Hacker News Reader

espeedon Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure

IP theft, copycat tech, and forced technology transfer [1] (US corps giving their IP to gain access to the market).

[1] https://econofact.org/what-is-the-problem-of-forced-technolo...

espeedon NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

In a nutshell, Elizabeth Hansen's Harvard research group got it right...

"Internet platform economics were going to swamp the majority of publishers no matter what—there is (almost) no market for their products any more; not because they couldn’t make one, but because that’s not how internet economics work."

https://twitter.com/ehansen02/status/1138077051934707714

espeedon How Did WeWork’s Adam Neumann Build a $47B Company?

Valuation inflation / delusion only really matters if you’re the last one left holding the bag

Not if you're positioned as too-big-to-fail [1] and can force a government bailout.

[1] https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/wework-strategy-t...

espeedon How Did WeWork’s Adam Neumann Build a $47B Company?

The CBINSIGHTS research report (WeWork strategy teardown) is an interesting read...

"WeWork’s $47 Billion Dream: The Lavishly Funded Startup That Could Disrupt Commercial Real Estate"

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/wework-strategy-t...

espeedon As Tech Goliaths Face a Reckoning, Small Businesses Say They Finally Feel Heard

It is if you open it incognito from a SERP.

Re: "how do they detect it?" -- without investigating it, I would suspect browser fingerprinting within a window time slice.

espeedon SoftBank could bring down the house?

Yes. One incident and a house of cards comes falling down. Too big to fail is one thing. Setting it up to fail is another. How did we get inflated valuations during the housing bubble. Fraudulent comps.

espeedon Google Cloud Is Down

What was the quickstart guide?

espeedon The Collapsing Crime Rates of the ’90s Might Have Been Driven by Cellphones

"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of." - Justice Ginsburg (July 7, 2009)

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.htm...

espeedon Advanced Data Structures (2017)

All time. Everyday. You'll know you understand it when you can build it, when you can see its structure.

"Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around." -- Guy Steele

"The Representation Principle: Once a problem is described using an appropriate representation, the problem is almost solved." -- P. H. Winston

"Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won't usually need your [code]; it'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks

"I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." -- Linus Torvalds

"Rule 5: Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming." -- Rob Pike

"What are tensors? The facts of the universe." -- Lillian Lieber

espeedon News Websites Are Dumpster Fires

That's not what this is. Market forces will sort this mess out. There are external initiatives under way, but it will take time to transition. Until that happens, something has to be done to keep them afloat if they are meant to survive. Look at it this way, the news industry has been turned upside down since the Internet came to be. It's been like a polar shift. Now people go to Google to search for news, and the old-media models don't survive because the old revenue flows right through. Google benefits from keeping them alive -- sure it could do nothing and let them die, but that would be like killing the host -- an environmental disaster and PR catastrophe -- if all the sources went away there would be no more news for people to google. And no one wins in that scenario.

Unless humanity is certain that's what it wants to happen, it's probably prudent to save this potentially critical leg from decay. Google has the means and if it's in everyone's interest for the greater good, this is a way to keep one of its leg from falling off until market forces have time to sort the mess out, something new emerges, and everyone has time to transition. In the old days, the government would supply the subsidy to buy the time to transition, but now market forces have aligned. Private industry has evolved and has the means -- it's willing and able. Maybe this is how a healthy, well-functioning system is supposed to work. Maybe this is a glimpse of capitalism at its finest. Maybe it's progress, maybe it's not.

Who knows how this will play out? It's uncharted territory. A new chapter in the American experiment. Whatever happens, we will see.

espeedon News Websites Are Dumpster Fires

And thus the Google News Initiative, its journalism outreach program and $300M Digital News Fund [1], which launched last year...

* Gooole News Initiative https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com

* Google Digital News Fund https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/dnifund/

* Google News Lab (2017) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...

* Subscribe with Google (2018) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...

* The Google News Initiative, One Year In (2019) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...

[1] "Google announces a $300M ‘Google News Initiative’ (though this isn’t about giving out grants directly to newsrooms, like it does in Europe)" https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/google-announces-a-300m-go...

espeedon Penrose: Create diagrams by typing mathematical notation in plain text

This is one of the projects out of Jonathan Aldrich's (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/) group at CMU ...

"The Penrose team is based at Carnegie Mellon University, comprising Katherine Ye, Nimo Ni, Dor Ma'ayan, Max Krieger, Rain Du, Josh Sunshine, Jonathan Aldrich, and Keenan Crane. (Emeritus: Jenna Wise and Lily Shellhammer.)"

http://www.penrose.ink

espeedon Lambda Twist: An Accurate Fast Robust-Perspective Three-Point Solver [pdf]

Last night I tracked down a copy to one of the seminal papers:

The Perspective View of Three Points – Wolfe (1991) [pdf] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20026626

espeedon Ask HN: What should a seed stage startup do to attract engineers?

Engineers to do what?

espeedon Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

WhatsApp is Signal under the hood. And as I recall, Moxie helped them set it up.

espeedon What is GraphBLAS?

Hi Michel - You're working on a GraphBLAS Postgres implementation [0] -- here's an open question I've been pondering...

[0] Postgres GraphBLAS https://github.com/michelp/pggraphblas

Now that we have SOTA linear algebra models for graphs [1], logic [2] and the lambda calculus [3] that are being optimized for vectorized parallel compute on modern CPU/GPU/TPUs -- do we have the makings for a unified linear algebra model that obsoletes the relational algebra model in relational DBs?

[1] Graph Algorithms in the Language of Linear Algebra (2011) https://epubs.siam.org/doi/book/10.1137/1.9780898719918

Mathematical Foundations of the GraphBLAS (2016) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.05790.pdf

[2] A Linear Algebraic Approach to Datalog Evaluation (2017) [pdf] https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00139

A Linear Algebraic Approach to Logic Programming (2018) https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/faculty-of...

[3] Lineal: A linear-algebraic Lambda-calculus (2017) https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0612199.pdf

The Vectorial λ-Calculus (2017) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.1138.pdf

Simple λΠ-interpreter for matrix computation (2017) http://cs242.stanford.edu/assets/projects/2017/nykh.pdf

Algebra and the Lambda Calculus https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/lambda.txt

espeedon What is GraphBLAS?

Also see Prof Tim Davis recent interview with the ACM: https://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2019/tim-davis

espeedon What is GraphBLAS?

Has anyone tried to compile GraphBLAS via emscripten [1] and have it running on wasm [2]?

[1] https://emscripten.org

[2] https://webassembly.org

espeedon Manipulating the YouTube Algorithm [video]

This one is on Twitter, and in it he also talks with NATO, who contacted him after he posted the first video and sent him a NATO report on platform manipulation. See...

Robotrolling https://www.stratcomcoe.org/robotrolling-20183

espeedon Manipulating the YouTube Algorithm [video]

YouTube uses multiple algos and signals, and yet spam still gets through. In some ways social media spamming techniques are reminiscent of the early days of the Web -- when the Web was overrun with "SEO" spam from junk sites attempting to manipulate the Google algo in the late 90s / early 00s. Google eventually solved the problem of Web and Gmail spam for the most part, but social media spam is a somewhat different beast.

HN has been having to deal with the in-authenticity problem too, maybe even moreso as of late. Solving it may require a concerted effort from all of us -- a vigilant watch by those who can see through -- those who not only take the time to flag inauthentic activity as they see it, but also educate others by calling it out and pulling back the curtain in a way that reveals its nature so more may become aware and learn to see it too. Discernment is a skill that can be learned when we are cognizant and vigilant and conscientious about paying attention.

espeedon Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

Beta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war

espeedon MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

Everyone in the West knows MIT. That's a clue the Reuters headline target audience is in the East.

espeedon The Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination

Blue and Green for the Web in 1999!

https://www.nngroup.com/books/designing-web-usability/

espeedon Google's Work with China Eroding US Military Advantage, Dunford Says

Notice any pattern in the writing style and sentence structure?

espeedon Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society [video]

Not this podcast, but I did a few years ago when I started googling Eric Weinstein's references on guage theory and the Wu-Yang Dictionary. See...

Gauge Theory and Inflation: Enlarging the Wu-Yang Dictionary [video] https://youtu.be/h5gnATQMtPg

espeedon Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society [video]

NB: Updated my comment with video references.

espeedon Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society [video]

On US soil you'd have fallout from the soil getting sucked up into the atmosphere. See...

"Why World War II Matters - Victor Davis Hanson" [video]

https://youtu.be/opDuw4OZ3QI

Harvard Belfer Center: "Nuclear 101: How Nuclear Bombs Work Part 1/2" [video]

https://youtu.be/zVhQOhxb1Mc

espeedon Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society [video]

You posted a reference to the law. Good start. Now post a reference to what he actually said.

espeedon Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society [video]

No, it's not. Incorrect on all levels. Please stop. Do yourself a favor and give everyone else the courtesy of checking your references.

Who was it who said, "You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant."?

espeedon Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society [video]

"The metaphoric mind is a maverick. It is as wild and unruly as a child. It follows us doggedly and plagues us with its presence as we wander the contrived corridors of rationality. It is a metaphoric link with the unknown called religion that causes us to build cathedrals — and the very cathedrals are built with rational, logical plans. When some personal crisis or the bewildering chaos of everyday life closes in on us, we often rush to worship the rationally-planned cathedral and ignore the religion.

Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/18/intuitive-mind/

BTW: Are you trying to associate Professor Peterson's work with the Seth Material?