If all cars were autonomous - <AUTHOR> https://www.volvocars.com/en-om/about/our-innovation-brands/intellisafe/intellisafe-autopilot/changing-the-world/if-all-cars-were-autonomous <comment><USER2> My immediate thought is a dystopian version of this article:

 _If all cars were autonomous, society, the economy and the environment would all suffer. Here is how…_

* You will be forced to watch non-stop ads in these automotive cars, similar to how some taxi services work today. You can turn these off for a fee of course.

* Hackers or bugs in softawe may easily cause global traffic jams

* Congress will pass laws controlling when, where and how you may travel

* You may be blacklisted from traveling in any autonomous by corporations, governments, police etc.

* The aggregate amount of automotive travel will increase exponentially, causing more carbon emissions and even worse traffic since more people will have access to travel

* Sprawl will get worse, as people move further away from urban areas since they can do other activities in cars.

* Investment in mass transit will diminish, since funds will move towards automatic cars.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Don't forget the inevitable regulations on the software too, or even restricting/banning non-autonomous cars completely. I'm glad there are others out there who also see autonomous cars as a threat to freedom.

It is said that driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do, but I think it's no coincidence that it's also one of the most liberating. It's a very pleasurable feeling to be able to get into a car and drive, controlling it as if it were an extension of your body.

The phrase "If all cars were autonomous" has a similar feeling to others like "if there was no crime" \--- sounds good on the surface, but also has deeply authoritarian and dystopian implications.

Edit: there's also this, which is basically like Stallman's "Right to Read" but for self-driving cars: [http://this.deakin.edu.au/lifestyle/car- wars](http://this.deakin.edu.au/lifestyle/car-wars)

<comment><USER4> > It is said that driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do, but I > think it's no coincidence that it's also one of the most liberating

I experienced this to an amplified degree the first time I rode a motorcycle. I now commute almost everyday on a motorcycle and my commute has transformed for a soul sucking hell to one of my favorite parts of the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is something I often thought about as a child. I didn't imagine self driving cars as they are being developed today. Rather, I thought about what it would be like if all cars were controlled by a common system. I would imagine cars all taking off together in unison from a stop at traffic lights, cars being merged together from two separate lanes without bringing everything to a crawl.

Maybe we'll get there one day.

<comment><USER6> The problem with a centralized system is that is a single point of failure. If the central system went out, things would get Very Bad, Very Fast.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't have to be centralized. If you think of the cars as data packets and the roads as cat-6 cables, then you can see how redundancy and alternate routing can be built in.

<comment><USER8> You'd want that protocol to be EXTREMELY collision resistant.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, and you would also want to avoid fragmentation of packets (cars).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Last week, I got an e-mail from Subaru telling me my windshield washer fluid was low (it was). The e-mail provided information on how to refill it, and, a link to make an appointment for service if I felt something else needed attention.

If, instead, my brake pads were worn and the car were fully autonomous, I could have scheduled it for service while I am at work and it could have driven itself in, got new brakes and driven itself back to my office. No loaner car, no time off from work, no hassle waiting in line for a service adviser, ....

File under the 'productivity' column, and I expect cars will be better maintained than now, since we procrastinators will be able to simply click a link and forget about it.

</comment><comment><USER11> They miss the point of not owning a car (partially mentioned in both "economy" and "environment"): the car is usually the #1 or #2 (after house, if you own one) household expense; it's a depreciating asset with a terrible utilization rate (typically less than 5%). Bought by individuals, who typically have much worse credit than corporations.

If you pay by the drive for a car service operated by a large company that borrows at the prime rate, your cost per mile is liable to be _much_ lower. Given the huge costs of car ownership, it's hard to believe any residual emotional bond of owning a car could trump the economic benefits.

And as for electric: knowing aggregate demand means you never have "range anxiety", and the charging infrastructure can be much less obtrusive.

Social consequences? Well, when you take that Google-operated car to Manresa it will likely detour past MacDonalds and offer you a 2-for-one discount on Big Macs if you go there instead. And there will be no ad blockers...

Oh, and you want to take that car to where there will be an alt-right rally? Oops, no cars allowed to drive there (either by government edict or because the car owners don't want to risk their cars being destroyed).

The self-driving fleets can't arrive soon enough for me, but I am aware of some of the malign risks as well...

<comment><USER12> You miss the point of owning a car: it's space that's yours. You only use your bed 1/3 of the time, and your toilet for less than 5%. Why not hot-sheet it and use a shared toilet down the street? Because you're willing to pay more for personal space, where you can leave your stuff and maintain your preferred level of hygiene.

<comment><USER11> I agree that certain cases will remain, such as for, say, a plumber, though in theory the ubiquity of autonomous vehicles means that a plumbing supply company could provide JIT service.

But although I don't blindly believe in _homo economicus_ , I wasn't kidding when I said that the car is an (or for many the most) enormous expense for most people, and the size of that expense will aggressively drive the adoption rate. The ability to have a box of Kleenex or your gym bag will become a nice to have when the price of that convenience doubles or triples your transportation costs. The difference in price might allow you to _afford_ gym membership in the first place.

It's also a generational thing. My 19 yo kid and his friends are pretty uninterested in cars. A bunch of them don't even have licenses (which is common in some big cities like NYC but uncommon out here in the sub urbs). They care about phones though.

In the case of the toilet and bed, those are typically bundled, but even then some people do make the economic choice to have only a shower rather than a bathtub just like they make such a choice for a normal car vs paying extra for automatic transmission.

(there are also transitional and special cases; it's hard to hail a car where there is no phone service!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I stumbled upon this when searching for "what if all cars were self driving". I really feel that a great deal of the problems with making self driving cars more prevalent are related to the human-driven cars that are on the road along side these autonomous vehicles. Having only autonomous vehicles on the roads seems to have some powerful advantages, including lighter vehicles. I would love to see a region or city go totally driverless to empirically test whether autonomous vehicles really can provide the added benefits mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER13> > including lighter vehicles

 _Much_ lighter. All the people driving alone could be in cars one-quarter the size if they didn't have to worry about being crushed by Canyoneros. Aside from the cost savings, half-width cars can offer a traffic volume / speed improvement by sharing a lane. (Ultimately though lane markings can go away along with traffic lights and signs.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. I've always found it strange that to move an 80kg human from A to B, we also have to shift a couple of tonnes of metal. Seems really excessive!

<comment><USER14> One often ignored thing in this conversation is we often use the ability to carry more. I keep my emergency kit in the back (I'm part of a CERT team) as well as spare chargers and cables and stuff. I keep telling myself I should stock a spare change of clothes too. Obviously sometimes I drive with friends or family, load up my car with groceries, occasionally move furniture or computers.

The car is a relatively reasonable standard for covering an individual's regular use cases for transportation.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if some kind of detachable "trailers" might be the answer here. For normal driving, you'd have a single-passenger pod (with maybe enough cargo space for a bag of groceries or whatever), but you could hook on extra passenger or cargo pods as needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is a small portent here of something I think we should be cautious of:

> The space that is currently used for car parks could be used for something > else.

We should be careful that this space does not uniformly end up being used for yet more skyscrapers and office buildings, but open space and parks instead. I feel like this is a major decision moment for ending up with beautiful cities or dark cyberpunk monstrosities.

<comment><USER16> Why's that a bad thing? Increased density in cities means more space for nature in the countryside.

<comment><USER17> 1\. Green areas in the city improve air quality.

2\. I don't want to have to travel 30+ minutes to see more than a single tree in one place. Frequent access to nature (or a sufficiently advanced facsimile) is life quality.

3\. If a city is sufficiently large, traveling to its outside may be prohibitively expensive for poor people who are thus barred from experiencing nature. (This concern affects developing countries and sci-fi dystopias more than current developed countries.)

<comment><USER18> It's not like #3 hasn't happened before. Central Park is so far north in Manhattan because it was originally meant to be inaccessible to those without the means to afford a carriage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Everyone is waiting for autonomous cars to be near-perfectly safe before accepting them.

The thing is, let's say that autonomous cars are only 0.25% safer than the average human driver. That means switching to them will reduce accidents by 0.25%. That's a significant amount considering how many traffic accidents there are.

Considering that traffic accidents result in the actual death of human beings, it is morally imperative that we require as much autonomous driving and reduce as much human driving as possible. Even the far-from-perfect autonomous cars we have now are safer than continuing to let humans drive.

<comment><USER20> Something you're neglecting to account for is that there's more to driving than simply moral hazards and safety. There's also the matter of liability and financial risk.

While it may be arguable that it's _morally_ preferable and _safer_ to adopt self-driving cars if they can be shown to reduce the incidence of accidents by _any_ amount compared to human drivers, it isn't desirable for the corporate entities producing vehicles capable of fully autonomous operation to make them a mass market product until it is _remarkably_ safer to ride in an autonomous vehicle compared to a human-operated vehicle.

One of the biggest boons for automakers in the status quo is that the liabilities associated with operating their products is mostly distributed to the users. From a financial risk perspective this is a massively preferable operating model (and not dissimilar from what you see with 'disruptors' in the consumer space like Uber, Air BnB, etc). When we remove the primary cause of faults while driving from the picture (the human agent operating the vehicle), the distribution of risk that has generally protected automakers in the past disappears. When an autonomous vehicle crashes, the automaker now must fend off claims about vehicle features (sensors, software, etc.) that will in some way be directly responsible for causing traffic accidents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cars dropping you off autonomously reduces the demand for parking, however it will also double traffic. This leads to worse traffic flow and more congestion, contrary to the claimed positive benefit.

A lot of things on the list are also almost completely orthogonal to autonomous driving, like electric cars and flexible ownership models

<comment><USER22> If autonomous cars are operated by centralized services (Uber/Lyft/...), then they can offer cheaper rides if you are willing to share a car with different people. Especially when congestion is at its worst, chances of matching people with the same destinations are also the best - the daily morning jam on highways is mostly caused by people driving alone in their cars. Why not share 90% of the way with X other people, if it lasts only 2 minutes more for changing from/into a small first/last-mile vehicle. And why not deploy lots of small buses which carry 10+ people through the congested areas? This could even be encouraged by lawmakers; but I think this group rides would be so much cheaper that many people would use them whenever possible. Just like you don't use your car if you live next to a subway and your destination is also right next to a station.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here's a classic joke: [http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw/microsoftjoke.htm](http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw/microsoftjoke.htm)

</comment><comment><USER24> The way my Tesla auto drives, traffic jams would be worse. It's slow to respond to speedups and keeps too far a distance, even at its lowest setting.

<comment><USER25> My Volvo (XC90) is the same way. It's not as advanced as the Tesla but it has a traffic jam assist feature. If the traffic goes from almost full stop to moving along I often have to override it and accelerate manually to avoid someone cutting me off or honking at me.

<comment><USER26> Ah yes! Just the other week I turned on Pilot Assist on our XC90 during a long road trip and people playing on their phones in left lane stabbing their brakes make for a very rough ride as the car keeps braking and then re- accelerating to try to keep a constant distance.

Not to mention all of the people cutting you off because you've left enough space for them to jam their car in front of you. I had to intervene a number of times and reposition myself in traffic to get away from "non-smooth" drivers,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> ... all communicating via the cloud...and if the network or cloud has an outage we have a million accidents at once, or just stand still.

</comment><comment><USER28> This TED talk provides some interesting insights about self driving cars of the future:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/wanis_kabbaj_what_a_driverless_wor...](https://www.ted.com/talks/wanis_kabbaj_what_a_driverless_world_could_look_like)

</comment><comment><USER29> >> The car could become an extension of the office and allow commuters to arrive at work less stressed and better prepared.

Wouldn't it be far easier for companies to embrace telecommuting than to have a worldwide network of autonomous vehicles?

<comment><USER30> Those two things are entirely independent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> An alternate, better version: If all mass transit was autonomous

<comment><AUTHOR> My issue with mass transit is destination granularity. I can imagine having individual cars that can "clump" together to form a mass transit system, and then break off as and when required to arrive at specific destinations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Most cars won't have people in them.

</comment><comment><USER33> Wait Volvo, where's the millions of people starving, on benefits and/or smashing your brand new cars because they have no job?

</comment><comment><USER34> Isn't Volvo planning on using Chinese self-driving software? As with the vast majority of Chinese software, I wonder if it will also contain a backdoor for the government.

<comment><USER26> Volvo has a partnership with Mobileye (based in Israel.)

<comment><USER35> Isn't it with Autoliv?

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15878900/volvo-nvidia- sel...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15878900/volvo-nvidia-self-driving- car-partnership)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If all cars were autonomous you could change how roads are built. They could become more like sewer pipes, sunk at least partly into the ground. Car designs would change and become more cylindrical and without windows. The car interior would be covered with displays. Travel videos will become a thing.

You can see why you might want to start practicing with boring machines and hyperloops. These things aren't just for Mars.

<comment><USER16> How would you drain these pipe/roads? Most current roads have a positive camber to aid drainage.

<comment><USER36> You could do the same in a pipe. I'm sure this problem has already been solved, given the thousands of road miles in tunnels that already exist. :)

<comment><USER37> _given the thousands of road miles in tunnels that already exist_

The Big Dig in Boston cost what, $20Bn? For less than 4 miles of road tunnel? The maths just doesn't work. What does average road cost per mile?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Less congestion.

I don't think that this is obviously true, especially in cities. When the cost of taking an autonomous car from door to door is comparable to the cost of public transport, there would likely be more traffic on the road, not less. We've already started to see this to some extend with Uber in big cities</comment>


Pirate Party Likely to Win Seats in Parliament This Month in Germany - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,821093,00.html <comment><USER2> "Who are the voters who attach their hopes to a party, which, at its national convention, voted with a two-thirds majority in favor of legalizing all drugs and providing an unconditional basic income guarantee, in which every citizen would regularly receive money to support themselves?"

Good question.</comment>


Infidelity and Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2009/06/25/infidelity-and-startups/

<comment><USER2> Being married and running an all-out startup is probably a bigger risk (unless your spouse is completely on board and works there too) to your marriage than the other way around (or even adultery).

The reason is simple, you only have so much time to spend on all the things that you have to do in order to launch a successful company, this can easily lead to your significant other to feel neglected (whether that's true or not is up for debate). Long hours, business trips, business crises, they're all par for the course.

Having a supportive spouse can help enormously but it definitely is not a guarantee.

Investors are just as interested in the moral fibre of their potential partners as they are in their ability to go over and beyond the call of duty. Being married is not always an advantage.

Oh, and of course investors would never cheat on their wives...

<comment><USER3> > Oh, and of course investors would never cheat on their wives...

You're not counting on investors to give their all and you know that they have other investments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is trustworthyness strongly related to success in business? It seems that, more often, successful people are characterised by their ruthlessness. Further, capitalism thrives on the selfishness of the invidual.

Ruthlessness and selfishness are two character traits that are found in people who are unfaithful.

</comment><comment><USER5> Welcome to VC Bigshots Inc. Please leave your balls at the desk. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER6> What an idiotic post. I have never seen any positive correlation whatsoever between fidelity in marriage and someone's business trustworthiness. Unless this guy has some very convincing evidence, what he says is moralising nonsense.

In fact in my experience the very opposite is true! I have friends who have gotten married; I know all about their personal lives, of course. The ones who've cheated are the risk-takers who get what they want. I would trust them over the scared little lifer accountants anyday. And I have never doubted their loyalty as friends, nor have I ever been given any reason to. These things just do not cross over like that.

Marriage is a complex institution. A man's sex drive is also complex. Drawing these simplistic conclusions is arrogant, insulting and holier-than-thou. I bet he doesn't invest in atheists, either, for some similar BS rationale.

<comment><USER7> Bros before hoes.

<comment><USER6> That's the condensed version, yes.</comment></comment></comment>


Sub-Acute Effects of Psilocybin on Empathy, Creative Thinking - <AUTHOR> https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02791072.2019.1580804 <comment><USER2> I don't really know if the effects can be attributed to psilocybin here. It describes general well-being improvements after a social event that was also a retreat focused on a mutually enjoyable activity which was psilocybin exposure. I'm curious if this happens also in writer's retreats, furry or anime conventions, group hiking, or meditation retreats.

The lack of even an attempt at control makes it a very weak paper overall and I wouldn't attribute it to support anything.

<comment><USER3> The tricky thing about psychedelics is that they have been described as delivering the "placebo effect on steroids". That is to say, the set and setting prior to ingestion directly effects outcomes, so if you want to maximize your chance of seeing some consistent results, you would want to prime people with certain expectations and knowledge prior to them taking the psychedelic. If you were to control it against an active placebo (people often use an amphetamine), the participants would be able to deduce they aren't actually taking a psychedelic.

<comment><USER4> I like to call it psilo-cebo for mushrooms, or psyche-cebo in general.

The approach should be to use different types of psychoactive drugs to multiple pseudocontrol groups. Have a control group have placebo, then another LSD, another Ketamine, another a synthetic cannabinoid, another mushrooms.

That way even if the effects are genuine of psilocybin it will pop from the rest in the results, if is in psychedelics in general LSD will pop as well, if it's anything "mind exploring" Ketamine will pop too, if it's just getting high what makes things better, the cannabinoid will join into the results.

And obviously this has to be done on people without drug experience, because the effects are rather easy to tell apart by drug users.

<comment><USER5> "obviously this has to be done on people without drug experience, because the effects are rather easy to tell apart by drug users"

Interestingly, the subjective experience of having a "high" seems to be somewhat learned through prior experiences. Testing on people without drug experience may not be the accurate test one might want and assume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Due to the non-random sample, as well as the lack of placebo control, it > could be argued that sub-acute enhancements are due to uncontrolled factors > such as psychological expectations, or the environment in which the drug is > taken.

Indeed. The setting of the retreat ("After ingestion, participants were instructed to stay on the premises, and were able to do what they wanted, as long as they did not disturb other participants. Facilitators provided music, tools to draw and/or write, and food. In the evening, all participants and facilitators came back together as a group.") might have had a significant effect on the results. These should be, at least, compared to a similar retreat where no psilocybin is ingested.

Otherwise, the effects could come solely from the environment, e.g., a calm and relaxing retreat far from a busy life.

<comment><USER7> If depression were so easy to treat it would hardly qualify as a mental illness. I think the purpose of the pleasant, relaxed setting was more to ensure the psilocybin had positive rather than negative effects on the participants. It's a precaution, like how in radiation therapy you point the radiation at the tumor rather than adjacent vital organs.

<comment><USER8> Sure, it makes sense --- but I think what your parent is trying to say is that a control would be fairly easy to implement --- just put some other people on the retreat and don't let them take anything.

<comment><USER9> Let them take a placebo.

<comment><USER8> Yeah that would certainly be a better approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The one time I took psilocybin, my buddy and I sub-acutely plastered ourselves in apple sauce and paper towels so we'd look like mummies, then we watched ninja turtles for about four hours.

Two thumbs up, would use again.

<comment><USER11> The only movie I've watched while tripping is eXistenZ, and that was an indescribable experience. I can imagine four hours of anthropomorphized turtles doing karate was also a good time, though probably less horrifying than eXistenZ.

Out of curiosity, how old were you when this happened?

<comment><USER10> 21, so 17 years ago. We git them the Florida way: Walk around a cow pasture and fill a grocery bag with mushrooms.

Yum... the smell of fresh mushrooms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Prior research at Johns Hopkins has shown significant improvements in depression months after ingestion, so this would track with that.

Sad that less than half of the study population returned for the 7 day evaluation point.

</comment><comment><USER13> > The truffle sample (15 grams; Psilocybe Hollandia) contained 1.9 mg of > psilocybin and 10.5 mg of psilocin. Participants ingested an average (SD) > 34.2 (8.9) grams of truffles throughout the day.

Is that equivalent to 15 grams of dried mushrooms? If so that is a serious dose (over 1/2 an ounce!), there would be breakthroughs and breakdowns happening left and right given that amount.

Seems unlikely that participants (particularly first timers) would ingest such a large quantity, even when spread out over a number of hours.

Perhaps if one only drank the tea the effects wouldn't be as extreme as both drinking the tea and eating the remnants, but still, I'd have some concerns if the facilitator presented 15 grams to me and said something along the lines of, "now don't worry, just drink the tea and eat the rest, everything's going to be just fine [after you get through the maelstrom phase]" :)

<comment><USER14> Truffles are less potent than mushrooms, so you need to more or less double the dosage. I would think that the 15 grams of truffles then would be equivalent to about 7-8 grams of dried mushrooms. Since it was ingested throughout the day, I would assume that's dosages equivalent to 1-3 grams spread out through the day.

<comment><USER15> I've found it to be closer to 10:1.

15g truffles felt like 1.5g.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd be concerned about the drop out rate. They started with 55 the day of, 50 the next morning and 22 just after.

That said I am a proponent of psilocybin research and believe there are some merits to it. I just think this is an odd part of the study.

</comment><comment><USER17> I microdosed shrooms once (.1g) and it was distracting. I guess my creativity was 'up' but that was because I kept getting distracted by cool lights and random thoughts.

It did motivate me to workout but mushrooms always make me want to exercise for some reason

<comment><USER18> are you sure it was a microdose?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I tried Psilocybin on two different occasions and two very different trips. The first being pleasant, the second being my last.

The first time I took it, I was outside. The very first thing I notice is just how vivid the green leaves swaying in the wind were. How calm, serene, peaceful. Then I started seeing the walls, "breathe". I've never been able to feel such inner peace before. In this moment, I realized, _I have so much potential_. We all do, yet it's our own doubts, and the internalized opinion of others or vanity metrics hindered our progress. I've found "spiritualism". I started playing Gran Turismo and realized how effortless I've been able to drive around the Nordschliefe. Normally I'd crash but I was putting no effort yet I was playing at a level that surpassed my normal everyday skill. Then I started joining meetups. Like groups that I never thought I'd join. I was suddenly interested in women's rights, I got interested in Hinduism.

The next day, the inner peace continued to linger. However, after a few months, I was back to my old self.

So this econd time, I upped the dose (bad idea). This time I stayed in my room (another bad idea). Instead of the inner peace, I was in a state of panic. There were some scary visuals like the Eye of Providence, I could feel the presence of some extra-terrestrial intelligence, looking at me, judging me with those unchanging Eye on the US dollar bill.

I headed downstairs and the visuals just got stranger. I close my eyes and see complex geometrics, and reopen them to see math formulas _everywhere_. I was getting even more panicky and I head to lie down.

Then I experienced what is called "Ego Death". I felt like I was dead. No identity, no awareness. It was awful, I longed for anything, any sort of order and structure I had in my normal reality. I was thinking "yup I fucked up. I poisoned myself. good god."

During the ego death, the only certainty I felt was Math. Math is the language of both this universe and the fabric of our universe. We are made out of math. The gut feelings we get, the emotions, thoughts, they were ultimately mathematical manifestations. This was the intuition I was feeling, a spiritual plane where Everything is Everything while being Nothing. The ubiquity and the ephemeral nature of both our life, and the universe.

There is a positive story out of this. I came out of the ego death, and I was sooooo thankful that there was something in this reality instead of nothing. The trip was not over, and I started seeing this bright pulsating object that looked like a symbol of sorts....kinda like a lightning symbol appear right above between the eye brows of the people I looked at!

I am not a religious person and have not come into contact with any Hinduism materials but when I looked up the Hindu symbol for the Third Eye, I almost fell out of my chair-it was the same. I never even heard or seen the Third eye before, and I was just reading other people's trips and there were people who saw the exact same thing....

After the trip was over, the next morning, I woke feeling light. It felt like I sat in a sauna but instead of sweating out chemical toxins, my spirit felt like it was cleansed. I did make some positive life changes....but ended up right back where I was.

It seems like you need to keep taking psilocybin to see the benefits but after that trip, I'd rather not open that door anymore. It was frightening more than it was awakening but perhaps because the possibility that our material reality that the Western civilization claims is be-all and end-all is not only incorrect but immature-civilizations and cultures that existed longer all have gone through such stages, and eventually gave way to spirituality at some point.

<comment><USER20> The third-eye thing is very very interesting

I'm also not a religious person but I once had a very odd feeling after a guided meditation (I completely lost ALL fear of death for a couple days... including the baseline fear of death, which we all actually have and which I had never noticed before, since it's always there). It is good to be skeptical, but I think it's also good to acknowledge when something truly subjectively weird occurs.

<comment><USER21> > including the baseline fear of death, which we all actually have

That is a strong claim.

I have no fear of death, but a fear of what often immediately precedes death, namely decrepitude and illness. I'm in my mid 50s and so I watched the generation of my grandparents go through it, and then my parents generation. The only positive I can find in that is that if any of them feared death, the illness had made them prefer it over the constant sickness.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, that's a reasonable fear to have IMHO. I turn 47 in a few weeks and it's on my mind, my mom has dementia and is on her way out</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Keas can understand probability, a trait only seen before in apes and humans - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-03-04/nz-kea-parrot-understand-probabilities/12018464 <comment><USER2> They'll also steal anything that isn't nailed down. Wheelbarrows, plump helmet roasts, you name it.</comment>


The Matrix in JavaScript in less than 600 bytes - <AUTHOR> http://timelessname.com/sandbox/matrix.html <comment><USER2> The closest environment I got to work with Matrix-like UI but real experience was:

There is board I'm developing on with serial port, and kernel debug prints so much garbage it literally fills the entire screen in less than couple of seconds. It was because of faulty/broken hardware and there is busy loop that keeps retrying to access the device.

I could enter shell commands but I/O lines get mixed in between the verbose kernel debug lines. After some time my eyes synced to the screen scroll rate and I could follow the output from bottom to top to read it (repeatedly run command until I could catch the output correctly).

For the moment, I saw "blonde" in fast scrolling random code :) Anyone else had to work like this?

<comment><USER3> Embedded hackers of the world unite?

Everytime u-boot barfed on me or I messed up the serial port I ended up having to scan through screenfulls of ASCII junk scrolling by at full speed to get my commands and results out.

The closest I ever got to -real- blonde/brunette effects was when I was debugging the output from a H264 streamer. I could figure out video resolution and slicing properties from the tcpdump trace scrolling by :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're 99% there. The leading characters need to be white, with the tailing characters being green.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or2m7rYHb_Q>

<comment><USER5> Let's get real picky:

\- chunks should vertically move down together, they don't just change color

\- leading char is a bright green with outer glow

\- movement doesn't always start at the top

\- there are gaps in the chars

\- there are vertical groups as small as 1 char that change chars at random

\- there is no trailing transition in the color

[http://www.endlessvideo.com/watch?v=Or2m7rYHb_Q&start=0m...](http://www.endlessvideo.com/watch?v=Or2m7rYHb_Q&start=0m31s&end=0m36s)

<comment><USER6> Furthermore, the characters are supposed to be horizontally inverted (flipped) half width katakana (Japanese) characters, not the Chinese kanji.

<comment><USER7> Also digits, flipped as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> here it is at 324 bytes, since your going to end up with scrollbars no matter what, you might as well not worry about document size

        <canvas id=q width=3000 height=3000 style=margin:-10><script>for(m=Math.random,p=[],i=0;i<256;p[i++]=1);setInterval('9Style="rgba(0,0,0,.05)"9Rect(0,0,3000,3000)9Style="#0F0";p.map(function(v,i){9Text(String.fromCharCode(3e4+m()*33),i*10,v);p[i]=v>758+m()*1e4?0:v+10})'.split(9).join(';q.getContext("2d").fill'),33)</script>

edit... and at 319

        <canvas id=q style=margin:-10><script>for(q.width=q.height=b=3000,m=Math.random,p=[],i=0;i<256;p[i++]=1);setInterval('9Style="rgba(0,0,0,.05)"9Rect(0,0,b,b)9Style="#0F0";p.map(function(v,i){9Text(String.fromCharCode(3e4+m()*33),i*10,v);p[i]=v>758+m()*1e4?0:v+10})'.split(9).join(';q.getContext("2d").fill'),33)</script>

<comment><USER9> If this is your thing, why not enter something for js1k? <http://js1k.com/2013-spring/>

<comment><USER10> They need to publicize this more. It was really fun in 2010, and I didn't even know they decided to do it annually since!

<comment><USER9> Shameless self-promotion: <http://js1k.com/2013-spring/demo/1423>

<comment><USER11> Nice work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I took the liberty do de-obfuscate the code : <http://jsfiddle.net/tburette/w6npr/5/>

<comment><USER13> Great, I changed it to one of the katakana ranges and flipped the canvas <http://jsfiddle.net/muV99/1/>

<comment><USER14> Now it just needs overflow:hidden to lose sidebars and it's perfect.

<comment><USER15> ...Enhance

<comment><USER16> overflow-hiddened: <http://jsfiddle.net/muV99/1/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation of speed beyond anything he'd known before in cyberspace... The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese program's thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity, as though the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell --"

<http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/neuromancer/> (1984)

<comment><USER18> Great book! been years since I've read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There has been some interesting discussion and code golfing on this piece over at Reddit that may be a worthwhile read for some:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1ag0c3/someone_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1ag0c3/someone_posted_an_htmljavascript_implementation/)

<comment><USER20> "Code golfing" is a truly marvelous term.

<comment><USER21> Reminds me of layer tennis: <http://layertennis.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why kanji instead of mirrored katakana?

</comment><comment><USER23> If The Architect hadn't thought he was smarter than JSLint, they wouldn't have ended up with that pesky anomaly.

</comment><comment><USER24> Attempted to upload my consciousness to this but it just crashed Chrome. Github issues link pls.

<comment><USER25> Worked for me in Firefox nightly.

<comment><USER26> Have you gotten the Data link hardware to work? I've been trying to install it into my spinal cord, but I'm getting Neurons_Out_Of_Bounds exceptions all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If anyone is curious how the code actually works, I've commented up a version below:

        <script type="text/javascript">

        function matrix() {
            // initialize variables
            for (s = window.screen,
                 w = q.width = s.width, // on my monitor: 1920
                 h = q.height = s.height,  // on my monitor: 1200
                 m = Math.random,   // random number from 0-1
                 p = [],
                 i = 0;

                 // i ranges from 0 to 255, one element for each character horizontally
                 // this is enough characters to fill the entire screen horizontally
                 // canvas won't let you draw off the screen - so I could set this to 1000
                 i < 256;

                 // initialize p (the y coordinate of each character) to start at 1
                 p[i++] = 1);

            setInterval(
                // every time we call this function we draw the entire screen a very faint black (with a high transparency of 0.05)
                // this means every 33 milliseconds the screen is getting slightly darker
                // this also acts to darken and fade the green characters - when they are first printed they are dark green, then they slowly fade to black
                function() {
                    // draw black (0,0,0) with alpha (transparency) value 0.05
                    q.getContext('2d').fillStyle='rgba(0,0,0,0.05)';
                    // fill the entire screen
                    q.getContext('2d').fillRect(0,0,w,h);
                    // #0f0 is a short form for color green (#00FF00)
                    q.getContext('2d').fillStyle='#0F0';

                    p.map(
                        // this function will be called 256 times - once for each element of array p,
                        function(v,i){
                        // map over the array p
                        //      v is the value in the array p, which represents the y-coordinate of the text going down
                        //      i is the index of the array p, which represents the x coordinate
                        // start from unicode char code 30,000 (0x7530) then add a random number from 0-33
                        // from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_Unified_Ideographs,_part_2_of_4
                        //      U+753x 	田 	由 	甲 	申 	甴 	电 	甶 	男 	甸 	甹 	町 	画 	甼 	甽 	甾 	甿
                        //      U+754x 	畀 	畁 	畂 	畃 	畄 	畅 	畆 	畇 	畈 	畉 	畊 	畋 	界 	畍 	畎 	畏
                        //      U+755x 	畐
                        randomNum = m()*33;
                        // note how the asian characters are slightly different shades
                        // of green, this depends on their line thickness etc, and doesn't
                        // really happen for english characters
                        randomAsianChar = String.fromCharCode(30000 + randomNum);

                        q.getContext('2d').fillText(
                            randomAsianChar,
                            i*10,   // x coordinate - each character is 10 x 10
                            v       // y coordinate
                        );
                        // draw at least 758 characters down before reseting to the start
                        minimumHeight=758
                        num = minimumHeight+m()*10000;
                        p[i] = (v>num) ? 0 : v+10   // increment the y coordinate by one character (10 pixels), reset when y-coord gets too big
                        })
                },
                33) // call every 33 milliseconds
        }
        </script>

        <body style=margin:0 onload="matrix()"><canvas id=q>

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks like you improved upon the one I posted yesterday <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387553> \- but it works much better in canvas for sure!

</comment><comment><USER29> When my eyes follow the raindrops it's impossible to see the Chinese characters. I have really to force myself to stare at one spot to see the characters. Interesting phenomena.

<comment><USER30> It's pretty simple - the symbols don't move. Their brightness changes. So if you move your view - you jump across many symbols and obviously can't "follow" anything.

<comment><USER31> I think what apunic is noting is our natural tendency to track movement. If you try to read something too close to the leading bright letter, your eyes get hooked by it and get dragged along for the ride. You have to stay a safe distance back to be able to read anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This can be rendered directly into Chrome by:

        data:text/html, <canvas id=q style=margin:-10><script>for(q.width=q.height=b=3000,m=Math.random,p=[],i=0;i<256;p[i++]=1);setInterval('9Style="rgba(0,0,0,.05)"9Rect(0,0,b,b)9Style="#0F0";p.map(function(v,i){9Text(String.fromCharCode(3e4+m()*33),i*10,v);p[i]=v>758+m()*1e4?0:v+10})'.split(9).join(';q.getContext("2d").fill'),33)</script>

<comment><USER33> removing the 9 split jazz is actually shorter (and more readable) <http://jsbin.com/idijay/1/edit>

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think it are the wrong type of characters. The Asian characters in the Matrix are less complex than those (Wikipedia says "half-width kana").

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow, what a coincidence. I just made one two weeks ago. Mine is way over 600 bytes though.

Requires Chrome:

[http://htmlpreview.github.com/?http://github.com/briangordon...](http://htmlpreview.github.com/?http://github.com/briangordon/xmatrixjs/blob/ed650310d1846e35cfcbeef47d09eb77c42536dd/xmatrix.html)

<comment><USER36> Doesn't work for me in Chrome 27.

I'd love to have one that accurate emulates the real animation.

<comment><USER35> Ah, newer versions of Chrome broke (<https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=180007>) the htmlpreview tool. Here's a link that should work with the newer Chrome. Please let me know what you think! It's modeled after xmatrix rather than the original film footage, but I think it's pretty good. Still Chrome-only:

[http://htmlpreview.github.com/?http://rawgithub.com/briangor...](http://htmlpreview.github.com/?http://rawgithub.com/briangordon/xmatrixjs/blob/ed650310d1846e35cfcbeef47d09eb77c42536dd/xmatrix.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> kostya-kow <https://github.com/KostyaKow/shell_matrix>

Bash version

<comment><USER37> All I see is this:

sed: 2: "x;s/\n//g;${p;x;} }'s) ": unexpected EOF (pending }'s)

<comment> kostya-kow Are you using OS X?

You need GNU Sed for this to work.

<comment><USER37> Ah. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> <http://timelessname.com/sandbox/matrix_orig.html> is the only version that works for me. I don't have time right now to figure out why that is.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is what a webcam packet dump looks like on a black console with green text: <http://bluesmoon.livejournal.com/32581.html>

</comment><comment><USER40> That is cool, wish I could make it my background.

</comment><comment><USER41> What's cool about 600b is you can use it for your browser start page. I'd like to see the picky stuff implemented. :)

</comment><comment><USER42> XP SP2, Firefox 19.0.2 and all I get is a screen that quickly fades to black and then ... nothing.

<comment><USER43> _"XP SP2"_

I'm nostalgic too (not about Windows that said) but... Windows XP is the most exploited Windows right now: zombie botnets are made of a huge part of Windows XP PCs. Microsoft ain't patching several critical exploits on XP and it has been demonstrated for a fact that any local hole on XP means admin rights.

<comment><USER44> and "SP2" At least get to SP3

<comment><USER42> I can't. This is a PC that is too slow for SP3 now. I tried it when SP3 was released and it just made it slower. I had to roll back. I use defensive measures and have been able to ward off bots and virii so far (not that they didn't get through a few years ago...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> obligatory <http://hackertyper.com/>

</comment><comment><USER46> Makes one heck of a screen saver</comment>


Show HN: Always on top webcam for Screen Sharing - <AUTHOR> https://camera.justclarify.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everyone,

I am Vigneshwarar, I created this tool. I am not sure how many people find this tool useful, I am doing a lot of screen-recording these days and it's hard on many platforms like Loom, VideoAsk, or google meet to show or see your webcam(Your face) while sharing your screen so I made a simple tool which will float your webcam in the picture in picture mode after activating this you can start screen share(Floating cam appears on Entire Screen recording option only) or screen record.

Well If you have any use-cases for using this tool feel free to drop it ill mention that on the site.</comment>


What it feels like being an iPad on a stick on wheels (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://labs.spotify.com/2013/12/12/what-it-feels-like-being-an-ipad-on-a-stick-on-wheels/ <comment><USER2> Had one of these at our office. I used it as a remote worker on a team across the country. Few things - the author's wish list is out of date. Mine I could drive into a dock and it would charge the whole thing and the iPad. The device is great, and did improve my telepresence significantly.

That said, the problem was consistently that the double robotics website you must run it through was consistently either down or had such poor bandwidth I couldn't use it. I wish I could take everything about this device, and host it in the office. It got to be near unusable most of the time, and we just switched back to webex. Expensive experiment.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if it would give more 'presence' by using it from within VR and a stereoscopic 360 cam. You would need a way for the double to present in what direction you are looking at, so perhaps make a cylindrical screen (not sure if these exist) or a led line with one or two 'eyes' like Kit or a Cylon. This would solve the problem of the uncanny valley. We have the capability to do this, but all people can come up with is an uninspired ipad on wheels.

<comment><USER4> If you were using VR glasses, then no camera could capture your face and show it on the robot.

It's probably better to control the view direction using the gyroscope on the tablet that you are holding with your hands.

<comment><USER3> Or a CGI generated face with googly eyes. Make the robot head transparent and spherical, with a one way screen for the stereoscopic camera, and holographically project your avatar (with googly eyes) inside the sphere looking in the same direction. A bit like this: [http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/08/27/3d-sphere-star- wa...](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/08/27/3d-sphere-star-wars- hologram_n_5720810.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this sort of works if the operator is familiar with the surroundings, but even then, I can see this being rather annoying for others physically present in the area... Also, I'm not sure what problem this is specifically solving. If the idea is to give you your own point of view, then toy like controls probably won't cut it. They should really look to provide an interface with an AR headset of some kind.

</comment><comment><USER6> My biggest peeve with one of these were the audio properties. The frequency response on the speaker is in the high notes, and the audio codec tends to have artifacts in the high frequencies. Combine these two and you get a shrill very far carrying sound; as a result whenever someone in our company was using it it disturbed a vastly larger radius of people than a face-to-face conversation would have.

</comment><comment><USER7> It would be really interesting to read more about the physical participants' impressions of this. Having a screen on a stick with a live human face on it follow you around must be quite the uncanny valley.

<comment><USER2> The people I worked with had a lot of fun with it. They'd dress it up like me, prank me by putting things in the way I couldn't see, etc. Occasionally they'd lose their composure at talking to it and start chuckling, the uncanny valley you mention at work I suppose.</comment></comment>


Many private college presidents make $1 million - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/101275431 <comment><USER2> U of C has an endowment of about $6.6 billion. Much of the job of the President of the University is to raise money for this fund. In any other context, $3.4 million/year for the chief fundraiser of a $6.6 billion fund would not cause anyone to bat an eyelash. Since 2000, despite two major economic downturns, U of C's endowment almost doubled, from $3.8 billion. About half that time was during Zimmer's tenure, and his fundraising activity undoubtedly had a major impact on that growth, especially given the impact of the downturns on investment returns.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. A relative of mine has done college presidencies and her main job was to visit wealthy alums and sweet talk them into more donations.

There are actually a lot of small, financially distressed colleges out there that pay their presidents about $120K or $160K, and hope they'll raise more money for the school not to mention attract in more students.

The picture is rather grim these days for many small liberal arts schools. I hope they can pull through but it's like everything else--the small newspapers, the mom-and-pop stores, the small publishers and broadcasters are all being squeezed out by mega chains and online options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This isn't an issue, despite the article's implication otherwise. Being a president of a college isn't exactly a low-impact position: in addition to being a public emissary to the college, they send the majority of their time on the road, raising money for their endowment. Colleges who offer poor compensation for their presidents will generally receive a commensurate return on their investment (though I'd love to see a normalized graph of presidential salary to yearly fundraising, as a point of comparison.)

(If you're interested in examining bloat and waste in universities, I recommend faculty-to-administrator ratio as a jumping-off point.)

<comment><USER5> With millions of your countrymen without basic health care, shelter and food, you think it's not a problem that someone makes $1 million a year? Wow.

<comment><USER6> I think the solution is that everyone should get subsidized health care, shelter, and food. I don't think you should need to work to have these things.

<comment><USER5> That's how it goes it many developed countries.

<comment><USER6> I don't get why we have free public education, but not these other things which are more essential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having gone to a private university with a highly paid (probably not 1M+) president, this is unsurprising to me.

University presidents and the vision + fundraising prowess they bring to these schools can be pretty amazing. The school I attended was quite small with a mediocre array of programs and athletics. After 10+ years of the current president's shepherding, the school has undergone a transformation in student body size, program depth, and athletic accomplishment.

All of these things mean more students in the future and an increased alumni pride - both of which mean more revenue to the school.

<comment><USER8> Yeah I think you're right. If anything it's the endless list of deans making $200k that we should be looking at, not the president.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The president at my university retired taking home $2.2 million his last year in service, second-highest in the nation [1]. As an alum, I'm really not that bothered because he raised >$250 million during his last three years in office. He gets a cut of that.

[1] [http://www.texastribune.org/2010/11/15/texas-college- preside...](http://www.texastribune.org/2010/11/15/texas-college-presidents- made-over-1-million-in-08/)

</comment><comment><USER10> ...this doesn't bother me nearly as much as some people. Certainly not while college football coaches earn _far_ more. The top ten highest paid football coaches are all taking home $3.7 million+, and that's at _state_ universities[1]. Personally, I would value the university president more than the football coach.

[1]:[http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1840036-usa-today- reveals...](http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1840036-usa-today-reveals- college-football-head-coaches-salaries-for-every-fbs-school)

<comment><USER11> Universities make a boat load of money on football. It's important to have a great coach.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciajessop/2013/08/31/the- econ...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciajessop/2013/08/31/the-economics-of- college-football-a-look-at-the-top-25-teams-revenues-and-expenses/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not surprised. Also, why single out private presidents?

FYI most California _Community College_ presidents (and there are over 100 of them) make $200-300K per year.

The UC system president gets a $570K salary, a $10K/month housing stipend, and $9k/year vehicle stipend [1].

[1] [http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/16/local/la-me-ln-uc- re...](http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/16/local/la-me-ln-uc- rental-20130916)

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of this: [http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong.html)

College presidents act as a face of an institution, paying someone extra 100,000 could mean bringing in millions extra in donations/tuitions/fees etc. Big money attracts talent.

</comment><comment><USER15> The median base salary for private was $301,299, the median base salary for public was $441,392. The slant the headline suggests is not well supported by the actual numbers, carefully hidden in the last paragraph. (The article itself is useful enough, I'm specifically criticizing what I feel is the slant they are trying to convey.)

<comment><USER2> I imagine public universities can't pay out the same kind of bonuses and the like, because of state rules, and have higher base salaries to compensate.

<comment><USER15> My point is that it's not as if private colleges are paying out in the millions while our frugal and humble public presidents get by on a paltry $50,000/year, pouring everything into educating the student. Fiddly little differences like this are no advantage to either side, irrelevant fractions of a percent of either budget.

The whole thing about salaries seems like an attempt to distract from the administrative bloat problem, which public universities have in spades. The problem in either school isn't whether one employee out of thousands is being paid a million dollars, the problem is that universities are paying a staggering number of "administrators" $50-150K/year, when after decades of computerization any sane person would expect the administrative load of universities over the past several decades to be rapidly trending _down_ , not up.

I haven't heard anyone criticize private universities for this; I infer with weak confidence from this and the general politicization of private university that do not have this problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Somewhere, Shirley Jackson chuckles...

</comment><comment><USER17> This is sensationalism. There are many college athletic coaches in state schools being compensated over a million a year. Look at the recent contract extension of Nick Saban at the University of Alabama.

<comment> steve-howard And the justification for that is the same; these people bring in tons of money.

First link I could find to support that: [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/03/report- finds-a...](http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/03/report-finds-alumni- giving-among-other-areas-correlated-football-success)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Supply and demand, supply and demand, supply and demand.

I wish more people understood this most basic law of economics.

If the supply of people who are both willing and able to handle the position of university President is low, wages (which are the price of labor) will rise, thus enticing those who are able but not willing to meet the demand. The prevailing average wage rate for university Presidents is simply a reflection of the price point at which the supply and demand curves of capable labor for this position meet. Conversely, if there was an abundance of people who could fulfill this position, wages would decrease commensurately. There is nothing wrong with someone making $1 million, or $10 million, or $100 million for performing a function, provided that wage is being offered to everyone who can perform that function indiscriminately. Of course, a system made up of imperfect agents will not function in a theoretically perfect fashion, but this is more or less how things work. I'm sure that being the President of a university is not without its myriad challenges, and it is unlikely that the average Joe off of the street could perform this function well. Thus, wages for university Presidents are going to be higher than the average Joe's wages. The solution for the average Joe is not to attempt to bring down the wages of the university President, but to aspire to become capable of performing the function of the university President himself.

Simplistic? Perhaps, but sometimes it's advantageous to think of things in simplistic terms. No one escapes the pot when everyone is being pulled back down.

<comment><USER19> That makes sense when the product in question faces a market test, but here that condition doesn't apply. Almost all universities are organized such that they are run by perpetual boards of directors, with only nominal oversight by a state AG.

The selection process for such board seats is not designed, nor does it, produce members whose incentives are identical to a hypothetical person privately purchasing college president labor from among all available choices.

Among other things Presidents themselves, after a reasonable tenure, have large influence on the composition of their boards.

<comment><USER20> How is this different than politics or nepotism within a private corporation or charity?

What about postsecondary education will keep larger market forces (i.e., attendance rates and donation levels) from solving this problem?

<comment><USER19> Educational markets move very slowly because almost all the value in a degree comes from reputation effects, and those are mostly solidified for each person when he is young. So they change as people die off rather than as the underlying _res_ changes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Beams, an OS for news - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/roscoelabs/beams

<comment><USER2> "Operating system" is a really bad choice of words for this. I would call it "Node.js-based CMS". Which, at the moment, only seems to serve static files.</comment>


River Thames 'severely polluted with plastic' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53479635 <comment><AUTHOR> Report: London's river of plastic: High levels of microplastics in the Thames water column

\- Science of The Total Environment Volume 740, 20 October 2020, 140018

Highlights and abstract (includes link to .pdf of report]:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720335385?via%3Dihub)</comment>


"Innovation" is Dead. Herald The Birth of "Transformation" as The Key Concept for 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2008/12/innovation_is_d.html?campaign_id=rss_blog_nussbaumondesign <comment><USER2> "conflating it with ... anything "new.""

That's all the word means.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. Think Tide detergent and use innovative instead of new and you get the picture. He says the suits have spoiled the word and people should be talking "transformation" because it has deeper meaning. I say let the suits have transformation and we can keep innovation. I don't see that you are going to have transformation without innovation anyway.</comment></comment>


Packaging LXD for Arch Linux - <AUTHOR> https://linderud.dev/blog/packaging-lxd-for-arch-linux/ <comment><USER2> LXC[0] is "the original" (citation needed) linux containerization effort, and LXD[1] which is the daemon built to manage it on top is a really really interesting project. In an alternative world, it would have taken off _instead_ of kubernetes as your container management and scheduling solution (which might have been wrong, k8s runs at a level of abstraction higher than lxd so actually I think it deserves to be where it is).

The main difference between a common 'docker' container and a LXC container is user namespacing[2]. This is where the improved security claims, and ability to run "unprivileged" containers comes from. This is accomplished by uid/guid mapping[3], and docker now has it[4] though of course docker and LXD are not comprable -- not even LXC and docker are comparable.

If the ends of the spectrum of abstraction are Kubernetes--<other tech>\--fork(), I'd say the spectrum with these tools included looks like: Kubernetes----LXD---Docker swarm----Docker----LXC----fork().

[EDIT] - "difference between a LXC container and a LXD container" -> "difference between a common 'docker' container and a LXC container". I mis- typed and just caught it. LXD is built on LXC so obviously it does not make sense, a LXC container _is_ a LXD container.

[0]: [https://linuxcontainers.org/](https://linuxcontainers.org/)

[1]: [https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/](https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/)

[2]: [http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man7/user_namespaces.7.html](http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man7/user_namespaces.7.html)

[3]: [https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/master/userns- idmap](https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/master/userns-idmap)

[4]: [https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/userns- remap/](https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/userns-remap/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Everything boils down to dependency management. It doesn't matter whether you're running a distribution, a container system, a VM farm, a herd of machines or anything that loves static linking: a sysadmin needs to be able to ask "what packages are in use right now, what is their provenance, and how can I roll out changes to that with the least amount of tsuris?"

(And the security officer needs to be able to ask a sysadmin to compile that data. And the auditor needs to be able to verify the chain that produced that data. And the poor dev trying to fix a bug needs to be able to use that data to build a version that replicates reported issues, so they can show that they can also fix the issue. And so on. And so forth.)

Just as interpreters usually beat compilers for speed of debugging, a system designed to properly manage and modularize dependencies will be faster to debug than an equivalent system that just builds the final target as fast as possible.

<comment><USER4> I love Arch. It seems to find a sweet spot between the boring business world of yum-based distros and the wild, wild west nature of gentoo.

Just the right thing for the academic pursuits.

Mileage is wildly variable, of course.

<comment><USER5> You can't really compare Arch to Gentoo really. Arch's goal is to keep it simple which they do via a extremely robust, but easy to understand package format. It takes almost no time to create a new package and submit it to the AUR. I can get the latest version of almost any piece of software I want with Arch between their standard package repo and the AUR. I can upload a small PKGBUILD easy-to-understand text file and create a package from it. Yum on the other hand is tedious to maintain. That is why RHEL and CentOS are often years behind stable packages in their repos, and using a two-year old kernel.

<comment><USER6> As someone who uses Arch as a daily driver and has spent plenty of time messing around with rpmbuild I disagree with your claim that yum (RPMs) is tedious to maintain. RHEL and CentOS are behind on software releases because they actually freeze functionality when they make a release and updates within a release will not upgrade to the latest and greatest major release of that software. They tediously backport bug fixes and security patches to keep the old version up to date and only upgrade to the latest and greatest when a new release comes around years later.

Arch is just a rolling release, it's basically the equivalent of running Rawhide but waiting for a couple weeks to install updates. RedHat spends more effort supporting the old versions that they ship than just following upstream. The whole point of an enterprise distro with long term releases is that they don't do any of those major updates to add features between releases. I can install CentOS and not worry that an update is going to suddenly change how a package works. Just look at [https://www.archlinux.org/news/](https://www.archlinux.org/news/), most of those almost bi-weekly news entries are stuff that I don't need to sweat on CentOS because they won't make any changes like that between releases.

<comment><USER4> RHEL and CentOS make great sense in the office, where we do NOT want to waste time faffing about with the configuration. All of that is moved to the package manager.

You will NOT use the walrus operator in python until the distro supports it.

When I want to live closer to the edge, and get the latest QGIS going, Arch and AUR are there for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is "vendored" in this context?

Verbising nouns confuses me....</comment>


PicnicHealth (YC S14) raises $2M seed round - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/02/y-combinator-backed-picnichealth-nabs-2-million-in-seed-to-build-out-a-virtual-healthcare-records-platform/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there, PicnicHealth CTO here. Happy to answer any questions you might have about what we do or how we do it! (Or really anything else I guess)</comment>


Still too expensive for most people to buy or rent - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/2020-real-estate-forecast-still-too-expensive-for-most-people-to-buy-or-rent-a-home/ <comment><USER2> It's insane. Fiance and I started looking this month, with plans to buy after June, and it's just downright absurd.

New construction not too far from where I'm at now, immediately west of Indianapolis, starting at $280k (more than 8x my annual income) for 1716sqft and a virtually non-existent yard that has been stripped of all the top soil so it could be sold before construction began so they can upsell you some sod...

Median household income in Indiana, $54,181.

Minimum wage $7.25 an hour.

That's basically the situation the article describes:

>To cross the current national median home price of $257,000, homebuyers need a gross income of $67,647, the report said — yet the average annual wage in the U.S. was $58,214, the report notes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Supply doesn't meet demand. Just look at the units built vs. population growth, as the article mentions.

We're experiencing the same thing in Canada. While the numbers show a steady increase in housing starts in Toronto and construction superficially looks healthy, the number of units barely matches population growth, and that's with the recent uptick in construction, after a long period of insufficiency. Unsurprisingly, rental and housing costs are insane here.

And when it comes to detached housing, supply is finite. A continually growing population and the suburban dream for all are not really compatible in the long run.</comment>


Nasa Eyes – explore the solar system in 3D - <AUTHOR> http://eyes.nasa.gov/index.html

<comment><USER2> Doesn't give a download if link if you're on Linux. But if you use a user agent switcher, and pretend you're on windows, you can download the .exe and it seems to work okay through WINE.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have any remote (work from home) teambuilding ideas? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> We share a lot of photos on Slack.

<comment><USER3> lot a good car in here also visit our website www.kingbaduki.com</comment></comment>


Time Review of Geoffrey Miller's Spent: Skim - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1900032,00.html

<comment><USER2> While not wrong, this research leads to foolish decisions: people will read them, and use it to justify their actions: "this is how it is, so this is how I am."

But no. This is projecting how people are meant to behave _in their natural state_ to the complexity of modern civilization. It depends on the assumption that the human mind is a crystallized, unchanging bundle of desires. This is where most of us humans fall short.

We have the ability of metacognition. Hence, we have the ability to self- evolve. A better way to go about publicizing this kind of research is "sex sells, by default, and is optimal for [these set of conditions -- i.e. if your goals are all sex-centric. Maybe they are, good for you]. For [another kind of condition], this is the optimal strategy, which leads to [these kinds of interesting interactions]."

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem is that this article isn't very good. You'd be better served to read the piece I wrote:

[http://jseliger.com/2009/05/20/spent-sex-evolution-and- consu...](http://jseliger.com/2009/05/20/spent-sex-evolution-and-consumer- behavior-—-geoffrey-miller)

and Robin Hanson's work at Overcoming Bias:

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/spents-main- argument.h...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/spents-main- argument.html)

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/engaging-spent.html>

I believe I submitted the first link to HN, but it didn't get voted up. That Time's facile article did instead is somewhat disappointing.

<comment><USER4> Not to say that this is a good reason, but the Time headline is extremely catchy. BTW, I did find your review to be actually a review (unlike the Time piece)

EDIT: I see the anti-catchy police have changed the HN title ;)</comment></comment>


Hold off on deploying HTML5 in websites? - <AUTHOR> http://remy.tumblr.com/post/1261575750/hold-off-on-deploying-html5-in-websites <comment><USER2> The main point of the article as I read it is that HTML5 is made up of a variety of technologies, which have different levels of completeness and readiness for the general public. To say that HTML5 is not ready to be deployed therefore makes no sense.

HTML5 is just a buzz word to describe recent advances in web technology which should be used in the same manner as us web developers have used web technologies for many years: consider the target audience and provide adequate fallback mechanisms if necessary.

</comment><comment><USER3> the amount of people that do not understand that html5 is not a point release is depressing, under the same rules that disregard html5, ajax/xhr isnt ready for the big time yet.

<comment><USER4> Surely it's OK to deploy anything that works acceptably for your audience. With sensible fallbacks and graceful degradation there is very little downside to using 'bleeding edge' features.

Most of html5 and related standards have been constructed with careful attention of backwards compatibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> HTML5 is not one cohesive thing, so it's hard to make a blanket generalization about it like "it's not ready to use".

Refer to <http://diveintohtml5.org/introduction.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> Thats why I stick to stable technologies and target IE6...

Seriously now, alot of the standard is fairly stable and can be used.

</comment><comment><USER7> HTML5 can't solve all the problems, e.g. support for full screen video. Browser vendors need to have their own workaround.

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://validator.w3.org/> has an entry for HTML5 (Experimental)

I don't know if that means the validator or HTML5!

Then BOFH's can brush everyone off with "The site is valid Nhtml, please contact your vendor regarding this issue"</comment>


iOS/macOS: Cursor Handling in Catalyst - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/steipete/status/1240718286721101824 <comment><USER2> Will this also work if you use your iPhone -> HDMI? + BT keyboard/mouse</comment>


Scoot Networks: the Zipcar for electric scooters - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cleantech/introducing-scoot-networks-the-zipcar-for-electric-scooters/ <comment><USER2> That $100-$150 per month price point is bad. For $1200 to $1600, you can buy one of these cheap 100cc Chinese scooters easily, and you don't even need an iPhone. Insurance is about $40 a month and usually not even required for such a low displacement engine, and parking and gas are negligible. Also, riding a scooter safely isn't trivial, and isn't a skill most people have already picked up, like driving. Also, stinky herpes helmet or bring your own, and they aren't really that cheap and are sized.

Also, I don't want to support starting a new trend of the iPhone being the new facebook login.</comment>


Control Groups (cgroups) for the Web? - <AUTHOR> https://www.igvita.com/2016/03/01/control-groups-cgroups-for-the-web/ <comment><USER2> If this existed, I would implement it _today_. Even better then that, I would insist that our tag manager implement it.

This goes beyond display ads. Your standard ecommerce site is littered with tags from all sorts of things and each one carries risk. You might be running any/all of the following:

\- Web behavior analytics tags (Mixpanel, Heap, Optimizely, Google Analytics, etc)

\- Site performance tags (New Relic, etc)

\- Conversion tracking tags (Adwords, Facebook, + a thousand little ad market platforms)

\- Remarketing tags (Facebook, etc)

\- Social sharing tags (Facebook, Twitter)

\- SSO tags (Facebook, Twitter, Google)

\- On-site survey tags

\- Live chat tags

... and more

Listing them out now makes me realize how absurd the situation has become with third party tags on our site. Having this feature would go a long way in protecting our site's performance from bad actors.

<comment><USER3> Or you could just use a self-hosted open source analytics platform, and not worry about the cacophony of bullshit you just mentioned.

<comment><USER2> Ok, sure. That lets me strike Google Analytics from the list. And of all the vendors on that list, Google is the one I distrust the least.

The reality is that to compete, we need to measure changes to our product, we need to buy advertising, and we need to track the efficacy of our marketing spend. Each of these tags drives value for someone in the organization. Yes, we could create our own A/B testing tools and get rid of Optimizely or build an in-house ad server to handle conversion tracking. But the truth is, those things cost time, money, and software engineers, all of which are in short supply. As we scale up, we have found opportunities to make things first party but we can't (and shouldn't) attempt to rebuild every third party service on our own.

In aggregate, I have no doubt that these tags negatively impact the end customer experience. But going scorched earth isn't the answer. Implementation of a tag manager, careful monitoring of front-end performance, and diligent review and removal of unneeded tags is the balanced approach.

<comment><USER3> > As we scale up, we have found opportunities to make things first party but > we can't (and shouldn't) attempt to rebuild every third party service on our > own.

So, you just want to whine then. You acknowledge a problem but are unwilling to do anything to solve it.

Thanks for confirming that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What problem is this trying to solve? Having a single webpage with full control of the device, but limiting how many resources the ads on it can take? I guess that could be useful on the mobile web. However, the proposed solution is still way too low-level for web developers.

If the problem you're trying to solve is that web pages take up way too many resources (they do), control must be exerted by the browser, on the user's behalf. The only input the web developer should be able to provide is what to prioritize when resources are curtailed. Ideally, all web pages should be stopped completely when they are not the active tab, with background processing allowed for specific purposes, such as receiving notifications for messaging, or playing music. But then the specification should allow the developer to indicate what they need the resources for, instead of just saying "I want some CPU just because". And the primary concern should be how to keep developers from just saying "I want ALL the resources ALL the time" by default until the whole scheme is useless.

<comment><USER5> >What problem is this trying to solve? Having a single webpage with full control of the device, but limiting how many resources the ads on it can take?

Restricting ad resource usage is the only non-niche answer I've imagined. You could make arguments that games could prioritize input/networking over refresh rate using something of this sort, but it seems like there should be a better mechanism for those kinds of applications -- especially since this proposal would require you to separate your JS into multiple subresources to take advantage of it AFAICT.

Assuming their motivation was in fact to restrict resource usage by ads, I'm not sure this is the right way to go about it. Perhaps if your ad network can't serve resource efficient ads you should change ad networks (or pressure your current ad network to improve).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ha. I really do love that one Alan Kay quote

> The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural > resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. > When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error- > free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. -- > Alan Kay.

This is just another example of how the browser should have been built as an OS instead of an app.

<comment><USER7> No, it's an example of how operating systems have failed to offer consistent ABIs; causing people to build applications in a document viewer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I watched yesterday Dan Kaminsky's surprisingly related DEF CON 23 talk [0], where he presents a approach to UI security such that one can embed a paypal iframe without the ability of the website to hijack it. In that context, I view the proposal as a way to combat ad stuffing. A site could give guarantees that the ad neither clogs up the browser and could guarantee that the ad is visible.

Plus, the same mechanism could be used to keep the browser responsive, simply by only allowing a tab 95% of the available resources instead of all resources. (And if it is done right, a site could also forbid something like unmuted autoplay videos, by just not giving the ressources to an ad at first.)

I really like the suggestion. It is only an improvement on the 95% of all sites which try to play nice, but an improved experience on most websites is a overall win.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wx2TnaRSGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wx2TnaRSGs)

</comment><comment><USER9> Hopefully the author only means to bring relative shares in from cgroups - absolute limits seem like they would only serve to throttle the browser for no good reason. If you do want to throttle a browser tab, let the user do this in the browser. No reason for that to come from the page markup.

Also, is it realistic that web publishers will have to intentionally deprioritize ads and tracking etc relative to the main site/application? I imagine some people (ad networks) might not be too impressed with this.

Maybe a cool PoC of this would be an "adblocker" type browser extension/feature that automatically deprioritizes known ad/tracking content, but still displays it eventually. Then again, forced "async" or "defer" might be able to achieve this too without a complicated framework.

</comment><comment><USER10> How about gimme a button to disable CSS3 fonts and HTML5 canvas, webGL and shit, like we used to with Flash.

</comment><comment><USER11> This overall article made me realize that since modern browsers can use one process per webpage, maybe we should try and run such process in cgroups in order to limit their resource usage.

Maybe this could solve the "facebook makes my fan explode" problem.

It's just an idea.

</comment><comment><USER12> If we had unprivileged cgroup subtree management in the Linux kernel (which is something that I submitted patches for, but were rejected) then you could actually use cgroups on GNU/Linux with a browser not needing any privileges.

</comment><comment><USER13> How does that applies to devices with vastly different CPU and network capabilities? Example: my old dual core Galaxy S2 on a 3G connection and my 8 core laptop with 100/50 Mbs fiber. Both are Linux and have cgroups (I googled and Android has them.) I expect the browser to ignore any recommendation on that phone and use 100% of the resources every time. That could change, at least for the network, when the phone is on WiFi. On the other side newer octa core phones on LTE could honor the recommendations every time. One problem is that mobile networks can perform very differently even in the same very small area, just add a couple of meters and one thick wall and performances drop. I wonder if the browser can cope with this variability (probably yes) and if it's worth the trouble to implement the extra performance checks and logic. Is this going to be a desktop only technology?

Another problem is the developer: we could pick horrible choices for those limits and break the usability of the site for everybody but us. We need some tools or heuristics to make sensible choices. It's an extra layer of testing, to be automated by simulating different performance profiles. Should those different profiles reflected into the recommended limits, similar to media queries?

</comment><comment><USER14> A much simpler solution might look like a whitelisted set of domains/domain patterns that are given priority for network and CPU usage. For example, a meta tag on every page that lists your domain and CDN domain as "primary", and every other domain is then aggressively rate-limited by the browser.

</comment><comment><USER15> I would love to try something like this.

My use case: I work at a company with a lot of engineers working on our website. Most of our important pages have lots of code from different teams loaded on them - arguably, far too much. We are trying to make it so that different teams code runs parallelized, so failures and slowness are completely independent- but this only makes sense on the back end; in js, it's far too easy for a few slow components to slow down our whole website.

</comment><comment><USER16> I already use cgroups to limit chrome, though i believe this has little effect when things are leaking. Would prefer official notifications like "this website/extension is bloated garbage" or "warning jquery! amateurs ahead!".

I'd rather have an option to control chrome's memory usage (--memory-model isn't good enough) and discarding of active tabs—always swapping like nuts, might as well use it...

</comment><comment> zupa-hu The web is in a complexity spiral. Please don't. If you worry about 3rd party code (which you should), don't embed it.

</comment><comment><USER17> The idea is nice, but the implementation is really bad. It makes no sense at all to mix CPU control with the hierarchical structure of a DOM tree. Hierarchically different parts of a webpage may use the same (CPU) resources.

</comment><comment><USER18> To me it makes little sense without parallel script execution and full multithreading support in JavaScript. And I'm not sure that's the way to go, current execution model saves us a lot of trouble.

</comment><comment><USER19> You could run the problematic script under your own JS interpreter.

</comment><comment><USER20> And so further turning the browser into an operating system.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just use Web Workers and let the OS do the scheduling.</comment>