Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/From-Technologist-to/128231/# <comment><USER2> Rich technologists are _exactly_ the type of people who should get PhDs in the humanities, since they require either a) you to have sufficient resources to live a life of leisure or b) external support by an organization which has a pile of rent and a big desire to spend some to signal status. Sell your startup, go get a degree in English. Become a Scholar in Residence at e.g. Google, do some pathbreaking anthropological work about youths' use of mobile devices. Whatever.

If you actually work for a living, though, this is _terrible_ advice.

</comment><comment><USER3> _I see a humanities degree as nothing less than a rite of passage to intellectual adulthood. A way of evolving from a sophomoric wonderer and critic into a rounded, open, and engaged intellectual citizen._

This is somewhat insulting to to those of us who, despite being "sophmoric" technologists, are actually quite well rounded.

<comment><USER4> Despite actually being a big fan of the humanities (though a computer scientist myself), it's sadly not really what the median humanities degree gets you either. You _can_ learn a lot of interesting stuff and become well- rounded, like in many fields. But, also like in many fields, you can also become the world's foremost expert on an extremely narrow subject that may or may not be even on the right track to anything. I believe this is one of several reasons for the big dropout rate in humanities PhDs--- signed up for the broad education in philosophy and knowledge, but dropped out when it became clear that it was a path to becoming the world's expert on Gendered Discourse in the Hungarian Mining Industry, 1872-1876; or perhaps on a very narrow technical problem in analytic philosophy.

<comment><USER5> > but dropped out when it became clear that it was a path to becoming the > world's expert on Gendered Discourse in the Hungarian Mining Industry, > 1872-1876; or perhaps on a very narrow technical problem in analytic > philosophy.

On the other hand, it's not so dispiriting when you consider that you'd probably be the world's foremost authority on the topic... forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If you are worried about your career, I must tell you that getting a > humanities Ph.D. is not only not a danger to your employability, it is quite > the opposite. I believe there no surer path to leaping dramatically forward > in your career than to earn a Ph.D. in the humanities. Because the thought > leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up > the career ladder. The leaders are the ones who took chances and developed > unique perspectives.

Apparently when he abandoned his sophomore technologist beliefs, he also abandoned the need to provide evidence.

</comment><comment><USER7> _To a young undergraduate, frustrated with the lack of rapid progress on tough philosophical questions, AI seemed like the great hope, the panacea—the escape from the frustrations of thinking._

Yeah, that'll go away in short order after taking a few AI classes.

<comment><USER8> It might also give you a clear insight on so-called tough philosophical questions.

<comment><USER9> Yea, after studding AI I find most philosophical debate boring. There may be interesting areas in philosophy outside arguing about unspecified definitions but I have not found any.

Consider the Chinese room argument, where is the brain? It's the arrangement of all the players and their rule sets. What is consciousness, it's their internal state etc.

<comment><USER10> So, if you have the philosophical Q's figured out, could you send me the lisp code for the 'redness of red', I need my latest program to have phenomenal feeling.

<comment><USER9> "Purple air sounds like rage." Is grammatically correct and passes a wide range of linguistic filters, yet for some reason it has zero meaning. Still read it a few times, it feels like there should be some meaning there. This get's at a core problem with language. Language is based around the assumption that something meaningful is trying to be communicated so we rarely bother with much precision. You can refer to ideas as physical objects but parsing into something meaningful requires a lot of context.

Redness seems to refer to some sort of external stimulus, but both redness and red are really internal qualifications of some external stimulus. So, I can point you to a red filter that looks at color codes and compares them to FF0000. If I then run that filter on FF0000 I get an internal state of 100%. But what that does not create something with emotions and your linking them in that sentence so what's wrong? I would suggest it's not the fact that the code does not produce emotion that's the problem it's your assumption that anything that understands redness must include an emotional context. Still, if you want both a test for redness and an emotional response you could code a simple AI with competing goals who responds emotionally to increasing amounts of red in it's environment.

Granted, you could then argue that such a simplistic representation of internal state is to simplistic a response to cover the full range of emotions. But a that point your not talking about 'redness of red' in the abstract but getting into mimicking your personal emotional responses. Which could be done to some reasonable level of accuracy.

PS: I could also have completely missed what you where trying to communicate, but I hope that line of reasoning demonstrated what I was talking about. Namely that in the context of AI you can translate abstract philosophical ideas into a meaningful context but they stop being interesting somewhere in the process.

<comment><USER11> The problem of qualia[1] is about the relation between knowledge of a phenomenon and experiences of that phenomenon. 'Emotion' has nothing to do with it, unless you consider the mental state that is the result of 'the perception of something blue' to be a distinct emotional state, in which case your usage of the word 'emotion' deviates from the common way[2] it is used.

I'm sorry if this seems unsubstantiated and unsatisfactory, but I'm afraid that you just do not yet understand the profoundness of the problem 'derrida' refers to. Your proposed way of attacking the problem is too naive.

[1] <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/> [2] <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/>

<comment><USER9> Human emotion is an complex internal biochemical reaction. Suggesting it has some deeper meaning from what is actually going on is naive.

Suppose you walk into a room who's walls are covered in fresh blood. Now Suppose instead you walked into an identical room that was identical room except the blood was green. What separates those two rooms is at some level a simple color filter, but your internal responses are going to be vary different. If you could slow down time and look at the individual responses to each room you could watch as the red or green information propagated around your individual neurons.

But at what part of that does 'redness' apply? The individual rods and cones independently respond to photons but you have to go into post processing before the concept of red is separate from white or black. If you look at the way neurons work there is some computation involved and comparison between individual sensor neurons but at some point that neuron fires and guess what that's what redness means. It's the internal state of on ore more neurons looking at those signals. Now you can ask about memory but it terns out that's a recording of internal states which is not really a copy of some RGB value but a copy of some of your internal state while the event was gong on. And when it comes to language you are communicating internal physical states. You can describe your dopamine levels in flowery language but there are underlying physical processes which your are describing.

Having said all that you could talk about the platonic ideal form for redness, but just because what he said sounds like it has meaning does not mean it does. He did not understand what was going on so he built up complex ideas that don't apply in the abstract instead he is describing your internal classification of things. When I look at this picture my internal chair classifier goes off etc.

PS: I am of course greatly simplifying my description of how the brain works but from a philosophical perspective the details are not vary important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As one who's gotten a Master's in Classics, I can say that my timeline for reference is about 3000 years, and more if I think about Egyptian papryri, and Indo-European Poetics. Most technical people have a timeline of only about 50 to 75 years, maximum, and it's quite a beneficial change of perspective.

<comment><USER13> This is a very good point. Reading old philosophers really open ones eyes to the things that have changed little in human culture throughout the centuries or even millenniums.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why does everything have to be so extreme - what's wrong with studying some humanities without quitting your job?

<comment><USER15> What's wrong with that is that it's common sense, non-offensive, and won't get pageviews. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If the only reason to do so is to become a "rounded, open, and engaged intellectual citizen", why not just read a few books?

Advanced humanities degrees are great, if you're into advanced humanities.

</comment><comment><USER17> Damon Horowitz is an extremely talented and smart guy who's proven himself in the startup world, but I don't think he's giving the best advice here.

He mentions Steve Jobs at the end as a technologist who's clear evidence of the importance of a liberal arts education. Jobs does credit a lot of Apple's design to that calligraphy class he walked into in his early days (while he was a college drop-out)... but if there's anything to be gleaned from the best and brightest, and the most creative, in industry, it's that they're _self- taught_ \- their creativity isn't a product of the humanities in academia.

Who was the last Philosophy PhD who went on to start the next great tech company? Or do anything particularly innovative?

</comment><comment><USER18> Why not read a bunch of books instead?

If the point is to become a well rounded person, think widely and read widely, then getting a PhD isn't going to help you much. I think of PhD's as very driven, focused, able to take a lot of abuse, able to write and research for several years. I don't think of them as particularly well rounded.

In particular, getting a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford after a BS in CS from Columbia and an MS from MIT is going to give you a couple of survey courses in Philosophy, and then a very deep knowledge of a very, very narrow band of philosophy..

 _I learned how the quantifiable, individualistic, ahistorical—that is, computational—view I had of cognition failed to account for whole expanses of cognitive experience (including, say, most of Shakespeare). I learned how pragmatist and contextualist perspectives better reflect the diversity and flexibility of our linguistic practices than do formal language models._

QED.

If the point is to be well read, well rounded, and be able to think broadly about a variety of topics, then... read a book. Read a lot of books. Read broadly. Read widely. Read people that you disagree with. Argue with writers.

Read literature, comparative religions, philosophy, cultural anthropology, sociology, history, science fiction, mythology, fantasy, psychology, biography, poetry.

Read Carl Jung, Freud, Neitsche, Marx, Kant, Dickenson, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Plato, Aristotle, the Bhagvad Gita, the Koran, the Tao, The Tao of Poo, Luther, Martin Luther King, Tolstoy and Doestoyevsky, Adams, St. John of the Cross, the Mystics--Christian, Bhuddist, Kabbalist, and Sufi, Gleick, Feynman, Shakespeare, Chaucer.

Chances are, if they say it's a "classic" it's probably hung around for a long time because it's good. (Except for Kant. He couldn't write worth crap). And, in reading we learn that we are not alone. We learn that perhaps creating a True AI isn't something to be desired anyway. We learn that maybe consciousness is more than a deterministic bunch of bio-chemical reactions taking place in our frontal lobes that can be modeled via neural networks and computer processors. And, we start to wonder, if perhaps as the poets proclaim... there something called a Soul. And if there is a Soul, can we actually create that via silicon, light, magnetics and electricity?

You can get that education in $1.50 in late charges at the library. You don't have to spend 3 years and $150k at Stanford working on your Phd.

<comment><USER19> While I agree with your suggestion of reading books (which is IMHO in general a good advice), I have to sort of disagree with your description of a PhD: The goal of getting a PhD at least in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is to autonomously advance the state-of-the-art of any chosen field, to contribute new knowledge to humanity without a supervisor giving directions.

Now, the process of advancing the state-of-the-art is unusually hard and there exists a good deal of very good write-ups of the intricacies involved (such as "So long and thanks for the PhD") which requires people to be driven and focused. But, at the same time, before actually starting the research that gets them their PhDs, gradute students spend time in advanced courses and later on read lots of research papers and additional textbooks. This is an invaluable process of unsupervised learning (hence the first paragraph), and I think that getting a PhD also gives you the abilities and experience to autonomously go from zero knowledge in an area to contributing new knowledge by reading. Of course, studying at a university saves you a lot of time, because somebody else--the professor--who is already very knowledgeable in the target area has already broken down his knowledge in edible--and ideally pedagogically-sound--pieces ready to be sucked up. But if time is not of the essence, and since you are already a driven and focused person, you should be able to do it by yourself.

So this was (quite unexpectedly) rather long, a more detailed discussion and probably a very good book to read for anybody can be found in: Mortimer Jerome Adler's wonderful "How to read a book". A brief summary for tl;dr reasons: I love and totally support your reading advice, but since the PhD experience enables you to work your way through literature in unknown territory, it might very well be worth the effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This advice is ridiculous. First, I don't believe the intent of most Ph.D programs is even to create "a rounded, open, and engaged intellectual citizen". I know quite a few people with doctorate degrees, and while most were quite happy with their educational experience, I doubt they would describe it as he frames it. Second, most of the great programmers I know are deeply interested in the humanities and tend to be quite well read in many disciplines. They just prefer to spend their creative energies and career creating software.

Furthermore, I am highly skeptical of the idea that you need a Ph.D to have a meaningful understanding of the humanities. Despite his assertions about the "thought leaders", it seems to me that those who have made the most progress on the big questions in the last 100+ years did so through science and technology, not through the humanities.

<comment><USER21> Completely agree. I find the article slightly silly in that what he is suggesting is the same thing as the purpose of any Liberal Arts degree... to create a "rounded, open, and engaged intellectual citizen."

It's interesting how we've fallen so out of touch with what our universities were created for in the first place, or rather that we're never told what we're going to school for and what our options are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have a lot of friends who are in the middle of their dissertations or freshly minted philosophy PhDs. From what they tell me the job market for philosophy profs is awful; in fact the job market for any professorial (tenure track mainly but also non-tenure) positions in the humanities is not a lot better.

</comment><comment><USER23> Man this guy seems to take his train of thought to a bit of an extreme.

"Hard distinctions make bad philosophy" - John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp, coined the term "AI")

I did both. I got a degree in Computer Science and Philosophy. I loved it. But I didn't have to do something drastic to get there. I enjoy humanities greatly, so I incorporated them into my study along with technology.

</comment><comment><USER24> As an aside, this is the fourth time this article has been posted to HN, and I say this as the person who posted it the second time around, a day after it first failed to gain traction, with a slightly modified URL.

</comment><comment><USER25> This article is almost 100% fluff.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm really curious how he used his philosophy studies to "make major progress in AI". I've spent several years avidly reading philosophy, and ultimately found the field quite sterile. Granted it raises interesting questions, but the answers are too varied and contested to be of much practical use.

The only example the article gives is "when you have a question, we connect you to another person who can give you a live answer". But this seems more like avoiding the problem than like major progress in AI.

</comment><comment><USER27> There is nothing wrong with suggesting something radical. At the same time, you have to be able to show the strength of your beliefs. A strong signal of belief is your willingness to place money behind an idea. Probably the best example of someone placing money behind a radical idea is Peter Thiel when he created Thiel Fellowship.

I think you would be well received if you were to offer full scholarship and stipend equal to the participants salary.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wish I thought that getting an advanced degree in the humanities would give you a background in the (ever evolving group of) classics, but I am afraid academics must specialize and so don't actually get to be well-rounded (Oh, I don't do Plato, I just do Kant...) I have always found my advisors to be disturbed that I thought it important to read widely...

</comment><comment><USER29> The guy is a bit of a masochist isn't he? Bouncing from one intractable problem to the next.

</comment><comment><USER30> The author has the good fortune to assume the critical stance of the philosopher and to enjoy unfettered intellectual freedom within a corporate institution such as Google. I myself prefer not to uncritically internalize the values of the workplace. My saying so at my own place of work was not appreciated, and culminated in an exit interview, a dramatization of which is available here: [http://christianmarks.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/exit- intervie...](http://christianmarks.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/exit-interview-2/)

</comment><comment><USER31> The sentiment is unimpeachable- but the advice isn't. Get the education, and the perspective that come with it- absolutely. But it doesn't require a retreat to academia for several years to gain it anymore.

The internet is the collective knowledge and experience of all humanity. To seek this information is wise and wonderful- but I respectfully suggest that dropping ones life to go back to school, chained anew in debt, isn't necessary for the attainment of that wisdom.

<comment><USER32> I don't see the internet as a source of wisdom, or even knowledge, depending on what one means by the word. Information, certainly. But the mental habits that the internet as a mass medium fosters are antithetical to study and reflection.

I love the internet, not least because of the ease with which I can obtain information that used to take hours in the library. But obtaining specific facts is not the same thing as learning or thinking.

From observing myself and others, I believe that something is wrong. I'm getting way more brain stimulation from the internet than I used to without it, but in terms of things that matter to me in the long run -- growth and learning -- it is of poor quality. I remember the quality of a life spent with books, and this is definitely not it. I feel like I'm experiencing my own atrophy, and it dismays me. Sometimes I think that one of these days I should post a list of books to HN and promise not to come back until I've read them.

So no, consuming information from the internet is in practice nothing like getting an education in the humanities, for anyone whose brain is wired like mine and those of people I know.

Books are food, the internet is a drug.

<comment><USER33> It all depends on what you view with the Internet, just like the quality of a life spent with books depends on exactly what books you're reading. If all you read is romance novels, you won't be stimulating yourself adequately; the same is true online. If you choose to access only brief news articles and simulator entries, for example, you may learn a lot; but you won't stretch your mind.

Every now and again read something difficult; something that makes you think and leaves you confused. You'll learn more in the long run. A great place start, if you happen to be interested in math, is Terence Tao's blog, and a number of the blogs he links to. (At the least, I find it challenging; the blog is over at <http://terrytao.wordpress.com/> .)

<comment><USER32> This is the sort of platitude that it's comfortable for everybody to agree on: it's just the quality of the material that matters, so just read better stuff. Well, no. That isn't the only thing that matters. The medium also has an effect. The internet is an excellent medium for random access to specific things and a poor medium for substantial thought and reflection. It's a mile wide and an inch deep.

Tao's blog is excellent, but how does one acquire the background necessary to understand his mathematical posts? By rolling up one's sleeves and doing hard work, most of which is likely done away from the internet. And this is the kind of thing that spending a lot of time on the internet makes it harder to do. That's my experience, anyway, as well as my observation of others'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A few things ignored:

A. The PhD concept, like academia itself, is broken. For most people, it's 5-7 years to get narrow training for an industry that has sold out a generation and a half and probably won't exist, in any meaningful way, in 40 years on account of how badly it has treated young entrants. The last time a disaster as bad as the academic job market occurred in the U.S., two countries got invaded.

B. You'd think the philosophy degree would give him the ability to avoid inverted-causality fallacies, e.g. "I know how to think a certain way _because_ I got a philosophy Ph.D."

Don't get me wrong. I think there can be a lot of value in a Ph.D. program. But I think for a successful person in technology, it's a really bad idea from a career perspective. I'll focus on this:

 _Because the thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder. The leaders are the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives._

Does he really think that everyone who takes 5-7 years off to pursue a humanities Ph.D. gets some kind of magical career rocket fuel that propels him or her into a decision-making role where broad-based perspective is crucial? I doubt it.

Now, I will agree that society would benefit immensely if our leaders (including in technology) actually understood the humanities, and many don't. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that taking 5-7 years off to study philosophy increases your chance of becoming one of those leaders; I think it lowers it, sadly.</comment>


The Baltic submarine cable that's breaking data speed records - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/helsinki-to-frankfurt-in-20-milliseconds-the-baltic-cable-thats-breaking-data-speed-records/ <comment><AUTHOR> 144Tbps to sum it up shortly.</comment>


Why does parseInt(1/0, 19) return 18? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11340673/why-does-parseint1-0-19-return-18

<comment><USER2> Contrary to what some people may think, this is non-obvious & surprising behavior which has nothing to do with JS being a "dynamic language". It requires knowing that the IEEE floating point standard arbitrarily defines 1/0 as positive infinity instead of being (the more widely accepted, obvious and unsurprising) undefined value. I believe JS is a powerful language but calling this reasonable behavior smacks of Stockholm Syndrome.

<comment><USER3> I would say the (bigger) problem is in JavaScript randomly calling toString on things, especially when you're calling parseInt on a number already.

<comment><USER4> Generally type coercion seems like a bad idea in most languages

<comment><USER5> Which is why you can use === to bypass type coercion when dong an equality test.

<comment><USER3> But === is the _other_ equals, not _the_ equals.

Also, that only helps in boolean contexts, not with any function calls.

<comment><USER5> _Also, that only helps in boolean contexts, not with any function calls._

Could you clarify?

<comment><USER3> '1' === 1 is false, because === is strict.

But there's no strict equivalent of + or -, so '1' + 1 is '11', but '1' - 1 is 0.

The same holds for parseInt('Ambulance', 16) and parseInt('A', 16), which are both 10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If this was in PHP people would be crying out what a bad and horrible language it is.

Javascript it's seen as an amusing conundrum.

<comment><USER7> The reason javascript won't get nearly as much ridicule as PHP is because there's no other choice with javascript. Most arguments against PHP are in the form - I'm using <super awesome language> because PHP has .... faults.

Also, the fact that very few people code pure javascript, instead choosing frameworks like jquery, goes to show how much people like it!

<comment><USER8> Sorry, your point about jQuery is off the mark. jQuery is a library (not a framework), and if you are not using libraries you are most likely doing it wrong, in any language!

jQuery does nothing to alter the language, so people using it are still coding pure JavaScript. jQuery itself is implemented in pure JavaScript.

\----

There does exist variants of JavaScript, such as Paper.js, Protovis and maybe even CoffeScript, but these are not what the majority of JavaScript users use.

<comment><USER9> I'm not so sure whether jQuery can be considered a framework or not. If you're using jQuery properly ($(document.ready).ready() and so forth) jQuery behaves very much like a framework, with inversion of control and other patterns.

JavaScript in the browser has access to the standard JavaScript and DOM libraries. I really don't think that not using any third-party libraries in any language means "you're doing it wrong". Pure JavaScript/DOM can go a very long way (especially in these days of more standard-compliant browsers), just like pure Objective-C & Cocoa or pure C# & .NET.

Finally, while obviously jQuery does not alter the language, it really changed how people approach problems in JavaScript. Code that uses jQuery looks nothing like code that doesn't use it.

<comment><USER8> jQuery is big and important and has lots of features that you can use or decide not to use. However, if you decide to implement simple animations yourself in a situation where jQuery would have been a fit, you are likely wasting time and effort.

Using jQuery for this does not mean that you like or dislike the language. That was the point I was trying to refute.

Animations is of course also not the only problem you can solve by using jQuery as a library every now and then.

\----

For what it's worth, I don't think jQuery qualifies as a framework in the definition on Wikipedia ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_framework> ), but this is besides the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Please put Python or Ruby or X in the browser.

Javascript is no better than PHP. It is there - like Php in its time- because we have no other choice.

We're supposed to be professionals and one of our main tool is a joke.

<comment><USER11> No one is stopping you from rolling your own browser and taking market share away from the current Big Three.

Or from forking Chrome, since it's open source, and then offering your patch back to the central repo. Not sure if Firefox is open source, but could use that instead, too, if it is.

<comment><USER5> Nobody would use it as it wouldn't have market share. But that's besides the point. The behaviour is actually well defined; the only issue is with parseInt() taking the first character it sees as a number, converting it from it's base to base 10 and then prints the number. The issue being, of course, is that it would have been more sensible to given an exception for non-numeric strings.

<comment><USER11> > Nobody would use it as it wouldn't have market share.

That's why I added the part about forking and contributing back. If it becomes part of the standard offering, then you don't have to worry about market share as much.

And especially if you get a portable implementation then the IE and Chrome teams might decide to adapt it in, since you've lowered the engineering cost.

> But that's besides the point. The behaviour is actually well defined

There's a good reason to _not_ use Javascript, if there's an option to use another language in the browser, that has nothing to do with JS's quality itself: context switching. Node.js is popular due in no small part to the fact that you have to use JS anyways. The purpose of GWT, as far as I'm aware, is to make it so you have Java as an option in the client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ah! Nice work - that makes total sense.

Incidentally, PHP doesn't have the concept of positive or negative Infinity, just NaN. However, when I tried:

      print inval(1/0);

I got an exception. But point taken :-)

Edit: I might not be correct about positive or negative infinity in PHP... apologies if I have at all mislead anyone!

Also: got a proxy error, so this got reposted, then I deleted one of the posts, but the other post got marked deleted. So third post about this!

<comment><USER12> Please read my comment below regarding this behavior in PHP. In addition, I will add that 1/0 here is not returning NaN (if you attempt to print it as a string you won't get "NaN"), and intval itself actually has the same behavior as JavaScript. (edit: Oh, I just realized the other comment I replied to was also you. ;P)

<comment><USER5> Argh! Sorry, proxy error caused all sorts of problems :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I the only one that has laugh maniacally after reading this? X-D</comment>


Algotrading Mythbusting - <AUTHOR> http://www.onlineinvestingai.com/blog/2010/02/16/expert-profiles-ben-gimpert-discusses-algorithmic-trading/

<comment><USER2> From the article: Q: "Where do you think the future of Automated Trading is headed?"

A: "Distributing computations across many systems with side-effect free languages like Erlang and Haskell. High-frequency strategies asymptotically approaching the speed at which the exchange itself can cross orders. Machine- learning inference from huge amounts of unstructured, ugly, textual and visual data."</comment>


Evolution of SW architecture - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@benorama/the-evolution-of-software-architecture-bd6ea674c477

<comment><USER2> Never thought software could make me hungry.

<comment><AUTHOR> there is a subtle message in that blog post - we eat our own dog food ;-)</comment></comment>


Openport – A free reverse ssh service - <AUTHOR> https://openport.io

<comment><USER2> What makes this better than simply using port forwarding and dynamic DNS?

<comment><AUTHOR> Port forwarding is not always possible if you don't have access to your company's router or whatever. Also, this is much quicker to set up if you only need it temporarily.</comment></comment>


The startup that's reinventing website localization - <AUTHOR> https://www.bablic.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Unlike other localization solutions, Bablic lets you edit your site in real time through their editor.

Just enter your URL on the homepage, select the language you want to add and choose from machine or human translation.

You can then manually edit all of the elements a user sees on your site (text, images, css, forms, error msgs, etc) just by right-clicking on them in the user-friendly visual editor.</comment>


Video: Google Data Center Security - <AUTHOR> http://www.thechromesource.com/video-google-data-center-security/ <comment><USER2> All security members in this video were black.

<comment><USER3> No. The person at the gate certainly wasn't!

<comment><USER2> You are right.</comment></comment></comment>


Unix Text Processing Transcription Project (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://home.windstream.net/kollar/utp/ <comment><USER2> A memorable appreciation of this book appeared here a while ago: "Whenever I read this book again, I am reminded of how much UNIX know-how is probably being lost to new generations that are steered away from learning the foundations that still make up their operating systems. ..."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16118155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16118155)

<comment><USER3> > "Whenever I read this book again, I am reminded of how much UNIX know-how is > probably being lost to new generations that are steered away from learning > the foundations that still make up their operating systems. ..."

From the look of things, most of it. Just look at the decision to use markdown (md) for github instead of the ubiquitous troff which is installed by default on every *nix machine to date so you can read man pages. Because of that decision, you now have people suggesting we write the man pages in md. Throw out the old tools because no one knows how to use them so instead we'll waste time rewriting everything using new tools. Instead, the time would be better spent learning the old tools and be done with it. Lunacy.

We can thank NIH syndrome, the new norm for these blunders. This NIH problem is a result of the historical machismo culture surrounding engineering and development. Namely these two awful quirks: n00bs think they can do it better than the gurus because the gurus tell the n00bs to RTFM because "back in my day all we had was $man intro". The gurus should be teaching and guiding the n00bs to properly understand these systems and the tools already provided. This allows us to build knowledge on a solid foundation, focus on real problems, learn from past mistakes, and avoid reinventing the wheel because of ignorance and hubris.

Lastly: You want to rediscover the simplistic beauty of Unix? Hack around in plan9. 9front is the most up-to-date fork so grab an iso from them. They have an odd culture, mostly trollish, but it's there to keep the know it all n00bs away (the salty guru syndrome is strong in them). I've been playing with troff on plan9 and using a tool called dpost which formats troff to postscript. Simple and effective formatting which makes me question the decision to use things like md.

<comment><USER4> No wonder nobody went with troff. Checking out the Troff homepage, wikipedia page, the GNU page for troff and scanning the manual, I still haven't come across example code (markup?) of troff, but it sounds like something closer to latex than a markup language.

While markdown lacks good formal definition, it is easy to read and easy to write. I picked up markdown faster than it took me to give up looking for example code for troff.

<comment><USER3> I hate to say it but you're exhibiting bias in your post. How much time did you actually spend looking? What search terms did you use? While I'll agree that md looks easy at first, troff isn't much more difficult if you put the time into it (humans are lazy, I get it). Here's one I found in under a minute by searching for 'how to write linux man page using troff':

[https://liw.fi/manpages/](https://liw.fi/manpages/)

and of course the official manual which has a nice command table in the beginning:

[https://www.troff.org/54.pdf](https://www.troff.org/54.pdf)

Also of note: troff supports macros so the man page formatting won't be found in the troff manual because they are part of the man macro package.

<comment><USER4> > How much time did you actually spend looking?

Like I said, more time than it took me to learn markdown.

> Here's one I found in under a minute by searching for 'how to write linux > man page using troff'

Of course I was not searching for "How to make man pages". Why would I do that, when parent said this was a better alternative to markdown.

> Also of note: troff supports macros so the man page formatting won't be > found in the troff manual because they are part of the man macro package.

Which again makes it pretty reasonable why places like github chose markdown over troff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I stumbled upon this book early in my career, somehow managed to lose track of it, bought an old copy on Half.com, still haven't done much with it but glad to have it.

Really glad people feel strongly enough to recover this treasure. Will be interested to see a revised edition.

<comment><USER6> It looks like a revised edition never came. The page is from 2004 after all, and nothing more seems to have happened.</comment></comment>


Getting Klued In: Announcing Our Funding and Story - <AUTHOR> https://klue.com/blog/klue-raises-4m-usd-seed-round-to-arm-sales-with-better-competitive-market-intelligence-2/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like a fascinating product, but customers are usually more impressed with what you are going to do for them as opposed to who funded you.</comment>


Eric Holder endorses warrants for e-mail. It's about time. - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/16/eric-holder-endorses-warrants-for-e-mail-its-about-time/ <comment><USER2> Saying that a warrant is required is only as meaningful as the difficulty of getting said warrant is. In other words, a rubber stamp is still a rubber stamp and I do not think for one minute it would be otherwise.</comment>


Ouya's first exclusive game  - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console/posts/270629

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I understand the developer incentive for releasing a game exclusively for the Ouya. As a game developer I'm excited by the Ouya, but precisely because it's part of the larger Android ecosystem. So I can release my games for a large screen console on the OUYA store and for millions of Android mobile devices on the Play Store. With very little engineering effort between the two (saved you already planed d-pad support in your game).

So why would I publish exclusively only on the Ouya store and not the Play store? Is there some partnership plan somewhere that I'm missing? Robotoki is getting a lot of good marketing directly from Ouya. That sounds like an interesting partnership. But is that scalable for the rest of us?

<comment><USER3> If you read carefully the developer is releasing a prequel to his real game. They are trying to leverage Ouya for publicity for when it releases its real game which will not be under an exclusive deal.

This is similar to movie studios providing say, Hulu or iTunes with exclusive trailers, and leveraging their platform for advertising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the looks of it, there's no meat behind this story other than the announcement. The developer has nothing more than words and some concept art. This is a pure marketing ploy for both the Ouya developers and the game developers - neither have anything invested at the moment, both just drumming up hype for their unreleased products.

Talk is cheap, as they say.

<comment><USER5> Those words and pictures are now worth $5,213,248 with 20 days to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is brilliant on many levels. This game, good or not, will make a ton-load of money - because of the hype/craze around Ouya.

This is Distribution 101. Find a hot platform/wave, and ride it as long as you can.

This guy is at the top of the wave and will be riding all the way to the steps of the bank.

<comment><USER7> They are releasing in 2015. The internet and the sort of hype around a gaming console is not going to last that long. Remember the internet (as a whole) has the long term memory of an intelligent goldfish. If they had a game to release right now, as the OUYA launched then you would be right but in this case it seems kind of far fetched.

<comment><USER8> If it makes the goal amount (it is currently $4M above it), the money is charged from people and is then in Robotoki's hands.

Whether those people still care about the game in 2015 is irrelevant - as a money making venture, it's quite clever (and clearly successful).

EDIT: Never mind - I got confused thinking the game had raised $5M on Kickstarter, not the Ouya. My bad.

<comment><USER9> Yes I was confused also, it's actually an Update post on Ouya's Kickstarter project, not a new project for HumanElement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since Unity3D already can deploy to Androd platforms I would venture to guess that we will see quite alot of games ready for the launch of Ouya.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ouya's KickStarter feels less like you are "backing it" to make it happen than it does advertizing to potential investors. The video is what I would call more than a little vague and uncertain of itself. Are you backing what "could be" or what WILL be?

<comment><USER12> They've raised $5m and counting. What do they need investors for?

<comment><USER13> For possibly ever becoming viable. Look, I'm a fan of indies as much as anyone else, but mass producing a game console- even one with this cheap of parts- is just not possible without more money. I'd be sincerely surprised if the money they've raised so far covered more than just paying the salaries of their employees and get the basic infrastructure set up.

<comment><USER14> Back in 2001 when the original Xbox and PS2 were current-generation consoles, the Indrema console failed because they couldn't get $10mil in capital. With more accessible Chinese manufacturing, more accessible venture capital, and a Kickstarter campaign that's already netted half that amount, I think Ouya stands a pretty good chance of being profitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Has Ouya actually gotten any other games promised for their platform yet? I don't care about exclusivity. I just want to know that there will actually be stuff to play when it comes out. I pledged originally, but cancelled after Ben Kuchera's skeptical article. I'd love to be given a reason to reinstate my pledge.

<comment><USER16> How about the fact that you simply want to see the idea succeed? That was enough for me. Even if it fails I know I was a part of the community that tried.

<comment><USER15> They passed their funding goal ages. What's your definition of "succeed"? Me pledging for a console isn't going to do much to get good games to be promised for it. I'd love to see it succeed, but it's hard to justify paying $100 for something that isn't even useful by itself.

<comment><USER16> Because I would love to see a console I could tinker with that is an open platform, (versus say trying to do XNA development), the $100 is worth feeling like I'm apart of something bigger than myself.

Sure its a gamble, but I want to see it enough that there is value to me in simply being involved. Clearly others agree with me. You don't have to feel the same way, and clearly you don't. No one is asking you to participate - which is the beauty of the kickstarter format.

At this point I don't see what good anyone is doing criticising it. Either you're on board.... or just chill out because it doesn't affect you in any way. That is, unless you work for an existing game studio.

<comment><USER15> Criticizing? I genuinely want it to succeed, but it needs games. A console without games isn't a console. It seems like getting developers to promise games at launch (or at least shortly after it) should be one of the top priorities for the Ouya team right now, but I don't see any evidence of that happening.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Will Mexico Get Half of Its Territory Back? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/opinion/will-mexico-get-half-of-its-territory-back.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> The answer is no, we all know this. It's an unfortunate title that provokes useless knee-jerk reactions. The author's main point is in the last three paragraphs:

>Three centuries before the ancestors of Mr. Trump landed on United States soil, there were Mexicans in that northern territory known as New Spain and Mexico. But neither they nor their descendants are even symbolically part of American national pride; rather they are objects of stereotyping or emblems of a disgraceful past that has remained, to a great extent, in obscurity. It is time for it to come fully into the light, to be recognized and vindicated.

>For us Mexicans, this is the chance for a kind of reconquest. Surely not the physical reconquest of the territories that once were ours. Nor an indemnification that should have been much greater than the feeble amount of $15 million that the American government paid, in installments, for the stolen land. We need a reconquest of the memory of that war so prodigal in atrocities inspired by racial prejudices and greed for territorial gain.

>But the best and most just reparation would be American immigration reform that could open the road to citizenship for the descendants of those Mexicans who suffered the unjust loss of half their territory.

<comment><USER3> That main point has _just_ as little chance of success as the lead-in, _especially_ in the current climate in the United States.

Mexico has an excellent chance to improve the situation though: rely less on the United States as its major trading partner. That is something under their control and something that actually would move the needle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Totally out of touch with reality. The only way Mexico would get this territory back is by waging war on the United States _and_ crucially, winning that war.

This isn't going to happen.

Mexico has a hard enough time to control events inside its own borders.

<comment><USER4> The article's quite clear that there's no possibility of the territories being returned (and, indeed, that the lawsuit probably won't even be successful). But this is a political act, not really a legal one, and the aim isn't really to recover Texas.

<comment><USER3> It's theater.

<comment><USER5> It's about making a point, bring awareness, create a forum for discussion, spreading information.

<comment><USER6> No, it's theater it's like Russia trying to claim back Alaska, they probably have a better legal ground and a much bigger agency trying to (re)enforce that request via other means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Click bait

<comment><USER8> not only that but another lame attempt to get in more bashing. This site is so easily manipulated it is getting pathetic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry to point this out, but Betteridge's law of headlines seems to apply very squarely in this case.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why is a piece on a likely upcoming political hack based on a legal hack flagged? If we don't accept this one, lets drop all the non-tech.

<comment><USER11> > lets drop all the non-tech

Sounds good.</comment></comment>


Wormholes Untangle a Black Hole Paradox - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150424-wormholes-entanglement-firewalls-er-epr/

<comment><USER2> Can someone explain why black holes are often assumed to "lead somewhere"? Aren't they just Very Dense Objects in space--hence, they lead to the surface of the object?

Also, the event horizon can be quite wide, but why the assumption that there's some kind of "singularity" inside? There's a center of mass, but what's to say the central massive object is not quite large in volume and organized at scales/levels near the bottom of the planck scale? Or is that what they mean by singularity (not so much a single point in space as a small but quite massive object residing within the event horizon)?

<comment><USER3> There are a lot of questions in there but I can try and answer a few:

1) Leading somewhere...

It's not really assumed they do but some speculate that they could.

2) Surface of the object/singularity/wide event horizon.

This is tricky to explain quickly and simply but here goes. In a very simple sense, a 'singularity' is really a name given to a thing which can't be explained by known laws or perhaps involves an infinity that shouldn't be able to exist in reality or some such. It's a name for a thing that by it's existance causes a 'problem' in that we an't fully explain it.

That's the layman's definition I often hear but in reality to be a singularity it needs to fit a set of criteria regarding geodesics and curvature etc that wikipedia can explain.

In the case of black holes it's used to refer to the infinitely dense mass that 'is' the black hole, or rather the point at which you'd reach if theoretically you fell all the way down to it. This isn't a small but massive object - it's an infinitely dense object.

So...there's the matter of infinitely dense. Once something loses the ability of its outward pressure of its mass etc to resist the inward crush of gravity, you get an object that becomes denser and denser and denser ad infinitum because it continuously collapses under its own gravity. It simply continues to collapse inwards on itself forever becoming 'infinitely dense' as it gets smaller and smaller.

There is no known reason why it wouldn't continue to collapse inwards on itself to an infinitely small point. There is no known reason why it would stop at the planck scale, no mechanism to suddenly overcome the immense gravity, and that's the problem really.

There is an assumption of a singularity because in order to create a 'strong' enough curvature of space-time such that light couldn't escape (i.e. to form an event horizon), you need to have a sufficiently dense object. The only way to achieve this is with an object that has collapsed past the 'point of no return' and continues to collapse in on itself (i.e you need a singularity).

Other fantastically dense objects like neutron stars lack the density, you've got to go 'super dense' and then you just get the run away effect and a singularity.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't any spherically symmetric configuration of mass compressed into an area smaller than the Schwarzschild radius create a gravitational force strong enough such that light can't escape? If there was an unknown force that could prevent the collapse at some level below the Schwarzschild radius it would still be dense enough to capture light. And there certainly could be since our understanding of things at the Planck scale isn't complete.

<comment><USER3> First question answer: yes

Second question: yes maybe. No one knows.

An interesting aside is that infinite density occurs only (I think) with no rotating singularities which don't exist in reality. Anything rotating will produce a non-infinitely dense singulatiry somehow, though the details of the maths behind that elude me.

<comment><USER5> Kerr vs non Kerr blackholes is where I usually start replying with "we don't know" to every second question.

But broadly speaking the inside is theorised to be a 1 dimensional torus having only diameter as a measurable quantity other than the location of its center of mass. This is opposed to a zero dimensional point having only the location of its center of mass. This means the mass is distributed through the torus and is "less infinite" in the aleph zero vs aleph one kind of way.

It just gets weirder from there haha

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting using gloves for an analogy.

I've gotten so use to using 1's and 0's.</comment>


Rich residents who got SF street back will pay 12 cents a year in taxes - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Rich-residents-who-got-SF-street-back-will-pay-12-12402464.php <comment><USER2> This is all thanks to prop 13. If prop 13 didn't exist, housing prices would be lower because people would sell and retire on their appreciated property value in an area with a lower cost of living and fewer jobs. As it stands, people who own houses in California feel like they can't sell because they are getting such a good deal on their property taxes. If prop 13 didn't exist, rents would be lower because people would be more likely to sell to developers who would then build more apartments. The phrase "pulling up the ladder behind you" comes to mind.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, everyone in that story is a piece of shit.</comment>


The Good, the Bad and the Employee - <AUTHOR> http://blog.favour.it/post/35119845417/the-good-the-bad-and-the-employee

<comment><USER2> good points i think ;)</comment>


Yova – a new collective procurement application for businesses - <AUTHOR> http://www.yova.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks! We've built the first collective procurement application for businesses making it possible for a group of businesses to combine their purchase orders in order to unlock volume based discounts. The concept was created to support high volume low margin products and services where buying together makes sense. So think paper cups and utensils for a restaurant business or sugar packets for a coffee business.

The beautiful part is that your purchase requests is aggregated with other businesses without you having to expose any competitive information to your peers. The entire platform is designed around what we call transactional group buying. Essentially, a group deal/promotion is created not based on location or region of the buyers but instead the actual product itself. Once a deal is unlocked through a predefined discount tier set by the seller, the entire procurement process is handled at an individual business level. In other words, we procure our requests together to unlock a discount but we actually order the products individually! So shipping, handling, tax, etc. is handled separately for each business giving you your own personal order but for a cheaper price!

Check us out! Any feedback is greatly appreciated!</comment>


A turbine that makes water from the desert air - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/a-turbine-that-makes-water-from-the-desert-air/14701

<comment><USER2> Access to clean drinking water remains a surprisingly big problem even today. Today, you probably paid more for your bottle of water than you did for your gasoline (do the math)[1].

The part I like about this technology is that it uses moisture in the air and can be instaleled anywhere, with no further infrastructure needed (wells, etc).

Unfortunately, as others already pointed out in the comments at the main article is that RO - reverse osmosis applied to contaminated ground water is way more cost effective and accessible.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/TalkingRain-Spring-Water-16-9-Ounce- Bo...](http://www.amazon.com/TalkingRain-Spring-Water-16-9-Ounce- Bottles/dp/B003OZYUEA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1333489425&sr=8-3)

</comment><comment><USER3> In light of this and other inventions, all the talk about oil peak and the war over water is moot. I'm convinced there will be technology - even in the near future - that will solve problems like water or energy shortage.

</comment><comment><USER4> This makes me want to go and read Dune again.</comment>


Thousands turn out to protest California school cuts - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2011/05/13/1890479/thousands-turn-out-to-protest.html

<comment><USER2> Isn't this like trying to squeeze blood from a stone? When you're broke, you have to make cuts. And it makes no difference, in principle, if you're talking about the budget of a single person or ten million.</comment>