Hetzner's new server offer: 1 Gbit, 2 x 240GB SSD, 32GB RAM - 59 euros/month - <AUTHOR> http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex <comment><USER2> Also have had a great experience with Hetzner, 100% uptime for the 11 months since moving [http://www.servicestack.net](http://www.servicestack.net) over to them. They ended up 1/4 cheaper than the previous dedicated leaseweb server with our redis benchmarks now completing in 1/8th of the time.

</comment><comment><USER3> "One time setup fee" of the order ~ 100 EUR _per server_ is enough to deter me from setting up and try out the servers/bandwidth/availability claims etc. on an immediate basis. This fee clearly separates these pretty good prices from Digital Oceans equally good server prices.

<comment><AUTHOR> German law provides a 14 days cancellation period. If you're from abroad read the T&C and try asking Hetzner support upfront about that.

Also, Hetzner has an auction platform for used servers without setup fee (of course not the latest ssd models yet): [http://www.serverbidding.com/](http://www.serverbidding.com/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks you. Yours is pretty much the only useful and informative reply in a sea of responses designed to make me feel bad for questioning the magnitude of the setup fee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone run into problems related to Hetzner's servers that use non-ECC RAM (which is most of them)? Reading stuff like [1] has made me wary of using non- ECC RAM for servers, but a lot of people seem to be getting by without it, so I'm not sure what to make of that.

[1] Google estimates that 8% of DIMMs per year will produce an ECC-catchable error: [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Amazon does not use ECC RAM in its AWS servers and the internet seems to work ok.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure? I could not find any reliable source for this, only things like [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898660)

The same person claiming it then, also claimed that ECC RAM can be twice as expensive, which is far from typical -- it's quite common to see differences of less than 15%. Maybe he was confusing ECC with FB-DIMM?

<comment><USER7> The RAM itself isn't much more expensive, but if you're trying to build a cheap Intel computer then it will get much more expensive with ECC, since there are no cheap Intel CPU/mobos with ECC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since when is an advertisement "Hacker News"?

I stopped reading slashdot regularly when this started happening there...

<comment><USER9> Not an advertisement, but a price list full of technical information.

<comment><USER10> Just read the title. Clearly ad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This post is free advertising for Hetzner, but I do think they deserve the attention for the unique value/price offering. Let alone that, their servers are not right under the nose of the NSA (although probably not that far away either).

<comment><AUTHOR> NSA, GCHQ, BND,… probably spy on every DC in Europe and the USA anyway… :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> People are complaining about this being an advertisement and it kind of makes me sad. I don't often invest time in looking at dedicated hosting offers so for me this was neat. Heck it actually got me excited considering moving some of my old ideas to this infra at an affordable price.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why is this making headlines? It's European, so you suffer the transcontinental latency, and OVH offers superior dedicated servers in either their North American or European Data centers. EU: [http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/](http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/)

NA(Canada): [http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated- servers/](http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/)

<comment><USER14> I can't comment why it's on the frontpage. But transatlantic latency is in the eye of the beholder, and when you say "superior servers", you're probably ignoring the prices. The Hetzner server mentioned here costs 59 EUR/month. For that price (or a bit more 54 GBP -> 62 EUR) your .uk link gives:

\- A CPU two generations older, without hyperthreading (i7-4770k vs. i5-2400k), with 25% less cache and 10% lower frequency

\- Half the memory

\- HDDs instead of SSDs

\- A 100Mbps connection instead of 1Gbps, and half the guaranteed bandwidth

If you wanted 32GB and the SSDs, at OVH it'd be 83 EUR vs. Hetzner's 59 EUR.

<comment><USER15> True, OVH is more expensive, (and their backend is downright primitive comapred to Hetzner's Robot UI), but that transatlantic latency just doesn't work for things like gaming servers. >300ms on a good day won't cut it for TF2.

<comment><USER14> Right, but as I tried to point out too subtly, the latency depends on your location.

You, and the original post of this sub-thread, seem to be assuming that the right way to measure latency is from the US. But this isn't purely an American site, and it's silly to assume that all posters are from the US. There are billions of people who will have lower ping times to Europe than to America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this being up voted because Germany is seen as a safe haven from the NSA?

Edit: Since when has a question here attracted down votes? Oh, more down votes for that one I suppose.....

</comment><comment><USER17> I really hope Hetzner expands to the US/Canada. If the level of service is comparable, this represents a ridiculous savings over Softlayer.

<comment><AUTHOR> They probably won't but have you seen [http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/](http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/) yet?

<comment><USER18> ... or their Kimsufi section [http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml](http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml) !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Was about time after Hetzner getting hacked the 2nd time.. My friend owns two of their largest dedicated boxes for some years now. His sysadmin is exceptionally good and his pay aswell (250€/h), I mean he can secure that box the best possible way, but he cannot do anything about Hetzner getting hacked.

Now guess how afraid they were when they heard that their project (6y effort) could be in risk.

I mean they have good offers and so on, but I wouldn't trust them after that. That's my opinion, maybe they changed or improved security. However I don't know a better alternative either.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hetzner's prices include 19% German VAT. If you order from outside of the European Union Hetzner doesn't charge VAT, so you only pay around 50 Euros instead of 59 Euros.

<comment><USER9> Pretty much the same, if you're a VAT registered business in the EEA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just moved my startup to hetzner. Used my win 2012 iso image, installed everything without any problem. So far so good. Previously i was on ec2 and azure vm, but those cloud operators have really slow hdd and cpu for twice as much $ (expectable of course). But, because of Hetzner commodity hardware (no ecc, asus/msi motherboards, onboard lan, software raid,...) i had to add special backup procedures, if anything goes wrong, and I'm keeping one Azure VM on standby.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been with OVH for the past 3 years, I can't say I am not satisfied with the performance and stability but this price is too tempting. Anyone here jumped from OVH to Hetzner can tell me about their experiences?

</comment><comment><USER23> Worst pricing page I have ever seen. It took me 2 minutes to figure out the prices. If I war the CEO with such an offer I would take some mesures to make sure this page is very easy to read.

<comment><USER24> How did it take you two minutes? The prices are written on the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Shame I can no longer purchase from them because they banned me for asking for a refund on an incorrect order they messed up...

</comment><comment><USER26> There are no bandwidth limits on Hetzner's servers which are a BIG plus.

<comment><USER27> They do actually have a bandwidth limit where they'll either throttle you down to 10Mbps or similar, or ask you to start paying by the TB. However, they set that limit at 20-30TB (depending on the server type), which most people won't come anywhere close to; to hit that you'd have to average ~61Mbps continuously for the entire month.</comment></comment>


The Camera Is the Lidar - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/the-camera-is-in-the-lidar-6fcf77e7dfa6 <comment><USER2> The hardware is described, vaguely, at [1]. It's a rotating drum scanner with 16 or 64 lasers. $12,000 for the 64-laser model. $24,000 for the upcoming model with 200m range. Still a long way from a useful auto part.

There are about a dozen companies in this space now. Nobody has the price down yet. Continental, the European auto parts company, is the most likely winner. Quanergy made a lot of noise but didn't ship much.[2] There's a conference on automotive LIDAR this month in Detroit.[3] Many of the exhibitors are major semiconductor packaging companies, with various approaches to putting lots of little LIDAR units in a convenient package at a reasonable price.

[1] [https://www.ouster.io/faq/](https://www.ouster.io/faq/) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17755183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17755183) [3] [http://www.automotivelidar.com/](http://www.automotivelidar.com/)

<comment><USER3> Why Continental?

Flash lidar seems to be a fundamentally broken concept to me wrt range.

<comment><USER2> One might think that, except that Advanced Scientific Concepts, which Continental bought, has had it working for a decade.[1] Their units work fine, but are expensive. They're mostly sold to DoD and used for space applications. The Space-X Dragon spacecraft uses one for docking.

There's a tradeoff between field of view and range. Automotive systems will probably include a long-range narrow field of view unit and a shorter range wide field of view unit.

Flash LIDAR has some advantages. No moving parts. Can be fabbed by semiconductor processes. The one big laser is separate from the sensor array, which helps with cooling. Also, you can spread the outgoing beam, which helps with eye safety. (Eye safety involves how much energy is in an eye iris sized, 1/4" or so, cross section of the beam. If the beam is spread out, energy density is lower.)

[1] [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7268968/](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7268968/)

<comment><USER4> What do you see as the key challenges in driving down the cost of flash LIDAR?

<comment><USER5> The light from the flash spreads out with the inverse square law, so you get much less signal compared with collimated laser beams. To compensate for that, you need much higher power. To get more power without blinding people, you need to use 1550 nm. This requires large arrays of exotic gallium arsenide semiconductors, which are expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is this better than separate LIDAR and camera?

Because you're collecting NIR ambient light, your optics are wideband. Meaning that daylight would have a more pronounced negative effect on system range (easier to saturate the photocells). It's also low resolution (as most LIDARs are), and there is no color segmentation data.

In an automotive application, I can't see a justification to unify both visual and LIDAR into a single sensor, rather than having an extrinsically calibrated array of sensors. You can improve the calibration out of the data over time if you're very concerned about system stability.

It seems like a nice party trick, but the vehicle LIDAR game focuses on solid state long range units, as this will be what gets into mass production. The visual band imagers in the car are a given for many other reasons anyway.

<comment><USER3> It's better because there's no need for calibration, you always have perfect calibration.

Solid state lidar has issues. The cofounder of Ouster, Angus Pacala previously cofounded Quanergy, a solid state lidar startup.

<comment><USER6> Solid state LIDAR certainly has issues - but someone is going to solve those and this is what will get into automotive, definitely not $10k units with moving parts.

There was an announcement on a cooperation between BMW and Innoviz (an Israeli maker of solid state LIDARs) with Magna being their OEM sponsor.

I'm not sure calibration is that big of a deal for this application. Sensors are going to be calibrated and tested in the factory or at a module level regardless, and the accuracy requirements in automotive are much lower than consumer products using similar technology.

You can't overcome not having colors (traffic lights, anyone?), limited ranging distance or sensor saturation due to ambient conditions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm sure this works well in bright light but I'm sceptical that this can perform at all well on overcast days or at night. The OS-1 device spins at 10Hz and the LIDAR samples 2048 points over one 360 degree revolution. This means each column of pixels is sampled at 1/20480 of a second. To sample that fast requires a lot of light which is fine on a sunny day but on a cloudy day you can have 100 time less light. And at night you would have no ambient near infrared light at all.

<comment><USER8> Could you have a camera without the IR filter and then use IR leds to make up the difference? You would have to worry about other vehicles doing to same and blinding the cameras somehow but that might be a solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem is that deep learning should not be allowed in safety critical systems, because (1) the accuracy is always less than 100% even in known test situations, and (2) we don't know how it works and under what conditions it breaks down.

<comment><USER10> I was in a car crash two years ago where a man went into a diabetic fit/seizure and sped through an intersection, ultimately hitting a building and my car and killing himself in the process. It is too bad his car did not have some of this deep learning that is not 100% accurate.

We don't know how humans work and under what conditions they break down, either.

<comment><USER11> There is no evidence that deep learning would give better performance than other collision avoidance algorithms in such a scenario.

<comment><USER12> But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I was agreeing with GP (u/amelius) because I had the same idea when reading the post, but the parent of your comment (u/simonsarris) makes a good point: we might not know deep learning as well as we might like to know it, given that it is being used in applications that have the potential to kill, but we also don't know our own brains that well.

Even if we don't understand deep learning to the degree that we would like, we can observe its safety record and compare it to humans'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A semi-off topic question. Is it not possible to get an accurate depth map based on a two camera stereoscopic setup? Like human eyes? Perhaps combine it with video processing to isolate objects at different depths.

<comment><USER14> I was watching a talk from Cruise that mentions this. The main problem with cameras is dynamic range. Dealing with different lighting conditions that can change quickly is hard (the sun is really good at washing out colors). Lidar doesn't care about the current lighting conditions.

[https://youtu.be/s-8cYj_eh8E?t=22m39s](https://youtu.be/s-8cYj_eh8E?t=22m39s)

<comment><USER15> Also heavy rain would be a problem for regular cameras. Not just seeing through the airborne droplets, but also (at a guess far more significantly) the water directly in contact with the windscreen causing severe random distortions.

<comment><USER16> I built a hacky prototype, combining:

\- FLIR thermal camera

\- 3 different small cameras manually set at different settings, models chosen for their qualities handling light levels.

Those 4 live feeds were fed into a small black magic design quad layout device, that turned them into a single hd feed via hardware/real-time. That was fed into a hardware capture, that stacked the quad arrangement, applied some other filters and did hardware compression. At that point almost no latency was introduced but had a nice working base video feed. That was fed into the Linux box for processing.

The quad device created a sort of super hdr video, and the thermal layer took it to the next level. All of the cameras had drawbacks, but combined they were minimized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is so brilliant, I'm considering completely switching the type of software/hardware work I've been doing for the last decade.

</comment><comment><USER18> The blog post is very badly written to figure out what really these folks are doing and what sets them apart. Here's my guess: they are detecting laser bounces using modified camera and using that camera to generate visual image at the same time as point cloud. It's still a mechanical moving lidar at 10hz, range is 120m and resolution of 2048 horizontal beams per 360-degree and 16 beams verticle looks pretty good, although not completely out of the league.

</comment><comment><USER19> Something i don't understand : i've seen those kind of videos (i think it was nvidia or maybe waymo) where a signal (either camera or lidar or both) is processed in real-time and displays boxes around cars, street lights, etc. It seemed to be that detouring real-life objects from sensors in real-time has been working for a long time now.

What does this bring that's new ?

<comment><USER5> Estimating depth and 3D bounding boxes using cameras only, while possible, is much less accurate than using actual range data from a lidar.

On the other hand if you fuse lidar and camera data such as with Waymo and others, there may be issues with the sensors being out of sync (as they run at different framerates, and the lidar continually spins) or physically offset (leading to parallax issues). Dealing with such issues is very difficult. Having a single sensor output both accurate range information and camera data makes it much nicer to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Relevant discussion with some comments from Angus on reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/9c60pe/the...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/9c60pe/the_camera_is_the_lidar/)

</comment><comment><USER20> So I'm not up on the Lidar industry but $12k for a sensor seems really expensive, but then again from my casual observations Lidar is really expensive. Is there a physical / first principles reason this is true or is it just really new technology?

<comment><USER21> The most general answer to your question is Peter Drucker's (famous management guru) observation that every doubling of production of an item (over the lifetime, not yearly) resulted in a cost reduction of 20-30%.

So right now, with very few LIDARs produced, we have a high price, which will start dropping as more are produced.

You might find this interesting: a single transistor used to sell for roughly the equivalent of $8 USD in today's money; today the cheapest ones are 6 _Cents_ USD (price checked today from Mouser.com) in qty 1 pricing...

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech- talk/semiconductors/devices/h...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech- talk/semiconductors/devices/how-much-did-early-transistors-cost)

<comment><USER22> At quantity 1, though, most of the cost is from the person who has to package it. Qty 100 will give you a much more accurate price.

<comment><USER23> You can buy 9.6 billion transistors for AU$599 (US$430) in the form of an AMD Threadripper 12 Core 1920X.

That's AU$0.000,000,062,395,833 (US$0.000,000,044,791,667) per transistor;

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I get really excited about this technology, yet the not-made-here-syndrome force is strong in this one. I wonder if theres an EU equivalent?

<comment><USER5> There are many EU lidar companies. SICK, Ibeo, Pepperl+Fuchs, Osram, Innoluce, Blickfeld, and so on.

However, none of those matches the capabilities of the Ouster OS-1 exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Could hundreds of self driving cars cruising around a city with LIDAR affect the eyes of pedestrians?

<comment><USER5> It would not affect the eyes of pedestrians.

The Ouster OS-1 in the article, as well as all other automotive lidars that I know of, are class 1 laser eye-safe, meaning that it is safe even if you put your eye right up to it for hours.

The power also decreases dramatically once you get far away from it, since the laser beams spend most of their time pointed in different directions, and the collimation is not perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is it just me, or are we seeing yet another impressive leap in Computer Vision that's soon going to be hyped as an incremental step into Skynet?

<comment><USER27> Unless you think Skynet is impossible, all impressive leaps are an incremental step towards Skynet.

<comment><USER28> Not necessarily. My expectation is that Skynet is highly unlikely, a side branch we probably won't take.

Think of the 1920s-1950s version of robots, for example. They were machines shaped like people and that acted like people. In retrospect, they seem not scary but silly. The human shape isn't particularly useful or easy to build; our most common robots are vacuums shaped like hockey pucks.

Skynet is another "what if machines acted like people" fairy tale. It makes sense if you imagine yourself as a computer that wakes up; we wake up all the time, so it seems normal to us. But self-awareness and self-preservation are biological systems that evolved over very long time scales. Those are intricate systems, again not really useful or easy to build. And also not likely to randomly occur.

It could be that we'll build those kinds of systems, of course. But I think it will take a long time to get them right, and then it's not really the skynet story, it's the mad scientist with the robot army story.</comment></comment></comment>


Second Android signature attack disclosed - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Second-Android-signature-attack-disclosed-1918061.html <comment><USER2> I'm sure Google's product managers and OEM relations people don't need any free advice, but maybe it's just possible that a more-coherent branding strategy for "Nexus" and "Google Edition" devices could have included requirements for OEMs to have the capability to accept patches from Google and push updated systems to customers over the likely life of 80% of handsets sold, or some other reasonable metric.</comment>


Ask HN: Save for retirement? - <AUTHOR>

I'll try and skip a big intro.
I am 27, after having dropped out of school and dicked off / traveled / had a good time for most of my 20s.. struggled doing free lance web devel stuff for a year and a half, and eventually took a full time job.
I make ~55k a year after having lived off ~20 or less for the last few years, I have a few grand in debt (7% apr).
Saving for retirement at this point seems like not a great bet.
It seems like any meager thousands I could put into an account at this point would be much much better suited to capital for investment / risk taking rather than sitting in a 401k I can't open for 40 years.
I don't really have much of a life-plan beyond the next year or so.  But I do expect to make a lot more than 50k a year in the next 40 years.
Does anyone else think like this?  I also have been just paying the minimum on cc bills for a while, assuming that in the future they will be 'easier' to pay. <comment><USER2> Generally speaking, it's better to pay off your debts first, since their interest rates are usually higher than the return on any investment you could make.

Re: risk taking: don't forget, big risk == potential big loss. To figure out your risk aversion, don't ask yourself how much you're willing to profit; ask yourself how much you're willing to lose.

Re: expecting to make more in the next 40 years: Young people have a tendency to overestimate how much they'll make in the future and underestimate how much they will need (medical bills, for example, generally go up).

Do the math sometime to see how much you'll need to have in your nest egg: retirement means, almost by definition, supporting yourself for 20+ years with no monthly salary.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess you haven't read up on compound interest.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_interest>

The 401k will compound tax free until you take out the money.

Also, I don't think there is any reason to have any debt beyond student loans and a home mortgage. You're throwing away money by paying interest on credit cards.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am working off my credit cards now, but delayed them literally years (at the cost of ~1k in interest) when I was making less money.

I definitely understand compound interest, but it works both ways. If I put 1k into a 401k _now_ that is 1k is no longer liquid. I think, (and I may be wrong about this.. but my whole strategy is based off it), keeping that 1k liquid will offer a higher short-term return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is a question of personality.

Are you more comfortable playing it safe or do you like to take chances and gamble? If you aren't comfortable gambling/taking chances, save yourself the stress and put the money in something low risk. As you are still fairly young, if you aren't risk adverse, swing for the fences.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am definitely comfortable with risk at this point. I am not taking any at the moment really, but I am trying to set myself up to take some big gambles in the next year or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't want to sound like a financial advisor because I am not. Your financials are different than mine but I hope that the below can allow you to relate so as to choose the best strategy for you.

My approach is a bit more traditional. I take each salary as the static factor (i.e. I will not get a raise in the future). This way if I get more money later on that would be a good surprise, otherwise I have my plan set.

The key factor for you at the moment is to get out of debt - all debt. I sat down and wrote my income. Then from that I subtracted the necessary expenses i.e. rent, utilities, transportation etc. I also subtracted a relatively small amount for food allowing a bare minimum of eating out and socializing. I cut all unecessary expenses and then paid the bare minimum on all of my loans and whatever was left was the money that I could spend on anything. Let's assume for a moment that this amount was $500.

I then opened a savings account and put that $500 there. I did the same thing for the next 3 months until I ended up with $1500. That money served as the immediate emergency fund. The number is arbitrary and I have since increased it to $2000. Your interpretation will depend on your own situation.

Say you had a problem with the car, unexpected expenses etc. - that is the fund that would help you get out of a very unpleasant situation later on. So if you needed say $200 for a car repair you could get it from there but you would replenish that amount as soon as you can. The emergency fund would need to have $1500 at all times. This gives you also a sense of accomplishment and security.

Once I had that done, I started attacking all the credit cards and loans. I started with the first one, the one that had the lowest amount. Once I paid that off, I went to the next one, the next one etc. Once everything was gone, I made sure that whatever I would spend I would be able to pay it off the next month. This way I would never pay any APR and would use my money for myself.

The next step would be to set up a 401K. A Roth IRA would be a nice place to start and you can choose a conservative strategy to minimize your risk. After this is set up, you will need to start setting a long term emergency fund. This would help you in the chance you lose your job and have nothing. Some people set aside 3-6 months of pay to help with any layoff. If this is set up, you will be able to pay your bills for 3-6 months and have a bit of time to find another job.

My point is that you cannot rely on the future since you do not know what will happen. Work with what you have today and you will be better off in the future.

I hope the above helps.

<comment><USER6> I am better versed in the investment area than in the personal debt area, so I will let others speak to that. But a couple of thoughts on the investments front:

1\. In many ways it is about time horizon. If you are sure that you will not need access to the funds in the short term (conservatively, in the next 10 years) then you can invest in high risk vehicles. But remember, this is not necessarily because the funds are in a 401(k) or IRA account where there is a large early withdrawal penalty, but also because high risk instruments could have fallen greatly in value at the time you need the funds, and if you have to withdraw them at that time you're forced to take a large loss.

2\. If you think you have a long time horizon make sure to do the math to actually be sure - ndimopoulos's advice above about having an emergency fund is good.

3\. If you have a long time horizon, there is no need to discount 401 K plans and IRA plans. Tax-free growth, or tax deferred growth as depending on which flavor you choose, is an amazing thing.

4\. If you're really interested in extremely risky investments in an effort to expose yourself to the largest upside, there's been some recent work around lifecycle investing where some relatively well respected academics are proposing a model that includes some small amount of leverage for folks who have a long time horizon and a large amount of risk tolerance. This will road, if you choose it, bears quite a bit of research before you start. Take a look (as a start) at [http://www.amazon.com/Lifecycle-Investing-Audacious- Performa...](http://www.amazon.com/Lifecycle-Investing-Audacious-Performance- Retirement/dp/0465018297)

5\. Remember that being rational with money is a lot easier when its not yours and when it's not decreasing rapidly. It probably bears some effort on your behalf before jumping into any high risk investments to project yourself into the future and understand how you would feel if your life savings drop by 50% or even 80%. Make sure that you're OK with this.

Just a couple of thoughts, hope this helps.

P.S. I am the cofounder of the recently launched YC Summer 2010 company FutureAdvisor. Our current product targets specifically optimizing an existing portfolio, so not much help in this situation, though this is definitely a scenario we hope to support in the future. Thanks for sharing your story, it helps us understand what folks might need out of a investing product.

(written with the aid of speech recognition, please excuse the occasional bewildering error)</comment></comment>


Walmart has old Macbooks for sale cheap at their website - <AUTHOR> They are of course just 10.7 max, old Intel Core 2 Duo Macbooks. They are good enough for someone just starting out who can't afford a modern Macbook. You can buy 10.6 Snow Leopard from Apple to run 10.6 on it and use Rosetta to run PowerMac apps. 10.7 removed Rosetta.
I'm sure it can dual boot Linux or Windows as well using Bootcamp. A good student starter laptop with the Apple logo on it for as cheap as $99.
I don't work for Walmart but I was browsing Netbooks and Laptops there for my son who is going to college soon.
https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=notebook&sort=price_low&cat_id=3944_3951_1089430_1230091_132960&facet=brand:Apple <comment><USER2> It's a third party, and ratings are pretty bad:

[https://www.walmart.com/reviews/seller/5049](https://www.walmart.com/reviews/seller/5049)

Probably do better buying off of eBay.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh well, it was worth a try. I can't delete the submission so it will stay here.

I was going to buy one of the cheap $99 Macbooks, but I have to save money for my son's college use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should know that Apple sells old iBooks by the box load to qualified buyers. From what little I have seen there is no quality assurance.</comment>


Why Tokyo's New Transparent Public Restrooms Are a Stroke of Genius - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2020/08/16/why-tokyos-new-transparent-public-restrooms-are-a-stroke-of-genius/#68c74e05211e <comment><USER2> Next innovation: Nail non-hand-washers w/ a dye packet on exit.</comment>


I gave up TV, then qualified for Olympic marathon trials and got my PhD - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/i-gave-up-tv-then-qualified-for-olympic-marathon-trials-and-got-my-phd/2017/03/24/6d90aafc-ee38-11e6-9973-c5efb7ccfb0d_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_notv-353am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.99ab3f2312d1 <comment><USER2> We at least have an option of not buying TV. Internet addiction is far worse. The sad part is I can not even avoid my laptop as it is where I do all my work. The device on which we work is slowly the biggest source of our time sink

<comment><USER3> Just edit your hosts file and route your most time consuming websites (i.e. hackernews) to localhost:

 _127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com www.facebook.com www.youtube.com_

<comment><USER4> On OS X 10.8, routing to 127.0.0.1 did not block the site reliably (with Firefox), but 0.0.0.0 did and still does on OS X 10.11 (with Firefox and Chrome).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The headline implies she went from zero to hero after quitting TV, but she'd already submitted her PhD thesis and was already close to her marathon time goal. I don't think TV was the difference.

Besides, the implication is TV is some morally bankrupt mind-killer, but there's plenty of intelligent programming out there, not everything is "The Bachelor."

</comment><comment><USER6> Next week's article: _I gave up my obsession with marathon training, then spent more time with my family. "

Next next week's: _I gave up obsessing over my family, then was able to clear my Netflix queue."

</comment><comment><USER7> > I was feeling proud until I realized I had started to transfer my TV time to > Twitter and Facebook. How was that better?

As the author observes, even if you stop watching TV, it doesn't mean you'll automatically be more productive. It's a struggle.

</comment><comment><USER8> Narcissism, I would argue, is a far more dangerous thing than TV. The author's narcissism lets her celebrate all these unlikable cliches: being a fitness guru, being an "aspiring writer," being an academic overachiever, having a perfect husband and incoming baby or whatever. Then the style: preachy, written in the first person, chronologically. As though the only way to write about yourself is like an upbeat propaganda travel log.

The beautiful thing about a show like Friends is that it takes broken people and makes them likeable. Girls does a great job at mocking a character like the author, and arguably does more to encourage people to do good for themselves than the author does.

<comment><USER9> I agree with you here. This is written in the preachy way that people post to Facebook and then say "#blessed" at the end. The whole purpose of this is to say how their lives are better than yours.

<comment><USER10> Isn't this the main purpose of FB anyway - to boast how much your life is better then everyone's else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of the onion article: [http://www.theonion.com/article/area-man- constantly-mentioni...](http://www.theonion.com/article/area-man-constantly- mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-tel-429)

I don't own a TV, but I doubt it makes me any more productive. There are plenty of other ways to waste time if you're not motivated.

</comment><comment><USER12> I gave up TV, those things didn't happen, but my wife left me, and took the kids and the dog

<comment><USER13> In college my grades went down significantly when I started dating my future wife Sophomore year. I was a 4.0 Freshman year and only a 3.75 Sophomore year. Definitely causation...

Sorry, I know you're being tongue and cheek, it just made me think of the anecdote :)

One could argue that if I didn't start dating her and get married I would be much more "successful" right now.

<comment><USER14> Protip: When somebody brings up their wife leaving them and taking the kids, save the marital bliss talk for later.

<comment><USER13> I never said we were still together or blissful... in fact I said I would have probably been more successful if I didn't get married.

Although the thought hadn't crossed my mind I was being insensitive because I am 80% sure the OP post was a joke. Intentionally in stark contract with the article.

Hence why the other replies are:

> You should try stand-up comedy

> But did she take the truck?

(a joke reference to American Country Western Songs)

If I am wrong and his wife did leave him and take the dog my condolences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article makes the assumption that people are not watching TV as a mental decompressor. Depending on your job and hours you may very well not have the physical and mental energy left over to engage in extreme physical and mental activity.

<comment><USER16> Actually, I'm a PhD student myself, and Netflix/Amazon/Twitch is how I decompress at the end of a long day of classes and/or research. I guess it depends on the person; some people find physical activity enjoyable, while others (like myself) see it as something that must be done in order to stay healthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I gave up _not_ watching TV and found myself more engaged with friends, family and colleagues. A world where nobody watched TV might be a more cultural and educated place, but in the world we actually live in, cutting yourself from it has negative consequences. Everything in moderation.

</comment><comment><USER18> I watch plenty of TV, but managed to get a Ph.D. in a hard field. Don't worry, TV viewers - you can have it all!</comment>


What on Earth? – Getty Images FOTO - <AUTHOR> https://foto.gettyimages.com/travel/nature/what-on-earth/?esource=CSM_GI_YDW_AWR_EDT_20180503_DRU_E01V1_NAM_NON_none_251314_enUS_SEG&utm_medium=email&utm_source=eloqua <comment><USER2> One of the rice paddy pictures has a sister image on WikiCommons. It's by the same photographer and potentially shot in the same session, as the region in the getty image is evident in the lower middle section of the wikicommons image. To my taste, the WikiCommons image is the more amazing looking one.

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Terrace_field_yunnan...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Terrace_field_yunnan_china_denoised.jpg)

[https://foto.gettyimages.com/photos/rice-paddy-fields-in- sou...](https://foto.gettyimages.com/photos/rice-paddy-fields-in-southern- china-picture-id86734194-story-large-4b3cfbe2-ffbe-4035-8553-bf0b68d72129.jpg)

In the vein of this article, if you want more amazing pictures, you can do worse than looking though WikiCommons' Picture of the Year, Picture of the Day or Featured Pictures.

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Ye...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year)

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_da...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_day)

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Featured_pictures](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Featured_pictures)</comment>


Show HN: Frank – A Platform to lend and borrow money between friends and family - <AUTHOR> https://www.hifrank.com/ <comment><USER2> Do you have credit cancellation when A lend to B, B to C and C to A? Do you do in-app payments and also track money transfers happening between individuals in specie?

</comment><comment><USER3> What's your plan for exiting if this isn't profitable, you're not acquired, don't want to continue paying for servers, etc?

Shutting down a SaaS is messy, shutting down one that's managing loans between people even more so.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey all - Frank is currently in public beta, but we do suggest to add at least 3 connections. That's how you get the best out of a two-sided platform. App is coming at the end of September. Do not hesitate to provide us feedbacks on either UX or product itself.

</comment><comment><USER2> Suggestion: let me use Frank to manage loans I already have with friends and family that are not willing to use Frank (yet!).

</comment><comment><USER2> Somehow the Google login is failing (why do I have to login if I have just signed up?).

<comment><USER2> Stopped failing.</comment></comment>


"Giganews is an FBI Operation" - <AUTHOR> http://cryptome.org/2014/09/giganews-fbi.htm <comment><USER2> Having worked at Texas.Net before it became DataFoundry, and being one of the people who built up the original Sun E450s that were used as the Usenet servers when the separate Giganews product was developed, I find this hilarious.

I know a good number of the GN/DF employees mentioned in the article, and think this sounds more like a disgruntled ex-employee trying to badmouth his former employer.

As for the "gigauth" file - how else are you going to run a subscription Usenet service without logging authenticated users?

Disclaimer: I worked for Texas.Net from 1996 to late 1998 and was one of the people involved in moving their HQ from their San Antonio location to 823 Congress in Austin.

Edit: BTW, here's pics of my tubby self at work in the GREEN TSHIRT THEY MADE ME WEAR! (hey, free clothing is free clothing, I loved not having to worry about what I was going to wear to work every day..)

[http://www.mrbill.net/texasnet/](http://www.mrbill.net/texasnet/)

I have nothing but respect for Ron Y. and his family - he and his wife invited me to spend Thanksgiving dinner in '96 with them since I'd just moved to Austin and had nowhere else to go. I will never forget that kindness.

<comment><USER3> You must be one of them as well then. /wink

Overall, this doesn't seem credible. FBI detectives will not be doing run of the mill OS installs and what not. Also there isn't a need for fake identities just to be a system administrator in a usenet company. This sounds like delusions from a paranoid schizophrenic.

<comment><USER4> > You must be one of them as well then

mrbill is a freemason working for Halliburton. My tin foil hat is tingling.

<comment><USER2> [http://www.mrbill.net/ink/firsttat/masonictattoo.jpg](http://www.mrbill.net/ink/firsttat/masonictattoo.jpg)

<comment><USER5> Now that's a gang sign if I've ever seen one.

<comment><USER2> Decided I'd try for the full Conspiracy Theory merit badge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a hoax. These allegations are 100% false.

Unfortunately, since his termination, the poster has periodically posted versions of this information online. Sometimes, he tries to misrepresent himself as our CEO and sometimes he posts as himself. Here are some examples of his previous writings over the last 18 months:

Nuclear Reactors? Our third CEO is Baal? Illuminati? "The Giganews logo is a red colored shield - subtle homage to the legendary Rothschild family"

[http://pastebin.com/gM9mN7gS](http://pastebin.com/gM9mN7gS) [http://ronyokubaitis.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/i-am-ron- yokub...](http://ronyokubaitis.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/i-am-ron-yokubaitis- co-ceo-of-giganews-i-run-a-huge-central-intellgience-front-in-austin-texas/)

In addition, we believe he runs a Twitter account (@AngelicPsalms) that accuses random companies, including Giganews, of being controlled by demons and governments:

[https://twitter.com/AngelicPsalms/status/510175616352923648](https://twitter.com/AngelicPsalms/status/510175616352923648)

@Golden_Frog @VyprVPN & @Giganews servers are run by FBI Special Agent Scott Kibbey. Do you really want FBI to handle your internet privacy?

[https://twitter.com/AngelicPsalms/status/510599892373614592](https://twitter.com/AngelicPsalms/status/510599892373614592)

Angel Yeiazel counters the demon who steals from King's houses, destroys cities & honors, &reveals past&future. Eg:#Credit reports, @Equifax

Hey even, Harley Davidson isn't safe either:

[https://twitter.com/AngelicPsalms/status/499732005350031360](https://twitter.com/AngelicPsalms/status/499732005350031360)

Angel Yezalel counters the demon on a pale horse w/trumpeters seen 1st as fierce/after as an innocent girl;Eg:Jeffrey Dahmer,@harleydavidson

We know Cryptome welcomes documents that expose secret governance, but that's not the case here. These allegations are sadly from someone who needs help.

We posted more links and info on Twitter:

[https://twitter.com/Giganews/status/511587414683291648](https://twitter.com/Giganews/status/511587414683291648)

Thanks, Giganews

<comment><USER4> You attack his character, but don't refute his claims. This seems fishy, or you aren't very good at convincing us otherwise.

<comment><USER7> The first line says "these allegations are 100% false" though

<comment><USER4> Oh, case closed. Move on everybody!

<comment><USER8> He's just pointing out that he __did __refute the claims, where you (in the comment directly above), claim that he refutes the persons character but __did not __refute the claims.

<comment><USER9> [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/refute](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/refute) To refute apparently can mean both /prove/ and just /say/ something is untrue. The way I know the word is in the sense of "proving", not just saying. I dare to say that is the way most people would use that word. Giganews only /says/ the allegations are untrue, it doesn't /prove/ that. To me it means poster is correct in stating their is no refuting of the claims, and I guess it's the same for most readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Giganews has responded by claiming the ex-employee is delusional. They posted links to a pastebin allegedly written by him, which includes the following:

"Besides spamming, the only other conduct that is unacceptable is uploading or contacting our employees with information about Vehuiah the holy angel, her invocation Psalm 3:3, Archangels, or the angels of Jehovah's 72 syllable name called the Shemhamforash. These are all unstoppable solutions to the 72 demon intelligences central to mankind, and will drive the dark of all evil away with an annoyingly bright Holy Light."

[https://twitter.com/Giganews/status/511587414683291648](https://twitter.com/Giganews/status/511587414683291648)

[http://pastebin.com/gM9mN7gS](http://pastebin.com/gM9mN7gS)

<comment><USER11> But it reads like a satirical manifesto. He certainly appears to be trying to be funny and wrote it as the Co-CEO. Ending with:

>Now that you know what we're about, start a free 14-day trial at Giganews.com and join the King of Thieves in the unholy war against God. We can only win with your help, and we need your soul to fuel Hells flames. Our servers are alwayson, always available, and run by a company you can trust. Giganews: Newsgroups Nonstop.

<comment><USER12> Yeah. I am not a medical professional, but I have spent a lot of time around schizophrenics and other folks with paranoid delusions, and this does not have the same highly disorganized and repetitive character that their speech and writing tend towards.

EDIT: To be clear, I still don't really believe the story, but if he is suffering from paranoid delusions, he is VERY high-functioning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was employee #3 at Texas.net (Datafoundry's predecessor) back in 1995. While Jonah Yokubaitis (Ron's son and texas.net co-founder) was a bit of a hot head and we had a few quarrels back when we were both young and dumb, the Yokubaitis family are good people. Ron Yokubaitis, in particular, is a good person. I knew him as a staunch Libertarian. In fact, he was the first Libertarian I ever met and what he told me about the party later influenced my own political views. While I have no evidence or knowledge to support or disprove this man's claim, I don't believe for a second that this is true. DataFoundry/Texas.net was quite the cowboy operation--literally and figuratively--and they employed some colorful and hot-tempered characters over the years, including my younger self. This Nick Caputo character sounds like sour grapes to me.

<comment><USER2> Hey, Chris. :) People are going to say the ex-Texas.Net Mafia is showing up now...

<comment><USER13> Howdy, Bill. :) Good to see you around here. I'm interested to see if anybody else shows up. It's hard to believe that this was almost 20 years ago. I wonder what happened to everybody. Ed, Mo, Mikedoug, etc.

<comment><USER2> As far as I know, Ed is now/still the CIO at DataFoundry. I'm in contact with Brett H. on FB and we're laughing about this. Mikedoug moved on a few years ago but I'm not sure what he's doing now. Mark is a barista somewhere in Texas, according to FB.

I've lost touch with pretty much everyone else...

<comment><USER14> When I left late last year, Mikedoug was still at DF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _In addition, Kibbey offered me a new name and identity, with a new drivers license and everything, if I were to go back to work at Giganews._

What? Why? The whole story seems disjointed.

<comment><USER16> Well, and this:

> It was then that I realized that the fed I was talking to had been my > coworker at Giganews since I started in 2009!

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I would instantly recognize any coworker I'd known for three years.

<comment><USER17> The word coworker can mean a lot of things. I worked at a company of 14,000 and while technically they would all be my coworkers, I probably would struggle to recognize more than 100 of them that I sat in the same room as every day. I've met more than a few "coworkers" from that company who drove a semi in Florida for the company while I worked five states away in an office.

Even at my current company with ~100 employees, damn if I could recognize the accountants just by seeing their face out of context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a thought experiment, let's assume at least parts of this story are true.

I would actually be very happy if the FBI was plugged into a USENET feed, sifting through the crud and fighting crime. This isn't like the NSA privacy incursions — USENET is public. Whatever you post is out there for everyone to see.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I agree - the only potential concern here is just that they can grab this connection data without probable cause and could easily decide to go after... most of the customers for piracy which could not otherwise be caught.

<comment><USER20> Hah! They'd have to hire a thousand more judges and prosecutors to handle that caseload!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My biggest surprise is that Usenet is apparently still that big of a thing. I guess I've been out of the loop, the last time I heard about Usenet was 10 years ago, with people talking about pirating from Usenet because torrents were being blocked. I don't think I've used Usenet since I had dial-up.

<comment><USER21> Usenet was basically the last bastion of relatively open to the public (but hidden by being obscure) piracy, but over the last couple of years even Usenet has been largely neutered by automatic DMCA requests, at least as it pertains to US-based providers.

<comment><USER22> "has been largely neutered by automatic DMCA requests"

For top 40 pop music and hollywood movies released within maybe 6 months of todays date.

For the rest of the cultural universe, no not really.

<comment><USER21> Also, HBO TV series, which is all.. er "my friend"... cares about, since HBO refuses to offer "my friend" any way to pay for their content that doesn't involve getting a full-blown oligopoly-supporting cable TV subscription (while also not putting much of their content on alt services like Amazon Prime streaming for months to a year after initial air date).

<comment><USER20> Just posted a link about Verizon breaking the cable monopoly:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8322762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8322762)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I worked with nickc before he was terminated (I am no longer an employee of PHMGMT, DF, or GN. I left but Imn sure the company doesnt have a very high opinion of myself), and I can attest that he is one weird dude. When I first started working there it was suggested to get Nick to start talking about all of his conspiracy theories in order to pass the time at night... I did not get the chance (nor did I have the desire). I am absolutely not surprised by this.

</comment><comment><USER23> Weird. 137 points, posted 2 hours ago... and already it's moved off the front page on HN.

Again, what's up, admins?

This and the Kim Dotcom / Snowden / NZ spying story both appear to have been hastily removed from the front page.

In fact, the NZ story ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317617](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317617)) appears to have been hidden entirely.

<comment><USER24> It's getting flagged, probably because it's of dubious veracity and the author doxxed GN employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does it really matter what he says? Giganews might keeps logfile "gigauth". I might not.

But still people have not understand at what scale the internet is broken. It does not matter weather they log. The NSA logs anyway.

Even if it's not a CIA op, the NSA will know everything as well, just as if it was a CIA op. Payments, traffic, everything.

</comment><comment><USER26> This claims that VyprVPN is logging things for the government and other actors. I use VyprVPN on a regular basis, so I'm curious about what exactly they are logging, how long they keep the logs, etc.

I don't use the VPN for anything illegal, mostly just to get around Verizon's stupid bandwidth limiting on Netflix, Amazon S3, and other services, and for an extra layer of protection when connecting from a sketchy public wifi, etc. But I still would like some answers about these claims especially since their privacy policy says:

 _Each time a user connects to VyprVPN, we retain the following data for 30 days: the user 's source IP address, the VyprVPN IP address used by the user, connection start and stop time and total number of bytes used._

and they say:

 _Does not log a user 's traffic or the content of any communications_

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.giganews.com/blog/2014/09/it-is-a-gigahoax- gigane...](http://www.giganews.com/blog/2014/09/it-is-a-gigahoax-giganews-is- not-an-fbi-operation.html)

It's a Gigahoax - Giganews is NOT an FBI Operation

Giganews has always supported the Open Internet and fought for the personal freedoms that the Open Internet enables. Unfortunately, one of those freedoms is the ability for anyone to say almost anything they want, whether or not it is true or factual, and for others to believe it. Yesterday, Giganews was accused of being an FBI operation by an ex-employee through the well-known Cryptome.org. This accusation is completely false, and the accuser offers no evidence to support the claim.

Cryptome's failure to contact us to validate the allegations or respond to our concerns has lessened their credibility. It does not seem that Cryptome is in search for the truth, which leaves us to question what are their true motives. Sorry, Cryptome - Giganews is NOT an FBI operation. You've been duped.

Giganews is in the impossible position of proving a negative. If we say our list of employees does not include any FBI employees, then they must be "using false identities." If we say the named FBI operatives don't look like any of our employee photos, "the pictures must have been altered." Even the denial itself is used as further evidence of the truth of the accusation. In a court of law, such an accusation would never stand up to scrutiny, but on the Open Internet, opinions can be formed by only a few words on a popular website. Fighting the lies only emboldens those who tell them – Feeding the Troll.

What we can do is stand on our long history of supporting the Open Internet and the privacy of our customers:

\- We are one of the few providers left still offering access to a full Usenet news feed \- We led the way in introducing encrypted SSL connections for Usenet access \- We worked with Golden Frog to provide the easy-to-use VyprVPN Personal VPN service with our Usenet accounts \- Giganews customers were the first to get access to Golden Frog's Dump Truck secure storage service \- Giganews and Golden Frog brought together those that fight for online privacy at our SXSW Take Back Your Internet Panel. \- Giganews spoke, just today, before the Texas State Legislature in support of proposed Texas privacy legislation.

Actions speak louder than words, and these are the actions of a company that supports customer privacy and a free and open Internet. Giganews has not and will not be controlled by any government organization, and we will continue to provide the best Usenet service to our customers.

</comment><comment><USER27> i stopped believing when he claimed the police detective also had a full time job as an undercover sysadmin. lol.

</comment><comment><USER28> The speed of giganews' response + allegations of mental illness for their attacker is pretty impressive.

</comment><comment><USER29> Poor Usenet. It was so beautiful, once.

<comment><USER30> "The Net interprets censorship as damage."

... but it apparently interprets passive, silent auditing as a feature. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Eh with the automated copyright takedowns usenet is useless now anyways, everyone has moved on.

<comment><USER32> Still works pretty well for me

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The Special Agent e-mail exist and headers looks strong ! This looks legit !

</comment><comment><USER34> Well, he says the cp groups were restored. That should be verifiable, no?

<comment><USER35> Heh, I'll let you go and check for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Unless something is verifiably true/false it should not be voted to the top. The conversation is the only valuable thing to the Hackernews community.</comment>


MathDeck: A math-aware search interface - <AUTHOR> https://mathdeck.cs.rit.edu/ <comment><USER2> In case authors see this, the last three videos of the intro popover (Upload, Reuse, Download) are all "No video with supported format and MIME type found" in a current firefox on linux. The earlier two (Handwriting, Creating) work. Fwiw.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is super cool! There have been rare moments where I wish that something like this existed. Bookmarked!

I wonder if there's something similar for code.

</comment><comment><USER4> How does the LaTeX generation work? ML or heuristics or both?</comment>


Grasshopper Explodes at Space X during test - <AUTHOR> http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/Rocket-Explodes-at-Space-X-272370541.html

<comment><USER2> It wasn't a Grasshopper, it was part of the launch subassembly for it, the F9R-Dev1.</comment>


Banks and Credit Card issues beware - Apple just stole your business - <AUTHOR> http://www.banking4tomorrow.com/?p=733

<comment><USER2> I think things like this are what Steve was talking about when he spoke of strategic opportunities coming up in the near future.

Entire categories of business are about to be disrupted by the mobile revolution.

Heck, just a few years ago a Visa IPO was floated in the ~20 billion range.

Not saying that Apple will buy Visa, but they have enough cash and a very powerful position. There could be some very interesting ways for them to take advantage of a "PC in every hand."</comment>


The mysterious case of missing URLs and Google's AMP - <AUTHOR> https://sonniesedge.co.uk/posts/amp-urls/ <comment><USER2> Yes, Google owns a significant portion of search but I don't think it qualifies as a monopoly.

* They have no exclusive rights to "search". Bing, DDG, Yahoo, and more all compete in the same space.

* They do not have a geographic right to any areas.

* They are not prevent me from using another search engine

I choose to use Google because it gives me the results I expect. Nobody is forcing me to use Google over other search engines. If anything, Google has raised the quality for all search engines by consistently producing the best product available.

<comment><USER3> This needs to be repeated because it helps to understand the issue.

There are only four (4) search indexes of sufficient size in English, these are Bing, Google, Baidu (Chinese), and Yandex (Russian).

 _Everything_ on the internet that calls itself a "search engine" gets its search result data from one of those four indexes. Different front ends provide different features around the results, whether it is privacy enhancement, ad enhancement, Etc.

Google's English language index is generally considered the 'best' based on the depth of the index with respect to its crawl size and that index's ability to provide both good precision and recall.

You can use any search site you want but you will likely be using Google search results. If you feel like you're results aren't quite as good as Google's, and you are in the US, you are probably using Bing. Neither Baidu nor Yandex have US data centers so latency to their indexes is pretty bad for most front end web sites.

<comment><USER4> This is incorrect, not _everything_ on the internet that calls itself a search engine get their results from one of those four. There's also Exalead, Gigablast, Mojeek and Findx for example.

Disclaimer: I work for Mojeek so know that it only gets results from it's own index.

<comment><USER3> That is _awesome_ love that you've crossed a billion pages in the index. I worked at Blekko (VP Eng/Ops) and at its peak it had about 5 billion pages indexed, and that is pretty good for targeted search. It loses on the long tail though for generalized search.

Something we did at Blekko which was really interesting/helpful was to feed a search query to our index, Bing's, and Google's and then compare the results. That was a great way to compare notes on ranking strategies between the three engineering teams.

[1] _" In 2015, Mojeek's index surpassed the billion pages, the only search engine in the UK to accomplish this and one of just a handful worldwide to maintain an index of this size (English language). Although, passing this milestone is only the first step and Mojeek is continuing to increase its index size and improve relevancy."_ \-- [https://www.mojeek.com/about/technology.html](https://www.mojeek.com/about/technology.html)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the info. Marc (who created Mojeek) mentions Blekko a lot as he considers yourselves to be the last ones so far to have a proper go at creating a search engine from scratch. Also, we're now up to 2.2 billion pages and it's only a lack of servers that stops us from increasing at a much faster pace.

<comment><USER3> For what its worth, this is the ultimate calculus for a search engine; The revenue you can produce is proportional to your query rate, your query rate is proportional to your recurring user base, and your recurring user base is proportional to the usefulness of your searches, which is proportional to the number of pages in your index which is proportional to the number of servers you have running which is proportional to the cost of running the service.

One of the things I would have done differently at Blekko is that I would have created our own in house ad serving system (network) way earlier in the life cycle (Blekko never did have an in house ad network). It gives you better control over advertising latency and the quality factor of the ads. You also get to keep all of the ad revenue rather than just some of it. And you can deal directly with advertisers rather than the ad-tech crowd which can be quite scummy at times.

I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor, if you can crack the secret of surviving in a market where Google pays people over $4B/year just to send their search traffic to them, then you will be one of my heroes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first theory that some designers think URL's are bad for users seems more plausible. Most people don't think of themselves as the villains in a movie. What kind of conversations do you think Googlers have?

We've seen this before with Gmail hiding email addresses. You can still show them with one click. These redesigns are annoying but world didn't come to an end.

<comment><USER6> Hiding email addresses is really annoying, and a security hole because email users can lie about their name.

Look at the problem with the telephone system where scammers can spoof caller ID.

<comment> kyle-rb People can already spoof email addresses pretty easily though.

<comment><USER5> You can do it, but with SPIF and DKIM checking, it might be hard to avoid detection, at least for some domains. How good is Gmail at detecting this?

<comment><USER7> Good if you set up DMARC. Quarantine setting guarantee that fake email goes to spam. Reject setting drops the fake email altogether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _> The hiding of URLs fits perfectly with AMPs preferred method of making sites fast, which is to host them directly on Google's servers, and to serve them from a Google domain. Hiding the URL from the user then makes a Google AMP site indistinguishable from an ordinary site._

Hiding URLs isn't necessary for sites hosted on the AMP cache to look just like other sites; Web Packaging will allow this while preserving the URL: [https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/a-first-look-at- using...](https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/a-first-look-at-using-web- packaging-to-improve-amp-urls/)

(Disclaimer: I work at Google)

<comment><USER9> Enabling Web Packaging and _then_ hiding URLs will produce a lot less blowback than doing it in the reverse order.

<comment><USER8> I was trying to explain why I don't think the people working on how URLs are being displayed in Chrome are doing it for the benefit of AMP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > If this sounds all conspiracy theory, then good for you - you've just earned > the Junior Meta Sceptic Badge.

At least the author seems to be aware that the article isn't anything more than a conspiracy theory. What is not clear, is why they then published it.

There are plenty of things to complain about with AMP. But, it also does address some very real problems - slow, inneficient, hard ti use web pages. What I'd love to hear about is a different approach to address these issues - and not something handwavy about how it could be done in a weekend. Actual code.

<comment><USER11> You don't need a different approach. It's absolutely possible to build fast websites today without AMP - it's just a collection of good practices and strict limits.

In fact, you can even use AMP itself without any of the Google garden parts.

<comment><USER10> So, your alternative is to do nothing. That's a valid alternative.

My experience, however, is that the web is clogged up with slow, painful to use web pages. Despite AMP's short comings, I do know that when I click on an AMP page, it's going to load quickly and behave consistently. IMO, those are pretty big benefits it would be good to bring to a larger portion of the web, regardless of it's via AMP or some other mechanism.

<comment><USER11> Google has already made speed a stronger part of their ranking system, and they could do more; when it comes to performance, they can prioritize fast and bloat-free websites regardless of AMP - I see it being more about controlling the platform, and the advertising revenue that comes with it than an improvement in tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At first glance, AMP will make life easier for Google's search robots, but the standard would also seem to benefit a competitor like Duck, Duck, Go by standardizing code organization, making it easier to find the true 'intention' of a website's pages. Is AMP contrived to benefit Google? For sure, but not sure it's a terrible idea.

</comment><comment><USER13> They're paralleling the days of AOL in a lot of ways.

</comment><comment><USER14> Doesn't bother me. IPFS makes AMP obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you joined Google to make the world a better place, it's time to look for greener pastures.

<comment><USER16> Sure, please point to some that pay equally well and offer equally interesting coworkers and tasks.

<comment><USER17> Those sound more like things that would be important to someone who joined Google because it paid well and offered "interesting" coworkers and tasks, not someone who (naively) joined Google to "make the world a better place".

<comment><USER16> If you _really_ do not care about being well paid and want to change the world, Red Cross is hiring.

<comment><USER18> They are.

However there is a sliding scale here, and a lot of people will willingly take somewhat lower pay in order to work for places they consider reasonably ethical and transformative.

Pay is not everything, but neither is it nothing.

(My partner works for the Red Cross in the UK, they are a great organisation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article, and the one it references about AMP, all throw the word 'force' around a lot. No one is 'forcing' you to do anything with your website, wanting to be top of Google SERP is optional.

<comment><USER20> I work for a large publisher. Google isn't putting a literal knife to anyones throat, but they are not so subtly suggesting that search traffic is tied to your usage of AMP. That qualifies as `force` in my book.

<comment><USER5> But this is the opposite of force.

<comment><USER21> A threat can be a way to force.

Saying a threat is the opposite of forcing is definitely wrong.

<comment><USER5> The original post talked about "a literal knife to anyones throat" which means physical force.

But what is supposed threat about? We are talking about whether or not Google links to a website, which has nothing to do with that. Linking is purely voluntary and there is not even a contract.

Of course, at scale, financial incentives are still very important for businesses, but let's be clear about this. There are no goons or threat of goons involved.

<comment><USER21> > The original post talked about "a literal knife to anyones throat" which > means physical force.

Here is exactly what _you replied to_ :

> Google isn't putting a literal knife to anyones throat, but they are not so > subtly suggesting that search traffic is tied to your usage of AMP.

1\. Notice the use of isn't. I'm not a native English speaker but it still seems clear that you are reading something that isn't written.

2\. The threat of being shunned is still a threat. Also there is something about abusive relationships where the abuser will say: I didn't force anyone, but everyone knows there would have been "consequences" if the victim didn't do what they were told.

<comment><USER5> You're implying physical force by comparing to an abuser situation where an implicit threat of physical force is involved. If you don't want to imply violence, don't use a violent metaphor.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Senegal to Introduce a New Blockchain Based National Digital Currency - tefo-mohapi http://www.iafrikan.com/2016/11/24/senegal-to-introduce-a-new-blockchain-based-national-digital-currency-making-it-only-the-second-country-to-have-a-national-digital-currency/ <comment><AUTHOR> Im a fan of crypto currencys, but they are simply not ready for primetime. In order to have a monatary system thay correcly works for a complex economy with many stages of production you need a way to grow and shrink the money supply.

Some people like to compair Bitcoin to gold and then the make the argument that gold worked well for a long time. That argument however is flawed because gold usually was used ontop of a banking and coinage/note system.

Take for example the old Scottish banking system during (17/18th century), they on avg had reserve ratio of 2%. That essentially means that the circolating money (feduciary media) is much higher then the gold stock. It also means the the broad response to changes in money demand (velocity).

As long as crypto currencies can not figure this out, the will not be able to run a full modern economy.

One way to do it, would be to use Bitcoin as a gold replacement, and then have 'banks' create Shaum-style E-Cash to people. Then these 'banks' could increase or decrease the supply based on the money demand. That is however far from optimal.

The tricky thing boils down the system being able to buy and sell assts in order to create or destroy money.

<comment><USER2> Can you explain why it is needed to grow and shrink the money supply ? I don't get that. In my view, the only problem with gold was that it was not practical to use. That's where bitcoin is better, you can divide a single unit into much much smaller unit (up to 10^-8 Bitcoin for instance) so everybody can use it.

<comment><USER3> Most central banks in the world do a lot of open market operations to keep the economy in check. It is how they affect inflation, interest and exchange rates.

Most cryptos are still commodity currency; the commodity is computation. Because we don't decide how many coins get "minted" our ability to affect the money supply is reduced. So we're castrating one of our major interventional instruments.

Practicality isn't the issue. During the Gold standard, the bars were kept in vaults and we traded in convertible paper notes. The mint could always print notes of smaller or larger denominations if needed, but couldn't print more than it had bars to convert to. And that is the problem.

<comment><USER4> > couldn't print more than it had bars to convert to. And that is the problem.

To be fair, one man's problem is another man's solution. "It can all be taken away" isn't a selling point to the currency's users, only to the issuer.

Monetary policy has always been a tool of governments, but that's been because the people haven't had any practical options other than another government's currency.

Having a flexible layer of fiat lets us have a shock absorber between the markets and the commodities we need to live. But too much of a decoupling and you run into more problems the other way.

It's hurt a lot of people when their government hyper-inflates the currency, or steals much of it back via bank controls, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a huge proponent of Bitcoin and other decentralized currencies, I really don't understand this. The entire point of going through the rigamarole of using a blockchain is to attain a large degree of byzantine fault tolerance in an adversarial, trustless, and most importantly unprivileged environment. That is, there are no "master nodes" or any sort of centralized hacks like that.

If you're Senegal, presumably you want control over your national currency, so you're going to need some sort of centralized authority anyway. Since you've already done away with decentralization, why waste the time and effort on using a blockchain? There are any number of simpler architectures you can use when you have a central authority.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that is the WHOLE point. An anonymous currency based on private keys, even if centralized, allows you to use electronic money without banks, which means without permission.

<comment><USER7> But if they're having the centralised authority anyway, can't they just allow anonymous accounts to transact through a more traditional secure electronic payments system provided by that central clearing house, without the resource consumption overheads and limits on concurrent transactions associated with blockchains?

I can't see true anonymity being a goal of a system introduced by governments either, though I can see why they wouldn't want an electronic payments system to rely on financial intermediaries in an economy where many people don't use banks.

<comment><USER6> A public blockchain, even if it is just readable by citizens if far more difficult to manipulate.

> without the resource consumption overheads and limits on concurrent > transactions associated with blockchains?

I'm not sure what this is about, do you have a source? Volume of transactions should be easily large enough to satisfy their currency - all that's needed is some hashing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't help facepalm when I read news like this. The value proposition of blockchain technology, combined with proof-of-work, is distributed trustlessnes. Why would a national, centralized issuer need anything of this sort? All they need is a PostgreSQL database or, preferably, letting their citizens use whichever medium of exchange they prefer, rather than try to pretend that there isn't plenty of foreign currency that their people would probably prefer using.

</comment><comment><USER9> I spent a semester abroad in Senegal during the financial crisis of 2008.

I wonder what the details are. The CFA is pegged to the Euro, so this could mark Senegalese monetary independence. A different sort of liberation than most in the blockchain space are going for, but a liberation nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder who is mining the blocks? Since this is launched by the government, are they the one doing all the mining? In that case, isn't the currency vulnerable to the 51% attack (i.e. the government could essentially "print" digital money as they wish)?

<comment><USER9> Well, it wouldn't be "vulnerable" to a 51% attack, this would just be controlled by a mint which was the model for cryptocurrencies until Satoshi figured out mining: [http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...](http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1389&context=aulr) [https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/120/358/universal_elec...](https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/120/358/universal_electronic_cash.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Senegal eCurrency = digital currency + centralisation?

Can someone explain the advantages of that currency for the people and not the banks nor the state?

I thought all the magic relied on decentralisation and removal of intermediaries.

Isn't it a progress, but backward?

<comment><USER12> This has nothing to do with decentralization or giving people any advantages.

This is to reduce expenses and dependency on cash or other currencies such as US dollars.

And of course to have central "push button" control over monetary instruments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know if "it still relies on the central banking system" means it can be inflated away to worthlessness by a poorly run government?

</comment><comment><USER14> >The other interesting point to observe is how both Tunisia and Senegal's digital currencies use the blockchain as part of their technology but don't use BitCoin as a currency.

That's a silly thing to say. Tunisia and Senegal already have Bitcoin. If they didn't declare some sort of national currency they would in effect be withdrawing from any sort of control over money in the countries entirely.

</comment><comment> Null-Set A better article with more detail. [http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161103006949/en/eCur...](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161103006949/en/eCurrency- Mint-Limited-Banque-Régionale-De-Marchés)

<comment><USER15> That's literally the press release.

Has there been any coverage in proper news outlets? Surely this would be _huge_ financial news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It will be interesting to see who may + how they will procuce new "coins". Blockchain is only better if it can deprive privat parties to deflate the value by "printing" more...

Also interesting how much anonymity users will have.

</comment><comment><USER17> Alternate head line: "Senegal to introduce national database of all financial transactions"

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm seeing no news coverage of this that doesn't reprint this article or the original press release. Surely this would be big news in proper media, particularly given the buzzword status of "blockchain". What are they _actually_ doing?

</comment><comment><USER18> Decentralized + Private + Cloud + Immutable on top of AUDIT TRAIL

</comment><comment><USER19> Good luck!</comment>


Bayesian ranking of items with up and downvotes or 5 star ratings (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://julesjacobs.github.io/2015/08/17/bayesian-scoring-of-ratings.html <comment><USER2> I recommend the approach described in this article:

[http://www.evanmiller.org/ranking-items-with-star- ratings.ht...](http://www.evanmiller.org/ranking-items-with-star-ratings.html)

In this formulation, s_k equals utility. Like the Wilson score formula (and unlike the linked article), the provided equation takes into account the variance of the expected utility.

<comment><USER3> I find that article very hard to follow -- there are lots of detailed formulas, but no obvious place where the prior distribution is discussed, or the utility score given to different star ratings. And the examples are all very abstract.

 _Edit to add:_ ah, I think I see, the utility of N stars is assumed to be N, and the prior is all ones. But aren't those the most important things to tune in a Bayesian model?

<comment><USER4> Another practical Bayesian approach that is much easier to understand and to productionize, is described here: [https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/27/bayesian- amazon/](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/27/bayesian-amazon/)

It does assume a Beta(1,1) prior however.

<comment><USER3> With star ratings, I think an important point that often gets ignored is: _different people use stars in different ways._ One user might 5-star most things, but give the occasional 4- or 3-star review if they have a problem. But another user might 3-star by default, and save their 4- and 5-star reviews for exceptionally good cases.

I wonder if a simple way to fix that might be to reinterpret everyone's star ratings as percentiles, based on the overall distribution of stars in their reviews. "This user gives 5 stars 10% of the time, so we'll interpret a 5-star review from them as anything in the range 90-100 -- assume 95%."

You would probably also want to reinterpret the results for each user. "This review scores average out as 84%. For user A, that's 4.5 stars, but for user B, it's only 3.5 stars."

The big downside is that star ratings become subjective. But they're _already_ subjective, and ignoring that problem doesn't make the results any better. Average star ratings on all the big websites and app stores right now are garbage -- they'll usually warn you if some Amazon product is terrible, but that's about all.

If you crunch all the review data and figure out the best possible recommendations, you end up with collaborative filtering and the Netflix Prize. It's a shame that so much great work was done for that competition, but nobody seems to be using it now. Netflix themselves just use a trivial upvote scheme now.

But I wonder if there's some much simpler approach that still gets pretty good results.

<comment><USER5> Or even a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. Less open to interpretation on how the user uses stars. 1 star or 5 star basically.

<comment><USER6> I wrote this a couple of years ago [1]. I think we need to remove subjectivity on ratings by asking more specific questions and only allowing a binary answer.

1\. Is the food good? 2\. Is the service good? 3\. Is the atmosphere good?

That's a pretty simple answer. Often when I see 1 star reviews it's because of a single element of the experience but not the overall experience.

It's easier to leave a review because there's less cognitive load. It's easier to search for what you want: if I have my foodie hat on, I don't particularly care about the service. If it's a night out with a customer, that becomes more important all of a sudden.

And then you can generate some sort of average score based on the answers to these questions to calculate the 5 star rating.

[1] [https://medium.com/@acrooksie/no-more-5-star-rating- systems-...](https://medium.com/@acrooksie/no-more-5-star-rating- systems-a4a5032bb19d)

<comment><USER3> I do prefer that over stars, but I think it potentially misses some information. Let's say most people answer "good" for all the categories. Does that just mean the place is good overall, or is it fantastic?

To put it another way, how do you distinguish the 4.0-star places from the 4.9-star places?

With conventional star ratings, you're reliant on most people using stars consistently. With a series of yes/no questions, you're relying on a potentially small pool of "no" answers to give you a useful signal.

I think stack ranking would be much more powerful. "How does this place compare to others? Average, better than average, in your all time top 5?" Everybody's feedback would be completely clear. It's not obvious how to aggregate that into a single rating number though.

<comment><USER6> Given a set of questions - e.g. "how's the food" "how's the atmosphere" "how's the service" etc. - you could figure out how the restaurant scores relative to others by stack ranking based on the % of answers to a particular question that got a "Yes". The numbers should hopefully reflect a normal distribution and from there you get your /5 rating.

If everybody answers "yes" to all of the questions - good value, service, food, atmosphere - then that suggests to me that it's a great restaurant. And you can have a lot of questions that are even asked randomly to limit the number of questions per user.

I rate a lot of places highly that have great a lot of things but not great service, because I don't think the service is bad enough to bring it down. But that's data that is being lost.

I like your idea of stack ranking but with a different flavour. I think that "in your all time top 5" is a hard question to answer. How about this though - if we know you've been to Taco Place X and now you're going to Taco Place Y, maybe the question is "are the tacos at Y better than X", "is the atmosphere at Y better than X" or even "is Y better than X" (but I like the idea of collecting more granular data).

If you collect this^ data to stack rank. Then it definitely gives you a better distribution of restaurants relative to each other in each category.

As a consumer, with this level of granularity, I can select what I care about tonight. If I'm grabbing takeout for lunch at work, does a five star rating even matter? I should ask Siri "show me the top fast and delicious takeout restaurants near me" and she should do: "select name from restaurants where distance < 500m order by (speed + flavour) limit 3;" and from there I will pick something from that list that looks nice. That seems like a nice UX.

<comment><USER7> There's a body of research on this, and it suggests that ratings are more meaningful if you add options, up to about 5 or 6 ratings.

That is, if you asked people to do the ratings once, and then asked them 1 hour later, there would be more consistency across time as you add options from 2 to 3 to 4, up to about 5 or 6.

The problem with binary ratings is that, as much as you might think otherwise, you're forcing a kind of hazy, grey experiential assessment into 0 or 1. And in doing so, people near the boundary (whatever that might be) will vacillate between them. E.g., people who feel "meh" about something are forced to choose something else, and sometimes they'll say 0 and sometimes 1. The more options you give, the more reliable / meaningful the ratings will be.

This example is interesting to me because it's something most people can relate to and illustrates the complications of utility-based and Bayesian formulations of the problem. You end up having to decide on utilities and/or priors.

To me the answer is to weight the data maximally in forming a posterior, in which case you end up using a reference prior. Similar kinds of arguments about utilities lead to reference priors. Reference priors can be complicated to compute, but for things like multinomials over ordinal ratings, reference priors have been worked out fairly well.

To me it always made sense to allow people to sort by the center of the estimate, or the lower bound (maybe using different language).

<comment><USER3> Slight tangent--

I think 1-4 stars is the ideal rating style. I wish that were used more often.

A choice of 1-4 stars gives you enough freedom to express your opinion, without being overwhelming. It's a small enough range to be reasonably objective (almost everybody will interpret it as 1 star = bad, 2 = passable, 3 = good, 4 = great). And with an even number of choices there's no middle "meh" option -- you're forced to make a choice between 2 and 3.

Of course it's important not to ruin it by adding extra options, like 0 stars or half-stars. (That was Ebert's big mistake!)

 _Edit to add:_ to relate this to the parent post, I'm thinking that maybe ranking things as 1-4 stars in several categories could be the best if both worlds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not a statistician, but this still seems flawed. The pretend votes need to be related to the person seeing the list of items. These normally come from the population (i.e. if you were ranking Netflix, the pretend votes would be the sum of all votes that exist for every movie, grouped by star count). This makes sense, because if you had no other information, your guess would just be the average of all the existing ratings.

The problem is that the pretend votes need to be culled in order to be predictive. Otherwise they dominate in the arithmetic. They need to be more specific to the user looking at the ranking. Continuing with the Netflix example, if a user was looking for scary movies, the pretend votes need to come from the corpus of all scary movies, rather than all movies that exist.

Here's the problem, there doesn't seem to be a good way to narrow the pretend votes. Worse, there isn't a good way to combine the two. If the pretend votes came from two sources, its not clear what to do. For example, if the user is from California, the California pretend votes (priors?) need to be combined with the scary movie pretend votes.

How can we add pretend votes without justifying where they came from?

<comment><USER3> It doesn't have to be correct, just a plausible starting point. The "pretend votes" have less importance as more real votes come in.

I do think this article suggests add too many pretend votes. Without the kind of justification you're talking about, it's usually better to add only a couple (reflecting low confidence in the prior).

<comment><USER9> I'm just getting into stats, but the way I see it, a new item has 0 votes with an error bar +/\- the number of possible votes. Each sorting should then include a randomization factor related to the error bar, and so randomly promote some new items into top rankings so they get some exposure to gather votes. As they accumulate votes, the error bar shrinks as the ranking becomes a little more certain.

<comment><USER3> I believe the right way to think about it isn't error bars, but the entire probability distribution -- what's the probability that if everybody voted, the upvote/downvote ratio would be 75/25, 80/20, 85/15, etc. Once you've figured out the probability distribution, you can calculate error bars any way you like (e.g. 95% confidence interval).

The beta distribution is one model you can choose for that probability distribution, which happens to have some nice properties that make it easy to work with.

The other question is, what's the "zero knowledge" probability distribution? I think your "0 votes with an error bar +/\- the number of possible votes" would translate to "uniform probability of any result", which I think is beta(1,1).

Depending on the scenario, though, you might look at the data and observe that extreme values are very uncommon, and therefore start with something like beta(2,2) instead (a bell curve rather than a flat distribution). That has minimal impact once you have lots of real upvote/downvote data, but it makes a huge difference to how the first few votes are interpreted.

<comment><USER9> Right, that sounds more like what I meant. Still familiarizing myself with the terminology, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10481507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10481507)

</comment><comment><USER11> Anyone here have thoughts on why, all these years later, Amazon still doesn't have a sort option along the lines of these proposals? It seems like such an easy win and an easy technical change. Do they have some business reason not to change their default sort?

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure what you mean -- could you elaborate?

Amazon probably doesn't use straigt score averaging to decide "best" items sort, and this is just proposals of how to change that to be better by not just using averages. So what is it you're looking for Amazon to add?

Disclaimer: work at Amazon, not on anything search related.

<comment><USER11> Amazon has the default "Featured" sort (I'm not sure what is behind this, but it intuitively seems like some combination of popularity + availability + rating). If this default doesn't fit your needs, your only option is to change to sort by "Avg. Customer Review", which gets you a list that is sorted by average rating regardless of the number of reviews. Evan called out nearly 10 years ago in the post that OP's article mentioned - [http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average- rating....](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html). The root problem is that one random obscure product with a single 5-star rating out-ranks something with 499 5-star ratings and 1 4-star rating.

I'm often looking for what is the best/highest-quality item in a category, meaning I want not just a high average, but a high average that is statistically meaningful. I'm just surprised Amazon hasn't offered a way to do that (and have read umpteen threads on HN in the past years expressing the same frustration).

<comment><USER12> ....Default 'featured' sort?

When I go to Amazon.com and search, I see 'relevance' as my default, with 'featured', some price related ones, 'average', and 'new' as options. ('Featured' only seems to exist on some products, and be related to ads.)

Is it not the same for you?

\-----

As for your main point (because I think that your complaint is still valid even with 'relevance' as the default), it sounds like what you want is a way to choose what factors are applied to your sort.

I'm not sure, but it seems likely that 'relevance' is doing more than just averaging, and so being able to select which parts you apply (eg, only use a statistical notion of best, don't consider availability or shipping times) would cover your usecase, right?

Well, you might want to be able to choose between a few models of 'best', but the real issue, the core need, is that you want control over the model that Amazon is using to sort what you see and to have some input on what that looks like. (And not just have 'lolsux' or 'Amznsort', to be a little glib.)

Gotta say, that actually sounds like a pretty reasonable ask. I'm not sure why it doesn't work that way, either.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, my above comment was not using a text search, hence no "relevant" option (i.e. if you just drilled down the department hierarchy to, say, the TVs department).

> the core need, is that you want control over the model that Amazon is using > to sort what you see and to have some input on what that looks like

Indeed, but I'm not even looking to have that much granular control over it. I just want "sort by rating, but toss out all the obscure crap that has 1 or 2 ratings, because that rating is meaningless."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately, no matter how you twist and turn it ordinal data is going to stay ordinal. You cannot try to make it meaningful regardless of how you aggregate it.</comment>