This Story Stinks - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-story-stinks.html

<comment><USER2> "Then someone invented "reader comments" and paradise was lost".

Of course the paradise was lost for the oppressing media. Long live the internet.

"Comments from some readers, our research shows, can significantly distort what other readers think was reported in the first place"

Research would show that your lies significantly distort what readers think in the first place.

"But as they say, the genie is out of the bottle."

You would happily undo this whole internet thingie, wouldn't you?

<comment><USER3> Yeah seriously.

This guy just lauded the internet as a bastion of debate, and then in the same breath bemoaned the fact that the dirty proles get to talk back.

It's not a "debate" if other people don't get a say, it's propaganda...

<comment><USER4> He's not referring to debates as being the problem. Quite the contrary: "In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments."

Civility does not mean blindly agreeing. It means just that: acting civil.

However, what he does argue against is rudeness and insults. Essentially, not debating, but slinging mud.

"Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought."

Simply put, you can act civil even if you disagree. This does provide value. However, when that civility is removed, the results are polarizing.

If you can't see the benefits of civil debate, you are an idiot.

<comment><USER2> Your last sentence ruined it, seriously.

<comment><USER4> Actually, I want to thank you. For making my point, better than I can. Whether you are being serious, or you understood what I was trying to say, that you said what you said proves my point.

Just to be clear, I did not really mean this:

"If you can't see the benefits of civil debate, you are an idiot."

It was intended to have a tone completely different from the rest of the comment. And so, despite the rest of the comment being sound, this one sentence caused a rift.

So, I did not add it to insult. I added it to make a point, and you highlighted that point so much better than you realized.

<comment><USER3> I don't necessarily disagree with you, it's a good point well made (it also made me laugh).

That being said, if you can't handle being called an idiot on the internet, you unfortunately probably are an idiot (on the internet).

<comment><USER4> That's completely beside the point though, and not the issue at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full article:

Crude Comments and Concern: Online Incivility's Effect on Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12009/full>

</comment><comment><USER5> When I made this comment, it should be noted that most of the comments were pretty negative toward the NYT in particular.

Not paying attention to the publisher, I've gotta say that I find myself agreeing more often than not. Sometimes, comments do great- but anything above a readership in a couple hundred thousand, and suddenly it all goes to hell.

You'll get a mix of misunderstanding, people inserting their own bias, memetic derailing bullshit, and a whole lot of people who think they're experts, for whatever poor reason they found. This isn't because they're trolls, or horrible people; We all have done it. We all do it. It's being human.

But the problem is, finding the signal in all that noise is just impossible given our current means of filtering. Different outlets have tried different ways of getting people to put more thoughts behind their posts- requiring real names, Facebook accounts, hell, entire companies like Disqus have sprung up for the exact purpose of trying to foster better conversations. And while they all make a decent change, none of them even solve a quarter of the problem.

About the only solution I've ever seen, is heavy-handed moderation. But that opens you up to 'censorship' comments, as we've seen here. Personally, I can't help but feel like maybe it'd be better if real, substantive stories and opinion pieces just didn't have comments; If a person wants to respond, let them go through the effort of making their own blog post, and addressing the author with it on Twitter or in e-mail. It'd certainly lead to more productive conversation. It's partly why I wish there were more intellectually-minded Tumblr accounts, as their format for this is perfect, with reblogging.

This isn't to say comments are all bad, or that they don't serve a purpose. Just that sometimes, all this social doesn't actually produce better content.

<comment><USER6> The Reddit voting system works fine. On both Reddit and HN I usually learn more from the comments than the actual article, but I still wouldn't want comments in the New York Times.

Heavy handed censorship turns rude commenters who should be simply ignored into internet terrorists, Facebook comments dilutes the conversation by making people self consciously edit themselves and Twitter or Tumblr replies are like shouting into the wind.

Good old semi-anonymous Reddit comments still perform though, even with a user base of millions of bratty kids the best stuff usually floats to the top.

<comment><USER7> Frankly, it depends on the reddits. The quality of the comments on the bigger reddits (say, r/worldnews) is often not much above Youtube level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hacker news is a great haven for this. I don't know of any other place on the internet where such a large portion of the comments are constructive, civil, and enlightening. It really adds a ton of value to the content itself. Such a shame that most of the internet is better off just turning the comments off.

<comment><USER9> The key is the limited community. Comments are great when the community is oriented towards something. Generic type comments, just like generic type social media are useless. In extreme cases, like youtube, the comments severely degrade the quality of the site (try using a youtube comment blocker).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article could be retitled to "Why Fox News and Right Wing Talk Radio is so Effective". Injecting constant insults and rage into commentary is the secret ingredient.

<comment><USER11> "Why MSNBC and Left Wing TV Shows are so Effective"

This is not new (go look at some of the early Presidential elections - 1800 is a good start). The only real difference is that science and technology have advanced and people's understanding hasn't kept up. We now have a lot more people commenting on things with whole services built for it.

Its kissing cousin is the "Link Bait Headline". Its basically an aggressive comment used as a title naming some items or concepts people hold dear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Comments on the same site as the article are a terrible idea. It basically allows every green-ink shouty idiot to undermine what's being said, in a way that gives them huge undeserved prominence. Just because you said something _to_ the NY Times, does not mean you deserve to be published _in_ the NY Times.

The internet permits you to reply to anything - get a tumblr. If your opinions are valued, you will attract a following.

</comment><comment><USER13> The idea of constant social feedback on just about everything brought this classic short story by the late John McCarthy to mind: [http://www- formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby/robotandbaby...](http://www- formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby/robotandbaby.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> But I never read the comments on a news story ... do most people read them? That is unaddressed in the article.

<comment><USER15> I usually do, not all of them, mind you, but at least the highest ranking comments. For example that's how I found out that former Italian PM Mario Monti wasn't that much of a "success" in his home country two months ago, by reading the top online comments in an Italian newspaper. My only tangent with the Italian political life was through newspapers and magazines like The Economist, FT or NYT, and they all were painting a pretty rosy picture of his job. Sure enough, come election time he got handily defeated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fascinating results indeed. Suppose you are a competitor or have some vested interest in a specific product failing/not being well received. You could poison the comments section in the articles that report on said product, using an army of sock puppets...thereby potentially turning any article into propaganda that works for you.

<comment><USER17> But that's not what the evildoer can learn from this article. He probably has those sockpuppets already. What is new, is that he now needs to tell them to curse, use ad hominem and generally be unfriendly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another interesting thing, if you include a somewhat negative remark about something the readers care deeply about at the beginning of your article, something like "paradise was lost because of reader comments", most people will ignore the content of the article and just argue about that part. As evidenced right now here on HN.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is what happens when people don't trust newspapers (for good reason).

<comment><USER4> Pretty sure this has nothing do with with trusting newspapers and everything to do with human nature. It's easier to call someone an idiot than simply disagree with them and explain why. Couple that with the immediacy and anonymous nature of the internet, and you give a lot more lazy people the ability to offer their opinion, even if it's nothing more than mindless drivel.

People have always disagreed with newspapers. It's just that prior to the internet, the overhead to respond was much higher.

<comment><USER18> My thinking was just that the efficacy of nasty comments is probably higher when you have readers who don't trust a publication, the writers, or editors. I think a lot of people assume newspapers are politically biased, but in reality I think they are biased by their desire to appear non-biased, their goal to go easy on people to get further interviews/access with them, and also their role as the mouthpiece for corporations and entrenched government power.

<comment><USER4> > My thinking was just that the efficacy of nasty comments is probably higher > when you have readers who don't trust a publication, the writers, or > editors.

I disagree. Oh, I'm sure if you dislike the source, you are more apt to dismiss them. What I disagree with is the nature of these comments and who they are coming from.

Nasty comments are most likely coming from people who disagree with the premise presented in the article, not who is writing the article. There is also the study that shows that other comments will induce you into taking one side or another. Any comment you make can easily be just as volatile.

Point is, the epidemic has nothing to do with the source, but rather, the message. I do not have enough faith that all those nasty comments are from people who've done proper research into what reporters and newspapers strive to do.

In the end, it's easier to blame someone else for your failings at civility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So the lesson here might be to never visit 4chan's board on technology [1] and the like?

[1] <https://boards.4chan.org/g/> (NSFW)

</comment><comment><USER20> "Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought."

That would mean that, the best way to influence people is to use expletives. If it's true then there's no wonder so many people are rude on the internet - it's the best way to get your message across!

</comment><comment><USER21> The tea party uses this to great effect. At one point they had training sessions where they would encourage people to go online and post canned comments in an attempt to discredit and delegitimize their political opponents.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGB8Uuffi4M>

</comment><comment><USER22> In sites like Amazon.com, comments and reviews have a big influence on the consumers. No wonder Yelp was built on reviews.

</comment><comment><USER23> From September of 2001 to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 the New York Times treated the world with fabricated story after story about WMDs in Iraq, by way of Judith Miller, by way of dedicated liar Ahmed Chalabi, whose fairy tales the New York Times saw fit to print on its front page time and time again. I kind of like the idea that the vox populi can call them for their BS under their articles. Of course comments are still invisible until approved by a moderator.

Incidentally, Chalabi went to MIT and studied under Whitfield Diffie, of Diffie-Hellman key exchange fame.</comment>


Planet Found in Habitable Zone Around Nearest Star - <AUTHOR> https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1629/ <comment><USER3> The fun stuff is buried in footnote [4]:

> The actual suitability of this kind of planet to support water and Earth- > like life is a matter of intense but mostly theoretical debate. Major > concerns that count against the presence of life are related to the > closeness of the star. For example gravitational forces probably lock the > same side of the planet in perpetual daylight, while the other side is in > perpetual night. The planet's atmosphere might also slowly be evaporating or > have more complex chemistry than Earth's due to stronger ultraviolet and > X-ray radiation, especially during the first billion years of the star's > life. However, none of the arguments has been proven conclusively and they > are unlikely to be settled without direct observational evidence and > characterisation of the planet's atmosphere. Similar factors apply to the > planets recently found around TRAPPIST-1.

<comment><USER4> Cool so it's an "eyeball" planet? [http://nautil.us/blog/forget- earth_likewell-first-find-alien...](http://nautil.us/blog/forget- earth_likewell-first-find-aliens-on-eyeball-planets)

<comment><USER5> This is the first time I'm reading about this concept and I find it fascinating. If there was to be intelligent life on an eye ball like planet the cultural, mythological and theological aspects of having a thin habitable strip of land sandwiched between ice and fire would be captivating.

<comment><USER6> I'm imaging an age of discovery-esque expeditions to the center of the _Solar Plane_.

They'd likely have radically different definitions of poles. One hot enough to melt lead, one cold enough to freeze C02.

<comment><USER7> Check out Proxima by Stephen Baxter:

[https://www.amazon.com/Proxima-Stephen- Baxter/dp/045146771X](https://www.amazon.com/Proxima-Stephen- Baxter/dp/045146771X)

It's a Sci-fi book about life on Proxima Centauri and includes the idea you mentioned.

(Also a really good read!)

<comment><USER8> God damn it!

I have this annoying habit of impulsively buying books recommended on HN. Never been disappointed by one though. So thanks! :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, amazing result. And talk about synchronicity - just last night I watched an interesting 2015 talk about the search for planets around Alpha Centauri using the radial velocity technique: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eieBXGpNYyE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eieBXGpNYyE)

The speaker even mentioned the previous incorrect HARPS announcement, which was later found to be an artefact due to the windowing function they used - <USER2> pretty embarrassing mistake. This new finding involves a completely different period: 11.2 days instead of the previous 3.24 day signal.

Also, link to the Nature paper for the lazy: [http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/es...](http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1629/eso1629a.pdf)

<comment><USER10> If the period is 11.2 days, seems like there is a high chance that it is tidally locked to the star. If that's the case, that side is probably pretty roasting hot, the other quite cool. But maybe life near the edge is OK. Probably some interesting weather patterns there as well.

<comment><USER11> _Probably some interesting weather patterns there as well._

If by "interesting" you mean constant hurricane force convective flows going 24/7 between a scorching hell and frozen wastelands.

 _Before there was soil, or sky, or any green thing, there was only the gaping abyss of Ginnungagap. This chaos of perfect silence and darkness lay between the homeland of elemental fire, Muspelheim, and the homeland of elemental ice, Niflheim._

[http://norse-mythology.org/tales/norse-creation-myth/](http://norse- mythology.org/tales/norse-creation-myth/)

Perhaps it could be "the chaos of perfect silence," because the wind noises generated would render any unprotected human ears deaf within minutes?

<comment><USER12> Hmmm. We can generate heat and light using electricity, and we can generate electricity using windmills. Could we perhaps inhabit the dark side of a planet like this by building really sturdy windmills to harness those constant winds and then building an insulated, heated, artificially lit structure to grow plants and live in?

<comment><USER13> We can build thermal powerplants on the edge and live off the temperature gradient. Either use Seebeck effect or just steam turbines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just in time for the third book in Liu Cixin's space opera ("Remembrance of Earth's Past") to be released in english next month: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25451264-death-s- end](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25451264-death-s-end)

Previously on HN: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+cixin+...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+cixin+liu&ia=web) [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Cixin%20Liu&sort=byPopularity&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Cixin%20Liu&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER15> And recently published Proxima about settlers on a planet around Proxima Cent. [https://www.amazon.com/Proxima-Stephen- Baxter/dp/045146771X](https://www.amazon.com/Proxima-Stephen- Baxter/dp/045146771X)

<comment><USER16> Finished Ultima a couple of weeks ago, didn't know it was the second in a series. I'm looking forward to reading Proxima when I can get to it on my list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Keep in mind that at best it would take maybe 1,000 years with current technology to get there with a probe or human-supporting ship. It would be highly unpopular however as it involves exploding nuclear bombs behind the craft to get it there that fast--that and it would probably cost trillions to build the thing.

<comment><USER18> There's a $100 million effort to develop tiny spacecraft that are accelerated to 10%-20% the speed of light with ground-based lasers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot)

<comment><USER19> The craziest thing to me is that if we sent a generational spaceship there that was expected to take 1,000 years, it seems likely that better technology would allow the next generation of spaceships to get there much faster. So by the time the 1,000 year spaceship arrived, there would already be people there!

<comment><USER20> This is a known paradox, I forget what it's called though. The concept is that it's arguable that any long-term space travel is pointless because there will always be a faster ship surpassing it as the originating civilization improves its technology, and so on for that faster ship. So, it's irrational to ever launch anything...

<comment><USER21> >>This is a known paradox >>So, it's irrational to ever launch anything...

That faster ship just won't appear out of the blue.

You need to launch slower ones to get to the faster ones.

Its like the original inventor of the car opting not to build it because someday there would be a Ferrari.

<comment><USER22> Improving the speed of a 1000-year ship may only require improvements in propulsion or structure (lighter ships). There are nearby incentives to create better propulsion and structure. We do not necessarily have to launch a 1000-year ship to create a 500-year ship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How big of a space telescope would we need to see this planet in any actual detail?

One of my sci-fi fantasies is to take a photo of an extrasolar planet and see someone else's city lights. :) Of course if we could see that we could also probably detect their radio emissions, but seeing someone else's lights would somehow be cooler.

<comment><AUTHOR> The planet is about 0.05 AU from Proxima Centauri, meaning we need an angular resolution of about 1.9e-7 radians to even distinguish it from its host star. Is that realistic?

In theory, an orbiting space telescope has a diffraction-limited resolution of approximately 1.22λ/D (λ = wavelength, D = aperture size). Modern image processing techniques can improve on this somewhat, but it makes a good order- of-magnitude estimate. Anyway, this formula tells us a 4-meter telescope has a maximum angular resolution of about 1.8e-7 radians at a typical visible light wavelength of 600 nm. That would be just good enough... except that we don't actually have a 4 meter orbiting space telescope. Resolving even large features on the planet would require a much larger telescope, probably kilometers or more.

For ground based telescopes, the situation is even worse because of atmospheric effects. Despite being 10 meters in aperture, the Keck telescopes in Hawaii are limited to an angular resolution of about 2e-7 radians because of the atmosphere. However, there is reason to hope that the even larger European Extremely Large Telescope will have enough resolution (about 5e-8 radians? hard to tell from their official publications) to image Proxima b directly. [https://www.eso.org/sci/meetings/2011/VLTI2011/presentations...](https://www.eso.org/sci/meetings/2011/VLTI2011/presentations/Kissler- Patig.pdf) Again, this is still not enough to resolve surface features.

So, long story short the answer is unfortunately no at present. Maybe space- based manufacturing will let us build a big enough telescope someday?

<comment><USER24>
        The planet is about 0.05 AU from Proxima Centauri, meaning
        we need an angular resolution of about 1.9e-7 radians to
        even distinguish it from its host star. Is that realistic?

Much more than that; that's the angle for HALF-maximum brightness, but since the star's many orders of magnitude brighter than the planet, you'd need a much larger reduction than 1/2\. Unfortunately, the diffraction-limited pattern [0] has fat tails -- it's not Gaussian, the brightness is slow to drop off away from the center (polynomially slow? [1]). I understand you'd need >100 times the FWHM angle in practice, on the order of 1" for JWST for instance [2]

This is why coronagraphs will be so useful.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk#Mathematical_details](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk#Mathematical_details)

[1] a log-log graph shows the envelope is close to inverse-cubic (x^-3)

[2] [http://nexsci.caltech.edu/workshop/2016/NIRCam_Planets_and_B...](http://nexsci.caltech.edu/workshop/2016/NIRCam_Planets_and_BDs_Sagan2.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Technically, 1.22λ/D is the angle for the first dark circular ring of the Airy disc (first zero of the relevant first-order Bessel function [0]). But you are still right that the host star needs to be blocked out in some way to produce a useful image. I think NASA is working on some ways to do this, see [1].

[0] [https://oeis.org/A245461](https://oeis.org/A245461)

[1] [https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/1015/](https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/1015/)

<comment><USER24> You're exactly right; good catch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Since we're all rolling out our best fiction here, here's mine:

We'll get there animating matter by means of beaming laser instructions onto it. We _just_ need to discover how we can move atoms by simply shinning a laser onto them, a controlled pulse of different light frequencies that allows us to arrange atoms in such way that they become tiny building blocks of nano- machines, like making pizza dough: twisting, throwing, rolling, until we have the right shape. Once the first Lego pieces are ready, we use the same laser to instill the energy required to move them. These animated nano-machines will then auto-assemble and become a bigger machine until we effectively, and remotely, build and operate a full-featured robot. Said bot will send back everything we need: images, audio, chemical reads, etc. Furthermore, our bot can build more bots and eventually build the laser that can be beamed into the next planet to repeat the process and expand colonization.

<comment><USER26> Unfortunately, even laser light has too much divergence (due to intrinsic behaviour of waves) to remain one focused tight spot by the time it reaches Proxima Centauri, or even the outskirts of our solar system. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#The_light_emitted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#The_light_emitted) does say that the rate of divergence is inversely proportional to the diameter of the beam, so maybe if we make the beam really wide, it could reach Proxima Centauri without spreading too much.. I don't know how wide that would have to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> So I guess we start sending light patters to that planet and wait 8 years for a response?

<comment><USER28> I think we started a long time ago. The planet is a new find, Proxima Centauri is not. If there were anyone there capable of responding, I think we would have heard from them by now.

<comment><USER29> Assuming they'd be capable of detecting the signal. And able to interpret it. And willing to respond.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> And here's the paper describing the discovery: [http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/es...](http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1629/eso1629a.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER31> It's not only temperature, presence of water and distance to star. It's also a large variety of factors.

For instance... what is the atmospheric pressure? boiling point of water is affected by atmospheric pressure. Even if temperature is low, if atmospheric pressure is also low, water would boil at a lower temperature. In Mars for instance, water boils all the time.

Some people might say you can probably create more atmospheric pressure by terraforming the atmosphere. But not all planets can retain an atmosphere. Solar activity, planet magnetic field and gravity can affect that.

Then, gamma ray exposure. Radiation can sterilize a planet. It would be good to measure what is it like there.

</comment><comment><USER32> Its hard to draw definitive conclusions when you're speculating from a sample of one! Imagine showing a child with no knowledge of animals a snake and asking her to describe what she thinks the other animals on earth are like and the habitats they occupy. I think there'd be a risk that she'd describe a range of snakes and possibly lizards, but wouldn't be able to imagine something radically different like a whale/eagle. That's the risk we run when our only sample is the earth.

</comment><comment><USER33> Although we can't image it with current technology (JWST and Hubble both have resolution of 100 milliarcseconds) we might be able to within a few years.

IR inferometers will be able to give us some data in just a few years, and the E-ELT/TMT will also let us "image" it. The "image" won't be anything you can really look at (E-ELT has resolution one milliarcsecond) but it'll give us important data.

<comment><USER34> In the medium term a 22 GHz radio interferometer using the sun as a gravitational lens would be able to resolve 80 km diameter water clouds on Proxima b. This talk by the inventor of the concept for SETI purposes explains it pretty well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvKVe5H8pc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvKVe5H8pc)

The real trick is getting out 600 AU to the gravitational focal line for the light opposite proxima centuari and staying with ~10m of it via station keeping. The only medium term solution to get out there in under 20 years are electrostatic solar sails. See Bruce Wiegmann of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's talk from yesterday on the Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System. [http://livestream.com/viewnow/NIAC2016/videos/133764483](http://livestream.com/viewnow/NIAC2016/videos/133764483)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Another good article: [http://www.nature.com/news/earth-sized-planet-around- nearby-...](http://www.nature.com/news/earth-sized-planet-around-nearby-star- is-astronomy-dream-come-true-1.20445) via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353448).

<comment><USER24> To piggyback on this, the _Nature_ paper (which is paywalled) has a free preprint version here:

[http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/es...](http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1629/eso1629a.pdf)

(PDF)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone here have an idea of which kind of resolution [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope) will provide? I'm assuming that this little rock might not even occupy a single pixel, but I'd love to be wrong.

<comment><USER37> The JWST has an angular resolution of 0.1 arc seconds (according to a quick google search). This means a pixel at a distance of a parsec will correspond to about 0.1 astronomical units, which is about 20 times the radius of the Sun.

Of course, this doesn't mean that the telescope can't image light from a smaller planet, just that there would be no resolution to distinguish features on the planet itself. Similarly, even though lots of stars and other astronomical objects are too small to resolve, we can still see the light from them with telescopes (and our eyes).

<comment><USER38> I'd like to add a few things:

\- 1 parsec ~~ 3.26 light years.

\- pixel coverage ~ angular resolution * distance. pixel coverage ~ 0.1 * AU / (distance / 3.26 light-years)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This discovery will greatly increase interest in gigantic telescopes, to allow a closer look at the planet and its atmosphere.

</comment><comment><USER40> Would it remain in a habitable state longer than Earth?

<comment><USER41> As with everything in astronomy: it depends. Just because the star is longer- lived than the Sun doesn't mean its planets will remain habitable as long. Small stars have planets that orbit close and become tidally locked, possibly losing their water and atmosphere in tens or hundreds of millions of years. It will be a long, long time until Proxima Centauri dies – four trillion years by one estimate[1] – but its planet may be dead already.

Cheerfully, multicellular life on Earth only has somewhere between 600 and 800 million years left before the Sun gets too hot and all the carbon dioxide disappears from the atmosphere. But single-celled organisms will persist nearly another 3 billion years.[2]

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri) [2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Future_of_the_Earth.2C_the_Solar_System_and_the_Universe)

<comment><USER24>
        ...tidally locked, possibly losing their water and
        atmosphere in tens or hundreds of millions of years.

How would this happen?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is it feasible to send deep space probes to such planet? Let's say the probe is accelerated to high sub light speeds with ion thrusters. Can it reach it in some sensible time then?

<comment><USER43> Assuming the recently announced deep space travel project [1] works out and their estimates are correct (unlikely), it would take 20 years of preparation + 20 years of travel + 4 years of data transfer.

Also mentioned in [1] is that if Voyager 1 was headed for Alpha Centauri it would take 70,000 years.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/science/alpha-centauri- bre...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/science/alpha-centauri-breakthrough- starshot-yuri-milner-stephen-hawking.html)

<comment><USER44> Related question: If some other advanced civilization sent us one of these iPhone sized computers, do we have the technology to detect it before it zooms past our planet or burns up in our atmosphere?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is any article ever published on an exoplanet in without speculating that it might harbor life?

<comment><USER46> > Is any article ever published on an exoplanet in without speculating that it > might harbor life?

Fairly common, as I recall, for articles about planets that either appear to be gas giants or appear to be outside of the "habitable zone".

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What's super confusing to me is: If the planet is so much closer to its star, and the star is so much larger than ours, why does the artist's conception show the star as being so "small" (perceived size, not actual size) as viewed from the planet? Was the artist just not thinking straight that day, or am I missing something? Yes I understand it's an "artist's conception" but the question remains.

<comment><USER48> not too sure about how incorrect the artist's concept is, but we have to remember that Promixa Centauri is a red dward with about 1/10 the radius of our Sun.

<comment><USER47> Ah maybe when the article said the star is "bigger" than the Sun it meant "more massive." Which could explain the apparent contradiction, if it was more massive and smaller in radius. Of course then it would be denser than the sun, which would have to be the case for all of this to make sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Posted this story when it came out a week ago but it got no traction. [1] This is quite exciting but as far as I understand we are not quite there in terms of technology to reach it within my lifetime.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12302489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12302489)

<comment><USER50> i see, next time i would say, to use simple title to get HN attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Nick Lane's book/hypothesis really change the way I think about life on other planets. His hypothesis is basically that the chances of Eukaryotic cells emerging from bacteria (via natural selection) are so rare (it only happened once in two billion years on our planet) that we really shouldnt expect to find intelligent life on other planets - rather the life we will most likely find will be small cells like bacteria and archaea, that lack a nucleus (and never get very big). He does a much better job of explaining why, but it is interesting nonetheless.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/22/the-vital- ques...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/22/the-vital-question- nick-lane-review-secret-life)

</comment><comment><USER52> For the foreseeable future, terraforming of Mars is much more attainable than any going remote.

</comment><comment><USER53> Here is slides and video for a talk "Adaptive Optics Imaging of Extosolar Planets" from 2015.

Especially the review of history of the study of exoplanets is amusing. When only our solar system was known, everyone believed in the theory of "inner rocky planet region, outer gas giant planet region". When astronomers finally started to have instruments to actually detect planets in other solar systems in the mid-1990s, almost none of the detected exoplanets fit the theory (slides 5-8).

[http://www.pppl.gov/events/colloquium-adaptive-optics- imagin...](http://www.pppl.gov/events/colloquium-adaptive-optics-imaging- extosolar-planets)

</comment><comment><USER54> "Major concerns that count against the presence of life are related to the closeness of the star."

I think the 'major concerns' are that we don't exactly know what 'life' is, and that since we have no information about any other 'biological entities' such as ourselves anywhere else, we can't entirely assume that it's a common thing.

I suggest that if we find life out there, it will be very common. But it's not entirely plausible that this is the case.

It's an interesting statistical game, made very difficult by the fact we don't fully grasp how 'we' became in the first place. I mean, we have the gist of it, but there's so much that remains unknown.

</comment><comment><USER55> I wouldn't hold out much hope for it being particularly habitable. Without the early development of life you don't have a high oxygen atmosphere for most of a planet's history. Without oxygen no ozone. Without ozone UV light breaks up water molecules high in the atmosphere and the planet loses hydrogen on the solar wind. And then you end up like Mars.

In terms of planets to establish a colony on I'd actually look for ones a bit outside the traditional habitable zones. You'd need a bit more in terms of solar panels and heating but lacking hydrogen is a big handicap.

<comment><USER56> There's a hell of a lot that we don't know about the universe.

What if there can be life within the restrictions you suggest?

Or even more likely, what if there is something lifelike that doesn't constitute as life?

Lots of questions and possibilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Let's say the chance of Aliens visiting Earth is 1 in 1 vigintillion, then the chance of the Aliens being at similar levels of technological advancement as humans is 1 in 1 centillion...

In other words, they are so advanced that they can visit us without us knowing, unless they wanted us to know. They can wipe us out without us knowing, unless they wanted us to know.

I am so glad all these are still theoretical.

<comment><USER58> It's kinda funny that almost always when talking about other races and levels of technological development, the issue of a more highly advance race killing us is raised.

I would see it highly more probable, that if another life form has (and probably, definitely even, has) reached a state of technological development where they can travel to the stars and beyond, they would have already went through a phase in their development as a race, where they realized

'Hey, maybe it's not a good idea to kill ourselves or others, c'mon, let's work together, evolve and go further!'

I could even speculate that this is one of the requirements of making it to a level of technological and spiritual development where we can unlock the secrets of the universe in mutual assurance that we are not afraid of killing ourselves every day, and save that energy for something more constructive, like building space ships..

<comment><USER26> I simply speculate that no life in our galaxy has gotten much further than we have yet. If humanity manages to survive long enough to develop technology necessary for exploring our stellar neighbourhood, I'm still not sure we'll have completely figured out how to avoid all conflict yet.

<comment><USER59> I speculate that inter-solar-system travel is just not physically feasible on a human-like time scale. In the absolute gigantic nature of the universe, a scale beyond all human concept, we have not come across any evidence of other life forms traveling to us. I have to believe that if they are capable, they would be willing to do so, and they wouldn't do so and leave without interaction. An alien race that explores seems to suggest to me that they have curiosity and motivations. They have some element of humanity to them. And I can't believe they'd come this far just to watch billions of people die (from any cause) over the next tens of thousands of years.

I think our best hope is that one day, humanity evolves away from biological bodies. We become hardware. We can now travel as an entire society throughout space for millions or billions of years without a problem. At some point, before the heat death of the universe when we're no longer able to get the energy needed to travel (or even exist), we might come across another race that has also progressed and advanced just like us and our paths happen to intersect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Melnorme are known to hang out around that system.

</comment><comment><USER61> I read this days ago, in fact I heard about it from some YouTube conspiracy theorist just before that, saying NASA was covering it up when instead the scientific evidence just wasn't conclusive that it was actually a habitable planet if even a planet because it could have just been two stars' orbits or other rocky bodies.

</comment><comment><USER62> This planet is "Nemesis". If you are an Asimov fan, you know why. Damn he was eerily prescient about this one.

<comment><USER63> The planet in Nemesis had one major difference which may turn out to be crucial: it was not actually a planet. It was a moon. Since Proxima b is a planet, it is probably locked with one side always facing the sun. In Nemesis, Erythro was locked around the gas giant it was orbiting, but not locked around the star, allowing normal day-night cycle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Has anyone considered this planet could actually be a smaller planet with a large moon tidally locked to each other?

</comment><comment><USER65> Sorry for the , but if you took a Space Shuttle to Proxima Centauri it'd take 160,865 years.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+Proxima+Cen...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+Proxima+Centauri+in+km+%2F+28300+kph)

</comment><comment><USER66> Two submitted articles on the habitability of Proxima Centauri b: [http://www.ice.cat/personal/iribas/Proxima_b/publications.ht...](http://www.ice.cat/personal/iribas/Proxima_b/publications.html)

</comment><comment><USER67> There's too many factors to say the zone may be habitable for life.

<comment><USER68> "may" being the word that makes it true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> If the planet is tidally locked I say that may be good can you imagine an 11 day "year" but also rotating? It would be like living on the Scrambler carnival ride.

</comment><comment><USER70> That will take the New Horizons 73,796 years to fly by.

</comment><comment><USER71> Was there an error in an early version of this article? There are two comments in here saying 500ly away. Proxima is only ~4ly away.

</comment><comment><USER72> Would moon also align its orbit? In the icy eyeball it could make some interesting tides like on the football stadium.

</comment><comment><USER73> Makes me wonder for AI and robotic "life" what would be the best "habitat" for growth.

</comment><comment><USER68> Funny that there have been exoplanets found on so many stars, but our closest neighbor can still surprise us.

</comment><comment><USER74> Pod Recovered

</comment><comment><USER75> Well, sounds like it's time to spin up another Space Odyssey book. 4001 anyone?

<comment><USER76> After the _awful_ 3001? Please... No. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> well obviously we need the world smallest factory gunned there, directly towards the star, slowing down on solar sails, drifting out into the local orb-equivalent, manufacturing drones and tight-beam equipment.

</comment><comment><USER78> For some reason this really reminds me of Asimov's Nemesis book.

</comment><comment><USER79> Ye, I am at an age too many untangile zeroes that I have no nexus.

</comment><comment><USER80> We should send Matthew Mcconaughey there asap.

</comment><comment><USER81> I hope we can get off of Earth.

</comment><comment><USER82> But is everything on a cob?

</comment><comment><USER83> and maybe the life on that planet just discovered us in the process

</comment><comment><USER84> If there is oil on it, centaurian bloody dictatorship cannot be tolerated by progressive democratical forces.</comment>


Coinbase Is Exploring Cardano, BAT, Stellar Lumens, Zcash, and 0x - <AUTHOR> https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-exploring-cardano-basic-attention-token-stellar-zcash-and-0x-9e44f0eb823f <comment><USER2> BAT is cool and the ad blocker in the Brave browser works really well. I use it on ad-heavy websites which burn up my computer on other browsers (which is any news site nowadays...). I still use Chrome day to day though because of the developer tools. Hopefully the project has some success because I appreciate the ethos behind it - empower users to capture some of their value from the attention economy.

<comment> polski-g BAT is a really cool concept. They need to expand beyond Brave though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In case you were wondering how this news affected the price of these assets (as of this posting):

        ADA  +10.59%
        BAT  +20.82%
        XLM   +9.42%
        ZEC  +15.18%
        0x   +23.40%

<comment><USER4> Wonder if folks at Coinbase did or could have engaged in insider trading? And if they did, does it even fall under SEC jurisdiction or crypto currencies are in the wild West of insider trading?

<comment><USER5> > Wonder if folks at Coinbase did or could have engaged in insider trading

They'd be fools not to. Cryptocurrency trading is not regulated by SEC type entities (yet). Until it is regulated, you can get away with insider trading and even other activities like wash trading, painting the tape, pump and dump etc.

<comment><USER6> Not true, you can go to jail for that stuff today. The moment there is a derivative (like a futures contract),the CFTC has jurisdiction (and has already sent subpoenas).

<comment><USER5> > Not true, you can go to jail for that stuff today

Source? Can you point to a single person prosecuted and sent to Jail for Cryptocurrency insider trading?

<comment><USER7> I don't believe anyone has been caught yet. Coinbase was in trouble after the BCH situation though, both risking an investigation as well as hurting user and investor confidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Disclosure: I work for the Zcash Foundation.

If you're interested in learning more about how the cryptography in Zcash offers users robust financial privacy, check out the talks and slides from Zcon0: [https://z.cash.foundation//blog/zcon0-recap/](https://z.cash.foundation//blog/zcon0-recap/)

[https://zkp.science/](https://zkp.science/) is also a great resource, as is the Zcash Company's FAQ: [https://z.cash/support/faq.html#what-is-a-zero- knowledge-pro...](https://z.cash/support/faq.html#what-is-a-zero-knowledge- proof)

</comment><comment><USER9> BAT is an interesting choice. I'm a fan of Brave browser and it will be intriguing if BAT is able to pull off its mission of monetizing the internet while protecting privacy. I really hope they succeed.

</comment><comment><USER10> ZRX is the odd-ball for me -- and I was an early investor. It's a governance token and it's not even needed to use with a decentralized exchange. In fact, a lot of exchanges aren't using it for fees.

But it makes since ZRX is part of the list. Its been rumoured for a long time given Coinbase's relationship with members of the 0x team.

</comment><comment><USER11> Surprised why XRP (Ripple) is not here given that XLM (Stellar), an _almost_ similar protocol and functionality, is being considered.

<comment><USER12> It might have to do with the SEC? announcing XLM is not a security but things are not clear regarding XRP yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why not Monero?

<comment><USER14> Probably because it's more difficult to build infrastructure for. As an example, the Ledger Nano hardware wallet still isn't compatible with Monero but is with ZCash, despite XMR being older and having a much larger market cap than ZEC.

Also Gemini, another leading US exchange, added ZEC recently and Coinbase wanted to catch up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm sorry, but that reads like gibberish. I think I remember Zcash from my Keybase account, but now I'm going to associate it with these other experiments irrespective of how legitimate it might otherwise be.

</comment><comment><USER16> Good time to buy on rumors...and then sell on news..

</comment><comment><USER17> How did they decide which ones to add? :)

<comment><USER18> "In evaluating these assets for exploration, we relied as much as possible on the criteria in our published Digital Asset Framework, but found that many of the criteria required communication with external parties to fully evaluate."

[https://pro.coinbase.com/static/digital-asset- framework-2017...](https://pro.coinbase.com/static/digital-asset- framework-2017-11.pdf)

<comment><USER19> I find it interesting they added zcash but not monero

<comment><USER8> Zcash with only t-addr support is very similar to Bitcoin, on a technical level, and therefore may be easier for Coinbase's eng team to integrate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> polski-g Really would be nice to support IOTA. Every other coin suffers from transaction speeds slowing down the more popular the coin is.</comment>


The pandemic is forcing America to confront its epidemic low-wage problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/opinion/wages-coronavirus.html <comment><USER2> except the article says it's not.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Several economists and think tank representatives commented on this, but there was little content about decision makers actually considering the issue. Maybe a poor subtitle choice, but it is an opinion article after all.</comment></comment>


PETA Targets Computer Programmers With String of Bizarre Protests - <AUTHOR> http://techfaux.com/2008/06/17/peta-targets-computer-programmers-with-string-of-bizarre-protests/

<comment><USER2> Foot.in.Mouth.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a Joke.

</comment><comment><USER4> thats ridiculous ha ha!!</comment>


Application Insights in Visual Studio 2015 [2015] - <AUTHOR> http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/66489a/application-insights-in-visual-studio/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly Googling for "visual studio application insights win7 diagtrack" reveals very little.</comment>


Show HN: Hive, a beautiful new Bitcoin wallet for Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=304060.0

<comment><AUTHOR> As stated on Reddit: Please note our caveat that this version is for testing and development purposes only! Please do not move any money into it that you cannot afford to lose. With that being said, thanks in advance for your feedback. :-)

</comment><comment><USER2> mac applications that require/have one of the following will be dismissed immediately: \- comes as an installer \- needs third party library/binary (not bundled with) \- java runtime

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that, we're working on getting the VM integrated; we've had a huge blocker for a month: [https://github.com/grabhive/BitcoinKit/tree/integratedvm](https://github.com/grabhive/BitcoinKit/tree/integratedvm)</comment></comment>


Google Is Testing a New Chrome UI - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-is-testing-a-new-chrome-ui/ <comment><USER2> > The new "Refresh" design looks more closely to a user interface designed > using the rules and guides from Google's visual design language known as > "Material Design."

That's the most worrying thing about it. Material Design has serious accessibility problems (motion and color) and is full of some really bad design ideas. It encourages people to abandon aesthetic restraint. If you walk around smashing cymbals together, your data will show that you are getting people's attention, but it won't necessarily mean that it's a good idea.

<comment><USER3> I have a hard time telling which elements are clickable, and which are not, with material design. Flat buttons , of course, are similar to labels.

<comment><USER2> Using underlines for input boxes is not clear. And the animation everywhere is very disturbing. I have high sensitivity to visual motion, which is a useful thing in most other situations, but the web is becoming increasingly difficult to use.

Even worse, both Chrome and Firefox have been building Material Design style animation in to the browser rendering, and I haven't figured out if there is a way to turn it off. Even on my own sites, where I don't want any animation, the pages are rendered with unpredictable animation.

<comment><USER4> > I have high sensitivity to visual motion, which is a useful thing in most > other situations, but the web is becoming increasingly difficult to use.

Designers seem to not realize that the human brain is fantastic at doing visuals diffs. We don't need animation hints anywhere near as much as they seem to realize and in many cases will actually undermine the brain, like when the change is to slow for the brain to register it.

<comment><USER5> I think it might be more a case of that you seem to be misunderstanding that the web is there to show you ads, not information.

That web design seems explicitly designed to make your normal way of looking at things fail is not a bug. Also I bet those designers judge themselves (and get performance evaluated) based on how long people look at those sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To each their own, but I'd hate the firefox-style scrolling tabs UI suggested by the article.

1\. I don't want to be surprised to find some old tab hidden by the scroll.

2\. Id like to be able to close tabs without first scrolling to it.

3\. If I control tab past the last tab does it scroll to the first tab? Id then have to scroll back to find my latest tabs?

4\. Again, personal preference, but if I had 50 tabs open and wanted to go back to the 24th one, id rather navigate to it through a search engine or bookmarks, rather than trying to locate that particular tab.

<comment><USER2> You can see all open Firefox tabs, including titles, with a button to the right of the tabs.

You can move a tab to the right with ctrl-tab and back to the left with ctrl- shift-tab. If you go too far, just ctrl-shift-tab.

How would you go to the 24th tab in Chrome, if no title is visible? With Firefox, you can use the button to the right of the tabs to view a list of all tabs, with titles, and find your tab from there.

Another useful tool is onetab. When you have too many tabs, send them into onetab and reopen them as you need them.

[https://www.one-tab.com/](https://www.one-tab.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _" Google designers should definitely take a page out of Firefox's book and > use a side-scrolling system, which keep tab names visible."_

What? God no, that's the worst anti-pattern in tabs. Keep all tabs visible all the time. If there are too many tabs, then the user can choose to clean them up however they like (by closing some, splitting some off into another window, etc.) A scrolling window of tabs is horrible from a usability perspective. You have no concept of how many tabs are open, you have a convoluted experience to switch between tabs on different ends of the tab list, etc.

<comment><USER2> > that's the worst anti-pattern in tabs.

Worse than that is Chrome's way of animating tabs long after you close the tab. You close your tab, go back to what you're doing, and then the tab row animates to slide into a new position after an unnecessary pause. It's extremely distracting, because my brain sees the motion and interrupts my new task, thinking that there might be something happening in a different part of the screen that I should investigate.

It's a serious problem with UI animation in general that keeps getting worse.

<comment><USER8> The pause is actually a feature, the tab resizing is delayed so that the next tab's close button will be positioned under your cursor.

FWIW Firefox and Edge both do the same thing.

<comment><USER2> I'm referring to the after-close animation. To reproduce, open a Chrome window and open enough tabs to fill the top (ctrl-t), and then add a few more. Then click on a tab in the middle somewhere to select it. Close a few tabs quickly with ctrl-w.

The tabs will close quickly enough, but then there is an artificial delay before all the other tabs shift over to fill the space on the right. It only a second, but I work quickly and have usually started to move onto a new task by then. The animation breaks my concentration. It's a problem for people who are especially aware of visual motion. If there were a way to turn it off, it would be fine, but I haven't found a way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I personally find Chrome's current tab style very geometrically pleasing. I'll even admit that it was one of the reasons why I wasn't using Firefox back in the day (it did have a Chrome skin, but it couldn't replicate the animations). Why give up the iconic shape? Wouldn't flattening suffice?

</comment><comment><USER10> The images posted in that article look pretty bad. Why are they adding so much wasted space above the tabs?

The current chrome UI is quite good at exposing necessary functionality without wasting space.

<comment><USER11> That's not part of the new design.

You're probably used to seeing a maximized Chrome windows, which don't have that space.

The space is present in free-floating windows to provide space for the mouse to grab and move it around (because grabbing on a tab would split the tab out into a new window).

At least, this is how it works in Windows, and (iirc) quite a few *nix window managers. Can't say for sure; I'm currently on i3 with window decorations disabled and my floating windows don't have it (and I can drag using any part of a floating window with alt+drag). Don't know how OSX behaves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Funny. These new tabs in Chrome make me think of the tabs in Firefox before Quantum, although in Chrome they are more rectangular. This would be a mix of Firefox Quantum and pre-Firefox Quantum tabs.

I'll possibly feel like I am using an old Firefox version when running Chrome the first few times.

</comment><comment><USER13> Are they going to call it Austral-ish?

</comment><comment><USER14> Gross.</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I do a self-study math degree online? - <AUTHOR> My background is in CS and I'm currently working as an ML engineer, but I'm very eager to go back for a PhD soon.
In the mean time, I've noticed my maths isn't as strong as I'd like it to be. That aside, I've also taken a big interest into calculus.
Are there any online courses (free or non-free) that would allow me to learn mathematics either through self study, or as a MOOC? I'll gladly take undegrad level courses. I just want something structured.
I've found that even trying to really study through books things like number theory, proofs, and integration takes huuuuge time investments. I feel like this will be less so with a structured course and teacher. <comment><USER2> This channel[1] (by the sounds of it) isn't exactly what your looking for, but I feel like it's appropriate for the topic and might act as a supplement to whatever course(s) you end up taking, depending on where you are having difficulties.

He has an amazing ability to break math down into intuitive visuals which highlight the underlying nature of math, rather than being hyper focussed on a specific problem. For myself, the videos have allowed me to pick up other/adjacent math concepts significantly easier because I've developed a signficantly better understanding of what's happening "under the hood", so to speak.

Might be worth a quick look at least!

[1][https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw)

<comment><USER3> Grant Sanderson has made a lot of great contributions to Khan Academy as well, particularly in the Linear Algebra and Multivariable Calculus sections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > I've found that even trying to really study through books things like number > theory, proofs, and integration takes huuuuge time investments.

Yep, that's how to do it if you want to do it well. Practice. There's a reason why these degrees take so long. I would advise against just about any online course where you only watch videos and get the feeling that you've learned something while in reality you retain close to nothing.

</comment><comment><USER5> The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers a wide variety of mathematics courses online for self-paced study[1]. The courses range from 100 - 400 level. 100 - 300 level courses confer undergraduate course credit at UIUC, whereas 400 level courses are eligible for graduate credit. (Note that you are not enrolled as a degree-seeking student in a mathematics program, you're simply taking courses online).

You have 16 weeks from the date of registration to complete each course. The courses themselves have weekly homework, two midterms and a final. You must find an eligible proctor to complete the midterms and final in person, but otherwise you need not go anywhere. Each course costs about $1500 - 2000. The lectures for each unit are video recordings of lectures in the corresponding course onsite at UIUC. There is also a certificate you can earn, but it's primarily focused on completion of lower-level courses.[2] Your homeworks are graded (with feedback) by a lecturer or math TA at the university. There are also remote office hours available.

UIUC is probably the highest caliber mathematics program which offers something like this. It's generally difficult to find a top ~20 math university willing to support online, self-paced study for credit. The ones which do offer such a system are usually very expensive[3] or predominantly focus on lower-level courses like a simple calculus sequence.

_____________________________

1\. [https://netmath.illinois.edu](https://netmath.illinois.edu)

2\. [https://netmath.illinois.edu/academics/certificate- program](https://netmath.illinois.edu/academics/certificate-program)

3\. [https://cvn.columbia.edu/program/columbia-university- applied...](https://cvn.columbia.edu/program/columbia-university-applied- mathematics-certification-certificate)

</comment><comment><USER6> Look at UIUC and Open University, MIT's OCW, community/junior colleges can give you a big boost, there's probably a lot of other advice at /r/math, /r/LearnMath and math.stackexchange.

Some older threads:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811715)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18939913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18939913)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19071050](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19071050)

</comment><comment><USER7> I assume you're looking to do an ML PhD, so you probably don't need to learn up on number theory. Mathematics is a huge topic, so you need to condense what you're going to study down to a couple of courses. Also, ML doesn't use that much actual maths, so you don't need to know proofs, real analysis, algebra, differential equations, etc. Though doing a a decent proofs course is always helpful everywhere.

I would start with linear algebra. This post [1] links to a great course. Then you might want to do a course on multivariate calculus and a course on optimization but it's not really required. Second, I would do this [2] course on machine learning.

After these two courses, which would probably take you 3 to 4 months if you have a job, then you'll have a better idea of what math courses to take.

Final note, when I say do a course, I mean watch a lecture, take notes like you would do in a real class, go to the course website, go through the lecture notes, do the homework set associated with the lecture, and then go to the next lecture. Just watching the lecture, especially for a math lecture, especially of you're not familiar with the subject, is not as helpful.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812266) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA89DCFA6ADACE599](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA89DCFA6ADACE599)

</comment><comment><USER8> University of London does post grad maths diplomas . They are solid and somewhat structured for self study. They are also cheap .

Aside from that find yourself a tutor over Skype and crack on.

Just be sure you know what you're getting yourself into. Unless you are one of the tiny number of people that have a genuine interest in maths, be prepared to slog through things you find senseless or boring in order to get to the prize. Further, and I think this is very true: there are no shortcuts. If you can implement something like mastery learning you will be all the better for it and if you don't you may just regret it.

Finally, think really carefully about how you're going to retain the maths you learn because if you don't you can be sure that a month after your exam you won't remember a scooby.

</comment><comment><USER9> You should probably look up the undergrad math courses of the grad school you want to go to, they will have lectures notes and textbook/chapter reading recommendations so structured and you aren't going through enormous reference books. Search the textbook name on youtube, often there will be some lectures for it sometimes even by the author.

There's an ML math prep book [https://mml-book.com/](https://mml-book.com/) which is basically a crash course, and a series of lectures here for a background in math for an intro machine learning course at CMU [https://www.youtube.com/user/professorgeoff](https://www.youtube.com/user/professorgeoff) though note they aren't as long as they seem, as these were live lectures so they start late, have breaks between exercises, etc. If you've read the Elements of Statistical Learning 2e you likely know much of this already.

Personally my recommendation is go through a Wilberger course, this set of undergrad lectures is for the Stillwell book 'Mathematics and it's History' [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL55C7C83781CF4316](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL55C7C83781CF4316) it will intuitively cover differential geometry, topology, group theory, polynomials etc, to the depth of Stillwell's book and if you see something that interests you or that you forgot, then you can pursue it taking formal courses. I'd recommend his Linear Algebra course too on the same youtube channel he uses clear definitions for everything so when you get to abstract 3D vector spaces it makes sense.

Anybody with a complete shit background in math like I used to have try the Wildberger foundations playlists on the same channel watching how he writes proofs, then pick up some large book written by Knuth and start attempting the exercises as a weekly hobby, which will now be possible to do. This is also how you retain these skills by using them on a regular basis, at least for me anyway.

</comment><comment><USER10> > I feel like this will be less so with a structured course and teacher.

There is no royal road to geometry. Try this: [https://aimath.org/textbooks/approved- textbooks/](https://aimath.org/textbooks/approved-textbooks/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Not sure what you mean by online. Do you mean distance courses?

I am based in the UK, and we have the Open University. I am currently taking a Mathematics and Physics degree with them.

The content is not directly equivalent to an undergraduate degree (probably around 40% of a normal undergraduate here in the UK). But they have lectures, assignments and examinations and you get a proper degree certificate at the end.

I have friend who is Spanish and he has been taking a distance Mathematics course with a Spanish University. That again seemed to be an excellent course (he is heavily into Category Theory).

<comment><USER12> I think your quote of 40% isn't right. From elsewhere on the net:

"Former students of the OU appying for a Masters at Cambridge have a 23% chance of getting of an offer. That's a bit below average but shows it is more than possible."

The level 1 courses are less complex than first-year regular uni because they'll take anyone and they have to get them up to par. But it quickly scales up.

<comment><USER11> In my experience Level 1 and 2 courses are not a match for normal Undergrad courses, but certainly the Level 3 courses are.

At level 2 maths I covered all the core subjects (i.e. differential equations, multi-variable calculus, fourier analysis, etc.) But each of these was just a chapter in the course (approx. 2 weeks of study). Whereas in normal undergrad they would be perhaps 8-10 weeks worth of lectures each.

But level 3 were certainly really great. The Quantum Mechanics covered everything up to perturbation theory, and the Cosmology module was very comprehensive and the Pure Maths courses covered Group Theory up to Sylow Theorems and Metric Spaces.

So, certainly if someone is considering a Maths course I would recommend the OU. But the cost is way too high for what you get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > I've found that even trying to really study through books things like number > theory, proofs, and integration takes huuuuge time investments

Well yeah, it's like three years of full-time study to get to an undergraduate level. Doing that part time is going to take you a decade or so. You need to put the time in. I'm not sure there's a shortcut.

There's no 'Royal road', as they say.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Open University in the UK is still a fairly solid bet, despite not quite being what it used to be.

<comment><USER13> What's changed?

<comment><USER12> The range of choice in modules was radically cut and the cost of courses was increased considerably.

You used to be able to get a very interesting degree in maths with chosen specialisms in various pure and applied areas for about £3600. Might have been a bit more for people from outside the UK, but not massively.

There's little choice of courses now.

<comment><USER14> I did that; finished around 2015, I think. The fees went up while I was there, but I have a half-memory that it went up in steps, or maybe if you were already on it the hike wasn't so extreme.

In retrospect, paying somewhere around 3500 GBP for a masters (even if it was basically "here's the textbook, see you in nine months for the exam!") that I could do in my evenings and weekends was a bargain. I should have done more of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are quite a few posts about this on HN, including this one 11 days ago. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811715)

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://pimbook.org/](https://pimbook.org/)

<comment><USER17> The reviews on Amazon were not particularly kind - regardless, good reading if you're interested in purchasing this book: [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1727125452/ref=as_li_qf_as...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1727125452/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=mathinterpr00-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1727125452&linkId=ba980a3cac32bd38deeb15441b2f1151)</comment></comment>


Show HN: The simplest geohash implementation under the sun - <AUTHOR> https://mro.name/g/u154 <comment><AUTHOR> Meditating over Gustavo Niemeyers [http://geohash.org](http://geohash.org), I wanted a conversion service

* without being stalked after,

* headache-free self-hostable,

* no runtime dependencies at all,

* no javascript whatsoever,

* no server-side templating,

* purely functional server,

* redundant source hosting (both mainstream & indie),

so I helped myself.

Thanks for reading and I'd really appreciate feedback.</comment>


The Last of the Bluefin Tuna? - <AUTHOR> http://food.theatlantic.com/sustainability/the-last-of-the-bluefin-tuna.php <comment><USER2> All fish are being caught faster than they can reproduce. I've experienced it first hand having fished offshore for 20 years. In those 20 years, I've seen stocks decline drastically across many, many species.

Cut your fish consumption to 1/5 of your current consumption now, or you are the problem.

<comment><USER3> Farmed fish are sustainable - salmon, talapia...

Actually went to Hawaii for the first time last week caught and caught few Yellowtail and skipjack tuna of the Kona coast. They fight like hell. Ate it on the boat.

<comment><USER4> Tilapia may well be fine as they are largely fed a plant based diet.

Salmon are fed a fish based diet. The fishmeal is obtained from less desirable fish but they're still taken from the oceans. Their stocks won't be as dangerously low but eventually they will be consumed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminded me a discussion on the public radio a few months ago.

Here is an interesting fact: "Japan imports 90% of the world's blue-fin for use in sushi and other dishes" [1]

[http://www.pri.org/science/environment/ban-bluefin-tuna- trad...](http://www.pri.org/science/environment/ban-bluefin-tuna- trade1609.html)

<comment><USER6> And then exports some of that back to sushi restaurants the world over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the Monterey Bay SeaFood Watch application I have on my Iphone...

"Rating: Avoid - All populations of bluefin tuna are being caught faster than they can reproduce. Bluefin is being further depleted by ranching operations that collect small bluefin and raise them to full size to sell primarily to the sushi market"

Best alternatives are: Albacore (U.S Pacific), Bigeye, Skipjack (Troll), Yellowfin.

<comment><USER8> If you eat canned fish, try Jack Mackerel. It's cheaper and in my opinion tastes better than canned tuna or salmon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> More oceans should get their own domains.

</comment><comment><USER10> The overall ocean ecosystem seems to be perilously closer to collapse:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_w...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_wish_to_protect_our_oceans.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's too bad toro is just so god damned delicious.

<comment><USER12> Not to mention heavily fortified with nutritious mercury compounds!

<comment><USER11> It's too bad toro is just so god damned delicious.</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Rochester, NY Meetup - <AUTHOR> http://www.meetup.com/Rochester-Hackers/calendar/11365915/

<comment><AUTHOR> We meet at RIT and this will be our third meeting. There will be a presentation on GPU programming with CUDA, and pizza! (as long as it lasts ;)

I made an announcement a few months ago, but school wasn't in session yet. So, if you're in school in the area come on by! If you need a ride to RIT drop a note to either me or on the Meetup page and we'll figure something out.</comment>


Rotating 3D Cube in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://maettig.com/code/javascript/3d_dots.html <comment><USER2> <http://tlrobinson.net/misc/3d.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is another cool one: <http://maettig.com/code/javascript/divo.html>

Then a bunch more here: <http://maettig.com/code/javascript/>

<comment><USER4> <http://maettig.com/code/javascript/swirl.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Simply awesome. All powered by a single nested for loop and a bit of linear algebra.

<comment><USER5> Yeah - it's a surprisingly compact bit of code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone else get some font artifacts left on the screen in safari?

<http://uploads.mibbit.com/up/hzVcXcFN.png>

See the red dots... That's not good.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow, I got flashbacks to an early PowerPC Mac app called Rotater...

<http://casr.adelaide.edu.au/rotater/>

Egad! There's a OS X version?!? I would have thought that this app would have been passe with modern 3-D hardware, but the developer's still maintaining it...

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://maettig.com/code/javascript/asciifire.html> ASCII demo love

</comment><comment><USER9> Up and down are switched. No wait, now left and right are switched! No, now it's up and down again...! (brain explodes)

</comment><comment><USER10> Perfect? no. Awesome? yes.

</comment><comment><USER11> heh the lens seems a bit fisheyed to me in the render. but still pretty cool

[oh i get it, it's like psuedo-3D, nice]</comment>


Launch HN: AssemblyAI (YC S17) – API for customizable speech recognition - <AUTHOR> Hey HN, I'm the founder of AssemblyAI (https://www.assemblyai.com). We're building an API for customizable speech recognition. Developers and companies use our API for things like transcribing phone calls and building voice powered smart devices. Unlike current speech recognition APIs, developers can customize our API to more accurately recognize an unlimited amount of industry specific words or phrases unique to what they're building without any training required. For example, you can recognize thousands of product or person names with our API. Or you can more accurately recognize commands/phrases common or custom to your use case.
We've developed our own deep neural network speech recognition architecture, and aren't using any open source speech frameworks like Kaldi or Sphinx (just Tensorflow). Because of this, we're able to run things more affordably and pass those savings on to developers.
I used to work on projects that had speech recognition requirements before starting AssemblyAI, and saw how limiting, expensive, and hard to work with traditional speech recognition services and APIs were. We want to help developers and companies easily build products with speech recognition.
Would love feedback from the HN community on what we're building, and if you have any questions about deep learning or deep learning in production ask away! <comment><USER2> You seem to be using a slightly tweaked CTC-based architecture built in tensorflow (possibly with Baidu's warp-ctc) but marketing it as some super- secret technology you invented in-house. I don't see any performance benchmarks or WER results we can compare with other APIs, but the pricing is the same. Surely character-based approach lets you add new words without pronunciations, but that process is not as flawless as you make it seem, especially when you lack language model data for new words. Now I'm still a bit confused why somebody would use AssemblyAI over other APIs given the same price. And FYI you are not using Kaldi / Sphinx because the guys behind them did not endorse CTC and are purposefully avoiding putting it in there, though for example Kaldi's chain models are also sequence based. There was also Eesen that tried to implement CTC on top of Kaldi. Sorry if this came off too harsh, but I am a little suspicious about the novelty of the approach here.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember 10 years ago Nuance used legal threats to eliminate competition in this field, to the extent that greatly discouraged any startup speech recognition companies.

Google was able to get around it, just because they became heavier..

Did this significantly change since then?

</comment><comment><USER4> > We've developed our own deep neural network speech recognition architecture, > and aren't using any open source speech frameworks like Kaldi or Sphinx > (just Tensorflow). Because of this, we're able to run things more affordably > and pass those savings on to developers.

Kaldi and Sphinx are _far_ more efficient than any tensorflow transcription model I've ever seen.

I assume this is an oversight ?

<comment><AUTHOR> We can get pretty good throughput with our setup. But the main thing about our architecture versus others is that it makes the automatic customization we offer possible. For example it takes under 2 minutes to customize the API to be able to recognize ~10,000 custom words/phrases for whatever you're building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your pricing page contains no pricing information.

<comment><USER6> Don't you just hate that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha totally get this. We wanted to give info about how we bill (ie, per second and we don't charge for customization) but we haven't publicly disclosed our rate yet. It's pretty low (fraction of a cent per second).

<comment><USER5> I'm sure you're aware of this, but for those who aren't, your YC buddy scaleapi.com offers _human_ transcription for a fraction of a cent per second as well.

<comment><USER7> With scaleAPI, you also have a 1 day delay in getting your response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Been wanting something like this for years. I have a bunch of old speeches and radio shows I'd like to transcribe. They all have "terms of art", and noone at Google would tell me how to train their API to adapt to my use case. Too bad I missed this Beta; hope you allow more people in soon.

Can you clarify: does your API allow me to run the transcriber, pause it when I see an error, tell it what the corrected text is, then continue with that correction taken into account?

<comment><AUTHOR> The way it works right now is that you would upload one of those old speeches or radio shows to the API, and then you'd get back a transcript that includes all the "terms of art" you customized the API to be able to recognize. Right now there's no feedback loop for you to tell the API where it was wrong, but that's something we have in mind to build! We do run QA across our entire API usage though, and from that are able to improve recognition accuracy over time. We also release updates to the models that power the API every few weeks which improves recognition accuracy too.

And then we do provide confidence scores, so we can at least give you some indication when we're not confident in the automatic transcript we're returning to you.

If you want to try out the API, you can email firstname.lastname@example.com and I will look for your mail!

<comment><USER8> Thank you, I will. I also wonder, does your API take context into account? For instance, depending on WHO is talking, and WHAT they've recently talked about in the recording, one transcription may be preferable to another. People often recognize other people by the types of things they talk about, characteristic phrases, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Small issue I notice that the email links on the pricing page: they're swapped, with "Basic" having an "Enterprise Plan" subject line and vice versa

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch! Thanks!

<comment><USER9> No problem! Can't wait to try out the beta, especially the streaming audio transcription feature!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any WER benchmarks for TED, Librisvox, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now we only test against a few internal test sets. On some clean speech test sets we're at ~8% WER. That's a good idea to test against some open source datasets for reporting accuracy metrics!

<comment><USER11> Shouldn't that be before you release MVP?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe a silly question but could you use this to recognize phrases or words in a language other than English?

<comment><AUTHOR> We haven't actually tried that yet. I imagine if you customized your model with words from another language and then pronounced them with an english accent the API might be able to recognize them ok. Would be a fun experiment to try at least!

<comment><USER13> If I understand correctly, "customizing the model" essentially adds new words to the vocabulary and adjusts the language model to change the probability of some phrases, but does not require any information about pronunciation, let alone audio samples.

But isn't having just the English text really error prone, especially when you are dealing with terms of art and proper names, that might even have roots in foreign languages? E.g. some people pronounce SQL as "sequel", and the English pronunciation of French words varies between "French pronunciation with English accent" and "French orthography interpreted as English orthography". (I'm guessing your model would tend towards the latter?)

So what I'm interested in is whether you have encountered examples of this during your testing, and whether you have some way to work around it (I would try phonemic transcriptions in addition to English); or whether this is not relevant for the use-cases you are trying to cover and the convenience of just using English text trumps the accuracy loss due to just using English text.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Great question. Our system is actually able to handle transcribing "sequel" as "SQL" automatically if you were to "customize the model" for phrases like "what was my latest SQL query". It can also get words like "colonel" pronounced "kernel". In both cases, without needing the explicit pronunciation of the word. We have some customers who've uploaded thousands of proper names, for example, and we're able to transcribe all of them without needing the explicit pronunciation. This is possible because our ASR implementation is pretty different than traditional setups like Kaldi. You're right that there are some edge cases, especially with foreign words, but we're working hard on smoothing those out.

<comment><USER13> Sounds amazing! Now I'm _really_ interested how your setup can do that. Will you publish anything about it, or is this the kind of secret sauce you'd rather keep secret?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is your product compatible with medical privacy law? Could it be made to be compatible with such law?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something we are looking into!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can you separate multiple speakers in audio when you do the transcription?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the question! If you have a stereo file, from a phone call for example, we can do separate transcripts for each channel...but we haven't launched any algorithms to auto-split speakers into the API yet! Definitely something we want to offer in the future though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just FYI, the cta buttons near bottom overlap on mobile

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up on this!

<comment><USER17> Similarly menu items in the navbar become unclickable on mobile (or at the very least when emulating iphone6+ in Chrome)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time to post this! On it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any plans on a JavaScript SDK?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup! This is in the works and should be released soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Your pricing seems on par with google and ibm

</comment><comment><USER19> Great work guys. Was excited to see AssemblyAI is free for open-source projects. Looking forward to see big relevant projects hop on the train.</comment>


How to Architect a Query Compiler, Revisited [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/rompf/papers/tahboub-sigmod18.pdf <comment><USER2> It's always nice to see the papers that come out of Tiark Rompf's group. For background, here are some other great ones:

Lightweight Modular Staging: A Pragmatic Approach to Runtime Code Generation and Compiled DSLs [https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/150347/files/gpce63-rompf...](https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/150347/files/gpce63-rompf.pdf)

Collapsing Towers of Interpreters: [https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/rompf/papers/amin- popl18.pdf](https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/rompf/papers/amin-popl18.pdf)

LMS-Verify: Abstraction Without Regret for Verified Systems Programming: [http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~amin/pub/lms- verify.pdf](http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~amin/pub/lms-verify.pdf)

There's a ton more. Nada Amin's talks on the last two papers are excellent also:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuJ- cEvH_oI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuJ-cEvH_oI) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywy_eSzCLi8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywy_eSzCLi8)

Oh, and I forgot my favorite: Functional Pearl: A SQL to C Compiler in 500 Lines of Code [https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/rompf/papers/rompf- icfp15.pd...](https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/rompf/papers/rompf-icfp15.pdf)

Some really mind-blowing stuff.

<comment><USER3> Worth pointing out that "Lightweight Modular Staging: A Pragmatic Approach to Runtime Code Generation and Compiled DSLs" is also co-authored by Martin Odersky of Scala fame. Definitely looks like good stuff.

<comment><USER4> No surprise here, as Martin was my PhD advisor :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi all,

Author here, great to see our paper on the front page today. Happy to answer any questions!

Since Spark was already mentioned in the comments, you might be interesting in the parallel/follow-on work we did applying similar techniques to accelerate Spark:

"Flare: Optimizing Apache Spark for Scale-Up Architectures and Medium-Size Data" (to appear at OSDI, preprint here: [https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/rompf/papers/essertel- osdi18...](https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/rompf/papers/essertel-osdi18.pdf))

If you're running Spark in production and are interested in trying it out, please leave your contact data here: [https://flaredata.github.io](https://flaredata.github.io). We're a small team and have a long waitlist, but should have some open slots in our private beta program this Fall.

Cheers, \- Tiark

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad to see the paper specifically contrast iterator approaches ( _pull_ model) versus a "data-centric" approach ( _push_ model). This was indeed the issue I've seen with Apache Spark's RDD.

Imagine a common pipeline:

      - input data
      - process data
      - output data

Using iterators, the output logic loops over an abstract next() interface provided by the process logic, which in turn loops over another abstract next() interface provided by the input logic. Given a long enough chain of dependent processes, the CPU's cache will be obliterated.

If we were to write code in a regular programming language by hand, we would never use such an inverted model. Instead, we would directly input the data, process it, and then output it. That's exactly what the paper proposes; the authors supply a callback function at the major stages of query evaluation. They use this model in the context of writing a compiler to speed query execution.

It's worth noting that the Spark maintainers also realized that iterators have bad performance and that newer versions of Spark follow the compiler approach:

[https://databricks.com/blog/2016/05/23/apache-spark-as-a- com...](https://databricks.com/blog/2016/05/23/apache-spark-as-a-compiler- joining-a-billion-rows-per-second-on-a-laptop.html)

<comment><USER6> As someone working on exactly such a query engine, this is very interesting, thanks.

It's worth noting that Rust uses iterators extensively, yet is able to get around much of the issues with the pull model by being able to optimize and inline iteration loops.

I believe its starting point for getting good performance here is by making iterators — i.e., the std::iter::Iterator trait — a first-class trait. For example, "for v in iter" knows about how to loop over iterators, and "for v in values" sees if "values" implements the IntoIter trait to turn it into an iterator. Rust also avoids vtable lookup when the value is not a polymorphic boxed trait. Together, this means it can aggressively inline and unroll iteration loops. I'm sure they use other tricks, as well.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Helishopter - real social shopping - <AUTHOR>

I've posted a few times regarding www.helishopter.com[1] , but I wasn't prepared to really post until we fixed up a few of the styling issues. Now, there are still a lot of bugs and UI issues, but you get the idea.
Our mission is:
"To be the premier destination for shopping inspiration and product research, by providing intelligent recommendations and tapping into the advice of our users network of social connections"
Of course, it will work a lot better once people start building follower/following lists, as one of the central features is to find inspiration by looking into other peoples "shopping bags".
Another issue is that the majority of our content is Swedish (we're based in Stockholm), but we're working on it now.
As always, we're looking for as much feedback as possible, so please let me know what's good, what's bad and how we can improve.
Note: 1. Mobile-version is non-existent (yet), please ignore. <comment><USER2> I like your landing page, because it's simple and your video explain what your service do pretty well.

After viewing the video, i still have two questions unanswered: \- Does my friend i need to ask about a product need to have an account on this site ? \- Does it cost anything or it's just free (aka: what do i need to pay if i want to use your service ?)

Another thing that blocked me: on the video, your product's UI seems very simple, but after going to your blog and followed a link, i was on this page and it's seemed more complicated than on the video: [Spotify list]([http://helishopter.com/jamespember/spotify/spotifypremium12m...](http://helishopter.com/jamespember/spotify/spotifypremium12months)). For example, what are all these spotify icons ?

What i like: \- your design \- the video (really well made !) \- how your explain what your product do

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind feedback kurt :) I'll answer some questions below.

1\. It will always be free.

2\. You can send Suggestions or Questions to users without an account. You just use their email. However, that functionality is a lot easier if you both have accounts on the platform.

3\. Yes, the video was made some time ago, before we updated our UI, so the functionality appears a little differently. We're working on a new video as we speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another web made with bootstrap. I've realized you're using jQuery 1.6.2 ¿why? we're already in jQuery 1.9

I actually love the idea but I think it's reaaaaally difficult to make it work because you require a lot of people to make it useful.

By the way, the video is fantastic, how have you done it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey man. The answer is that at this point we will get a whole lot of new bugs pop up if we drop in a new version of jq. It will be done at some point when the timing is right!

Regarding the film, it was done by simplestoryvideos and I highly recommend them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I opened the homepage, at the bottom I could see some options and on the top of them it was written, you are using "Helishopter Lite", to enable full version click here... something like that, I clicked but nothing happened, then I refreshed the page, and the bottom part was not visible anymore, I think the issue was both mobile and web version got loaded at once.

The transitions on this page <http://helishopter.com/s/*/fashion> where the options to save it buy it and send it appears are not so smooth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey.

Firstly, we don't currently have a mobile version of the app yet (it is a web app, not a website). It's coming soon though.

Helishopter Lite will appear if you don't have Javascript enabled - can you check that? Thanks!

<comment><USER4> I never turned off my javascript. It was that I was able to see the both versions on one page and once I reloaded it was fine, probably the javascripts didnt load or broke somehwere as far as my understanding is.

and btw when you ll be launching the app? I am seeing it is still in beta

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm weird - I'll look into it now, but thanks.

Probably still a month or two off - just working on fixing up all the bugs & styling issues that we have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It does kinda feel weird that <http://helishopter.se> doesn't work when the application is in Swedish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep - we know. We're working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry but it seems to be an inferior version of sites like, thefancy.com, svpply.com, nuji.com, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback Julian. In fact, we feel we're quite different to sites like that. Those websites concentrate on "curated collections" and "inspiration feeds", whilst we are trying to build a destination site for all online shopping. Of course the site is still in it's infancy and is nowhere near complete, but you get the idea!</comment></comment>