A lot of free ebooks - <AUTHOR> http://hackershelf.com/browse/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for all the feedback everyone. Some things I need to clarify:

1\. The site was never meant to be purely for programming books. It says "free books for the intellectually curious" for a reason :) 2\. Non free books are not allowed. That's where the flagging feature comes in. All those were added today, with the best of intentions, I'm sure - and I'm truly grateful to whoever did - but they have to go. Sorry people.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most of these books are neither free nor have anything to do with programming.

<comment><USER2> I didn't submit the link (I'm the developer), so it may not be obvious, but the site was never at any point meant to be purely for tech books. As for the non-free stuff, all of that was added today while I was at work. I'm already culling those submissions. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yo, developer guy, it would be nice if there was some curation involved; some, if not most, of these books are not free. Perhaps allow the community to also remove books that don't fit the guidelines or report them for just not being free? Otherwise, this is going in my bat-belt. Totally awesome idea.

<comment><USER5> There's already a "Flag book for abuse" link for each item.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't mean to hijack the thread, but there is another great resource for this (in spanish, though) with a very high amount of ebooks:

Open libra: [http://www.etnassoft.com/biblioteca/?search_term=&books_...](http://www.etnassoft.com/biblioteca/?search_term=&books_category=libros_programacion&books_criteria=post_date_DESC&lang=english&since=all) (I took the liberty to pre-filter the link with "programming books in english", since there are a lot of them in spanish on this site)

</comment><comment><USER7> Why the hell is "The God Delusion" in the mix? That is not a programming book, it's a social commentary about religion.

<comment><USER8> One could argue that it ties to Artificial Intelligence, and how ideas get into our heads. But yes, I had the same reaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The gem inside that list:

[http://hackershelf.com/book/289/a-mathematical-theory-of- com...](http://hackershelf.com/book/289/a-mathematical-theory-of- communication/)

<comment><USER10> For me it was [http://hackershelf.com/book/350/ai-algorithms-data- structure...](http://hackershelf.com/book/350/ai-algorithms-data-structures- and-idioms-in-prolog-lisp-and-java/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of these aren't actually free. It doesn't say that on the website either, but it would be nice if you could filter by free books.

<comment><USER12> Submission guidelines say, 'only link to free (as in beer) books'. No one is reading the submission guidelines...

<comment><USER13> Right. Nothing on the main page or Submit page mentions free books; the guidelines are hidden in the "about" link in the footer (<http://hackershelf.com/about.html>). Because of that, I've seen a certain poor misguided user submit 30 non-free books, complete with cover art, that are going to have to be deleted eventually. All we can do for now is flag non- free books until the site owner deletes them or creates a separate section of the site for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Missed some haskell books, if that's your site

[http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1af3iw/9_best_free_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1af3iw/9_best_free_haskell_books/)

[http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20130316105209238/BestFree...](http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20130316105209238/BestFreeHaskellBooks.html)

and scala staircase 1st ed <http://www.artima.com/pins1ed/>

<comment><USER2> Hey. I'm the developer behind the site. You could submit those if you'd like. That's where the "community" bit comes in :)

<comment><USER15> Feat suggestion: would be nice if you allowed for a TOC to be attached to book description, to ease a quick glance over the contents. Occurred to me when browsing <http://hackershelf.com/book/344/speeding-through-haskell/> \- as the target link has no TOC, if someone took care to provide a TOC on the Shelf, I'd know better what to expect.

After more browsing, the topics list at <http://hackershelf.com/topics/> looks like it could take some more care: probably case insenitiveness, maybe fix the strange duplication of letter topics (or does it have some hidden purpose?), maybe put a list of quicklinks to letter-sections on top.

Just some feedback from a random Internet guy ;) the site does a very good first impression!

<comment><USER2> Thanks :) The TOC sounds like a great idea, obvious in hindsight. The case sensitivity of the topics is just a reflection of my laziness, I should have taken care of that a long time ago. Hope you keep finding the site useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This one is brilliant: Mathematics for Computer Science.

[http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr10/cos433/mat...](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr10/cos433/mathcs.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER17> It is getting to the point where the only advantages to 'real' books left are: 1. they can be autographed (thank you Mr. Knuth and Mr. Brodie) and 2. they make really good insulation during winters...

<comment><USER18> E-books are still an inferior technology to physical books in some ways. I can't, for example, draw a diagram in the margins of an E-book. I can write notes and highlight, but it basically stops there.

With Amazon (not sure about other providers), there's a risk of remote wipe. E-books are often not really yours, and DRM makes that doubly true. The risk of loss with e-books is significantly higher than with physical books.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure you can quantify the risk of loss with e-books being significantly higher than with physical books.

There are a lot of house fires, any one of them could destroy your book collection (even the smoke damage alone can make then unusable) - same with floods, vandalism, etc.

How many people have lost their e-book collection due to remote wipe? And if you're going to talk about the person who was wiped by Amazon, it's worth checking the conclusion of that story...

<comment><USER18> I was thinking more along the lines of accidental data loss than everyone having to worry about remote wipes all the time. I should've made that more clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thanks! I didn't see that there were more pages at first (Page 1 out of 16). It could be highlighter better.

<comment><USER2> Haven't had much time to work on it since last year. I'll look into this over the weekend. Thanks.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for assembling this wonderful collection! One more suggestion, though: Since many of the books don't have cover images, you actually have to mouse over the ":-(" images on the "shelf" page to locate a particular title. It would be nice to also have a simple textual list of all the titles on your shelf, sorted in alphabetical order.

Another useful feature might be an RSS feed that gets updated when a book is added.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I counted close to ten free books by Allen B. Downey [<http://allendowney.com>].

<comment><USER23> He publishes all of his books at: <http://greenteapress.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> +1 for seeing the word free so far and every book I've gone to click on is not free. Very frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER25> Thanks for sharing this, Now this was a great link!

I want to recommend Eric S. Raymonds books for those that haven't read them.

</comment><comment><USER26> +1 for Simon Singh's _The Code Book_ as an engaging read, but it's by no means a programming book.

</comment><comment><USER27> Cool! I like this a lot.

</comment><comment><USER28> DOM Enlightenment sounds like a treasure. Cheers

</comment><comment><USER29> Spam please delete this link, misleading the books are not free

<comment><USER30> Annoying, as the entries are user submitted.

The site should be more upfront about its intent.

There are still many free (beer) texts on there.</comment></comment>


The 404 Test: Wildly Brilliant or User Suicide? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-404-test-wildly-brilliant Alternate link - http://dob.posterous.com/the-404-test-wildly-brilliant<p>Apparently the DNS may not have propagated fully. But it's quite ironic that the link is leading to a 404 for some people. <comment><USER2> A solid idea, but why not spend 5 more minutes, make the link point to a page that says "Sorry, we're still working on [feature X]. Check back soon!" and avoid looking like an amateur?

Better yet, include a form on that landing page asking how important the feature would be to the user, and get the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER3> > make the link point to a page that says "Sorry, we're still working on > [feature X]. Check back soon!" and avoid looking like an amateur?

You've officially missed the point of the article. The argument is not that _you_ look like an amateur, but that the user thinks the problem is with their computer or ISP. Since most 404's are due to user error in URI entry, web filters or cross-site link rot, this is a reasonable assumption on the part of the user, an assumption that can be readily exploited.

<comment><USER4> Maybe I've just got more tech-savvy friends than most, but I don't know anyone who assumes a 404 _when following an internal link_ is their fault. Usually they just assume that the webmaster was sloppy.

Why not use a 503 Service Unavailable? This is telling (stretching ;-)) the truth, and people _do_ assume that a 503 is temporary, because that's the explicit point of the message. And you can throw in an e-mail link, like someone suggesed, if they want to be notified when the service is "back up".

Or I suppose you could use 501 Not Implemented if you really want to be honest, but that's boring. ;-)

<comment><USER5> Why not simply be honest and tell them "Hey, we intend to introduce these features and testing few ideas. So far, 445 people have expressed their interests, including you. Thank you for your interest and time. You can enter your email below (this is optional)and we will let you know as soon as this is available. Thanks again."

Two birds in one shot :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Alternate link - <http://dob.posterous.com/the-404-test-wildly-brilliant>

Apparently the blog.dougpetkanics.com DNS may not have propagated yet. Sorry!

<comment><USER6> your site is showing 404 error too, Maybe even you are testing to to see how many people will click on the link. ;)

<comment><USER7> Now that many people have clicked on it, he wrote the story?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "But upon further thought, the 404 test is brilliant. Why? Well as the CEO aptly put it, most of the time the visitors to the site blame the 404 on their own browser, connection, or service provider anyway."

I think this is a faulty argument, since you know most users will hit refresh and realize it is your site after about 30 seconds? People are pretty familiar with this new fangled web browsing on those interwebz now...

</comment><comment><USER9> The author is making the assumption that clicking on the 404 link is correlated with interest in the feature... I'm not sure if that's always the case.

<comment><USER7> I agree it's not a perfect correlation, but there would be some, most of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this supposed to go to a 404 page?

<comment><USER11> No: <http://dob.posterous.com/the-404-test-wildly-brilliant>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really like this philosophy. Why waste precious development time early on building something no one wants?

<comment><USER9> The philosophy is a truism, but the methodology is flawed - users don't know if they need a feature until they've used it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is terrible. You could at least put up a custom page, with perhaps an email field offering to notify the user when that feature is available.

</comment><comment><USER14> Heck, with this we can completely solve "build something people want" and fill in the ever mysterious step 2 into the bargain:

1) Create a home page peppered with links (all 404s)

2) Fill in the links, prioritising by link click count, building your company into one which solely and only does Things People Want (tm).

3) Profit

</comment><comment><USER15> I read about a similar idea ( in 4hww maybe? )

Basically take out adwords ads for products you havent developed yet, see which ones get clicked, develop those products.

</comment><comment><USER16> Anybody else have a problem with the fact that visitors will blame their computer or their ISP first before the website that returned the 404 error?

My personal experience is that if users are confused about what system to blame, they blame any systems they can!

I'd guess this approach works if you have a large user base with a lot of churn. It doesn't matter if you upset a particular user because they probably wouldn't return anyways.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm sorry but there are many, many other ways to test if people are interested in something. This is a horrible idea.

Poll users, send out a newsletter and see the response, post a link to a page telling them what's coming and see how many click. If no one clicks, then no one will miss out on this new upcoming feature that all of a sudden isn't coming.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think it's almost always a bad idea to create a subconscious association between your brand and something that doesn't work properly.

Yeah, maybe the rational user will conclude that the 404 was somehow their ISP's fault (although I, for my part, tend to regard 404s as a sign that either the link or the site has aged out of existence). But convincing the user's _conscious_ mind is only part of the battle. At the subconscious level, you've just lost: The user now associates your site with brittleness and broken promises.

I think it's probably better to test with a "beta" page, or a "coming soon!" mailing list, or something other than a metaphorical brick wall.

</comment><comment><USER19> On a lot of sites, especially those with a set navigation layout (where a new link/button is more obvious) and regular user-base, users will often click on a new link/button just to see what it is and not always because they want it.

I cannot help but think this is only useful on (high-volume) sites where individual users are of low value i.e. do not pay to use service or contribute much, and for anything more sophisticated or with savvy users it would be deterimental (imagine seeing this on the stock-market web-app you pay $$$ for).

It all depends on how often you use this trick really.

</comment><comment><USER20> Lots of people only look at a feature once out of curiosity. Feature usage is a different thing. Just noticing something is there might cause me to click. Whether I would continue to use it would totally depend.

All this tracks is how many would try out a feature at least once which isn't the same as how many people actually want it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Or you could put a simple tracker on the page...I'm surprised that someone there couldn't think of a better approach to web stats than Apache error logs...

</comment><comment><USER19> "Fool me once Shame on you. Fool me twice Shame on me." --Chinese Proverb.

<comment><USER14> "Fool me once, shame on ... {404 proverb not found} shame on you. Fool me, can't get fooled again"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Any guesses as to the name of the unnamed "wildly popular web site"? :)

<comment><USER23> Twitter.

They also do these tests regularly to make sure we still need existing features.

<comment><USER24> Twitter 404s for a whole other set of reasons. But this site isn't Twitter, because it has been acquired:

> ... and it was acquired not so long ago for a figure with 9 digits

<comment><USER25> It was a joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> this seems like a really boneheaded idea considering that search engine ranking algorithms penalize broken links</comment>


Internet sleuths solve mystery of Flight Simulator's 200-storey Melbourne house - <AUTHOR> https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-08-20-internet-sleuths-solve-mystery-of-flight-simulators-200-storey-melborne-house <comment><USER2> Love how everyone is caught stealing from openstreetmaps but nobody contributes anything back.</comment>


Show HN: Traffic Generation Idea Feedback - <AUTHOR>

Hey Everyone,
To start, I'd like to say that it's my hobby to design and program websites and web applications. My ultimate objective is to make something really valuable such that it generates enough income that I can work on it full time. The problem is I usually make things that most people just don't want.
So, this time around, I thought it would be cool to propose the idea first using a landing page and judge the demand for the product based on how many emails I collect.
Please check out the following landing page I made that presents the idea in just a few slides. If you like the idea, please submit your email address to help me judge demand and to be informed if/when I release the product. Also, feel free to provide any feedback in this thread so that I may improve the idea before starting to implement it.
The idea is here:
http://www.trafomatch.com
Thanks so much everyone and I look forward to your feedback! <comment><USER2> I have a problem with your landing page. When I try to view the full text on "Monetize Your Blog" on my 11" screen, it jumps to the "Traffic Matchmaking" section. Need to be able to scroll the text, without fully changing the pages content.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would not use it because it sounds like something Google refers to as a link scheme.

[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I think there is a fine line to walk with regards to Google's concept of a link scheme.

In the case of Trafomatch, the links won't be embedded in the article with keyword-rich anchor links. There will only be a section at the bottom of the article with a link to article writer's site for more information.

The link at the bottom of the article will be approved/vouched for by the blog site owners. Furthermore, blog site owners will only select excellent articles that fit within the context of their blog to keep their user base happy and engaged.

With all this, I think Trafomatch will fall on the good side of a link scheme analysis.

Also, even if no links are provided do to a negative link scheme analysis, website owners will still get a lot of traffic from the blog reader base itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How would website owners have confidence that their article would appear on a blog with significant traffic?

<comment><AUTHOR> All blogs show their Alexa ranking which is calculated by how many unique visitors per day the blog receives combined with how many page views it gets. For example, an Alexa ranking of #1 means it's the most popular site on the Internet where an Alexa ranking of #1,000,000 might mean the blog gets about 200 unique visitors per day with about 1,000 page views.

Therefore, by looking at the Alexa ranking, you can get a really good idea as to how much traffic you'll get. The price per article will be a function of a blog's Alexa ranking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://theleanstartup.com/](http://theleanstartup.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Really like the idea, if you can get enough bloggers on board.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm going to start working on that today. I think bloggers will be very interested considering that it's a great way to monetize their blog as well as receive awesome articles to provide to their reader base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> how are you going reach the blogs?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to manually email them myself at first. The ones that decide to use it will hopefully do a blog post on it furthering the concept's reach more autonomously. Over time, as it gains traction, the site should start to promote itself.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the server costs of running Twitter? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'd be curious on the current amount of infrastructure, machines, data centers etc more than cost even.

Cost is interesting but it isn't as telling a number to me as # of servers, services etc is to me. Of course, I'd be curious to know any of it, as operating at that scale is so interesting.

My guess is it is in the 10's of millions per month for infrastructure costs, servers, network etc.</comment>


Privacy Zuckering - <AUTHOR>

""The act of creating deliberately confusing jargon and user-interfaces which trick your users into sharing more info about themselves than they really want to." (As defined by the EFF). The term "Zuckering" was suggested in an EFF article by Tim Jones on Facebook's "Evil Interfaces". It is, of course, named after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg."<p>Source: http://darkpatterns.org/privacy-zuckering/ <comment><USER2> Definitely an important dark pattern with real, significant impacts [1]

Curious though - is this personally attributable to Zuckerburg?

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000087239639044416580...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444165804578008740578200224)

<comment><AUTHOR> I doubt it. Humans hoodwinking others into giving up "the goods" (money, information, time, etc...) is older than the hills. Much like Doc Holiday, who no doubt was preceded by others who were brash with no care for their own life following a terminal diagnoses, just did it best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The term is even funnier when you know German, since Zuckering is close to the word "Zuckern" which means "to sugar" or "sugaring". So they basically give you something sweet for you to forget about your privacy. Just like the creepy stranger they are.

</comment><comment><USER4> Original EFF article: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil- interfa...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfaces)

At the last Y Combinator Startup School, this guy got a standing ovation. Is it OK to deceive and cynically manipulate people if it builds an awesome business?</comment>


No one is allowed to leave Wuhan (10M residents) until the outbreak dies out - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1219711720375103488 <comment><USER2> An update in the thread says this only applies to public officials, not to the general population.

<comment><USER3> [https://3g.163.com/news/article/F3HRMGN80001899O.html](https://3g.163.com/news/article/F3HRMGN80001899O.html)

It says, no civilians shall leave Wuhan except for a special reason.

And all buses, metro, airports, stations and remote transportations are closed for now.

<comment><USER2> Could that be a later development than the original Twitter thread?</comment></comment></comment>


Spent – Poverty Simulator (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://playspent.org <comment><USER2> Past Hacker News thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070094)

<comment><USER3> I actually got quite depressed playing the game, then reading the quite dismissive comments of 2011.

It was kind of nice to switch back to the current discussion and see it lean a bit more toward empathy for the poor.

<comment><USER4> Something I've realized here, and in other discussions I'm randomly having: I think most people just don't think things through and can't put themselves sufficiently deeply into another person's shoes.

Someone just asked me, "why do you have to register to vote? why can't I show up with a passport?" \- which sounds reasonable until you start thinking about local elections, where you need to prove that you live in a certain area, and then the need for some sort of registration becomes more obvious. (Or another refactoring of the system, at least.)

Same here - people think, "why do you _need_ a car, I certainly don't need one on the Upper East Side!" \- and for them, they don't. In rural Texas, not having one means you're very geographically bound, and effectively unemployable.

So, for some things, I don't think it's just a lack of empathy; it's just a quick knee-jerk comment on an internet forum.

<comment><USER5> A year or two back, I had an encounter with an artist. They were in some financial distress. This person blamed Uber and a company they'd rented a car from for this distress, telling a tale of woe and failed art shows. They included numbers.

I took the numbers provided and worked out what their finances looked like. Tracked income and outlays. It quickly became clear that while Uber hadn't helped their situation, the several thousand dollars they had spent on financially unsuccessful art shows had more to do with their distress.

The artist in question was blown away. They'd literally never encountered the notion of tracking their money in a meaningful sense.

What I learned from this is that what's unimaginable to me - such as the idea of budgeting being entirely foreign - is someone else's normal. I also learned that it's impossible to put myself into their shoes fully, because life experiences can easily diverge wildly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On opting out of playing the lottery:

> It may seem like a waste of money, but for people like you who have no > 401(k) or savings account, it can look like an investment in a better > future.

How is that advice helpful? A lottery ticket is not an investment in any way.

<comment><USER7> Lottery tickets are sort of interesting. Yes they are a bad deal, but they're the highest variance "investment" you can get by a long shot.

If you're very poor and stuck in a bad situation, there could 0.0% chance you ever become a millionaire through the normal mechanisms, maybe spending $1 a week on a lottery ticket raises that to 0.00000000001% and creates a bit more hope in your mind.

Again, I'd never advise anyone to buy a lottery ticket. But if it makes you hopeful, maybe it's a better treat for yourself than a chocolate bar.

<comment><USER8> Want to see something scary? [https://www.businessinsider.com/powerball-mega- millions-how-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/powerball-mega-millions-how- much-states-spend-on-lottery-tickets-2018-1)

Per capita lottery spend by state: Massachusetts @ $761/year. West Virginia @ $594/year. Georgia @ $391/year.

<comment><USER9> Is $800 a year a lot? Invested for 30 years with a 8% return it will be $100k or maybe $300/month in safe withdrawals. Im not trying to beg a question here... Really is that a lot of money? $300 isn't enough to live on but it's maybe a quarter of the poverty line? I guess that would be significant when added to social security.

Is that per capital lottery spend just total sales divided by population? The more interesting statistic would be average spend by people who buy at least a ticket a month. I'm sure the $761/month is brought down by people who buy 0-5 tickets a year.

<comment><USER10> $800 buys a lot of food, pays a lot of bills and could keep a roof over your family's head for a month or two depending on where you live.

Reminder that 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense[1].

[1] [https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses- house...](https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses-household- finances/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny, because I have no way to see what my state is. How I live, subscriptions etc. So everything comes at a surprise.

<comment><USER12> The "college loan due" really came as a shock. I had a college degree??

<comment><USER13> College degree, working a 9$ / hr job. Not saying this is impossible, but probably not the case of most college degree holders.

<comment><USER14> Maybe technically _most_ , but with an estimated 25% of collet graduates being overqualified for their jobs, the situation is all too common, especially for those outside if STEM.

[http://time.com/money/4658059/college-grads-workers- overqual...](http://time.com/money/4658059/college-grads-workers- overqualified-jobs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 75usd on a phone bill? Really? Basic plans with unlimited calls and texts, and maybe half a gig of data are about £6-8 (say 8-10USD) here (1). 75 USD should be enough for 6 months service in any other western country, easily.

The cell phone bill makes me question how realistic this "simulator" is. Are the healthcare costs realistic? Obviously in every other western country these costs would be zero (or very close to zero if you don't qualify for 100% free prescriptions in the UK at least).

Is healthcare really that bad in the US? Really? Genuinely staggering if so.

1 - [https://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/compare/sim_only_deals/](https://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/compare/sim_only_deals/)

<comment><USER16> (Canadian)

I pay $35/month for 1GB of mobile internet + unlimited phone calls/texts. Over that, I pay 47$/month for unlimited 30Mbps internet. That's ignoring taxes.

Take a look:

[https://www.planhub.ca/quebec/compare-cellphone- plan/0min.10...](https://www.planhub.ca/quebec/compare-cellphone- plan/0min.1000MB.2.1-9-2-5-8-6-7-4-10)

[https://www.planhub.ca/quebec/compare-internet- plan/search?l...](https://www.planhub.ca/quebec/compare-internet- plan/search?locality=nc&postal=nc&downloadspeed=30Mbps&uploadspeed=0Mbps&bandwidth=unlimited- data&services=&provider=all-carriers&searchinput=%20)

Remember that the province I live in is more the size of France and is covered with ice during winter. Carriers have to support the entire province and then the entire country.

See those size comparison:

[https://mapfight.appspot.com/quebec-vs-fr/quebec-france- size...](https://mapfight.appspot.com/quebec-vs-fr/quebec-france-size- comparison)

[https://mapfight.appspot.com/ca-vs-fr/canada-france-size- com...](https://mapfight.appspot.com/ca-vs-fr/canada-france-size-comparison)

<comment><USER17> I'm with freedom mobile and pay about the same in bc. But I get no service outside the cities and certain areas and my data gets slowed after 2GB I think. A lot of people I know here on telus or Rogers pay insane prices for slow capped data. A coworker of mine was freaking out recently about a $700 phone bill he got for apparently going over his data limit. There was no proof of this from telus and his phone disagreed heavily with how much they'd said he'd used.

I can't remember the exact amount but it was ridiculous more than I can use in a month unless I really try though my home WiFi let alone on a mobile.

He talked to them but In the end he still had to pay something like $150.

I'd like to say thinga like that don't happen often. But it seems like I hear stories about it fairly regularly.

Telus plans start at around $80/month

[https://www.telus.com/en/mobility/plans?linktype=nav](https://www.telus.com/en/mobility/plans?linktype=nav)

Rogers at $85 for 3GB of data

[https://www.rogers.com/consumer/wireless/smartphone- plans](https://www.rogers.com/consumer/wireless/smartphone-plans)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Eyeballing it with a spreadsheet, simulator offers $1440 in monthly income, but at least $2000 in expenses. You've got a car to pay off and insure, a kid, a pet, a heap of CC debt, and a cell phone bill triple what I pay. You're renting an apartment, but you have monthly gas and electric bills of 125 and 150. Internet fees are higher than I'm paying now. And zero access to credit to make any investments you'd need to make, or tax credits for dependent children, retirement savings, Earned Income Tax Credit, etc.

Even if you _could_ fix all that, you're still not going to make ends meet. The player is effectively bankrupt.

<comment><USER19> The "simulator" does put you in an essentially unwinnable scenario. I too, would probably go broke if all my bills occurred in one 30 day period, while I was cut off from all my credit, given thousands in debt, and left with zero savings plus a kid.

I think the creators reduce the impact of their own message by making it so far fetched. I can't relate to anyone who would put themselves in such a terrible financial position, so its just an unwinnable game.

<comment><USER20> That happens a lot more often than you may think. Sure, it's rare for all that to happen on any given month, but cyclic things will all converge eventually over a few years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This game needs in-app purchases so you can win at it faster.

<comment><USER22> How about crime? Didn't play for long, but an "pay off your credit card by thieving from someone" option adds another interesting facet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If I were only earning $1000/mo then my Affordable Care Act health insurance would be free...

<comment><USER24> With a $13k deductible...

 _edit:_ Don't get me wrong, it's better than nothing. I'm on the exchanges myself. That said, a major illness is still going to be a massive financial hit even with subsidized premiums.

<comment><USER25> At ~$1000 per month, you're either on Medicaid, stuck in the coverage gap if you live in the wrong state, or getting both premiums and deductibles subsidized so that the deductible is at least an order of magnitude lower than $13k. If you qualify for subsidies and are earning slightly more than the poverty line, the only way to get close to a $13k deductible is to deliberately avoid the plans that qualify for the most subsidies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I want real poverty simulator. Or, better, Low Income living. With adequate probabilities (like going more than 10 days without crashing your car), knowing that you have a kid upfront, etc.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't think you can call a demonstration that deliberately excludes many available options a "simulator".

If you are poor, then living alone or taking on a lease is insane. The implicit assumption that you can't move and that "the rent" is as high as it is in this demo is untrue.

So what you end up with in this demo is a race against unsustainably high costs because you arbitrarily can't remove them.

<comment><USER28> Agreed. This simulator seems to make a lot of near worst case assumptions and paint with a very broad brush.

For starters:

Lifting 20lb is not going to take a toll on your body unless your body is already beat to crap from something else.

Most people can replace a window. If you don't then you probably know someone who can. Poor people trade semi-skilled labor around as favors all the time.

You don't need to join a gym to stay in shape, especially if your job involves manual labor. You also don't need to stay in tip top physical shape, just don't let yourself get seriously out of shape.

Nobody is doing credit checks for lower end jobs or lower end housing. They care more about your criminal record or lack thereof. If your poor you're either not going to use credit or your credit will be crap. Good credit isn't going to help you dig a ditch or unload a truck so you'll get hired anyway.

The whole point of choosing housing on the rural end of the available options is to reduce the cost of living and not have someone siphon the gas out of your car. In the simulation the shopping selector reflects city prices and the crime happens anyway.

Doing laundry in a sink, tub or 5gal bucket is a perfectly fine option if your washer doesn't work. It also doesn't cost $30 to go to the laundromat. You don't just wear dirty clothes. That's what college kids who've never lived on their own and lose their laundry card do.

I get that the whole point of this game it to make a statement but it paints a picture that seriously undersells the resourcefulness of poor people. It's also very clear that the decision tree in this simulator was written using a set of assumptions about how certain problems be solved and those assumptions were either made in an ivory tower or were designed to mostly go unnoticed to those in ivory towers.

edit: Yes I have had jobs like this. I know exactly what they're like. I've been a janitor, I've worked in food-service, I've done under the table construction, I've worked for a temp agency. I've literally dug ditches and scrubbed toilets (not that bad on average, watch out for the edge cases though). If you expect me to have a lot of sympathy with people who lift 20lb in a 70deg warehouse then you will be disappointed. Yes it's a crappy job that pays poorly and I'm sure it's soul crushing but it's not the pyramid building slave labor that some people like to equate it to. The lack of advancement opportunities (advancement to better paying jobs) in some of these jobs are what I consider the primary reason that people in these jobs can't get out of poverty.

<comment><USER29> I'm curious as to whether you've ever had a job like this?

There's a difference between lifting/carrying the occasional 20lb weight, and doing that continuously for 8 hours.

I used to have 8 hour shifts at a standing only checkout - it took about a month before my back started hurting continuously. This was just a standing on concrete job, not even lifting all day.

Low end housing does do credit checks, and does increase your "deposit".

<comment><USER28> >I'm curious as to whether you've ever had a job like this?

Several. I edited my original comment to reflect this.

>I used to have 8 hour shifts at a standing only checkout - it took about a month before my back started hurting continuously. This was just a standing on concrete job, not even lifting all day.

Not imagine it being hotter, louder higher humidity, and having to bend over slightly to reach things all the time. Welcome to a dishroom.

<comment><USER29> I'm impressed you did that without back pain :)

Just to be clear though

1\. I said I got back pain just standing on concrete, without actually lifting anything

2\. People are super bad at lifting things properly, so I'm sure a reasonable number of injuries are "avoidable"

3\. I'm not saying that everything in this was realistic (there are some questionable options), just that this particular case is super plausible. After all the equivalent in tech is RSI/OOS (whatever it's called now), and that's super common even though avoiding it is way easier than avoiding back problems when your job is picking things up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I was expecting this to be interesting and was excited to play, but it's not. In fact I found it annoying. But maybe that's the point. From playing it made me thing I could get out of poverty.

"You've made your bed and now you need to sleep in it."

</comment><comment><USER31> Such deja vu! This was my life for years.

<comment><USER31> I never had health insurance though. This was pre-affordable care act. My teeth were falling out after a decade of no dental coverage. I almost died from pneumonia. For some reason, I turned out to be a socialist..

<comment><USER32> I know someone from Canada who had the exact same experience (homelessness/drugs/poverty) and is now a staunch conservative, believing that there should be no socialized insurance or provision for anyone.

His rationale is "I picked myself up with no help from the state, so why should I have to pay for others? If you're poor, it's because you're lazy". I was of the opinion that the help he received from his church is just a smaller version of socialized healthcare, but he disagreed.

<comment><USER31> I believe you, but I find it impossible to understand that point of view.. I see a person in their 50's bagging groceries or working the drive through and I think to myself, could have easily been me, different childhood interests, different opportunities, just slightly worse luck and I could have been in your position. And still might, depending on if the economy tanks or if I get brain damage from being hit by a car or something.

<comment><USER32> Me too. I guess he thinks that anyone can have the interests/luck/opportunities he can? Who knows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> One of my favorite games growing up was Jones in the Fast Lane ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_in_the_Fast_Lane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_in_the_Fast_Lane)).

<comment><USER34> mine too! I don't really know why

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Interesting to see those comments on a platform whee the avg warning and chances is way higher than what reality looks for lots of other people.

Yes this game is not realistic. Now let's talk about fairness and responsibilities of us for all others.

</comment><comment><USER36> I lost when my landlord raised rent $150. My options were pay or argue. I picked argue, I lost, $150 went away.

In reality I would have squatted and forced them to spend 6 months evicting me, giving me time to save up firsts month rent for a new place.

<comment><USER5> That's a very clever idea! In many places eviction is a drawn-out process that can be taken advantage of.

It's worth considering that that approach might be an excellent way to make it very, very difficult to get a new place. Squatting to afford rent on a new place is very much like declaring bankruptcy so you can afford a new car loan, complete with the major black mark on your credit report that makes it much more difficult to get a reasonable interest rate. This is less fanciful than it sounds, as agencies that track information about your rental history can and do exist.

Your idea is very clever. It's maybe worth thinking about if clever is the same thing as a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The "Ask a friend" social media thing is really obnoxious.

</comment><comment><USER38> Very well done. In a personal or online conversation, it takes a little while to explain how bad things can be for the poorer people and how it's a vicious circle (or like struggling in quicksand). Many people don't get this without an explanation.

A couple of suggestions:

1\. The Facebook and Twitter icons were too close to the last choice on the screens, and I ended up tapping on them when I intended to tap on the last option. This was on a phone. Please move those buttons down a bit.

2\. The site didn't work on Firefox Focus onnthe phone. But it did work on Brave. Something about Firefox Focus's blocking must've caused this. I didn't have time to figure out the issue.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm seeing like a site to purchase things for people in need. Can someone link the game, I can't find it in the website's current design.

<comment><USER40> [https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/UMDurham?code=SPENT](https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/UMDurham?code=SPENT)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Gotta say, kinda crappy. Why do I have a car? I'm wasting so much money on insurance and gas - that would never work out better than renting a shitty place closer than bussing distance. Accept the commute, even most of the middle class does it anyways so they can live in a bigger house.

And it just randomly decided to take tutoring money away even though I answer its math question correctly? Why do I have over $7000 on my CC bill? Was I living well above my means for some reason? Why do I have a kid? That was a rather poor financial planning decision...

<comment> 52-6F-62 You can opt to live closer to work and not pay as much in transportation

<comment><USER4> Which sounds great, until you lose your job and your new one is suddenly 75 miles away, or away from any public transit options.

Move closer to the new job, you say? Not everyone can drop a few grand to terminate a lease and hire a moving truck and put down a new first-month-and- security-deposit.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I was just responding to their critique of the game—not real life.

I know what poverty feels like.

<comment><USER4> Ah, sorry; I didn't realize. I think a lot of people here don't know what it's like.

<comment> 52-6F-62 No worries. It's good to see that some people empathize, especially if they don't know what it's like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Having been (relatively) poor, I've seen all these things, but not in a single month.

</comment><comment><USER43> I love that this simulator exists. super stressful

</comment><comment><USER44> One thing I noticed immediately is that this person has a lot of luxuries: 1\. Child. 2\. Pet (went to the shelter)

<comment> crooked-v Considering the mere existence of a child to be a "luxury" is fundamentally bad for society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Instead of complaining about how evil society is that it leaves them in the lurch, poor people should rather be mad at their (often poor) parents that the parents give birth to them.

<comment><USER46> This. It always baffles me why people are not shamed more for having kids when they clearly have no resources of place for them in their lives.

<comment><USER47> Birth control is expensive. Birth control often requires regular, routine access to the healthcare system. This is a problem when you're poor.

At the time of conception, nobody knows how things will turn out in their life a few years down the line. Will I still have that job that allows me to pay my bills? Will I have been bankrupted by an acute medical issue, because I lost my health insurance at a critical moment?

Having kids is a commitment. But you have to take a leap of faith. You can't just undo that commitment later, or walk away from it.

But shaming people for having kids? Have you no heart? How on earth is that going to help with anything? Is it going to make their lives better? Is it going to help the kids?

<comment><USER45> > Birth control is expensive. Birth control often requires regular, routine > access to the healthcare system. This is a problem when you're poor.

As I wrote in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18284196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18284196) Let's subsidize vasectomies so that they can ideally be gratis. They just have to be done once. No regular visits necessary.

> But shaming people for having kids? Have you no heart?

I have a very big heart. But my heart is a deeply rational one instead of an empathic one (I know, I will never become a diplomat). My big, rational heart is the reason why I became very anti-natalist.

<comment><USER24> "Sterilize the poor" is, historically, not a great road to start down.

<comment><USER48> An opt in program to improve the ability of people who don't want children to reliably control their reproductive choice is wildly different from forced sterilization.

<comment><USER24> We've got historical precedent for that, too. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization#Steri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization#Sterilization_Procedures_and_Coercion)

> Sterilization was most frequently recommended by physicians because of a > pervasive belief that Puerto Ricans and the poor were not intelligent enough > to use other forms of contraception. Physicians and hospitals alike also > implemented hospital policy to encourage sterilization, with some hospitals > refusing to admit healthy pregnant women for delivery unless they consented > to be sterilized. This has been best documented at Presbyterian Hospital, > where the unofficial policy for a time was to refuse admittance for delivery > to women who already had three living children unless she consented to > sterilization. There is additional evidence that true informed consent was > not obtained from patients before they underwent sterilization, if consent > was solicited at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is totally secure software possible? - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.infoworld.com/securityadviser/archives/2009/02/perfectly_secur.html

<comment><USER2> No, totally secure software is not possible (aside from trivial applications). However, it is possible to write software which, given our current knowledge and technology, would take all of the computing capacity of the world longer than the predicted lifetime of the earth to successfully attack.

 _DJB is a deadline-be-damned-I'm-all-about-the-security type of guy. He'd be great for security, but terrible for the overall product. It would take DJB's team (assuming he would even relax control long enough to have a team) more time to make the product than customers would be willing to wait, or it would be more expensive to build than customers could afford. Another vendor's product would steal all the market share, and no one would be left to use his now ultra-secure product._

I'm a deadline-be-damned-I'm-all-about-the-security type of guy too, but oddly enough I still have people paying to use tarsnap. (Maybe this is because I wrote tarsnap myself rather than assembling a team?)

While I hate to disagree with such a credentialed author (I mean, gosh, he's a CPA, CISSP, CEH, CHFI, TICSA, and MCSE:Security -- he must know what he's talking about, right?) I think he's getting cause and effect backwards here. Yes, there is very little secure code available; but that's not because vendors have decided that writing secure code is too hard. It's simply because their customers don't hold software companies accountable for severe product flaws.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is always going to be a security hole, even if it's human.

</comment><comment><USER4> the long answer is in the classic:

<http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html></comment>


Making $1000 in 5 days with Amazon Associates Program - <AUTHOR> http://hackernewsbooks.com/blog/making-1000-dollars-in-5-days-with-amazon-associates <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here, happy to answer any questions and get feedback!</comment>


A Midsummer Night's Term Sheet - <AUTHOR> https://alexdanco.com/2019/07/14/a-midsummer-nights-term-sheet/ <comment><AUTHOR> From a blog I discovered earlier today, I felt like the content was apt for Hacker News bringing a sort of Girardian narrative to the startup world. Saw no comments, so thought people here would like it!</comment>


Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html <comment><USER2> There's no dirty little SEO secrets!

Tagged with seo, dirty, dirtyseo, secrets, littlesecrets, little secrets, dirtylittlesecrets, dirtyseosecrets, dirtyseolittlesecrets, dirtylittle secrets, dirty littlesecrets, dirty little secrets, dirty seo, dirtyseo, seo secrets, seosecrets, secrets of seo, dirty secrets of seo.

PS. Don't forget to link companies, products and names to your own sites, and remember if you get caught putting _two_ external links in an article you get fired!

<3 Engadget, and most pro-i-cant-believe-this-is-what-was-supposed-to-replace- journalism blogging.

</comment><comment><USER3> _"I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches - informational and commercial," he said. "If you search 'cancer,' that's an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google's results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest."_

<comment><USER4> Perhaps, for predominantly commercial searches, the old 'goto.com' (which became Overture) had it right: top results should be blatantly (and honestly) paid-for.

Google could implement this by showing more paid results for commercially- motivated searches – while allowing users to dial this back down if desired. (They do this a little with the varying number of AdWords units above natural results.)

 _Pretending_ the top results are not going to the largest budget, simply because they're the result of massive investment in gray SEO rather than direct payments to Google, is in some ways the worst approach. It enriches some shady operators, and has negative externalities polluting the rest of the web.

At one point years ago someone – I think it was Yahoo – experimented with a slider atop results that let you bias your results in a more- or less- commercially-oriented direction. It might be time to try similar experiments again, with a new UI and the now-more-sophisticated searchers of today.

<comment><USER5> Google does this already - compare [flowers] with [ipad] with [ghc syntax]:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=flowers>

<http://www.google.com/search?q=ipad>

<http://www.google.com/search?q=ghc+syntax>

There used to be "More/fewer shopping results" in the left nav as well, but these seem to have been unlaunched.

<comment><USER6> That's not Google's doing, that's just representative of the adwords inventory. Obviously, there is no advertiser anywhere who's going to pay for the keyword "ghc syntax".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I work with Doug Pierce, who is mentioned in the article. If any HNers have any questions about this story, I'm happy to answer the ones I can and pass on any that I can't.

<comment><USER8> How did J.C. Penny's get singled out for the story?

<comment><USER7> Size and egregiousness, I think. There are worse offenders, and there are bigger companies that play fast and loose with SEO, but this is the biggest company to do something so black-hat.

<comment><USER9> How was it detected? Just noticing Penney seemed to be ranking awfully high in a lot of searches, or something else? (I ask because the blackhattery mentioned in the article didn't seem very noticeable in its own right.)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, just noticing it.

I actually figured out what the basic strategy was, but Doug dug up a _ton_ of data on exactly what they were buying. Some of it is kind of insidery stuff you'd want to know if you were an SEO but not if you were a typical _Times_ reader. (David Segal does a really impressive job in general of writing about this stuff in a way that's understandable to the average person. I hope he does an article about white hat SEO some time, so I can cite it when I explain SEO to my clients.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting that the New York Times seems to have done all of the footwork in finding & reporting JCPenney in order to have a ringside seat to the public hanging. There is only really a passing mention of the NYT's direct involvement... I don't have any problem with them outing an obvious example of manipulation with paid links, but I wonder if they are unsure how some will react.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious how The NYTimes got tipped off to this story before Matt Cutts and the Spam Team. Since this had been going on for month, I wonder how long The NYtimes had been investigating it. The article says, "Last week, The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com."

</comment><comment><USER12> Where is the boundary beyond which the link-building is considered black hat? I remember in the past black hat was referring mostly to deceptive tactics like invisible links, serving different page to Google and to humans for the same URL, etc.

<comment><USER13> Our quality guidelines are here: [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3)

We've talked a lot about why buying/selling links that pass PageRank violates our guidelines. The best starting point is probably this blog post: [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/informati...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information- about-buying-and-selling.html)

<comment><USER14> Blatantly off-topic, but...

Matt, you are _everywhere_. I'm amazed that you have time to actually _do work_ , let alone sleep, considering how prolific you are on blogs and forums.

It gives me the Warm Fuzzies™ to know that an actual human being is indefatigably fighting search spam 24/7. On behalf of teh interweb, thank you.

<comment><USER13> Thanks; I get to work with a wonderful/smart group of people at Google-- they're doing the really hard work. Both webspam and search quality folks are crunching on linkspam and content farms, so I hope we'll have more to talk when some of the things in the pipeline make into production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Glad to see the folks at SEOMoz getting a hat tip, albeit indirectly. This is the tool that the researcher used to discover JCP's links:

<http://www.opensiteexplorer.org>

<comment><USER16> I thought Yahoo site explorer shows more links than just 1,000?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How long until someone pays for blatant black-hat SEO on a rival's site in order to get it trashed in the google ratings? How would you be able to tell whether that's happened?

</comment><comment> mkr-hn For anyone who wants to take a look at the links heading to the site: <http://preview.tinyurl.com/jcpseo>

</comment><comment><USER18> So if JCPenney sells black hats.. shouldn't they rank #1 for black hat?

</comment><comment><USER19> This story should be more about Google's ranking code than a none story about JC Penny paying a SEO company, who did their job.

Matt_Cutts, people pay 3rd partys to "get me to the top for xx" when they deliver, you penalize then into oblivion?

<comment><USER20> Yes, Google does generally penalize that behavior, if the SEO companies cheat. Do what JC Penney apparently did -- use a load of unrelated sites to artificially boost its standing in search results -- and Google has a good reason to penalize you. Google can only stay trustworthy (and therefore relevant) if it eschews results like that.</comment></comment>


Ask PG: Would you consider making comment tree collapsable?  - <AUTHOR>

I'll be surprised if no one has asked this before. On a very popular topic, it's hard to get to a different comment branch. <comment><USER2> IF you're using chrome, install this: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr- news/mnlaodle...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr- news/mnlaodleonmmfkdhfofamacceeikgecp)

It highlights new comments and makes threads collapsible

</comment><comment><USER3> I have the chrome extension that others have mentioned already installed but I'd still like to see this as a default on the site rather than something only a few have.

For one thing I imagine it would spread out the conversations in threads better. Currently most threads have one comment with a lot of replies at the top and not much going on below it.

Is there some stated reason why there aren't currently collapsible comments?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd very much like a solution to this without a browser extension.

Even having reddit style comment tree lines would help with eye tracking. I find it difficult to just skip a thread.

</comment><comment><USER5> if you use chrome, theres an extension in the chrome store that does this, it works really well

</comment><comment><USER6> In chrome, you can use extension</comment>


Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 2: Meet Lollipuff, Goldbely, And More - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-winter-2013-batch-2/

<comment><USER2> > _Medias founder Gautam Sivakumar_

If any of the techcrunch folks are watching, you've misspelt the company name. It should be "Medisas"</comment>


Ask HN: Make money whilst travelling easily - <AUTHOR> Hi there!
I am a computer science student, and after university I would love to go travelling and see the world before I plant my feet. I would love to know of a particular service that I can provide from anywhere using a laptop. I would like it to be specific (so I can get good at it quickly as I don't have much experience), and I would like there to be enough demand (so I can make enough money to sustain my travelling). I would prefer to do small tasks so it doesn't take too long to wrap up a new delivery.
Any information to help my cause would be much appreciated. Or let me know if I'm barking up the wrong tree. <comment><USER2> I don't have answers to your question but I guess it's fairly easy to either get a remote job or work as a freelancer these days.

Depending on the country you visit / your home country it might be straight up illegal to work (visa limitations). In most countries you'll need a legal status (insurances, taxes, &c).

You can game the system and probably get away with it for a while but when you eventually will settle down and need proof of income or other documents it'll be a pain. It's not a deal breaker per say but look into these things seriously.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very good point, thanks:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Tough. You can check copy writing, teaching English online or something from UpWork/OtherFreelanceWebsites Honestly, I would suggest working and saving up (I did it twice like that) so you can enjoy your travels more. I met also people that do little local jobs here and there to sustain their travels. Some countries might not care but some are pretty strict on this being a NO-NO.

</comment><comment><USER4> Google "digital nomad" if you haven't already. You can likely find a remote tech or support job.</comment>


Why America's biggest charities are owned by pharmaceutical companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/08/15/why-americas-biggest-charities-are-owned-by-pharmaceutical-companies <comment><USER2> The pharmaceutical/medical/insurance industry has made the payment system exceedingly complex and opaque. The result is predictable - those who understand and control the system benefit at the expense of those who do not, because they are able to hide from scrutiny.

It's striking how similar this is to the financial sector.

<comment><USER3> That's kind of the point George carlin said it best:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q)

The whole educational establishment is to create an ignorant slave class.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is Facebook "Un Named App"? - <AUTHOR>

Facebook users: if you look in Settings->"Applications Settings"->"Added To Profile" you may see an application named "Un Named App".  Any idea what it is? Rumor has deleting it cuts down some tracking and speed things up. <comment><AUTHOR> Another take: <http://geekdrop.com/content/facebook-spybot-how-to-remove></comment>


Skype Launches New Wi-Fi Finder for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/17/skype-launches-new-wifi-finder-for-ios/

<comment><USER2> Am I understanding this correctly that skype is getting into the business of selling WiFi access?

If so, this is a brilliant move. Can I actually open up my router and sell some of my bandwidth? Looks like a possibility.

<http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/features/allfeatures/skype-> access/

Very smart move.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you read books? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Almost exclusively on my iPad mini. I "carry around" multiple technical references, newspapers, academic papers, the current novel I'm reading plus the next few I have lined up.

I commute most days and travel a fair amount so having access to most of the written material I'm likely to need day to day is, if not critical, at least very, very handy.

The novels I mostly get via Amazon. The rest from multiple sources.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like to read from paperback/hardcover. Never enjoyed reading from kindle/ebooks.

</comment><comment><USER4> Technical books: via paperback/hardback Any other book: Audible

</comment><comment><USER5> From the library if possible otherwise used when practical.</comment>


EMI Sues Grooveshark - <AUTHOR> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090617/another-music-startup-sued-emi-takes-grooveshark-to-court/

<comment><USER2> I've always wondered how Grooveshark got away with it. Most online media distributors like Hulu and Pandora just lock out countries like Australia and the UK. I'm amazed it lasted this long!</comment>


AI in physics: are we facing a scientific revolution? - <AUTHOR> https://www.4alltech.com/2020/07/ai-in-physics-are-we-facing-science.html <comment><USER3> Some applications in computational physics involve solving a "variational" problem, where you have some parameterized function and try to numerically find the parameters that minimize energy or error. This does not necessarily involve supervised learning from outside data as in this article -- it can be purely an optimization problem.

But neural networks are very good parametric function approximators, generally better than what traditionally gets used in physics (b-splines or whatever). So people have started to design neural networks that are well-suited as function approximators for specific physical systems.

It's fairly straightforward -- it's not an "AI" that has "knowledge" of "physics" \-- just using modern techniques and hardware to solve a numerical minimization problem. I think this will probably become pretty widespread. It won't be flashy or exciting though -- it will be boring to anyone but specialists, as the rest of machine learning ought to be.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I think this is a great use for neural networks since they are effectively high dimensional function approximators, and something like Schrondinger's equation is a PDE where the number of dimensions is the number of observables so it can get very high dimensional very fast. Classical methods don't necessarily scale that well in high dimensions (curse of dimensionality: cost is exponential in dimensions), but using neural networks does very well. This gives rise to the physics-informed neural network and deep backwards stochastic differential equation approaches which will likely be driving a lot of future HPC applications in a way that blends physical equations with neural network approaches. We recently released a library, NeuralPDE [1], which utilizes a lot of these approaches to solve what were traditionally difficult equations in an automated form. I think the future is bright for scientific machine learning!

[1] [https://neuralpde.sciml.ai/dev/](https://neuralpde.sciml.ai/dev/)

<comment><USER5> This is fascinating. ELI5: how does this work? (I'm couldn't find references on the linked site)

Let's say I supply a high-dimensional DAE, f(x', x, z) = 0, x(0) = x₀, where classical methods like quadrature are unwieldy. Does the algorithm generate n samples in the solution space by integrating n times and then fitting an NN? With different initial conditions? Or does it perform quadrature with NNs instead of polynomial basis functions?

<comment><USER4> A lot of these methods here utilize the universal differential equation framework described here: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04385](https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04385) . Specifically, the last example in this preprint describes how high dimensional parabolic PDEs can be solving using neural networks inside of a specific SDE (derivation in the supplemental). Discrete physics-informed neural networks also are a subset of this methodology.

The other subset of methods, continuous physics-informed neural networks, are described in [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002199911...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021999118307125) .

For a very basic introduction, I wrote some lecture notes on how this is done for a simple ODE with code examples: [https://mitmath.github.io/18S096SciML/lecture2/ml](https://mitmath.github.io/18S096SciML/lecture2/ml)

<comment><USER6> These methods are really interesting for high-dimensional PDE (like HJB), but there's a ton of skepticism about the applicability of NN models for solving the more common PDE that arise in physical sciences and engineering.

The tests are rarely equivalent, in that standard PDE technology can move to new domains, boundary conditions, materials, etc., without new training phases. If one needs to solve many nearby problems, there are many established techniques for leveraging that similarity. There is active research on ML to refine these techniques, but it isn't a silver bullet.

Far more exciting, IMO, is to use known methods for representing (reference- frame invariant and entropy-compatible) constitutive relations while training their form from observations of the PDE, and to do so using multiscale modeling in which a fine-scale simulation (e.g., atomistic or grain-resolving for granular/composite media) is used to train/support multiscale constitutive relations. In this approach, the PDEs are still solved by "standard" methods such as finite element or finite volume, and thus can be designed with desired accuracy and exact conservation/compatibility properties and generalize immediately to new domains/boundary conditions, but the trained constitutive models are better able to represent real materials.

A good overview paper on ML in the context of multiscale modeling: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.02619.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.02619.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Yes, and our recent work [https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04385](https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04385) gives a fairly general form for how to mix known scientific structural knowledge directly with machine learning. In fact, some of these PDE solvers are just instantiations of specific choices of universal differential equations. I agree that in many cases the "fully uninformed" physics-informed neural network won't work well, but we need to fully optimize a library with all of the training techniques possible in order to prove that, which is what we plan to do. In the end, I think PINNs will be most applicable to (1) non-local PDEs where classical methods have not fared well, so things like fractional differential equations, and (2) very high dimensional PDEs, like 100's of dimensions, but paired with constraints on the architecture to preserve physical quantities and relationships. But of course, something like a fractional differential equation is not an example for the first pages of tutorials since they are quite niche equations to solve!

<comment><USER6> You've got a lot of broken references (??) in that preprint, BTW.

I think I understand why you're putting in the learned derivative operator, but I think it's rarely desirable. Computing derivatives with compatibility properties is a well-studied domain (e.g., finite element exterior calculus), as is tensor invariance theory (e.g., Zheng 1994, though this subject is sorely in need of a modern software-centric review). When the exact theory is known and readily computable, it's hard to see science/engineering value in "learned" surrogates that merely approximate the symmetries.

More generally, it is disheartening to see trends that would conflate discretization errors with modeling errors, lest it bring back the chaos of early turbulence modeling days that prompted this 1986 Editorial Policy Statement for the Journal of Fluids Engineering. [https://jedbrown.org/files/RoacheGhiaWhite- JFEEditorialPolic...](https://jedbrown.org/files/RoacheGhiaWhite- JFEEditorialPolicyStatementControlOfNumericalAccuracy-1986.pdf)

<comment><USER4> >When the exact theory is known and readily computable, it's hard to see science/engineering value in "learned" surrogates that merely approximate the symmetries.

I completely agree, which is why the approach I am taking is to only utilize surrogates to think which are unknown or do not have an exact theory. I don't think surrogates will be more efficient than methods developed that exploit specific properties of the problem. In fact, I think the recent proof of convergence for PINNs simultaneously demonstrates this might be an issue (there was no upper bound to the proved convergence rate, but the one they could prove was low order).

>More generally, it is disheartening to see trends that would conflate discretization errors with modeling errors, lest it bring back the chaos of early turbulence modeling days that prompted this 1986 Editorial Policy Statement for the Journal of Fluids Engineering. [https://jedbrown.org/files/RoacheGhiaWhite- JFEEditorialPolic...](https://jedbrown.org/files/RoacheGhiaWhite- JFEEditorialPolic..).

Agree, this is a difficult issue with approaches that augment numerical approaches with data-driven components. There are ways to validate these trained components independent of the training data (i.e. by using other data), but validation will always be more difficult.

<comment><USER6> With enough coaxing, we can get the optimizer to converge to known methods (high-order, conservative, entropy-stable, ...), and I'm sure this tactic will lead to more papers, though they'll be kind of empty unless we're really discovering good methods that were not previously known.

I presume you meant "verify" in the last sentence.

<comment><USER4> No, what I am doing is using high order, conservative (universal DAEs), strong-stability preserving, etc. discretizations for the numerics but utilizing neural networks to represent unknown quantities to transform it into a functional inverse problem. In the discussion of the HJB equation, we mention that we solve the equation by writing down an SDE such that the solution to the functional inverse problem gives the PDE's solution, and then utilize adaptive, high order, implicit, etc. SDE integrators on the inverse problem. Essentially the idea is to utilize neural networks in conjunction with all of the classical tricks you can, making the neural network have to perform as small of a job as possible. It does not need to learn good methods if you have already designed the training problem to utilize those kinds of discretizations: you just need a methodology to differentiate through your FEM, FVM, discrete Galarkin, implicit ODE solver, Gaussian quadrature, etc. algorithms to augment the full algorithm with neural networks, which is precisely what we are building.

So I completely agree with you that throwing away classical knowledge won't go very far, which is why that's not what we're doing. We utilizing neural networks within and on top of classical methods to try and solve problems where they have not traditionally performed well, or utilizing it to cover epistemic uncertainty from model misspecification.

<comment><USER7> This looks really interesting.

I think it would be a good topic for a blog post or teaching paper that shows how to do this for very simple problems "end-to-end" (e.g. advection eqt, diffusion eq, advection-diffusion, burgers eqt., poisson eqt, etc.).

I see the appeal in showing that these can be used for very complex problems, but what I want to understand is what are the trade-offs for the most basic hyperbolic, parabolic, and elliptic one-dimensional problems. What's the accuracy? What's the order of convergence in practice? Are there tight upper bounds? (does that even matter?), what's the performance, how does the performance scale with the number of degrees of freedom, what does a good training pipeline look like, what's the cost of training, inference, etc.

There are well-understood methods that are optimal for all of the problems above. Knowing that you can apply these NN for problems without optimal methods is good, but I'd be more convinced that this is not just "NN-all-the- things hype" if I were to understand how these methods fair against problems for which optimal methods are indeed available.

<comment><USER4> No, it will not work well without the optimal method. But the method is no longer optimal if say a nonlinear term is added to these equations, so you can use the "optimal" method as a starting point and then try to nudge towards something better. Don't throw away any information that you have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm studying in the intersection of physics and data science, and I think there's a number of places where physics can benefit from ML. From my current point of view though, most of these applications lie more on the experimental/computational sides of physics rather than the theoretical side. One of the current use cases is using ML to aid in the processing and analysis of data obtained from experiments.

I would like to see more truly innovative work done on the theoretical side, but I don't think we'll see "AI" bridge the gap between QFT and GR any time soon. I think in order for something like that to happen we need a new approach, as the current approach of throwing deep learning models at it doesn't feel like the right answer.

On a more general note, the SciML organization [1] has been quite successful in helping incorporating more ML into science.

[1] [https://sciml.ai/](https://sciml.ai/)

<comment><USER9> I agree that the potential impact of ML on the theoretical side is very exciting. I think there's a lot of bridging to be done between the most advanced mathematics and the most advanced physics that could lead to new insight, but it's a hard problem for humans to tackle since we have very few people who are deeply proficient in both—although it is becoming more common. I'm thinking something like GPT-3 trained on literature in both fields could be the kind of thing we want, but like you I still doubt that a DL system is likely to come up with any real insight. I'd like to be proven wrong, though.

<comment><USER10> GPT-3 is already not too bad with basic physics:

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L5JSMZQvkBAx9MD5A/is- gpt-3-c...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L5JSMZQvkBAx9MD5A/is- gpt-3-capable-of-reasoning)

And this is without training on the specific task. It's getting scary...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am actually surprised this is not more mainstream.

20 years ago I wrote my PhD thesis in physics, using genetic algorithms and neural networks to "guess" some basic physical behaviour in particle physics.

It was difficult to find good reporters because the application was quite exotic but I felt that this is something which would be worth investigating. I quit academia afterwards and did not come back - but I am happy to see that this road is back on the radar.

<comment><USER12> I wrote my diploma thesis 10 years ago and had to do a lot of pen and paper calculations. Actually it was kind of standard stuff (Lagrangians of Standard model, calculating parametrized decay widths) At that time I really hoped I could automatize the error-prone steps of plugging in and simplifying equations but I found nothing, except for isolated steps. Maybe this is also due to the fact that the most powerful tools for manipulating symbolic expressions are closed source. Not sure how it is now but as long as these tools are not expressive enough to work "end-to-end" with SM Lagrange densities, I doubt anything innovative could be done by automatizing that with AI.

<comment><USER13> That problem of pen-and-paper calculations featuring unintended errors is what I try addressing in a project I work on [1]. My approach is to use Sympy (which has a lot of Physics support) to validate expressions entered by a human. Not quite the AI-focus of this thread, but still a machine augmenting the work of researchers. To your point about the complexity of the math, the Physics Derivation Graph is able to handle simple inference rules but there's nothing preventing more advanced use.

[1] [https://derivationmap.net/](https://derivationmap.net/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a ML group at Fermilab just outside Chicago working on ML applications in high energy physics and astrophysics.

[https://computing.fnal.gov/machine- learning/](https://computing.fnal.gov/machine-learning/)

One of the "AI" applications I remember seeing -- potentially applicable outside physics -- involved using CNNs to read a 2D graph (as in graphical plot, not G = (V,E)) in order to visually detect certain patterns/aberration. (probably many physics groups around the world are doing the same)

At first glance this sounds kind of silly and trivial -- one might say, why not just detect those patterns from the data arrays directly? Instead of from a bitmap image of a plot of the data?

Unfortunately some patterns are contextual. A trained human eye can detect them easily, while writing a foolproof mathematical algorithm is difficult: e.g. it has to pick out the pattern, apply a bunch of exclusion rules etc.

(One instance of this, for example, is an old mechanic telling you what's going on under the hood just from listening the vibrations of a car, while a traditional DSP algorithm might not be able to do it as reliably because it hasn't seen all the patterns and _contexts_ in which those sounds arise.)

This is a domain where neural networks/transfer learning really shines. It can capture "intuition" by learning the surrounding context, rather than relying on handcrafted features.

So Fermilab has an AI algorithm that looks at millions of graphs via a CNN, which replicates the work of thousands of human physicists looking for patterns. We've already seen examples of this in radiology.

<comment><USER14> Makes sense. A graph can be represented by a matrix which is what an image is.

<comment><USER15> Images and matrices are 2D data structures of numbers, but that is where the similarities end. An image is more like a vector, which matrices can be applied to. You would never matrix multiply an image onto another vector. Still, it isn't uncommon to visualize matrices as images.

<comment><USER14> Well a matrix is a collection of vectors so... I guess I somewhat agree.. You can certainly apply projections to images, I mean this is what photoshop does.

<comment><USER16> > Well a matrix is a collection of vectors so

That's like saying "a matrix is a collection of real numbers, so anything you say about one applies to the other".

> You can certainly apply projections to images, I mean this is what photoshop > does.

This doesn't seem to refer to anything in the comment you're replying to.

<comment><USER14> Would you please elaborate on your last point?

<comment><USER16> In reply to a comment that said nothing about projections, you wrote:

> You can certainly apply projections to images, I mean this is what photoshop > does.

What's the relationship of this to anything in the comment you replied to?

<comment><USER14> "You would never matrix multiply an image onto another vector."

<comment><USER16> > "You would never matrix multiply an image onto another vector."

That wasn't me. But I can still elaborate: while you can certainly consider a non-color image as a matrix, the operation of multiplying this matrix with a vector is rather meaningless.

While a lot of things can be made into or viewed as matrices, a matrix is typically only meaningful as a representation of a linear map.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > If AI is like Columbus, computing power is Santa Maria

Does that mean when AI finally arrives, it slaughters all of us?

<comment><USER18> A lot of the death was due to the introduction of new diseases, so maybe AI is to blame for Covid-19?

Also, in the similie I think humanity is supposed to be the Old world, so I'm really wondering _who_ we're supposed to find and enslave ...

<comment><USER19> Everybody thinks they're the center of the universe. Sometimes they're right, for a time. When they decide they were wrong, they tear down the old statues, if only to make the new overlords feel welcome...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am not working in AI so I only know what I read here or on other sites etc. There seems to be a lot of buzz for AI and ML. But where actually are these techs succeeding currently? I feel like there is supposed to be a revolution going on everywhere but anywhere I look, it's just plans and press releases...

<comment><USER21> Siri, Google Assistant, speech detection, speech generation, textual photo library search, similar data augmentations for web search, Google Translate, recommendation algorithms, phone cameras, server cooling optimization, phone touch screens touch detection, video game upscaling, noise reduction in web calls, file prefetching, Google Maps, OCR, etc.

AI has already won, most people just don't realize it.

<comment><USER22> Won what? Is there a competition? Humans still have jobs. Humans are still politicians, judges, CEOs, generals. They even still play chess!

All those successful forms of AI are narrow, not the AGI of science fiction (like Data, Skynet, HAL) or Ray Kurzweil predictions. AI is a tool humans use to extend human capabilities. It always has been. Maybe someday it will be something more.

<comment><USER21> Won a place in the software stack, alongside traditional software approaches, much like the GPU won, and became a second pillar of computing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> IMO not a revolution, but I can see a solid evolution. My reading of the work on embedding ML into physical models so far is that the best strategy is to take it as far as possible with the standard physics approach of abstraction and reduction, and once you exhaust that, apply ML to solve the remaining (often crucial) complex behavior.

</comment><comment><USER24> There are a lot of cool advances in AI and physics. In my particular field of condensed matter physics, a number come to mind. One is trying to automatically extract synthesis recipes from the literature. Imagine that you want to see how people have synthesized a given solid state compound. Then searching through the literature can be painful. A great collaboration from MIT/Berkeley did this using NLP. I don't know what blood oaths they signed, but they were able to obtain a huge corpus of articles. But, how to know if an article contains a synthesis recipe? They set up their internal version of Mechanical Turk and had their students label a number of articles. Then they had to find the recipes, represent them as a DAG, etc. They have now incorporated the result with the Materials project ([https://materialsproject.org/apps/synthesis/#](https://materialsproject.org/apps/synthesis/#)).

There are groups that are using graph neural networks to understand statistical mechanics and microscopy. There are also a number of groups working on trying to automate synthesis (most of it is Gaussian process based, a handful of us are trying reinforcement learning--it's painful). On the theory side, there is work speeding up simulation efforts (ex. DFT functionals) as well as determining if models and experiment agree (Eun Ah Kim rocks!).

Outside of my field, there has been a push with Lagrangian/Hamiltonian NNs that is really cool in that you get interpretability for "free" when you encode physics into the structure of the network. Back to my field, Patrick Riley (Google) has played with this in the context of encoding symmetries in a material into the structure of NNs.

There are of course challenges. In some fields, there is a huge amount of data --in others, we have relatively small data, but rich models. There are questions on what are the correct representations to use. Not to mention the usual issues of trust/interpretability. There's also a question of talent given opportunities in industry.

</comment><comment><USER25> GPT3 + replication crisis = huge volume of scientific papers produced, but nobody can know if they're accurate or not.

Landmark to watch for will be when the first GPT-generated paper gets a citation in a human-authored paper without the human realising.

</comment><comment><USER26> > For this they use so called neural graph networks (GNN). These neural > networks rely on graphs instead of layers arranged one after the other.

This affirmation shows the author has little idea about GNNs. GNNs have layers, and each layer is a graph. In order to implement the graph GNNs use the adjacency matrix to propagate information along the edges. But there are multiple layers of GNN, without multiple layers they would not be able to do multi-hop inferences.

</comment><comment><USER27> Columbus is probably not the best character to use for analogies...

"If AI is like Columbus, computing power is Santa Maria"

and intractable physics problems are like... indigenous people?

</comment><comment><USER28> As someone who has worked on ADAS software and saw a simple un-optimized ML object detector beat a custom hardware solution at both speed and accuracy, I can honestly say machine learning is amazing.

Just in this domain alone, excluding the 100 other applications of ML, and the fact that we haven't even begun optimization in earnest, I certainly believe ML will change the direction of computing. It already has: look at where investment and research dollars have gone. (not to say that trends don't happen, but when I saw the performance results I thought: sh*t, this is big.)

Add to this the rise of the qubit, and the next 50 years are going to be even crazier than the last 50.

Yes, I am a proselytizer of school of James Gleick. "Faster" was a prophecy[1].

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Faster-Acceleration-Just-About- Everyt...](https://www.amazon.com/Faster-Acceleration-Just-About- Everything/dp/067977548X)

</comment><comment><USER29> I've often thought that maybe the reason we can't get a quantized theory of gravity is that it's too complicated for human brains rather than we need a bigger accelerator. You might be able to get somewhere with a brute force type approach of almost randomly coming up with equations for a theory and then trying to see if they make any sense and predict anything interesting. I suspect a breakthrough may be like AlphaGo's move 37 where it leaves the humans saying wow what happened there? [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/move-37-or-how-ai-can- change-...](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/move-37-or-how-ai-can-change-the- world_b_58399703e4b0a79f7433b675)

</comment><comment><USER24> Shameless plug--The American Physical Society has a topical group on Data Science. Since our annual meeting was cancelled due to Covid, we've been running a free series of webinars on data science and physics: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfPG- nSsgnFeWuzgPcbKlCw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfPG- nSsgnFeWuzgPcbKlCw/videos)

If anyone is interested, we have one on data science in industry coming up: [https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/604483936035643777...](https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6044839360356437776)

</comment><comment><USER30> > If you want to read a linear function from the data in a two-dimensional > coordinate system in math lessons, you can do it in five minutes - <USER2> > quickly watch a video on YouTube.The situation is different for more complex > tasks: Physicists, for example, have been trying to combine quantum theory > and relativity theory for almost a hundred years. And if this succeeds, it > could take generations to clarify the effects, says physicist Lee Smolin .

What on Earth does that paragraph mean? Parts of the article read to me like they were generated automatically, but other parts don't.

</comment><comment><USER31> The author has no idea what he's writing about, calling it a "graphene" network, and several awkward phrasings about dark matter etc. Read the papers instead.

</comment><comment><USER32> Re: "scientific progress could be bound by Moore's law and increase so much."

Moore's law appears to be slumping lately.

Re: "This coincides with our previous experience in physics, says Cranmer: "The language of simple symbolic models describes the universe correctly."

As an approximation, yes, but that doesn't mean a "true" formula has necessarily been found.

<comment><USER21> > Moore's law appears to be slumping lately.

Not so. [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NNOqbJfcISFyMd0EsSrh...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NNOqbJfcISFyMd0EsSrhppW7PT6GCfnrVGhxhLA5PVw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think it's more of an engineering revolution. The opaqueness of (at least current) machine learning means we won't really enhance our understanding of the universe, just our ability to predict it.

Some people would argue that these things are one, I think otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not sure about if this is really science. Physical formula are derived from known physical laws in order to understand the original of the phenomenon. If theorists are allowed make up arbitrary formula of course it can fit the data with less error.

</comment><comment><USER35> The article confuses me. I was doing symbolic genetic algorithms to derive formulas back in the mid-90s so that's not new. But this seems to suggest a combined genetic algorithm/NN approach is being used. Curious to see the underlying paper.

<comment><USER36> I'm also interested to see how this is different from generalized additive models (GAMs - not GANs). It seems to be the same principle except with a genetic mutation and selection aspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What is the purpose of the neural network and how does that help generate the symbolic regression using genetic algorithms?

Are they somehow using the parameters of the ANN to seed the generic algorithms (and structure)?

</comment><comment><USER38> The site is throwing a security error for me: PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR Anybody else have the same issue? Or is the site just being hugged to death.

<comment><USER39> Do you use (willingly or not) any proxy, including an antivirus? The problem might be there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think this is pretty significant. I would have guessed this to be among the very last things to be automated.

<comment><USER41> I was expecting AI to become an indispensable part of science well before it was able to turn natural language descriptions into functional code, but: [https://mobile.twitter.com/sharifshameem/status/128410376521...](https://mobile.twitter.com/sharifshameem/status/1284103765218299904)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> TLDR: Using neural network to model physical systems as black boxes and then, later, using symbolic regression (genetic algorithm to find a formula that fits a function) on the model to make it explainable and improve its generalization capacities.

The system managed to reinvent Newton's second law and find a formula to predict the density of dark matter.

(note that symbolic regression is often said to improve explainability but that, left unchecked, it tends to produce huge unwieldy formulas full of magical constants)

</comment><comment><USER43> No, we have merely found a new and slightly better way of interpolating between (slow and properly calculated) known data points.

</comment><comment><USER44> I work in this space (intersection of science and ML) and I can say with high certainty that Betteridge's Law[0] is likely accurate.

But then again, pretty much any article that uses AI instead of ML is hogwash too. Are we crediting someone with this one?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER45> curve fitting is no science, no matter how deep the net goes, it's great for calculus, and obtain numerical models of what we already can measure, but all the correlation would require an human to verify and a theory to be synthesize post fact, especially if there's a margin of error or confidence, as generating infinite correlation would only result in finding models that are not there

this shows the effect of infinite dissecting data searching without a theory pretty well [https://xkcd.com/882/](https://xkcd.com/882/)</comment>


ArangoDB 3.3 GA: DC2DC Replication, Encrypted Backup, Server-Level Replication - <AUTHOR> https://www.arangodb.com/2017/12/arangodb-3-3-dc2dc-replication-encrypted-backup-server-level-replication/ <comment><USER2> Faster shard creation in cluster Creating collections is what all ArangoDB users do. It's one of the first steps carried out. So it should be as quick as possible.

Definitely very Interesting!

</comment><comment><USER3> Release looks cool! DC2DC opens many doors... but why the hack do you release on a Friday before Christmas?

<comment><USER4> Must hate their customer support reps. But yes the feature set looks cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Looks great!Something to try after the holidays!

</comment><comment><USER5> The much needed Enterprise level features.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool</comment>


Fentanyl: The most dangerous illegal drug in America - <AUTHOR> https://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2020/01/fentanyl-the-most-dangerous-illegal-drug-in-america.html <comment><USER2> The full report is at: [https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3100/RR3117/RAND_RR3117.pdf)</comment>


Experimental Realization of Quantum Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.1054

<comment><USER2> Could someone explain this in layman's terms? The abstract is a bit tough to follow; it appears the authors' first languages aren't English so for a non- physicist, following it is difficult.

<comment><USER3> Nothing special. The authors have implemented a machine learning algorithm using a quantum instruction set. DWave has had open-source implementations of some machine learning algorithms for a while. This is not exactly an easy feat, but it's not particularly novel.

I'm not sure how familiar with programming you are, so I'm not sure how to key this summary. That said, let it be known that anything that can be done with a classical machine can be done with a quantum machine -- just not necessarily as fast. A quantum computer has one operation (lets call it emin) which, in parallel and in nearly constant time, selects the minimum value from an array of items AND the arguments which made it the minimum. So if I want to find the minimum of f(a,b,x) = a^2 _x^4 + b^2_ x^12, I can run emin(f) and it will return [a=0, b=0, x=0, value=0]. We _could_, in a classical system, for integer values, just try all values of a, b, and x. (There are other, simpler ways, but it's just an example.) The quantum instruction set means we don't have to try each instruction one after the next. We can try them all at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of Eschaton! Paging cstross...</comment>


A Path Less Taken to the Peak of the Math World (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-path-less-taken-to-the-peak-of-the-math-world-20170627 <comment><USER2> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646280)

</comment><comment><USER3> Click-bait title. It's a pity to see this journalistic approach to math and sciences which dramatizes them.</comment>