stock trader can be successful one year and make up for losses the next, so long as he is successful more often than not. If an excellent teacher has a 25% chance of being fired every evaluation session, he has nothing to compensate for this risk -- just low pay, unconscionable hours, and a very difficult, thankless job.

Most teachers are teachers because of belief in helping children and personal dedication. Flipping a coin and saying "you're fired if I get two heads in a row" every year means that is gone.

It is not innumeracy to suggest there are so many confounding variables that are nearly impossible to separate from the treatment that it isn't a realistic or effective method for making real decisions about performance that negatively impact the careers and lives of dedicated public servants. It is innumeracy to suggest that "the bigger the effect size, the easier it is to measure" \-- it is not incorrect technically, but it is very misleading. No matter how large the effect size, it can be very difficult to separate the effect of different variables with limited data (which is always the case -- we are testing one teacher against another)

Granted, I haven't read those particular sources and I'm not sure if this is the approach they take.

Of course phrases like "left wing mathematics denialism" are purposefully incendiary, contentless, and laughably absurd -- they belong somewhere like Breitbart, not here. Most Mathematicians are left-wing, for the record. I've never heard of anyone denying the pigeon hole principle in that context (or any context), but straw men are a very effective rhetorical device.

<comment><USER12> _A stock trader can be successful one year and make up for losses the next, so long as he is successful more often than not_

If you don't get good returns your first couple of years, you'll likely be out permanently. A couple of bad years on a 20 year trading record, you might be fine. Then again, Alex's sources all note that VAM stabilizes after a number of years (between 3 and 5). So long term teachers should be fine too.

Similarly for salespeople. Like it or not, getting a professional evaluation based on a noisy objective measurement is nothing special. It happens in many professions - why should teachers be protected?

Also, I didn't realize 38.5 hours/week, 9 months/year was "unconscionable".

[http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf](http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf)

Also, teaching is not "thankless". Teachers are given a high degree of respect - #2 below nurses, in terms of ethics/honesty.

[http://www.gallup.com/file/poll/166364/Honesty_and_Ethics_of...](http://www.gallup.com/file/poll/166364/Honesty_and_Ethics_of_Professions_131216.pdf)

In terms of competence and warmth teachers also rank near the top on both axes.

[http://www.pnas.org/content/111/Supplement_4/13593.abstract?...](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/Supplement_4/13593.abstract?sid=70a3fb78-4496-48b1-af32-fe27b57550fd)

Or just note the typical language used to describe them, e.g. "dedicated public servants".

What makes you think teaching is "thankless"?

 _I 've never heard of anyone denying the pigeon hole principle in that context (or any context), but straw men are a very effective rhetorical device._

Go listen to discussions of housing in SF.

<comment><USER15> No good teacher only works 38.5 hours a week. They will often be awake at 1AM several nights a week grading papers and tests, they are expected to stay past contract time to meet with students, and they have significant continuing education requirements. Many also need to take on extracurricular activities or summer teaching to get enough money to live within 30 minutes of work.

Teaching is absolutely a thankless job in the actual work. Students are constantly disrupting class, calling teachers names, threatening teachers and other students. Administrators blame teachers for their students' behavior. Parents routinely shout at, insult, and threaten teachers. Other teachers are often hostile. Any perceived glory in teaching is just whitewashing the real nature of the job (kind of like military service -- lots of talk about glory and honor, but immense disrespect in day to day experiences).

"Dedicated public servants" is almost a pejorative euphemism at this point.

<comment><USER12> Then a significant majority of teachers are not "good", by your definition.

Some simple arithmetic: given that teachers are excluded from that study if they work less than 35 hours, we discover at most (38.5-35)/(K-35) % of teachers work K hours/week. (This is based on the extreme case of x% of teachers working K hours, 1-x% working 35 hours.) So if 50 hours/week is "good", then at most 23% of teachers are good.

As for your subjective opinions about "thankless", what evidence - if any - would cause you to change your belief?

<comment><USER15> How did they define and report "work", and are they including breaks in those averages?

I know several teachers. The burden of proof would be on you to demonstrate that teaching is a higher status profession with endlessly respectful and eager students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dr. Atul Gawande is one of my heroes; he's arguably one of the most influential public-health thinkers around. Practicing surgeon. Med-school professor. Stanford undergrad, Harvard Medical School. Rhodes Scholar. MacArthur Fellow. Frequent contributor to the New Yorker. Author of several books; I think I've read them all, and all of them were excellent.

"Atul Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and also chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally." [0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande) (footnotes omitted)

</comment><comment><USER17> I was recently listening to a Science magazine podcast[1] discussing this year's AAAS meeting[2] and particularly a session called, "A War on Science? Vaccines, Climate Change, GMOs, and the Role of Science"[3]. The presenter was especially impressed by the argument of one of the speakers, that there is no "War on Science". There are conflicts on specific issues, but "science" itself is so powerful that it is the backdrop for those conflicts. Both sides on any of the conflicts want to present science to support their side.

The point being that framing any issue as being a "War on Science" (or a mistrust of science) is (a) sloppy, (b) misrepresenting all of the sides, and (c) unlikely to be effective.

[1] [http://www.sciencemag.org/podcasts](http://www.sciencemag.org/podcasts)

[2] [http://www.aaas.org/event/2016-aaas-annual- meeting](http://www.aaas.org/event/2016-aaas-annual-meeting)

[3] [https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Session12441.ht...](https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Session12441.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Just a little reminder that non-nutjobs can:

\- Object to GMO crops on basis of politics and intellectual property.

\- Support organic cultivation for reasons of environmental and cultural preservation.

<comment><USER19> Organic cultivation is kind of a silly concept. Who cares whether the fertilizers that you put on crops are processed industrially, or biologically? Objections to pesticides, I can understand, given that some of them, incidentally the ones that actually work, like DDT, are sort of detrimental to humans as well as pests.

Mostly it's an excuse to mark up vegetables 250%.

Hybrid seed that doesn't grow true if reused is kind of an issue, but that has nothing to do with GMO crops, versus regular, naturally bred hybrids.

EDIT: source, grew up as basically a poor white Yankee subsistence farmer. Could probably have qualified as an organic farmer, if we didn't sprinkle Sevin and Rotenone on things to keep them from having the invasive beetles chew the bejeesus out of them. Hint: bugs eat Sevin and Rotenone and just become larger, angrier mutant variations of themselves, like the Hulk munching on concentrated gamma radiation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As most protectors of the establishment are wont to do, the author conflates lack of trust in science with lack of trust in the system used to produce medicines. Putting the profit motive ahead of concerns for safety, performing biased studies while burying relevant data through intimidation and lawsuits, and past history of incredible breaches of public trust is quite enough evidence to make any rational person question the medical system and it's willful, arrogant ignorance in pursuit of competitive advantage. If you want to increase the rate at which people immunize, the answer is simple and obvious, change the for-profit medical industry to an open, verifiable and free model. Anyone who would put the future of the human race into the hands of for profit corporations, deserves to be ejected from the gene pool at the soonest opportunity. A virus is more trustworthy than the likes of Monsanto, Bayer, GSK or any other of these vampires of human misery.

</comment><comment><USER21> In response to the paragraphs about bad-faith pseudo science "To defend those beliefs... Science's defenders have identified..."

One field that has a lot of experience dealing with this is law. I wonder if the scientific community can learn anything from it.

<comment><USER22> Mostly what scientists and lawyers can learn from each other is humility.

For both (in different ways) invesitgating the truth of purported facts is important -- as is understanding the laws governing those facts. But lawyers are dealing with interested, intelligent agents, some of whom will try to game whatever environment they are faced with.

Science has less of this problem, so it pushes harder into realms of precision that lawyers ought not dare enter. But scientists who wade into policy or legal fights should remember that they are n00bs who's methods are easily perverted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Atul has missed something very important here.

Firstly; it is true that many right wing persons and groups mistrust science for fallacious reasons.

However this is not interesting. And it does not explain the decline in trust in science. Take the theory of evolution. Many religious conservatives do not believe it. However they were certainly aware of the concept fifty years ago. They didn't believe it then either. Logically their trust level on that point can't have changed much. So; it is something else.

My opinion is that the right wing rely on their intuitions. This will sound like I'm castigating them as unscientific, but this is not true. Intuition is a genuine information discovery system, sometimes flawed, but, and this is the key point, usually right in a way that increases the odds of survival or else it could not exist.

So the question we need to ask is: why would the right wing feel queasy about science today?

Consider the following:

1\. Their tribal enemy has overwhelming majorities in large scientific fields.

That by itself is enough of an explanation. The intuition that your native enemy is likely out to get you by means fair or foul is a pretty good intuition.

2\. Universities teach liberalism. It is so pervasive that commonly students and professors don't realize this. They are the proverbial fish in water. If you believe conservatives have low IQs or are intrinsically biased against the scientific method, you've been drinking the kool-aid.

If universities don't teach liberalism then it is quite remarkable how synchronized the students are in their beliefs on liberal talking points. This isn't an accident and it has nothing to do with rigorous logical arguments.

If as a student you read enough old books you'll run into trouble pretty quickly because the right wing weren't the straw men identified on television shows such as the Colbert Report or The Daily Show. Quite simply there exists a strong intellectual heritage on the right and most students never encounter it because the media and faculty are usually incapable of steelmanning their opponents arguments. That does tend to happen when point (1) is true.

3\. There have been no major scientific discoveries seen as directly beneficial to the human race for some time now.

This will be my controversial point I think. It is a simple one. Every field has a need to justify its existence, regardless of whether it's astrology or astronomy. Astronomy needs to provide useful data, new evidence of discovery, and astrology needs to make people feel entertained. If either field stops accomplishing those things they become stagnant and eventually they get forgotten.

This will be a bitter pill to swallow but consider that the discovery of DNA and the Human Genome Project has had no meaningful effect on people's lives. They aren't living longer or better because of these projects. Many promises have been made with each development, but no meaningful change has occurred.

Naturally there are many worthwhile scientific projects which don't directly affect us and especially not right away. However the intuition when hearing that 'something doesn't affect you but could in the distant future and also by the way could you please give us money today' is that you may be listening to a description of a scam.

Perhaps technology has stopped integrating scientific knowledge into useful products and services in the way it used to. What matters is that people are broadly looking over their lives, hearing how batteries/cancer will be solved soon by some whiz-bang-discovery and then later hearing nothing and thinking they've been hearing a lot of squealing but not much pork.

Common people use common sense, and that's saying to them we haven't been back to the moon in half a century. That major diseases remain unsolved problems. That their wages haven't gone up in decades. Eventually youthful optimism becomes lost for what is a completely rational intuition.

These are all areas science is supposed to indirectly relate to, and people aren't seeing it anymore. All the time they have heard how wonderful 'progress' and 'science' is, but not seen it for themselves outside of, say, computing or information science.

So those are my 3 reasons why a right wing person would grow to distrust science and scientists.

<comment><USER24> I think you _may_ be confusing the intellectual right-wing with the, e.g. evolution/climate change-denying right wing.

There is a lot to be said for the need for differing opinions on, say, social mores, finance, healthcare, government, and philosophies of life in general. That is to say, I agree that the intellectual/philosophical right-wing is indeed not at all similar to the caricatures we see.

I have a hunch, though, that highly religious and closeted people (of the "Do not be educated lest you lose your humility" kind) are almost tautologically biased against evidential "scientific method" models of the world, as opposed to one where all truth flows from $HOLY_BOOK. And if you'll look closely, it is this part that is ridiculed, largely for the unquestioning nature of its beliefs and worldviews.

Aside: I have a feeling I'm stepping on the wrong side of the Slate Star Codex "outgroup" essay with this. If there are any logical fallacies in this, or anything similar, I would appreciate comments. I'm not a seasoned observer of politics or society :)

<comment><USER25> Name a few outstanding members of the intellectual right wing.

<comment><USER23> Historically; people like Edmund Burke and Issac Newton. In more recent history people like William Buckley and Milton Friedman. I would also say that somebody like Stephen Pinker is strongly approved of in right wing intellectual circles although I doubt he'd characterize himself as such.

There exists a large 'grey tribe' that doesn't classify itself as a purist left wing or right wing, but has strong elements of both under it's banner. I think of somebody like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Scott Alexander as continuing the Enlightenment tradition which has strong right wing influences. There was always a strong link between classical liberal thinking and the Enlightenment scholars.

In HN's own backyard we have Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel. Our history is of course very recent but there are still people who stand out with their ideas and are mostly on the right.

In the more public sphere we have people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden who are more easily claimed by the modern right wing intelligentsia than the left.

Obviously there is some noise with the signal but you've got to anticipate it is not often that a human being is a ideological purist to the degree of say: William Buckley or Noam Chomsky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why did science reject women in the past as if it was scientific to do so?</comment>


Marp: Markdown Presentation Writer - <AUTHOR> https://yhatt.github.io/marp/ <comment><USER2> The Chain-of-Responsibility software development design pattern provides a way to separate a source document (Markdown) from its final presentation format (PDF).

On a related note, I've developed an open source editor that can edit Markdown, R Markdown, and XML documents[1][2]. The input document is translated in real-time to HTML. Using the Chain-of-Responsibility pattern[3] makes it straightforward to introduce additional processor chains, which could include slide show output via CSS.

On a minor technical note, including HTML tags (such as <small>...</small>) defeats one of the key benefits of Markdown: separation of content from presentation. An alternative is to use named blocks to classify text, such as[4]:

        ::: footer
        Copyright 2019 ...
        :::

[1]: [https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar](https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar)

[2]: [https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/blob/master/USAGE.m...](https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/blob/master/USAGE.md)

[3]: [https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/tree/master/src/mai...](https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/tree/master/src/main/java/com/scrivenvar/processors)

[4]: [https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#divs-and- spans](https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#divs-and-spans)

<comment><USER3> For a very long time I have extended Markdown for my writing style. I too use the ::: notation for <div> blocks. I have always used MD as a loose idea which I can change as needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The React community has started to make some tools that use the "MDX" format [0], which combines Markdown and JSX syntax together. The MDX-Deck [1] and Spectacle [2] tools both allow using MDX to create presentations.

Last week I wrangled together a repo that adds Spectacle with MDX support to a Create-React-App project, as a reusable starting point [3]. Worked out nicely for a talk I gave this week.

[0] [https://mdxjs.com/](https://mdxjs.com/)

[1] [https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck](https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck)

[2] [https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle](https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle)

[3] [https://github.com/markerikson/cra-spectacle-mdx- boilerplate](https://github.com/markerikson/cra-spectacle-mdx-boilerplate)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is Markdown really the best tool for this job? I love markdown as much as the next person, but it was designed for writing, not for slides. Maybe I'm naive, but it feels designing your own markup language for slideshows would make a lot more sense.

<comment><USER6> >Is Markdown really the best tool for this job?

Of course not, we've had Beamer[1] for that purpose for many years :)

>I love markdown as much as the next person, but it was designed for writing, not for slides.

People said that about LaTeX, and it stopped no one :D

On a more serious note, imagine living in a world where your presentations/slides are version-control friendly.

Now look around you. You are in that world now.

[1][https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer](https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer)

<comment><USER7> Beamer is far from being the right tool for making presentations, and I've basically used only that for the last 12 years.

LaTeX is for writing long-ish text. If what you are writing doesn't contain sufficiently long text, then it's hard to justify the overhead compared to say Markdown-based solutions.

<comment><USER8> I found the pair pandoc+beamer perfect for some kinds of presentations. Recently I used them to prepare the keynote and the proceedings for a conference talk:

[https://bitbucket.org/Maurizio_Tomasi/adass2018-julia/src/ma...](https://bitbucket.org/Maurizio_Tomasi/adass2018-julia/src/master/)

(The keynote is in "presentation.md", and the paper in "article.md".)

I had to customize a few pandoc's defaults (see the Makefile) and even had to use a Python filter to tweak the output, but the result was excellent: once everything was in place, creating the slides required no effort at all. I was even able to switch the format from 4:3 to 16:9 in a breeze, once I learned what the resolution of the projector was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a terrific tool which I've used several times to rapidly assemble presentations. If you're already fluent with markdown, Marp is a very natural fit.

I find working in heavy-duty presentation software packages to be like running through glue. Instead of creating content, I get caught up in pixel-pushing to make everything look right. Marp offers a couple of styles. It's very refreshing to use.

Best of all, it'll output nice-looking PDFs that you can share afterwards. Recommended.

I have no affiliation with Marp or its creator - I'm simply a happy user.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've used this tool which provides similar functionality for several presentations and I love it. Especially using git to version control my talk.

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

<comment><USER11> I also used it, and I can say that it's an excellent tool/app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> From a brief look at the code I suppose that the app is monolithic.

I wish it was split into the processor and "IDE". I'd be able to use my preferred editor instead. I'd be able to run an md -> html -> pdf pipeline in a lightweight, headless build script.

Just saying.

<comment><USER13> If you want true separation between processor and "IDE" for your decks check out [https://gitpitch.com](https://gitpitch.com) \- modern slide decks for developers on Git. Use your preferred editor - vi, emacs, atom, etc. to create your slide content.

The _build pipeline_ is a simple _git-push_. Your slide deck is then instantly available for sharing online and for download as self-contained bundle or PDF.

A dedicated desktop tool is also available that gives you live previews and speaker support offline. You can also export your decks to Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, and Google Slides.

For a sample GitPitch slide deck see here:

[https://gitpitch.com/gitpitch/demo-deck](https://gitpitch.com/gitpitch/demo- deck)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Want to make an absurd amount of money? Integrate this with Excel to allow the user to include images that are defined as outputs from certain ranges of cells in the spreadsheet. Figure out how to streamline that workflow and every financial services company out there will want to use your product.

<comment><USER15> Never tried but is it not possible to include Excel "Objects" in Powerpoint and Word that can easily be updated?

<comment><USER14> Gets out of hand fast for sufficiently large Excel files or for presentations with lots of slides and data

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like the idea, but keep wondering what people do for illustrations. Diagrams and whatnot are best rendered in SVG if you're going the HTML route, and I haven't yet found a nice way to both draw and present such things other than standard PowerPoint/Keynote.

<comment><USER17> There is mermaid: [https://mermaidjs.github.io/](https://mermaidjs.github.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think this link [https://github.com/marp-team/marp](https://github.com/marp- team/marp) is more relevant since this was the preview app and the ecosystem is now much more extended.

<comment><USER19> Definitely backed up by the tiny text on OP's page:

"We have already dropped maintenance."

... so, don't use this one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice!

It's like a scaled-down Beamer[1] for people who don't speak LaTeX :)

[1][https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer](https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer)

<comment><USER15> I really wish more of these projects would adopt org-mode for its underlying format instead of markdown.

<comment><USER20> Well, =org-mode= in itself is quite complete when it comes to beamer. The only thing that it lacks is having an IDE which has Emacs editor on the right, with synctex running in the bckground. Tbh, I don't see it that helpful compared to the engineering that needs to be stitched together.

<comment><USER15> Just talking about the file format. Programs could implement partial functionality, leavng everything it does not recognize untouched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> black-tea I've done many presentations using ox-reveal, an org-mode exporter for reveal.js. Org-mode is far better than markdown, has much tooling for writing it (ie. org-mode and the rest of emacs), and reveal is much cooler than a PDF.

But regardless of these choices I think this method of writing plain text with a sprinkling of markup is great for all kinds of documents. Thanks to tools like pandoc I haven't had to touch MS Turd in years, but I can still produce better looking doc files than people who do use it (obviously I prefer pdf but sometimes the battle is not worth fighting).

</comment><comment><USER21> > MARP: MARkdown Presentation Writer. Like Powerpoint, but You Only Have To

Only have to what? Not the first title I've seen today where someone accidentally a word.

<comment><USER22> I see what you there.

The title has been fixed, I noticed that too, and I'm always advocating for removing artificial barriers such as HN limit on titles. When truncating a title HN could for example show the complete one onmouseover or use some JS to expand the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm in the process of trying to automate production of presentation material. Almost all slides contain a single header + chart or a single header + subheaders for multiple charts (think R ggplot charts and faceting). Data is mostly representing descriptives from surveys.

Once I have good data pre-processing and charting in R, what is the best way to easily automate much of the creation of presentations? Any experiences?

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting timing on this. However, I just got org mode and reveal humming together using org-re-reveal and couldn't be happier.

</comment><comment><USER25> That looks pretty useful.

With my terminal focus I suspect I'd go with landslide before an electron app.

[https://github.com/adamzap/landslide](https://github.com/adamzap/landslide)

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow, I love the look & feel of the preview. I would actually use this not just for slides but general markdown writing. I love how the text starts off in the center of the page.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does this support code blocks and syntax highlighting?

<comment><USER8> Yes, it does, and it also supports LaTeX formulae.</comment></comment>


Dark truth Behind Amazon.com - <AUTHOR> http://day0001.tumblr.com/DemandChange

<comment><USER2> I was sympathetic and supportive when Kivin Varghese first released the legal documents, but this is starting to look like a grudge between a fired employee and a public company.

I am withholding my support, and continuing to use my Prime account, until I see a pattern of bad behavior reported by other current or former employees.

Also: Contrast this with the Uber stories making the news, in that you have a current employee on the record doing stupid things. It is far easier to make a case for boycott against Uber (based on that) than it is to make a case against Amazon based on Kivin's assertions.

<comment><AUTHOR> See here: day0001.tumblr.com/profoundlysickcompany

plenty of stories from current and former employees - it's sad that nothing has been done despite these articles and the undercover investigation. Amazon needs to change, not continue to deflect and avoid the issues.</comment></comment>


Hedge Funds Faced Choppy Waters in 2015, but Chiefs Cashed In - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/10/business/dealbook/hedge-fund-manager-compensation.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 <comment><USER2> The capital in RenTech's flagship fund is 100% from the employees of Rentech. These guys are managing their own money. So the idea they're screwing customers on it is false, they are the customer. I think they have some other funds as well, but not the flagship Medallion fund.

I did IT at a Wall Street investment bank. Jim Simons and these math and CS guys at Ren Tech made a paradise for math and CS people over there. At investment banks you make money for heirs, and as IT are treated like garbage, and their IT and quant operations are garbage at investment banks (relative to hedge funds). Rentech, DE Shaw etc. did quant math, IT infrastructure etc. right and are kicking investment banks ass. Rentech manages employee capital instead of handing it to heirs and underpaying IT and treating IT like shit and having a shitty IT infrastructure like even the top investment banks often do. So these hedge funds are demonized by traditional Wall Street, who are trying to hang some populist halo around the criticism. It would have to be a populist or liberal/soc-dem criticism, because it's certainly not some kind of Marxian criticism. Marx explained how exploitation happened in capitalism, and it's not by a bunch of machine learning gurus managing their own money figuring out how to trade commodities better than Wall Street investment banks who manage the money of heirs.

<comment><USER3> Nice username. I thought all these things because I never heard the other side of the story, now I'm not sure what I think.

These guys aren't sitting around by themselves making money in a vacuum, they're also allegedly engaging in illegal and/or unethical financial fuckery, for lack of a better term, and obviously spending money on politicians which may or may not mean anything at all.

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/hedge-fund- taxes...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/hedge-fund-taxes- superpacs-election-renaissance)

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/hedge-fund- hedge...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/hedge-fund-hedges-its- political-bets-rentech-renaissance-technologies)

Before any bias is expressed against motherjones, all I want to say is that these two articles are the only even quasi-critical voices I have seen, which also points out the timing and circumstances that surrounded the publication of the article that enamored me of James Simons: [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/science/a-billionaire- math...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/science/a-billionaire- mathematicians-life-of-ferocious-curiosity.html)

Anyway, everything is grey and nothing is black and white. Just wanted to put something on the other side of the scale.

<comment><USER4> I can only scream bias in the reporting given the title of the article and the fact that Soros is in a picture with Simons and there is no mention of Soros in the article. Unreal.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it's very anti-Simons, my point is until now I have heard no criticism of either him or rentech, I just found it interesting to find any criticism at all.

He's an interesting guy regardless, video interviews with him are often fascinating... and he named his yacht Archimedes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If they are providing their customers at least 10x that value then what's the problem? Customers decide, or do we want to go back to the Middle Ages and leave decisions up to kings? One way or the other somebody is going to manage huge wealth, I prefer the first because in this case at least that somebody is not there because of born rights.

By the way, want to lower salaries of hedge fund managers? Make great startups that: 1. provide serious automated financial tools for investors; 2. make this financial stuff so that it can be used by everybody on the planet, not only by US currency holders

<comment><USER6> I don't believe a single hedge fund manager can personally contribute $5 billion per year in value. Some of the people in this list managed funds that lost money, so they obviously didn't.

<comment><USER7> Maybe they made good decisions and lost money. Let's say I have a million to invest. I value an expert making investment decisions with that million at $10,000 per year. There are many others like me so the manager collects many millions to make decisions with. They doesn't guarantee the money will be made, they just guarantee they will make the best decisions they are able to with that money which has higher expected return than me making those decisions.

It's in nature of our world that very often good decisions lead to losses.

<comment><USER6> If they make the same decision for many customers, then you can't just multiply the value of the work to do by that many customers. They still do the same thing, so the value to society as a whole stays the same.

That they can multiply their earnings over all their customers, and keep this insane income for themselves, is morally wrong and a huge bug in the way the world currently works.

<comment><USER7> I very strongly disagree that it's morally wrong. Let's say I provide a service to people for 1000$/pop. They value it at more than that and happily exchange money for that service. I get my 1000$. I don't use almost any environmental or public resources to perform the service (I write code or perform massages or w/e).

The mere fact that I exist and provide those services is beneficial for society even if I am taxed at 0%.

There are of course issues if I have a monopoly or if I am extracting rent from what should be a common good (say natural resources of crucial piece of land) or if I am polluting while providing my services. There are also issues if what I do hurt others but they are or unrelated to the fact that I create wealth for myself. How is it wrong? What moral principle are you using to say it's wrong? My reasons are quite straightforward: by providing sought for services I am increasing my and my customer's happiness while not hurting others in the process. It's a win-win, the more I provide the more insanely win-win it is even if I collect a trillion dollars in the process.

<comment><USER6> I know my opinion on this sort of thing isn't exactly popular, but I just feel that it is morally wrong for one person to have so much wealth that he can afford to control the entire output of a huge number of people over their entire working lives.

<comment><USER7> I think it is quite popular. I also think it's misdirected. There is a lot of wealth which was built unfairly/abusing others/exploiting resources which should be a common good. Those are real problems. On the other side someone who is not abusing anything and just providing services to people is just net win for everyone.

>>he can afford to control the entire output of a huge number of people over their entire working lives.

That's vast majority of working Americans. Make 100k USD in few years and you are able to control a lot of lives around the world, not only output of their work. Buy a nice car, a Macbook and some clothes and you have just controlled output of more than one whole working life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The title is incorrect and very misleading. This is not "salary" for hedge fund managers, it's total income. I couldn't find the exact breakdown, but for the guys at the top of the list, most of the income is not compensation for being a manager, it's returns for the money they had invested in their own funds. It's not a coincidence that the guys at the top of the list are the ones that manage funds that had a good 2015.

To see a better breakdown look at the 2016 rich list at

[http://www.institutionalinvestorsalpha.com/Article/3552805/T...](http://www.institutionalinvestorsalpha.com/Article/3552805/The-2016-Rich- List-of-the-Worlds-Top-Earning-Hedge-Fund-Managers.html)

Note the following paragraph:

        In a year when roughly half of all hedge funds lost money, a
        number of frequent Rich List members are conspicuously missing
        from the ranking because their funds finished in the red.

So for guys previously in this list their "salary" for 2016 was negative.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does no one know what the word _salary_ means anymore?

</comment><comment><USER10> Comparing what an owner Kenneth C. Griffin makes to what a hired manager Jamie Dimon makes wtf?

<comment><USER11> Owners get paid more than managers. The controlling shareholders of certain banks will most certainly make more annually from dividends than the management team running these companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's the controversy here? They make what their clients are willing to pay them. Now whether they should be taxed at a higher rate is a legitimate issue but there is nothing wrong with "25 people making 12.94 billion"

</comment><comment><USER13> "Hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin made $1.7 billion"

"Mr. Griffin's firm, Citadel, has grown from a hedge fund that managed family and pension fund money into a $25 billion firm"

"Citadel's flagship Kensington and Wellington hedge funds returned 14.3 percent over 2015."

It might be true but seems incredible, that would mean he personally took 6.8% of the entire fund's capital as a salary. Not salary of course but carried interest - he only has to pay capital gains tax rate because Wall street.

<comment><USER14> The deal is often 2 and 20. 2% of the invested funds and 20% of the earnings. That lines up okay with your numbers (say he owns a big chunk of the fund, that would make up some of the difference).

<comment><USER15> Keep in mind that the 2% is there to cover the expenses of the firm and its trading costs. The 20% is the real incentive for the fund managers.

Also keep in mind that they only get that if they earn more for the investors than the "hurdle rate" which is an agreed upon metric for return.

Quite literally, they only get paid if you do very well in the markets. For every $10 that they grow your money, they keep $2 and you get $8.

<comment><USER16> > Keep in mind that the 2% is there to cover the expenses of the firm and its > trading costs. The 20% is the real incentive for the fund managers.

True to a degree, unless your AUM is growing substantially faster than your costs, at which point your fees are covering more than that already.

<comment><USER4> And what almost always follows in that case is that performance starts to lag because most strategies do not scale with how well your fundraising ability happens to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wouldn't even know what to do with all that money. If I had just 1/1000 of Kenneth C. Griffin's 1.7 billion, I'd be more than set for life.

<comment><USER18> Wikipedia gives some idea of what Griffin does with his money. For example, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_C._Griffin#Philanthrop...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_C._Griffin#Philanthropy)

<comment><USER19> I'm only seeing a little under a billion there. If he had similar returns in previous years he donates less than 10 percent of his income. Many poor Catholic families give 10 percent as a tithing. While better than nothing, I find the latter contribution to be more substantial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How do you become one?

<comment><USER21> By starting a hedge fund.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fun fact: Mr. Griffin made more than, for example, the total size of 3D modeling market [http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/3d-mapping.as...](http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/3d-mapping.asp) (I'm not sure of the quality of the referenced link so if someone has better information please correct me)

</comment><comment><USER23> Down with the oligarchs!

Pension funds are a clear wealth transfer from the working class to HF/PE managers without any benefits to the working class.

Fee adjusted returns are worse than index funds.

HF/PE managers dodge taxes through the carried interest loophole which the "socialist" Obama refuses to close despite having the power to do so without enacting new legislation.

</comment><comment><USER24> If it was indeed paid as "salary", the taxes are huge. No sane hedge fund manager would to this (except that there are some other direct benefits of doing this). There are many ways of avoiding paying salary (and therefore taxes).

(Making money is great, I don't see anything controversial in it as long as nobody's hand is forced).

</comment><comment><USER25> Personally I don't really care what hedge fund managers earn, since they don't (directly at least) get any of my income.

</comment><comment><USER26> Isn't this an issue of paying capital gains tax instead of income tax?

The amount of money they earn is arbitrary. If the deal is 2/20, and the manager performs (hence the 20), they're rewarded. That seems fair to me. If you think 20% is too high, find a different fund?

<comment><USER27> Did you read the article? Some hedge fund managers earned enormous pay even when their funds lost money.

<comment><USER26> Yes. But correct me if I'm wrong, but the article says that the managers made money because their firms are so large. Thus, they earned their 2% management fee regardless of performance. Should they be regulated? Won't the market correct when investors pull their money from the fund if they continue the losses?

<comment><USER4> Of the three firms listed in the article, two of them have had significant redemptions in the past year and one of them has returned all outside capital. This says that Och-Ziff has had $4.2bn in redemptions during the first nine months of 2015 [0]

[0] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-02/hedge- fund...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-02/hedge-funds-brace- for-redemptions-as-losses-engulf-marquee-firms)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Their tax rates should be significantly more progressive. Before the 1980s this headline would be unthinkable. Watching the apologists here justify this is Mark Twain Americana at its finest.

</comment><comment><USER4> Strange, most hedge fund managers do not collect much if any salary at all.

</comment><comment><USER29> Seems cheap. Why have they not earned more?

Edit. I know snark is not the HN way, but when faced with the total obscenity that is 25 people exploiting pension funds to the tune of $12.94 billion in one year it is more than I can stomach.

<comment><USER4> Please detail how hedge funds exploit pension funds.

<comment><USER30> Pensions could've been higher if they didn't take that much out? Not sure how OP meant it but that's what I feel; same when CEO's take obscene salaries; the employees could've been paid better if she/he didn't take that kind of money. It seems obscene anyway; I can see you want to secure your future by taking enough millions (depends on where you live how many) to do that even though you make enough per month to live comfortably. I cannot see, unless (like Griffin does by the way) you have a higher plan, how taking more is better than flowing it back to employees or the actual purpose of your company (which in this case is pensions)?

<comment><USER31> > Pensions could've been higher if they didn't take that much out

Pensions would also be lower if they were invested in funds that made lower or negative returns. The theory (right or wrong) is that the high fees charged by the hedge funds are justified because they provide better risk-adjusted returns than other investment vehicles. Hedge funds may be bad and their CEOs may be overcompensated, but it is more complicated than just "every dollar paid to Kenneth Griffin is a dollar taken from a pension fund."

<comment><USER30> "every dollar paid to Kenneth Griffin is a dollar taken from a pension fund." => I know it's not that black and white, but they could take a smaller cut / lower fees etc which then, in a lot of ways, would be shared in a fairer way than this. I know it doesn't work like that and there is nothing to do about it at the moment, but that is what I would have against this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Simple software rasterizer in a single C++11 header file - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Steve132/uraster <comment><USER2> I TA'd a rendering course once and wound up assigning a homework where the students implemented their own software rasterizers in CUDA. Before that homework, a lot of students didn't really understand what a rasterizer did. Afterwards, everyone got it.

<comment><USER3> Do you have links to any resources the students found handy? I'm not very familiar with anything to do with the graphics stack other than familiarity with some of the words.

<comment><USER4> I'm not the author of the original comment, but when I was in high school I found the Graphics Programming Black Book to be useful for understanding graphics primitives and how they can be implemented in software. It's available for free online: [http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/graphics-p...](http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/graphics- programming-and-theory/graphics-programming-black-book-r1698)

Maybe start with chapter 38: [http://downloads.gamedev.net/pdf/gpbb/gpbb38.pdf](http://downloads.gamedev.net/pdf/gpbb/gpbb38.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, this is a great read (even though parts seem dated, for example, the TOC has chapters on the 386 and 486), I'm surprised that I haven't stumbled upon it before.

<comment><USER4> The latest Core i7 still has all the same instructions as a 386 or 486, so while these days you'd probably use SIMD instructions, the code will still run and run _very, very fast_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not a C++11 developer, I've done a little C++ in the past. What is the pride in putting all the code in the header file? Shouldn't the declarations be there, and the definitions be pulled out into a .cpp file? Is it somehow smaller, faster, more convenient to have it all in a header file?

<comment><USER6> Header libraries are easier to add to your project because there are no build scripts to figure out or cross-compiling to do or whatever. A lot of Boost is header-only, for example. GLM (OpenGL Mathematics), too, is header-only. OTOH if you end up modifying a header that's included in a whole bunch of places, woe unto you.

<comment><USER7> The reason Boost is headers only is you have to be a header to be generic. Implementations outside of headers have to friend / otherwise be not truly generic.

<comment><USER8> Assuming you mean friend in the standard cpp way, that's not exactly correct.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/495021/why-can- templates-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/495021/why-can-templates- only-be-implemented-in-the-header-file)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why aren't you using nullptr instead of casting NULL to your pointer type?

</comment><comment><USER10> What exactly is the difference between this and for example a simple ray tracer? Seems like it takes a lot of the same steps.

<comment><USER11> This loops over the triangles and converts them to screen pixels. A ray tracer loops over screen pixels and checks if there are any triangles that overlap it.

<comment><USER12> More or less this. To expand a bit - rasterization converts lines or polygons to pixels via hidden line removal techniques ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_line_removal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_line_removal)) and/or hidden surface techniques ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_surface_determination](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_surface_determination)) while ray tracing can mean a lot of different things, where most common and basic form is Whitted's ray tracing where final image is a grid of pixels with from each one there is a 'ray' shot towards the scene and checking if there is a collision with the object (polygon) and then turned towards each light source. In normal world, model is that light travels from light source, bounces from objects and comes to the camera - Whitted's algorithm is opposite where rays are shot from camera towards objects (modified by surface properties there) and towards light sources (less computation that way). Modern ray tracers involve Kajiya's equations and other fancy stuff.

<comment> alok-g Thanks for the explanation. How are multiple hops in light path handled without having the computational complexity go insane?

<comment><USER13> They aren't.....

Some popular shortcuts include:

\- Cut at n hops (with n=4 or n=8 popular choices), defaulting to "ambient" light after that

\- Give each material an "ambient" color, so that you don't actually need to trace every pixel back into every light source (just into e.g. spotlights)

\- Solve a radiosity equation for the surface colors, and trace rays for textures/reflections.

Complete ray tracing is, indeed, insane - in fact, to get high quality pictures and avoid aliasing, most ray tracers send multiple rays through every picture and average the result.

<comment><USER13> (too late to edit:) that was supposed to be "multiple rays through every _pixel_ "

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recently unearthed the code I wrote at school in 1996 which implemented a 3D Gouraud-shaded renderer that managed ~1000 triangles/sec on a 33MHz 486. It's a great learning experience doing this from scratch.

Mine did Bresenham's algorithm for pixel fill rather than the winding approach used here.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very cool - any perf stats though? Would be interesting to see how this compares to other software renderers.</comment>


Haskell in the Newsroom [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/haskell-newsroom-nyt

<comment><USER2> I think this really gets to the core strength of Haskell, which for me has always been having code that we can rapidly prototype but migrate into production and have living in the codebase for a long time. I've written code in good deal of languages and haven't found a language with the power/weight ratio that Haskell has.

The slight cost I have found though is that a lot of the tools he mentioned have a rather steep learning curve ( monads, parsec, repa, conduits, lens ) especially for those coming from an imperative background. But learning any of them is an investment in your programming skills that pays off ten-fold down the road.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree. 9 times out 10, something compiles and works as expected, and can stay working in production for years. I don't know of any other language where I can do this and keep developing (and prototyping) the codebase.

(This is not to say that testing isn't necessary--in fact Haskell offers an amazing framework for fuzz testing, QuickCheck--but 100% code coverage unit tests is a pointless endeavor in Haskell.)

I will say that "rapid prototyping" of _new_ applications is a bit tedious in Haskell (mainly because of the cabal etc. bootstrapping work you have to do), but prototyping new features in existing ones is smooth.

<comment><USER4> Why do you say that unit testing is pointless in Haskell?

Edit: My bad - I missed the 100% part.

<comment><USER5> He said that aiming for 100% code-coverage tests in Haskell is pointless, not that unit-testing itself is pointless. Which I think is a pretty reasonable given that a lot of bugs cannot exist _by construction_ in a lot of Haskell code.

Personally I very much enjoy unit-testing in Haskell especially with the new tasty library which makes combining all the Unit/QuickCheck/SmallCheck tests very pleasant.

[1] [http://hackage.haskell.org/package/tasty](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/tasty)

<comment><USER3> Indeed. I'm not a fan of 100% code coverage tests in any language, but it's especially apparent in Haskell where, as you said, if code compiles (and you keep most of your functions pure), there are whole classes of bugs that simply cannot exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love the bit about conduits, lenses and data abstraction, really excellent stuff. The intro may not be interesting for people already into haskell but he makes a solid case for it if you're not sold.

</comment><comment><USER7> A bit off topic but that crowd was awfully dry. This guy had a pretty good sense of humor and made his keynote quite entertaining but not even a chuckle from the audience.

<comment><USER8> Often that's just because the mic isn't setup to capture audience noise - I've been to a few lectures where the audience was very engaged/entertained, but from the recording you'd think they were all sitting there in complete silence.

<comment><USER7> ah that makes sense. Was a bit annoyed because it seemed like every attempt he made to warm the audience up failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great talk. The cameramen zoomed on the guy just when the slides with some code are shown! Anyway the slides can be found here:

[http://codemesh.io/slides/erik-hinton.pdf](http://codemesh.io/slides/erik- hinton.pdf)</comment>


Google rejected historically-accurate WW2 game due to Nazi references - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/CharlesGames_cz/status/1284116775702077440 <comment><USER2> Interesting. I wonder if it shows the evil on both sides or only one.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I facilitate a username transaction? - <AUTHOR> Hey everybody,<p>So someone grabbed a social media account with our startup's username, and he's willing to sell it to us for a reasonable price. The problem is, he wants payment in Bitcoin, and for me to transfer the money before he transfers the account. I want to somehow protect myself from fraud, but he does to. What's a good way to facilitate such a transaction so that we're both protected? Any ideas? :-) <comment><USER2> escrow.com is perfect for the transfer portion (don't know if they support Bitcoin). I have used them for half a million dollars' worth of domains and they have functioned flawlessly.</comment>