Elon Musk's Boring Co. Wins Chicago Airport High-Speed Train Bid - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-14/elon-musk-s-boring-co-wins-chicago-airport-high-speed-train-bid <comment><USER2> Chicago already has two rail systems that go in that direction. One, the CTA Blue Line, literally connects O'Hare and the Loop. The other, Metra, goes most of the way to the airport already.

The El (that's the blue line) already has absurd capacity problems. Chicago airport transit, at both Midway and O'Hare, is already pretty great compared to similarly sized airports: [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes- trains-and-taxis...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and- taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/)

In conclusion, maybe we should have more trains on the El, express and otherwise, or invest in Metra to get to the airport, instead of betting on an unproven, totally new, single-use kind of transit?

<comment><USER3> That was somewhat my first thought - "Why not just upgrade the Blue Line to a 4 track system so they can run express trains on it?"

I wouldn't be at all surprised if they could halve the El service's time from the loop to O'Hare by having a train that only has stops at major connection points - Clark & Lake, (maybe) Logan Square, Jefferson Park, Cumberland, and O'Hare.

But, of course, the Blue Line runs down the middle of I-90 between Jefferson Park and Cumberland, so there's probably not really any room to expand to a 4-track system.

<comment><USER2> Yep, the El's number of stops contributes greatly. Metra follows it starting Jefferson Park and Mayfair or so, and it gets to downtown a lot faster.

There already are some express trains but they still have more stops than what you're suggesting.

The El hasn't kept up with the massive increase in popularity of Wicker Park and Logan Square. Not so huge in absolute numbers but disproportionately people more likely to take transit. Surely CTA has already mined that out of their ridership data.

<comment><USER3> The El's "express" trains aren't really express. It's just a way to get a train back on schedule if it's been severely delayed for some reason. The system isn't set up for one train to be able to pass another, so it has to go back to regular service once it's back on schedule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't get it. Aren't there lots of companies around the world that already have this equipment and have done this kind of work for years? Drilling holes for trains is nothing new. What does Musk's company offer that is different? Is it just branding and marketing to make drilling holes the next big thing?

Is there really that much margin in drilling tunnels that they can just undercut competition while using the same equipment and technology and still make money?

<comment><USER5> Well, The Boring Company is claiming they've improved the speed of a traditional boring machine by 10x. So, maybe they are making the argument the improved speed makes larger projects more practical?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Boring_mach...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Boring_machines)

<comment><USER6> If the Boring company could produce a reliable boring machine that dug at 10x speed, the boring machine would far far more valuable than these tunnels. It makes me think that the claims are exaggerated or misleading.

<comment><USER7> _It makes me think that the claims are exaggerated or misleading._

Which is why they need to get their first paid job so they can prove it. They can make lots of bold claims for their own tunnel, but if they prove it's true on a real job, then their technology suddenly becomes _much_ more valuable.

That said, I'm skeptical too.

<comment><USER8> "Which is why they need to get their first paid job so they can prove it."

Shouldn't the boring company prove that it works before they get offered the job?

<comment><USER9> Is that necessary? If it turns out that their machine isn't 10 times faster than others', that's just their own problem.

<comment><USER10> Not sure. Did finishing in 1/10th time part of the contract? If not, then it we can think of the '10 times faster' claim to be bullshit which was only meant to win the bid...

<comment><USER11> There's no advantage to promising more than needed to get the contract, and there's a big disadvantage in that projects _universally_ tend to take too long, whether the tech is 10x better or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hate this so much.

First, nobody who's lived in Chicago for more than about thirty minutes can possibly believe that this will end up being free to the city. At some point, somehow, we're going to pay.

Second, we already have a perfectly fine train to O'Hare! This is an incredibly marginal improvement, and only benefiting a group that already has plenty of options. The existing train systems are focused entirely on an outdated model of exclusively bringing people to and from downtown. And huge swathes of the city don't even get that.

<comment><USER13> A little OT but what is it called when a rail system is setup purely to ferry people to and from the heart of the city?

Philadelphia is the same way. New York on the other hand is more of a spaghetti mess. I wonder if that interconnection does things for the city too, like encourage growth in more areas.

<comment><USER14> _> New York on the other hand is more of a spaghetti mess._

Not really. Look at the map again. Everything flows through Manhattan. The entire system is setup to take you to Manhattan. If you want to go from the Bronx to Queens or Brooklyn, you go through Manhattan.

There's really only one line for which this isn't true: the G from Queens to Brooklyn.

Lines like the M [0] that could fairly easily have been designed as a full circle, are actually U-shaped, because it's really about funneling people in and out of Manhattan.

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/yK4JtoG.png](https://i.imgur.com/yK4JtoG.png)

<comment><USER13> Ah that's true. I haven't really ventured farther out from Manhattan than the G. Lots more city out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Detroit's Mayor Mike Duggan wants a subway to run from the airport to downtown. He said he's waiting for Boring Co's project to finish in LA so he can check with the mayor to see if it's worthwhile.

[https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit- city/20...](https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit- city/2018/06/12/mayor-mike-duggan-elon-musk-underground-railway-tunnel- detroit-metropolitan-airport/695486002/)

Meanwhile Chicago's mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, just slipped ahead of him in line ;<).

<comment><USER16> I've heard some people cynically suggest that stalling public transportation projects is the true objective of the Boring Company, similar in motivation to the General Motors streetcar conspiracy. But I'm pretty skeptical of this since Tesla sells luxury cars; public transit seems unlikely to threaten their business.

<comment><USER17> I don't think public transportation was threat to Tesla at any point. Would families stop buying cars and prefer public transportation over their own car? Some may but the majority of them are still going to use their own cars.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure if you realise there are many world cities where you don't need a car.

I think great public transit is extremely threatening to car ownership, especially when zoning changes as a result of public transit.

<comment><USER19> In Hong Kong, which is one of the densest cities on earth and probably the world capital of public transit, _many_ families (at least those who can afford to) still prefer to use cars to get around.

It's just easier - until car sharing is functionally seamless and available more-or-less instantly, that will continue to be the case.

<comment><USER20> There are apparently ~500,000 private vehicles in Hong Kong (population 7.5 million). While I'm sure there are plenty of rich families doing that (perhaps partially as a status thing), it's not the norm.

Apparently Tesla isn't having much luck selling its cars there anymore anyway:

[https://qz.com/1024886/nobody-in-hong-kong-wants-a- teslanasd...](https://qz.com/1024886/nobody-in-hong-kong-wants-a-teslanasdaq- tslaanymore/) [https://www.ft.com/content/2b8eb480-0a45-11e8-839d-41ca06376...](https://www.ft.com/content/2b8eb480-0a45-11e8-839d-41ca06376bf2)

<comment><USER19> I live in Hong Kong. In a city this small and dense (and where a residential parking space can cost _several hundreds of thousands of dollars_ ), 500,000 private vehicles is a _huge_ number.

<comment><USER20> Actually I misread [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Hong_Kong#Private...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Hong_Kong#Private_cars) and that's the number of licensed vehicles. Maybe a substantial portion are taxis/delivery trucks/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For those wondering « WTF », the project is fully financed by the contractor. The risk taken by the City is zero. Worst case scenario they rebid after the Boring company crashes and burns. For Musk, the business equation thus relies on the costs of construction to be correctly balanced with future revenues obtained from operating the line over the next decades. If you do it right like Hong Kong MTR, it's a cash cow. If not, well, it's Eurotunnel.

<comment><USER22> Worst case scenario, they rush to break ground, bore half the tunnel, and Musk's financial house of cards collapses, now leaving us with another Chicago Spire sized mess underground.

<comment><USER21> This is not as unusual as you may think. Examples abound in such mega projects where a major civil works contractor default and another one walks in to pick up the mess. In addition, the path of the tunnel will be decided in details and subjected to various authorizations so mess will be limited. Delays will occur but, regardless what Elon thinks, there are plenty of reaaaaally good tunnel makers on this planet that will happily come and finish the job.

<comment><USER22> Without government funding?

<comment><USER21> Yes. I am involved in one privately funded metro project where the civil work contractor in charge of building the stations just went under. So, they rebid, and in the meantime other part of the project like mine have to standby :b

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting tidbit in this RFP is the winner has to pay for it! So of course they chose a startup that hasn't built anything and has no financing.

<comment><USER24> If they build the tunnel at $20k/foot, the cost would roughly be $1.6B. The line will supposedly run every 30 seconds for 20 hours per day. That's 876k trips per year. If they charge $20/ride and it fits 16 people, it will generate $280M/year at 100% utilization, or 17% ROI. Maybe a more realistic number would be 40% utilization, which still gives a respectable 7% ROI.

<comment><USER6> The article claims service every 15 minutes during most of the day, which means it will be extremely unprofitable to build.

This isn't meant to return it's investment, it's meant as an operational testbed for musk's vision.

<comment><USER25> The 30 second figure is from The Boring Company:

> _Electric skates will leave each station as frequently as every 30 seconds. > The Chicago Express Loop will operate 20 hours per day, every day of the > week._

Source: [https://www.boringcompany.com/chicago/](https://www.boringcompany.com/chicago/)

<comment><USER6> Ahh, I appreciate the correction!

I thought they were going to have a single track tunnel with passing sidings based on the 1.6 billion dollar construction costs, which would limit frequency.

Does Musk seriously believe he get two ~20 mile tunnels and terminals for $1.6 billion? I don't know if he's exceedingly ambitious or delusional, give that a underground that's depicted in the rendering would cost 1/4 of his budget.

<comment><USER24> That $1.6 billion was my back of the envelope estimate based on costs I found in the news. Apparently, there is a unnamed source quoted in the Tribune that the cost would be under $1 billion. Also, these skates are the width of an electric car, so one tunnel 28 feet wide should suffice for bidirectional traffic.

<comment><USER6> If your goal was to cut costs and your largest single expense was boring, you would choose two 14' bores over a single 28' bore, because a 28' bore has a cross section twice as large as the combined cross section of two 14' bores and variable costs for boring are roughly based on cross sectional area

One of the only things that I can agree with Musk in regards to this project is that larger tunnels are more expensive.

<comment><USER26> Wouldn't you need a third tunnel for emergency escape / access?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here is their project page: [https://www.boringcompany.com/chicago/](https://www.boringcompany.com/chicago/)

<comment><USER27> Why does this need to have battery? The skates will be mechanically confined to a concrete track as they describe, wouldn't it be easier to power them as high speed rails are powered?

<comment><USER28> They've said they want to power their TBM via batteries instead of running miles of high voltage cable. A similar rationale would probably apply for powering the skates.

<comment><USER29> Don't you need a really long extension cable to charge the batteries?

<comment><USER28> That's essentially what conventional TBMs use - high voltage extension cables to power electric VFD-driven motors. If you use batteries, you can drive them out of the tunnel and recharge anywhere.

<comment><USER30> Which also means that passenger loading and unloading can happen outside, thus substantially reducing station costs too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Isn't this extremely risky of a thing to do? Give rights to a company that has developed nothing for a design that has not been implemented anywhere else? Every major city outside of the US in the world has solutions to this, mostly being direct express trains. Why do something different like this?

<comment><USER32> One possibility: because when those projects are awarded in U.S. to the usual suspects, the projects start with exorbitant costs and decade-long timelines and then the price goes up and timeline slips by years.

See for example California High-Speed Rail: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/12/californias-77-billion- high-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/12/californias-77-billion-high-speed- rail-project-is-in-trouble.html)

Or "The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth" (in New York): [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york- subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway- construction-costs.html)

Apparently we do need to give it to someone who can control the cost and deliver things within our lifetime.

<comment><USER33> 3.5B$/mile is absolutely insane. London crossrail was built perfectly on time and supposedly only with a small increase of the budget (a couple hundred millions). And it costs around 15B£ for more than 100km and something like 50 stations.

<comment><USER34> Crossrail isn't built yet, and it's _definitely_ not on time (e.g. [1]) (but for some reason I keep people saying this!).

[1] [https://1londonblog.uk/2018/01/04/bond-streets-crossrail- sta...](https://1londonblog.uk/2018/01/04/bond-streets-crossrail-station-off- track/)

<comment><USER33> It's on time, they postponed it by one year to save 1B£. And the part that is opening this year is built, they are just undergoing testing and finishing the stations and the lines that will open next year. Everything seems on track for the December opening.

Edit: link that proves that in 2010 they decided to delay it by 1 year to save 1B£

[https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crossrail-opening-is- delayed...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crossrail-opening-is-delayed-by-a- year-as-engineers-told-to-find-savings-to-16bn-project-6524132.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If this works I'll be surprised... but happy. But realistically, I'll probably still take the blue line to O'Hare unless Musk's toy accepts my monthly CTA pass.

<comment><USER35> When I was younger, I'd always be looking for ways to do things cheap. The CTA Blue Line: $2.25 to the airport and $5.00 back to the loop? What a deal!

But now that I'm older, I'd rather pay more to reduce the agony if I could. It's just me. The CTA Blue Line to O'Hare for me is an uncomfortable 40 minutes. Uncomfortable because there's no room for a suitcase and you feel like a douche if you put on the seat next to you. It's a boring 40 minutes. You can't sleep because it's never a good idea to nap on the CTA. I guess you can do stuff on your phone (cell signals are good) but I'm not big on that.

That said, I still take the Blue Line to the airport. Because during rush hour, it's the only game in town.

<comment><USER36> A tale about "saving money" on transportation (and parking) ...

I used to live in San Mateo, CA near 92 / Hillsdale (up in the hills between US-101 and I-280). My wife, daughter, and I would fly out of SFO Airport to Arizona or North Carolina frequently. Rather than paying for a taxi or for on- or near-airport parking (Uber/Lyft wasn't a thing yet) we'd opt to take the SamTrans bus from Belmont -- the service was good, on-time per schedule, and cost $2 per adult each way, meaning we could be away for a week or two and pay just $8 round-trip to/from airport.

The minor catch was where to park our car in Belmont while we were away. There was plenty of parking about two or three blocks away from the bus stop (Belmont Caltrain) in places not directly in front of any houses or condos. We took seven or eight such trips ... no problem!

... till it was a problem. After one almost-three-week trip we got back to the airport and then went on to Belmont -- CAR WAS MISSING. So we figured the car had been stolen or towed. I called the police to see which, and they confirmed the car had been reported as "abandoned" and impounded.

Apparently Belmont (and perhaps other municipalities) have a 72-hour law for cars parked on public roads. You must "move your car" every 72 hours, or else risk somebody reporting your vehicle as abandoned. We must have taken somebody's favorite parking spot.

Total monetary damage, with city fees, towing fees, storage fees, our cut of the towing-and-storage-company's side-kickback to a city government official ... all came out to about $800. I figure across all our trips we probably ended up with a net loss compared to taxi-or-airport-parking.

<comment><USER20> Many municipalities have such rules (the public streets are not meant for "storage" of vehicles). In some places they are even enforced!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> >Elon Musk's Boring Co. is the winner in a bid to build a multibillion-dollar high-speed express train to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. The result gives the young company a big boost in legitimacy as it tries to get transportation projects underway in Los Angeles and Washington.

So, basically, they've won the right to make a proposal to finance their own construction of an airport link--which understandably just about no one else was interested in doing.

</comment><comment><USER38> If you can shoot rockets into Earth's orbit and land them back, you should be ok and be surrounded by the right people to shoot some pods up and down a tunnel. :)

</comment><comment><USER39> >15 miles and a $40 taxi ride away.

>...the city set a goal of connecting downtown with the airport in 20 minutes or less, with service every 15 minutes for the majority of the day. It also requested that fares be below the current rates for taxis and ride-share trips.

This seems technically rather undemanding. My local train service does 16 miles in 12 mins from St Albans to West Hampstead using some very run of the mill electric trains [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thameslink,_Southern_and_Great...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thameslink,_Southern_and_Great_Northern_franchise)

</comment><comment><USER40> > "I suspect it's going to evolve a few times before anything concrete gets > done"

That is a nice way of saying bribes, navigating institutional corruption and then of course dealing with organized crime. This is Chicago so good luck.

</comment><comment><USER41> As said earlier on similar boring company related topic, the metro in (say) Tolouse (France) or Turin (Italy) has been made using small tunnels (and unmanned carriages, Matra VAL system) several years ago already:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12935974#12937599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12935974#12937599)

Not exactly "news" and for the moment at least the boring company bought a used TBM:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002501)

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm not sure where they got the price of $5 for the current CTA train to the airport.

[http://www.rtachicago.org/index.php/plan-your-trip/travel- ti...](http://www.rtachicago.org/index.php/plan-your-trip/travel-tips/paying- for-your-ride)

> CTA "L" train fare $2.50

More realistically there's a single-ride ticket for $3.

> Single-Ride Ventra Tickets cost $3, which provides up to 2 transfers within > 2 hours

<comment><USER43> The cost from any station to O'hare is $2.50. However, the cost from O'Hare to downtown is $5.00

[https://www.transitchicago.com/fares/](https://www.transitchicago.com/fares/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> As the article notes - the Blue Line currently runs from the Loop directly to Ohare in about 40 minutes for $5 (though realistically more like 50 minutes). I am not sure how much more I would be willing to pay for the trip to only take 20 minutes... $10 at most?

<comment><USER3> Nitpick: Loop to O'Hare is only $2.50. It's just the return trip that costs $5.

I'd probably keep using the El for my own purposes, but I could see business travelers liking this option. They're already taking cabs, which charge more like $30 or $40 to get downtown (IIRC) and can probably take as much as an hour to make the trip if traffic is bad.

<comment><USER44> Fair point. It just seems like a very of a narrow market for high speed public transit over such a short distance. A large % of the travel time to O'Hare is not spent on the train/in a cab.

As a former consultant, I agree that business travelers would be willing to pay the cost whatever it was. However unless my hotel/office was right near a stop or traffic was unusually bad, I think it would take less time to get a cab from wherever I happened to be than to schlep over to the stop, wait for a train to arrive, take the train, and then walk all the way over to the terminal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> No public financing? How will the builder make a return on the capital, from fares? Ugh. It will be expensive and risky now. Hope there is a public component of the operating entity.

</comment><comment><USER46> > Electric pods for sure

That's not very exciting at all. Heathrow has them already, and even further back the Morgantown PRT from 1975...

<comment><USER39> Not 150mph pods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The negative nonsense here is surely astroturf but from whom?

"Without tunnels we'll be in traffic hell forever" -Elon Musk

Better electric transportation is an unalloyed good.

<comment><USER20> Some of us are concerned about burying more money underneath Block 37 ( [https://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/How-Chicago- Spent-...](https://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/How-Chicago- Spent-400M-On-a-Subway-Superstation-to-Nowhere-293754431.html) )

<comment><USER47> There's no public money being spent here

<comment><USER20> If this were Germany or Japan, I might believe that. But this is Chicago so please forgive me for being a bit skeptical.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do apps build encryption in calls? Any libraries or open source? - <AUTHOR> I know it consists of separating the audio in small packets and then encrypting them before theyre being sent to another user. However, theres so many of these encrypted call apps that I am getting the feeling that its either easy to make one or theres open source stuff or libraries that can help? <comment><USER2> Encrypted voice is very tricky to get right. One of the state of the art open protocols is SRTP (and ZRTP). However, outside of Signal and a few others, a fair amount of e2e encrypted voice is proprietary and aimed at the defence market. Webrtc (including p2p) is also encrypted, but it's not e2e unless the calls are p2p.

One channel for information leakage is variable bitrate codecs. Have a look at this paper. [http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/voip- vbr.pdf](http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/voip-vbr.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Is webrtc not p2p? I will check out SRTP! Thanks for letting me know!</comment></comment>


Ikea made a kitchen showroom in VR - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2016/04/05/ikea-htc-vive-kitchen-vr-app/ <comment><USER2> Now this is a cool innovative use of VR.

Imagine if you could look around your current kitchen, dining room, etc. and see how it would look with different furniture, paint, what have you.

I guess this might fall more under augmented reality, either way cool concept.</comment>


James P Allison and Tasuku Honjo win Nobel prize for medicine - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/01/james-p-allison-and-tasuku-honjo-win-nobel-prize-for-medicine <comment><USER2> That's great. They discovered the CTLA4 and PD-1 receptors - cell pathways that help protect against auto-immunity and allergy, but which can be hijacked by cancer to prevent cancer clearance.

The realisation that our immune system is important in protection of cancer is only really just starting to blossom, and there is a lot that still isn't understood. We don't know how many cancers are routinely cleared by our immune system. Some researchers think it might be in the order of 10s a day.

<comment><USER3> So if my understanding was correct, by applying the treatment (Immune Checkpoint Therapy I guess), immune system will clean cancer cells like they're doing a everyday task?

Well, then I hope one day that treatment will become cheap enough so it can benefit everybody.

<comment><USER4> The immune system is thought to already clear mutated and defective cells as part of their everyday activity.

Cancers which grow to a detectable/dangerous population have to find some way to evade this immune surveillance and hitting off switches like "immune checkpoints" is one way to accomplish this. So, blocking the off switches helps the immune system resume its everyday task of killing weird cells.

<comment><USER5> Is this envisioned as a treatment for detected cancer, or a preventative measure, or is the discovery too recent to tell at this point?

<comment><USER6> This is already being deployed in therapies today - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkpoint_inhibitor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkpoint_inhibitor)

And it works well in conjunction with other therapies that guide or otherwise help the immune system find the cancer. In particular, a style of designer gene therapy just approved by the FDA, of which one is called a Chimeric Antigen Receptor - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimeric_antigen_receptor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimeric_antigen_receptor)

These are in patients now, and curing people today.

If, for instance, the chimeric receptor (a designed synthetic cell-receptor) is able to enable immune cells to better _sense_ the cancer, and that is coupled with the checkpoint inhibitors to prevent the cancer from disabling those immune cells, one's own immune cells will then be able to directly kill the cancer.

The checkpoint inhibitors (associated with the Nobel here), take the brakes off of the immune system. This can of course be dangerous, but generally one of cancer's first tricks it learns is how to apply those brakes to hide from detection. So by tuning down the sensitivity to the immune system's 'brake pedal', one's own immune system becomes more capable in fighting cancer.

<comment><USER4> Maybe helpful for the HN crowd: the adaptive immune response typically prioritizes a low false positive rate. A developing cancer sneaks by as a false negative. Checkpoint blockade moves the immune system to a regime of higher sensitivity, at the expense of potentially lower specificity.

<comment><USER7> Yes, this. The side effects are not to be underestimated (they are similar to autoimmune disorders). Moreover, there are no good tests yet that can predict whether someone will respond. If someone does, it's sometimes spectacular but with all therapies from the field combined optimally, less than 40-50% responds (with single drugs it's around 10% I believe).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why not link to the source of information (with summary, explanation and illustrations to for common people):

[https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2018/prize- announ...](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2018/prize- announcement/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Obvious cancer treatment aside, I'm amazed about the possibilities for treating allergies. Sure, allergies might not seem as big a deal, but with the last few American generations having to deal with - what seems like a crazy increase in manifestations - from mild nasal/environmental allergies all the way to severe, deadly anaphylaxis-type (such as vs. peanut and other food) allergies...I sure hope this area of research gets tons of money thrown in.

Don't mean to get political, but when many U.S. administrations talk of throwing billions towards military weapons, but nowhere near as much towards positive research like this, it just gets me frustrated. (Caveat: I do understand and support __some __types of military research that lead to positive technologies such as GPS, etc. I 'm referring to governments spending billions on stupid projects like the F-35 joint strike jet fighter.)

Anyway, kudos and hearty congrats to the Nobel winners!

<comment><USER10> > Don't mean to get political, but when many U.S. administrations talk of > throwing billions towards military weapons, but nowhere near as much towards > positive research like this, it just gets me frustrated.

I picked up an adage from an old engineer once:

"It doesn't matter how many men or how much money you have, it still takes 9 months to make a baby".

I do agree that science is underfunded, but sometimes money isn't the problem, things just take time.

<comment><USER11> It strikes me that the "9 months to make a baby" applies much more to Engineering than it does to Research Science.

There are a ton of areas of research that we know will yield a lot of future benefit but since the NIH is actually funded at a lower inflation-adjusted rate compared to 15 years ago [1], the research is held up greatly. Grants to young scientists are diminishing and many promising researchers are leaving the field.

Building a bridge is a serial process, studying the metallurgy of hundreds of compounds is massively parallel.

[1] - [http://faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/FederalFunding/Graph%2...](http://faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/FederalFunding/Graph%202.jpg)

> _From FY 2003 to 2015, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lost 22% of > its capacity to fund research due to budget cuts, sequestration, and > inflationary losses._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's also a link to live-reporting: [https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2018/oct/01/the- nob...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2018/oct/01/the-nobel-prize- in-physiology-or-medicine-2018-live)

<comment><USER13> James P Allison on the harmonica!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPsjsdNsdgs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPsjsdNsdgs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Amazing and very well deserved! Checkpoint blockade drugs are in their nascency, and though they aren't a silver bullet, they can be incredibly effective nonetheless. A large number of people will be saved from cancer (and maybe some other ailments too) thanks to these scientists.

As an aspiring medical researcher, stories like these are humbling and inspiring.

</comment><comment><USER4> Surreal to be at the CRI / cancer immunotherapy conference while this got announced.

<comment><USER15> Yes, I'm there too, feels like we are participating in history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This certainly is promising, but I fear the drug companies will block the customized processes that would make this truly useful for mass produced pills of less efficacy.

I think there are lots of medical treatments involving custom genetics that might not be as profitable as drug production but would rather involve a lot of lab work. Things that are initially not as easily automated and profitable (but certainly economically feasible given the prices of drugs imposed by patent monopolies).

I don't think investment in these approaches will occur without government sponsorship and kickstarting.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder what the effect on some psychiatric diseases will be? Recently it was reported that bone marrow transplant resolved schizophrenia in a cancer patient.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder how long it will take for CRISPR to be recognized.

<comment><USER19> Possibly soon. Some awards that Allison/Honjo and CRISPR researchers have both won recently:

Warren Alpert Foundation Prize: Allison, Honjo et al. (2017). CRISPR researchers (2016).

Tang Prize: Allison, Honjo et al. (2014); CRISPR researchers (2016).

Albany Medical Center Prize: Allison et al. (2018); CRISPR researchers (2017).

Gairdner Foundation International Award: Allison et al. (2014); CRISPR researchers (2016).

Gabbay Award: Allison (2011); CRISPR researchers (2014).

Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Allison (2014); CRISPR researchers (2015).

That doesn't mean they'll win the Nobel, but they're definitely in the same awards realm recently. It might be Emmanuelle Charpentier, Feng Zhang, and Jennifer Doudna.</comment></comment>


Apache Kafka Basics Made Simple - <AUTHOR> https://turkogluc.com/apache-kafka-basics/ <comment><USER2> yes i also request people to give them back as you can also view at [https://mobilemall.pk/prices/apple- iphone](https://mobilemall.pk/prices/apple-iphone)</comment>


75 Percent of Animal Species to Be Wiped Out in 'Sixth Mass Extinction' - <AUTHOR> http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/06/19/75-percent-of-animal-species-to-be-wiped-out-in-sixth-mass-extinction#

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing they're not including insects nor protozoans. Just animals big enough to be obvious to people.

</comment><comment><USER3> I saw this in magazines in the 1970s. It never happened.

When the media starts to play the same game religions use (you will go to hell unless you do X), I realize that it's no longer about science and just about politics.

There have also been recent articles about the pope endorsing the idea of climate change. Since when has the Catholic church (or the Pope) been the voice to listen to when it comes to anything scientific?

<comment><AUTHOR> > I saw this in magazines in the 1970s. It never happened.

What hasn't happened? Mass extinction? You realize that species are going extinct at an accelerating rate. Currently it's roughly 2000 species a year.

> When the media starts to play the same game religions use (you will go to > hell unless you do X), I realize that it's no longer about science and just > about politics.

Well unlike with hell though, extinction of species is being observed and is pretty well documented.

Also your argument is fundamentally flawed. Something isn't necessarily false just because the church says so.

> There have also been recent articles about the pope endorsing the idea of > climate change. Since when has the Catholic church (or the Pope) been the > voice to listen to when it comes to anything scientific?

It's not like the pope pulled the idea of climate change out of his holy bottom. He's only promoting the idea that has been established by the scientific community so that the millions of people who are believers but who might not be aware/might not care about climate change might get involved.</comment></comment>


Why There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America - <AUTHOR> https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/paxadz/the-surprising-reason-that-there-are-so-many-thai-restaurants-in-america <comment><USER2> That is actually a great idea.

The best way to build a bridge between peoples is through culture, and food is an important part of culture.

The next step in bridge building is sharing meals with people of other cultures. Starting or strengthening friendships around food is a great way to lessen the power of prejudices, and put aside our _national_ identities for the benefit of sharing a common bond as humans through our _cultural_ identities.

Edit: even though the stated reason in the article has a political motive, I still think it helps at a human level.

<comment><USER3> I have to assume when you say national identity it means the same thing to you as racial identity because our national identity is mutable and transcends race. I can't move to Thailand and become Thai. I can't move to China and become Chinese. But they can move here and become American. They can move here and live the American Dream.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that what's so amazing about the USA? That it is open to "anyone"( well you get what I mean)?

People come from different nations, a country that allows different nations to exist in the same physical space is a great way to bridge that gap and food seems like a good starting point. Anyone can probably gain some appreciation for some culture if the food is good( like, this culture actually has something worthwhile to show). I think it works in a subconscious level. Also given the lack of worldwide history education it's also an interesting way to get people in a first contact with a different culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not mentioned is that probably half of Thai restaurants in the US are run by Chinese people. A good chunk of Japanese, Vietnamese and even some non-Asian restaurants are run by Chinese also. One of the top Thai restaurants in my area is run by a white guy. And there's a sushi place run by Thai folks. Good cooking doesn't care where you're from.

<comment><USER6> My wife is Thai and she tells me that the majority of the Thai places she's eaten at in North America suck.

Exception is San Francisco. There's a place in Little Saigon that is run by Thai people and she said the food there is exactly the same as home.

Here in Toronto we recommend Si Lom Thai Bistro. Which is good but not perfect.

<comment><USER7> Majority of Indian restaurants food doesn't taste like what we eat at home.

<comment><USER8> I have a friend that lived in India for a year or so. At the end of his stay and american chain restaurant opened up TGI Friday I believe). He said that was one of the worst meals he had while there. Nothing tasted "right."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are also plenty of Thai restaurants in Reykjavík (and Iceland in general), probably for a different reason then the article states since Iceland has a significant Thai population.

Living in Seattle for the past year, and loving Thai food, I noticed that there is a general overall difference in the type of restaurant a Thai place is between Reykjavík and Seattle.

Thai places in Seattle seem a lot fancier then in Reykjavík. In Seattle you most likely have to order a table, or at the very least have a waiter show you to your table. In Reykjavík, on the other hand, Thai places tend to range all over the place, all the way down to having only 4 bar-like seats by the window.

The menu is also way more diverse in Reykjavík. In Seattle, you can pretty much guess the entire menu before you walk into a Thai place. While in Reykjavík a Thai place might only have three types of pad thai on the menu, or only sell soup, or even sell have 3 or 4 pages of stuff on the menu, including non-thai cuisine.

Generally, I like the Thai places in Reykjavík better then in Seattle.

<comment><USER10> Check out "Thai Tom", it's more the style you're thinking of and very, very good. Expect to stand in a big line though

<comment><USER11> Very, very good. One of those meals I can remember years later. Sit by the burners and sweat for the full experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Indonesian food are delicious and the country population are huge but yet relatively unknown outside Indonesia. So yeah the power of marketing and deliberate smart plan can't be underestimated.

<comment><USER13> I will briefly add that Indonesian food is massively popular in the Netherlands ("East Indies" being a former colony). Rijstaffel [1] -- literally, "rice table" \-- is a national specialty that is celebrated by the Dutch, although I will admit that the history of the meal is rooted in that former colonialism.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rijsttafel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rijsttafel)

<comment><USER12> Well, Netherlands is a special case, of course. But relatively unknown compare to korea/thai/japan. These country population is much smaller than indonesia yet their cuisine is everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have been to Thailand about 5 times since 2006. In fact, I'm writing this from the airport returning from Bangkok this evening.

One thing I've noticed over the past decade is that the diversity of tourists has changed dramatically over the years. The first time I went to Thailand I saw mostly Americans, Australians, and Europeans. Nowadays its common to see people from all over the middle-east, Africa, South America, and of course the rest of Asia (China and Japan in particular). I was even surprised to see a Vietnamese tour group at Suvarnabhumi today (interesting to see Vietnamese with the disposal income to travel and the interest to travel to their next door neighbor). Just goes to show everyone loves Thailand.

Gastro-diplomacy appears to have paid off! What a great investment!

<comment><USER15> > I was even surprised to see a Vietnamese tour group at Suvarnabhumi today > (interesting to see Vietnamese with the disposal income to travel and the > interest to travel to their next door neighbor).

I live in Vietnam. Virtually every middle class Vietnamese I know has been to Thailand. For two simple reasons: it is one of the few places on Earth a Vietnamese can travel visa-free and it is relatively cheap. (Especially compared to, say, Singapore, which also allows visa-free travel.)

<comment><USER14> Is it correct to say that having disposable income for international travel is a relatively new phenomenon for the Vietnamese?

<comment><USER15> I guess it depends on what you count as "relatively new". Vietnamese have been traveling internationally, since the early 1990s after Đổi Mới in 1986. It is 4 hours from Saigon to Cambodia by bus. It is 12 hours from Hanoi to China by bus. I think Hanoi to Laos is also 12 hours or so by bus.

That's three countries within a pretty easy bus ride, making international travel relatively common.

As far back as 2007 (the oldest numbers I could find quickly), Cambodia was seeing over 125,000 Vietnamese tourists a year.

There's a reason there are massive casinos in Cambodia all along the border. (Vietnamese aren't allowed to gamble in Vietnam, so they go to Cambodia to do it.)

Vietnamese have been traveling throughout Southeast Asia for a while now. It is just that their numbers have finally caught up to (and in many cases surpassed) Japanese & South Koreans so you can notice them.

More disposable income certainly helps. But so do things like the increase in the formal economy (it is impossible to get a visa anywhere unless you have a bank account, a labor contract, etc). So do things like the spread of "Western" work hours (even now, the typical non-office job is 6 days a week, usually 10 hour shifts, which doesn't exactly leave much time or energy for travel; so travel most often happens in between jobs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had always assumed that many Asian themed restaurants added Thai menu items because it was trendy/popular. It's common to see sushi at Chinese, Korean, or pan-Asian restaurants.

Also, where I live, many specific Latin American restaurants (Peruvian, Costa Rican, etc) have started offering burritos and hot salsa, even though it's not typical of their cuisine.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's a lot simpler than this. Pad Thai is very sweet and Americans love sugar.

<comment><USER18> Pretty much! They are mostly over-sweetened versions of some southeast asian food. Once I had a curry chicken in a supposingly high end Thai restaurant. The curry sauce was so sweet that it tasted like dessert. Most Thai restaurants in North America are like that. I guess to most people sugar==taste good. This rule applies to many other ethnic cuisines that target "mainstream" in NA as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> if only more countries invested in soft power instead of saber rattling.

<comment><USER20> I would argue that the largest direct attack by one major power against another major power since WWII was Russia hacking/interfering in US elections, and that's an example of soft power.

I'd honestly rather have sabre rattling, because at least it's in the open and subject to popular scrutiny.

<comment><USER21> You mention the upside of sabre rattling. The downside is it tends to result in people getting killed.

<comment><USER20> And election meddling doesn't? It's not as direct, but it happens.

Also, as I alluded above, sabre-rattling hasn't resulted in armed conflict between superpowers since nuclearization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you don't appreciate the clickbait headline, it's because the Thai government subsidized them, as a form of soft-power diplomacy.

<comment><USER23> Soft power is the best kind of power. Oh no we've been conquered by excellent cuisine!

Someday, we'll just call it "food".

<comment><USER24> Yeah but what about these few extra kilos I'm carrying around because of it?

Help I'm being oppressed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This says that the Thai government started the program in 2001, but I remember Thai food suddenly becoming trendy in the 90s.

<comment><USER26> "Apparently, the government had been training chefs at its culinary training facilities to send abroad for the previous decade, but this project formalized and enhanced these efforts significantly."

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> While this play by the Thai government is a pretty indisputable home run in terms of mutual goodwill, what would be the reaction if [controversial foreign power of your choice] launched a similar effort at a greater scale?

<comment><USER28> To be fair, it matters very much who is making the gesture. The gorilla in the room behaves very differently from the underdog. Everybody expects that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if that's the reason why a few of my favorite local Thai restaurants all have the same or similar Thai tourism posters displayed throughout.

Regardless I think this is a brilliant idea by the Thai government. I'd love to see other regions / governments do a similar thing!

</comment><comment><USER30> In London there are plenty of Thai restaurants too, but I don't know how that compares with the proportion of Thais in the general population.

There are also plenty of Japanese restaurants, yet very few Japanese. Many of them are run by Chinese who have learned to prepare Japanese food.

<comment><USER31> And many more of them are run by Chinese who haven't learned to prepare Japanese food, unfortunately.

By the way, are you the dataflow guy?

<comment><USER30> > And many more of them are run by Chinese who haven't learned to prepare > Japanese food, unfortunately.

It's variable. There are some I'd avoid, but there are also some good Chinese- run Japanese restaurants.

> By the way, are you the dataflow guy?

Yes. I've had to move my pages (now at [http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/FMJ.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/FMJ.html) ). I've recently made major changes to the numeric type system, which now has a built-in Prolog interpreter and supports units and numeric ranges. I'm planning to add dependent types at some point but not soon. The system's still not ready for release.

<comment><USER31> Interesting. I'd like to try to use a dataflow system like that for an industrial application (despite my name, not for uranium enrichment centrifuges, I promise). I'll keep my eye on it. Will it be released as open source or a proprietary product?

Also, have you looked at the static checking of units of measure in F#? I find myself wishing I had something like that since I work with a lot of physical measurements.

<comment><USER30> I intend to release it as shared source, i.e. charge only for commercial use.

Units of measure in Full Metal Jacket are SI, similar to those in F#, but it also supports prefixes, e.g. 2.3mg expands to 2.3e-6 kg. The types and units are checked while the program is constructed in the IDE. At present there's no fully working compiler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Interesting. I've been surprised by the number of Thai restaurants that have opened (and often, quickly closed) here in upstate SC, a relatively rural area that, so far as I know, doesn't have a large Thai community. So I guess this at least somewhat explains it.

I've also noticed that Thai restaurants tend to be a little more hit-or-miss than other ethnic food places. I imagine the Thai gov't pushing to encourage Thai-Americans who are on the fence about whether they should open a restaurant would explain that as well.

</comment><comment><USER33> Depending on where you live, the reason also could be because there is a refugee population that has been resettled in that city.

Omaha, where I live, has a growing local chain of Thai restaurants (Salween, if you live here) that are owned and run by Karen refugees who have been resettled here. Their food is very, very good, the restaurants are very popular around town, and they greatly assist their community.

If you want to help refugees and other people groups, patronizing businesses owned by them is a fantastic way to do so.

</comment><comment><USER34> Very interesting. I wish there were more, "authentic" Thai places around. I'm in Chicago and by far the best Thai place I've ever eaten at was a small shop in Vermont. The owner is Thai and it's only open for lunch in the summers. No other Thai I've ever had compares. My brother who has spent some time in Thailand said it's because most Thai places are serving Americanized Thai food.

Authentic Thai Food is also a difficult thing to search for.

<comment><USER35> I'm in Chicago, and good Thai food is indeed hard to come by around here. I've been to Bangkok and good food is everywhere, even in mall food courts (Siam Paragon in Bangkok has surprisingly excellent food -- I think it's because most Thai people tend to hang out a lot in malls due to the hot weather).

Most of the places that non-Thai people recommend in the Chicago Loop are mostly of the Americanized variety (because restaurant economics -- these places need broad appeal to turn a profit given the high rents).

Don't get me wrong, I'm ok with non-authentic cuisine as long as they are good, but Loop Thai restaurants are mostly only "passable". The better Thai places are in locales with cheaper rent, e.g. JJ Thai Street Food in West Town, and Aroy Thai in Ravenswood (Aroy was recommended to me by a Thai person). These serve dishes that are much closer to what you would find in Thailand (i.e. spicier, more fish-sauce punch), but the downside of this authenticity is that folks with milder palates might be put off -- you probably wouldn't be able to bring any Olive-Garden-loving relatives to these places.

My personal barometer of how good a Thai place is the sweetness. The sweeter the pad thai, the less authentic the place.

Tyler Cowen, the economist, has this to say about Thai food in the United States: [1]

"Thai food in the United States is becoming bad. It's getting sweeter—with excessive use of refined sugar—and the other flavors are growing weaker and less reliable. In absolute numbers, more excellent Thai restaurants exist than ever before, but I wouldn't want to vouch for the average quality of Thai food in America these days.

One problem is that many Thai people have such a wonderful service ethic. I don't think I have ever once been treated poorly in a Thai restaurant. That has made courting wide audiences relatively easy. Thai food also looks healthy and has beautiful colors—all those greens, reds, yellows, and oranges.

As a result, Thai food has become cool. I first saw this trend in California, in the 1980s, when young people in black started turning up in large numbers at Thai restaurants in Hollywood. It spread. Americans eating in a Thai restaurant are likely more hip than those eating in a Chinese restaurant. Yet hip people do not always have superb taste in food.

As Thai restaurants have become more popular, they have become unreliable. It is so easy to make the food too sweet, appealing to lowest-common-denominator tastes or masking deficiencies in the food's preparation. The best sweet Thai dishes mix sweet with tart, but there's been too much abuse on the sweet side and not enough use of fish sauce or fermented shrimp paste or ground white pepper. The most-reliable indicators of bad Thai restaurants are a large bar and sushi on the menu. Those are both signs that the restaurant isn't that serious about food. Stay away."

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/six- rul...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/six-rules-for- dining-out/308929/)

<comment><USER36> Aroy was recommended to me by a Filipino person.

I like Andy's Thai Kitchen a lot. They've managed to treat my friends and I really well even during peak times. Also, you get a lot of food with your order. (Downside: Cash only)

Ocha in Bucktown is good.

<comment><USER35> Yes, I forgot about Andy's Thai Kitchen. My Thai friend recommended that one too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I had a look at ratios of immigrants to numbers of restaurants in Italy a while back, but it looks like the chart may have been lost during a blog migration:

[https://journal.dedasys.com/2008/05/13/restaurants- immigrant...](https://journal.dedasys.com/2008/05/13/restaurants-immigrants- and-the-popularity-of-various-cuisines/)

</comment><comment><USER38> All this may be true, but part of the reason is still that Thai food _is_ yummy and delicious! Speaking for myself, I could eat Thai pretty much every day. And luckily enough, I feel like we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of good Thai food here in the Triangle area. You've got:

YumYum in Cary

Thai Villa in Cary

Thai Cafe in Durham

Thaiphoon in Raleigh

Champa in Raleigh

Thai Palace in Chapel Hill

etc., etc. So sure, thank you Thai government, for sending all this yummy goodness our way!

<comment><USER39> Finding restaurant recommendations for my area on HackerNews of all places. This is great.

Can we get a Triangle Food thread going?

In no particular order or connection, some of my favorites:

* Relish, by Crabtree

* Salt & Lime Cabo Grill, by North Raleigh

* Fiction Kitchen, Downtown Raleigh

* Remedy Diner, Downtown Raleigh

* Beer Garden, by Glenwood (The pretzels <3)

* Trophy Pizza & Brewing

* Orient Garden in Cary (our favorite Chinese takeout place)

* Himalayan Nepali Cuisine, Cary (watch out for that spicy scale)

* Coffee & Crepes, Cary

* Mac House, Durham

* Mura Sushi, North Hills

<comment><USER40> > _Can we get a Triangle Food thread going?_

Please, no.

Yelp is a thing. This is not what HN is for.

<comment><USER36> Yelp is terrible.

<comment><USER40> And yet still a better venue for this garbage than HN.

<comment><USER38> And yet you seem to be the only one complaining...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Interesting, had never heard of gastrodiplomacy or culinary diplomacy. But a few other countries, including the US, have established some of these programs: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culinary_diplomacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culinary_diplomacy)

</comment><comment><USER42> It's the same in Stockholm. Lots of Thai restaurants, food trucks and those semi-permanent wooden structures.

<comment><USER43> One interesting thing I have noticed is that Thai food in Sweden (or at least Gothenburg) tastes almost nothing like Thai food in London. I wonder how much 'foreign' cuisines adapt to match local expectations.

<comment><USER44> The worst is Vietnamese food in Stockholm, it taste nothing like Vietnamese and tries to imitate local thai tastes. And that makes me so sad because I love Pho but I have yet to find a good one in Stockholm.

I also wonder why people buy sushis in a thai restaurant here, they are usually much worse than in real sushi restaurants and equally expensive. Maybe it's because the different persons at the tables disagreed on which food to buy but still, what's the next step? Selling pizza and Kebab in chinese restaurants?

<comment><USER42> How authentic are the fresh spring rolls? I really like those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> On a similar theme, there's a couple of companies that produce cookie-cutter Irish pubs for global markets:

[https://www.eater.com/2017/3/7/14839472/irish-pub- design](https://www.eater.com/2017/3/7/14839472/irish-pub-design)

</comment><comment><USER46> Smart plan, and works on many levels--both product and service industries included (in terms of creating demand), but of course cultural and diplomatic ones as well, with network effects.

</comment><comment><USER47> I remember reading something similar regarding Chinese restaurants.

It works though, my wife and I spent 2 weeks in Thailand largely because we were so enthralled with Thai food in the US.

</comment><comment><USER48> As I skimmed through the first N paragraphs in search of the buried lede of this article, as I seem to need to do for most articles these days, I am reminded yet again that HN needs an abstract service (aka tl;dr). Commenters should submit an abstract which is voted up or down, hopefully based on accuracy and compactness. Reader could then skim through abstract and make a more informed decision about whether it's worth the time to read, just like is done with academic articles.

(People who are going to comment without reading the article will do this regardless of whether you have an abstract.)

</comment><comment><USER49> TL;DR:

> But as it turns out, there is a much simpler answer: The Thai government > paid for it.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thai is pretty terrible compared to Vietnamese and Indonesian cuisines. Such a shame the latter two have made so little of an impact on most of the west, France and the Netherlands, respectively, excluded.

<comment><USER50> Never have I seen such a subjective statement in my life.

For what it's worth, I prefer Afghan cuisine, but all food is a fusion of earlier ideas anyway.

<comment><USER33> Kabuli Pulau is fantastic. I used to live down the street from a kebab shop that had the best kebab and pulau, all cooked on outdoor grills in front of it. Fantastic food, and I wish there were more good Afghan places in the U.S. I'm in the midwest, and the closest Afghan place I know of (that serves Afghan food, not just owned by Afghans) is in Chicago.

<comment><USER50> Incredible, I love it :) Hicksville NY has a decently large diaspora, we are a bit spoiled here. I taught myself how to cook their way, here's what I do:

Buy onions by the 50lb sack, chop them up, put them in the food processor, cook them once then freeze them into smaller containers. Whenever I want to cook a quick meal in 10 mins, grab the onion puree from the freezer, throw it into a pan with garlic and oil and paprika, fry it up and serve over some bread :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I would like to believe this article but:

a) Having eaten supposed Thai food in the USA I can tell you it's not Thai! Most of it's Chinese based.

b) You're talking about a government that couldn't organise its way out of a coupe let alone have a foreign policy. There's no way they are organised enough to do this.

It would be a great idea if it was in fact real.</comment>


The other hidden cycle-eating demon: code cache misses - <AUTHOR> http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=201

<comment><USER2> Cache sizing and memory latency are linked.

Up to a point, implementing larger caches can improve aggregate performance in higher-latency processor design configurations. Beyond a point, larger caches aren't performance- or cost-effective. Conversely, lower-latency processor designs mean that cache misses are less costly, and that L1 or particularly L2 caches can be smaller.

For a reasonable comparison of what changing the latencies within a design can provide, here is a LANL write-up from the Alpha microprocessor environment, and where Alpha EV7 had (for its time) low interprocessor and low memory latency and with toroidal processor links as compared with its Alpha EV68 predecessors and hierarchical or bus-based systems:

[http://www.c3.lanl.gov/PAL/publications/papers/kerbyson02:EV...](http://www.c3.lanl.gov/PAL/publications/papers/kerbyson02:EV7machine.pdf)

Among the x86 designs, the Xeon Nehalem-class processors have substantially better latencies (around 27 ns and 54 ns remote) than previous generations of Xeon processors. And rather better than the Alpha latencies discussed in the LANL document. Which means the effects of different cache sizes or access patterns can change.

Branches, too, can play havoc with the instruction streams and with the efficacy of caching and of instruction decode. Branch often and performance can suffer. Highly pipelined designs can take bigger performance hits with branches.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This post is a followup to this one: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803826>

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do you assume that you get the whole L1 code cache to yourself? I would think that on a real desktop system you would be lucky to get even half of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The L1 cache is only 32 (or 64) kilobytes. One program's time slice lasts at least a few milliseconds, easily 100 times longer than would be necessary to fill up the cache with that program's code data.

The OS can't dedicate parts of the L1 cache to different applications (the CPU doesn't offer any feature to allow it to do so), nor would it be a good idea to do so.

<comment><USER4> I would expect the hyperthreaded cores share their cache between both threads though.

<comment><AUTHOR> That could actually be a good explanation for why reducing code cache pressure can help even in cases where it doesn't make sense that it would; because the another thread is also using that cache.

Though I wonder if that's true of all SMT chips; I wonder if any chips have dual L1 caches for exactly this reason?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Optimizing is-multiple checks with modular arithmetic - <AUTHOR> http://duriansoftware.com/joe/Optimizing-is-multiple-checks-with-modular-arithmetic.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17887774](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17887774)

</comment><comment><USER3> The patch for the optimization is actually currently under review for llvm! [https://reviews.llvm.org/D50222](https://reviews.llvm.org/D50222)</comment>


NBCUniversal Sold $500M Stake in Snapchat - <AUTHOR> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/nbcuniversal-quietly-sold-500-million-stake-snapchat-1283201 <comment><USER2> > Three years ago this month, as Snap Inc. went public, NBCUniversal announced > that it had invested $500 million in the company.

Not sure why you would invest in Snap at their IPO price at $17, given that they had no prospect of profitability or any signal of growth due to Instagram's aggressive copying strategy at the time.

Compared to three years ago, $10 is a bargin, but no better than the $5 price in early 2019. Better wait for it to enter single digits.

<comment><USER3> Of course if they had known it would have fallen to $5, they would have waited. Anyone would have. But nobody has the fortune to invest with 20/20 hindsight

<comment><USER4> They gambled on a profit-less company IPO and lost. I'd say there was some hindsight.

<comment><USER3> Great. I assume you shorted them at IPO and reaped a fortune. Otherwise, my point stands :)

<comment><USER5> There's a huge difference between having the foresight to say this is risky and predicting it will crash to $5 in 372 days. One is prudent investing the other is gambling.

<comment><USER6> There is ___NO DIFFERENCE_ __between investing and gambling.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree. Maybe there are different degrees of gambling ie informed vs blind, but it is all gambling. Unless you are talking about fixed income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how much they regret not selling to FB

<comment><USER8> Not sure I understand.

The IPO of Snap raised $3.4 billion w a valuation of $24 billion.

Evan Spiegel has (maybe not this month) a net worth of over $2 billion.

Zuck was offering $3 billion.

<comment><USER9> Without contradicting your general point, Spiegel's bet worth is so illiquid (so solid? :) ) that I'm not sure what it really would be if he wanted to get cash out

<comment><USER10> I'd guess that a lot of the offer was in SO. so also illiquid. Though FB stock is worth way more than Snap stock so he probably made the wrong choice, but who knows.

<comment><USER11> FB is less illiquid than SNAP for Evan. If he sells 50% of his SNAP shares, people will get concerned about his investment in the business. A mid-level exec (or even high profile acquisition) selling a bunch of FB stock doesn't affect the price much.

But he probably likes running the company more than he'd like the extra money.

<comment><USER8> That is the key, he still had cash and control of a platform.

Very different situation for Jack Dorsey w/ Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Lots o people be liquidating assets right now...

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe they're little late to the party

</comment><comment><USER6> Who was silly enough to buy it??

</comment><comment><USER14> Liquidity problems?

</comment><comment><USER15> I never understand the "Quietly" part in headlines like this. The fact that it's headline news is kind of self-refuting, and even without that, where do people usually shout about the positions that they're selling?

<comment><USER16> It's part of the headline newsspeak bingo game. My personnal dislike is to "this SLAMS that". It's one of the many many reason why news sites lose value and identity, everything is instant, everything is a big news, everything is written in a way that shocks to get clics and views, and the actual information comes second place.

<comment><USER17> My favorite is the question headlines.

Is Mexico in talks with the US about drug cartels?

Are you chicken nuggets covered in covid-19?

Is Trump ritualistically sacrificing children in the oval office?

They're leaving it up in the air, so you can't call them on writing garbage they barely try to back up.

<comment><USER18> If the headline is a question, the answer is always no.

<comment><USER17> That's a good rule of thumb</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Looking for up to $10/hour dev to help me development of a side project - <AUTHOR> I have a side project which I'm looking for someone talented to help me with.   I'm an individual full time worker, but this could provide with a side gig for you and also its interesting, like up to $10 / hour ping me if you are interested. <comment><USER2> Maybe you can outsource the development in India / China, where $10/hour is an high price

</comment><comment><USER3> Talented. $10/hour. Pick one.

<comment><USER4> yeah, McDonalds will pay a 16yo boy more.</comment></comment>


In Graphics: Supercomputing Superpowers - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10187248.stm

<comment><USER2> I just watched this the other day - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9kobkqAicU> Cray-1 Supercomputer 30th Anniversary. I would give up my career and turn it around if given a chance to work in HPC.

<comment><USER3> What part of HPC would you like to work in? I have some contact with various HPC facilities but have never envied the people who work there -- they're just sysadmins who happen to work in larger, noisier server rooms than most.

<comment><USER4> Well, I'm just one of those sysadmins (but the clusters on which I work are much more smaller than the 'monsters' in the top500). I don't know if someone could envy me but there are surely other things apart the noise of HVAC systems (by the way we are using remote console when possible :-)). How about working with a lot of different computer nodes combining them with a fast network (Infiniband) and exporting the storage space through the cluster with a parallel file system? How about optimizing every aspect of the software installation (OS, compilers, scientific libraries) to give your users the best resources to run their simulations (biophysicist, electrical engineers, etc.)? To not to mention follow the aspects regarding the structure of the data center: cooling systems, UPS, raised floors, etc.? It doesn't sound too bad to me :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These kind of articles are why I really love the BBC.

</comment><comment><USER6> While the supercomputers themselves are interesting, I really like graphic. I think it displays the information in a more clear and compelling way compared to something like a stacked column chart, like [http://www.highcharts.com/demo/?example=column- stacked&t...](http://www.highcharts.com/demo/?example=column- stacked&theme=default), which would just be too busy with a lot of information.

</comment><comment><USER7> So where does Google fit in on that scale?

<comment><USER8> Google has a lot of computers, but they are not tightly coupled enough to be considered super computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious about the applications of these systems. Why is it that finance would be the third largest (known) group for supercomputer use? What kind of number crunching would they be doing?

<comment><USER3> A lot of it is statistical arbitrage.

That is: you look at the historical prices of all commodities over time and try to figure out which ones tend to vary together (eg copper-mining companies go up when copper prices go up... but you're looking for less obvious examples than that). Then you look at whether current prices diverge from these trends at all, and if they do you buy/sell accordingly. At least, that's the handwavey version I know -- I'm sure whatever they're doing at Rennaisance and DE Shaw is something I don't even know about.

<comment><USER10> Not a lot of it is statistical arbitrage - yes this is what Rennaisance and D.E. Shaw do, but this is not what banks (sans perhaps Goldman Sachs) devote much of their compute power to. It's just too hard to make money doing this compared to more traditional activities like market making.

As stated, risk management is a big application: VaR and market stress scenarios are computationally intensive, particularly for portfolios with path-dependent derivatives. Pricing is the other big application: it is similarly computationally intensive to value derivatives against the market- implied term structure of volatility.</comment></comment></comment>


Adblock Browser for iOS and Android - <AUTHOR> https://adblockbrowser.org/ <comment><USER2> Lol I'm never gonna touch a product by Eyeo / Palant / Faida again. Their policy and choices makes their products much worthless than they were, which are now racketwares, not to mention the addons are bloated.

Adblocking on iOS will go through OS content blocking for me.</comment>


FreeDesktop.org financial situation regarding cloud hosting for Gitlab - <AUTHOR> https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2020-February/041232.html <comment><USER2> There's more details 2 messages later on what the cost is for:

> Some clarification I got from Daniel in a private conversation, since I was > confused about what the money was paying for exactly:

> We're paying 75K USD for the bandwidth to transfer data from the GitLab > cloud instance. i.e., for viewing the https site, for cloning/updating git > repos, and for downloading CI artifacts/images to the testing machines > (AFAIU).

And more details on their infrastructure in general is at [https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Infrastructure/](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Infrastructure/)

gitlab.freedesktop.org is hosted in GCE us-east1. One runner for CI jobs is also in us-east1, but there are also (donated) runners at Hetzner and Packet, and a lot of bandwidth goes toward communicating with those. Apparently even if they disabled CI, it would still be $30K/year, I guess for hosting and web/git traffic. Not a good situation.

<comment><USER3> This is laughable. Just renting another box at Hetzner with the specs necessary for their Gitlab would be around $100-$150 per month. That is maybe 1-2k per year. With 10tb/month traffic included already, IIRC, additional at a very reasonable price, and traffic to their already existing Hetzner runner box being non-metered to begin with.

But woooh, that's probably not cloudey enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why don't they host it themselves in a colo?

Doing like Netflix did by paying AWS millions is wasteful and insane when managed colo is cheaper and self-managed colo is cheaper still. ByteMark.co.uk and pair.com are both great vendors that could save them money.

<comment><USER5> Colocation would shift a good portion of the annual expense to an up-front investment in hardware (as well as setup, shipping, install fees). It would also increase the required admin time.

It's quite possible that they could save some money by going this way, but it's by no means going to just fix their problem. In a way it would exacerbate it due to the capex for hardware.

<comment><USER6> They don't have to buy their own servers, renting from Hetzner would probably be much cheaper than AWS or Gitlab, and you can automate installing the runner on the server so your administration needs get reduced to basically "reformat the server and run this provisioning script".

I'm sure there are things I'm not taking into account, but it doesn't seem that bad.

<comment><USER5> Their issue is GitLab itself, not the runner. And sure, Gitlab is available in forms like a Docker image, but as someone who managed Gitlab for years... it's reasonably high effort.

Additionally, I would not trust Hetzner with anything that gets this much usage. They're very cheap, and they're very cheap for a reason.

When buying colo for a busy application, it's not unusual for bandwidth to cost more than the power and rack. All in all I'd expect them to be looking at at least $2k a month or $24k a year for power/rack/bandwidth. This would be something like an average, there are lower rates available in markets with cheap connectivity but then if the equipment isn't local you end up spending more on smart hands. In many places the rate would be higher.

Then up-front hardware purchase could easily be $50k and probably more. I wouldn't expect to see savings at all the first year, I'd expect it to cost a chunk more. Of course that's not quite fair, the hardware purchase amortizes over at least a few years, but when you're struggling to pay the bills that doesn't make you feel any better.

Renting hardware is an option, but will still cost you more than colo on year for year for equivalent capacity. Dedicated servers from a reputable source start at a couple hundred a month and quickly go up from there. It sounds like their situation will require HA.

I'm just waving my hands here based on my guess of how much usage they're seeing for the $75k they estimate in AWS spend, but I have a quote in my inbox right now from a reputable datacenter operator for $18k per year just for rack/power/x-connect, that's before bandwidth, which I'm going to be paying two different providers for for diversity (and this is still worse connectivity than AWS gets you). That's a full rack, which is a lot of room, but the power/xconnect/bandwidth part of that basically don't change as you go to partial racks so the savings are not really that big. Quality colocation costs real money, and a gitlab instance with that kind of usage shouldn't be running out of a bargain-basement provider.

<comment><USER6> That's very informative, thank you. It's still a third of the price, though, if your calculations are ballpark correct, which is nothing to scoff at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe it's time to acknowledge that fd.o is primarily a Red Hat operation, and ask Red Hat to step up and serve the community?

<comment><USER8> You mean IBM which could give this project a huge cloud services credit with the click of a mouse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is exactly why Void Linux uses GitHub and Travis. Hard to pay for one's own CI.

</comment><comment><USER10> > With reasonable estimates for continued growth we're expecting hosting > expenses totalling 75k USD this year,

How does that happen? My understanding here is the servers are doing something ephemeral and so... uh, why this isn't on Hetzner SB? I do not know of course whom they are using for hosting but 35 USD gets you a decent quad core 32GB RAM server there which is very hard to beat.

<comment><USER11> Problem is not server specs, but bandwidth.

<comment><USER10> Great, Hetzner has unlimited bandwidth (well, 320TB since the port is 1gbps).

<comment><USER12> If they start using 320TB / month they will quickly enter "Fair Usage Policy" territory. At that rate of bandwidth usage, Hetzner would be taking a massive loss and other clients would probably be impacted.

<comment><USER10> [citation needed]

[https://www.hetzner.com/news/traffic- limit/](https://www.hetzner.com/news/traffic-limit/)

that's not what this says. Nothing at

[https://www.hetzner.com/rechtliches/root- server/](https://www.hetzner.com/rechtliches/root-server/) [https://www.hetzner.com/rechtliches/agb](https://www.hetzner.com/rechtliches/agb)

In fact, people have asked support before

[https://i.imgur.com/usd27c2.png](https://i.imgur.com/usd27c2.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would switching from GitLab to something like Gitea/Gogs cut down on those costs? The GitLab system requirements start at multiple gigabytes of RAM and CPU cores for almost idle installations whereas a small Gitea I'm running takes <100MB RAM and next to zero CPU. Most people I know that self-host (i.e. privately, not commercially) a git server with issue tracker don't run GitLab due to the resource hogging. But I don't know how it scales when you put more load on Gitea vs the same load on GitLab -- does anyone have experience with that?

<comment><USER7> It says in the message it's storing and serving build artifacts that is driving costs. This means the expense is in disk and bandwidth, not CPU and RAM. Switching to Gogs would cut down on the resources which are not identified as the problem.

<comment><USER14> They probably could use some cheap blob storage like Backblaze B2 which is very cheap ($0.005 GB/month storage, $0.01 G download) for storing artifacts then put Cloudflare in-front of it.

If artifacts are treated as immutable most of the traffic will be from the CDN and as they are immutable can have a far future cache-control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Digital Ocean bandwidth is 1 cent per gigabyte.</comment>


Show HN: Intuitive Code Search - <AUTHOR> https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MetacodeInc.metacode&source=hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> We can use Google to search the web, but we don't have simple tools to search code using intuitive queries, until now.</comment>


Swede's iMac takes a burnin' and it's still turnin' - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2010/02/15/swedes-imac-takes-a-burnin-and-its-still-turnin/

<comment><USER2> heh, last story about a real-world burnt computer I saw involved evacuating Yahoo HQ for a fire started by a Dell laptop battery. Now the Mac survives a building burning down around it. Not a fanboy (own more Dells than Macs, most running Linux), but that's a good story.</comment>


Ask HN: Secure Domain Consignment - <AUTHOR> At the moment, my digital identity is entirely dependent on a "@gmail.com" address. Bank accounts, social networks accounts, digital services - all of them tied directly to my gmail account.
I'd like to slowly start untangling the mess. The plan is to register a
.com domain, and start routing my emails through that instead.
My main concern here is losing my domain name. If I lose my domain, I'll likely lose access to the various services tied to it, with no ability to recover access.
This brings me to the issue of choosing a registrar I can trust. Registrars have varying track records when it comes to trustworthiness and security. I need a company I can rely on to safely secure my domain. In the possible event of a breach, or even in an identity theft scenario - I'll need a registrar I can work with to ensure my rights are can be restored.
Can anyone recommend such a service for private individuals? <comment><USER2> Here's a list of proper services:

[https://www.privacytools.io/providers/dns/](https://www.privacytools.io/providers/dns/)

I'm using Gandi (a french company) right now without an issue, too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've used GANDI for all my personal vanity domains for many more years than I care to count.

Highly recommended.</comment>


Niantic is opening its AR platform so others can make games like Pokémon Go - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/28/17511606/niantic-labs-pokemon-go-real-world-platform-ar <comment><USER2> It's about time. I've been waiting for this forever.</comment>


How do I find Waldo with Mathematica? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-waldo-with-mathematica?repost_to_hn_because_the_last_discussion_was_861_days_ago=true <comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly, even though the top answer has 1337 upvotes, it appears none of those people checked whether the answer actually works. Either that, or Mathematica's algorithms have changed since Jan 2012.

Another commenter got me curious about just how hand-tuned the answer was, so I fired up Mathematica 8 and put their solution in. I had to dig up the original image using Wayback Machine (thanks, archive.org!) but then, to my surprise, their answer didn't actually work. It merely darkened the image uniformly, meaning it wasn't able to find any potential Waldos.

I fiddled around with their solution for a bit, and then finally just hooked their parameter up to a slider. I thought maybe the "level" parameter just needed a bit of tweaking. But surprisingly, it still doesn't work as advertised: [http://i.imgur.com/XWNTvYU.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/XWNTvYU.jpg)

Their "level" parameter was originally 0.12, but like I said, that didn't work at all. It doesn't work until the parameter is bumped up to 0.18, at which point it gives the wrong solution (the lower-left circle). Then, 0.19 gives another incorrect solution (the lower-right circle). Finally, 0.20 identifies Waldo.

So this solution is a nice way to filter out potential targets, but I wish I could figure out whether the original poster was being shady or whether Mathematica's internals changed since they posted their answer. I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, but that has me burning with curiosity about what exactly must've changed in Mathematica's implementation.

EDIT: I didn't do the most basic of checks: to make sure I didn't introduce any changes in the original experiment. It turns out by rehosting the image on imgur, it compressed the resulting image, introducing artifacts into the color channel. Their solution no longer worked as advertised due to this. That shows how brittle the solution is, though! I wonder if we can make it more robust without fundamentally rewriting it?

<comment><USER2> The code works as-is in Mathematica 9 (though with the URL modified to point to archive.org), so there's likely a difference between your version of 8 and 220.127.116.11.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you try [http://i.imgur.com/WwQ8P5R.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/WwQ8P5R.jpg) instead of the archive.org link? I rehosted the image on imgur, but it looks like imgur re-compresses the jpg, resulting in differences in the image. If so, then that demonstrates just how brittle this solution is.

<comment><USER3> I can confirm with this screenshot ([http://cl.ly/image/2Q2e3k1w0g25](http://cl.ly/image/2Q2e3k1w0g25)) that imgur does indeed do some sort of compression that makes this solution break with an imgur link for Mathematica 9. I may investigate a bit further. I had previously tested with an uncompressed image, and the same technique did produce the expected results from the answer on Stackexchange.

UPDATE: Changed the correlation value from .12 to .2 and the compressed imgur image has some interesting results (3 circles, one of them is on Waldo): [http://cl.ly/image/0Z3k150S2z10](http://cl.ly/image/0Z3k150S2z10)

<comment><AUTHOR> _Changed the correlation value from .12 to .2 and the compressed imgur image has some interesting results (3 circles, one of them is on Waldo):_ [http://cl.ly/image/0Z3k150S2z10](http://cl.ly/image/0Z3k150S2z10)

Yeah, I'm getting the exact same results. So it looks like compression is messing with the algorithm's correlation ability. I think the problem is that red color values are often thrown out in image compression (moreso than intensity / green channels).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> it makes me incredibly happy that the top answer is just a simple correlation - building a boltzman machine or svm is completely overcomplicating the problem. In the other thread the top comment echos that this is a common problem in CV (as in object detection) and goes into that process. But an important thing we ML practitioners should remember is that we're building toward a goal, and exercises like this can help put us back in our place when we see that simple is usually better.

<comment><USER5> As long as we're admiring simple solutions that work on a dataset of size one, and as long as we're allowing a human in the loop, you might like this algorithm:

        return (150, 200);

It's pretty straightforward, it just took some parameter tweaking to match Waldo's coordinates exactly.

Obviously I'm being pedantic, and I mean no disrespect, but I have a bone to pick with so-called "computer vision" algorithms that are little more than simple image processing. In this case, the time spent implementing and tuning the algorithm exceeds the time it would take to solve the task manually (e.g. pay a second-grader to do it). And as others have observed, it isn't obvious that this algorithm would generalize to other images, in which case no time is saved over the manual approach.

It is tempting to dismiss sophisticated techniques because (a) they are hard to understand and (b) the task seems so easy to our own brain-equipped vision systems. But the fact is, most interesting computer vision problems (including this one) require sophisticated representations to achieve robustness and generality. In other words, any good solution will need an answer to the question "What is a Waldo?" that is better than "a 50x50 patch of pixels with red and white stripes".

<comment><USER4> > "so-called 'computer vision' algorithms that are little more than simple > image processing"

Implementing any learning algorithm should be the absolute last resort. They're complicated, hard to generalize, and difficult to guarantee in the real world. Not that image processing is much better, but it's definitely more deterministic and predictable in its results. With any system geared toward a specific goal, your first approach should be to look at the simplest solutions (no matter how rudimentary they may be).

> It is tempting to dismiss sophisticated techniques because (a) they are hard > to understand and (b) the task seems so easy to our own brain-equipped > vision systems. But the fact is, most interesting computer vision problems > (including this one) require sophisticated representations to achieve > robustness and generality. In other words, any good solution will need an > answer to the question "What is a Waldo?" that is better than "a 50x50 patch > of pixels with red and white stripes".

Yes, of course. I'm using waldo as an example toward a problem I often see reading research papers, that is an overly complex system made to try to solve more than just the initial task. "What is a Waldo" is irrelevant to the task at hand. Identifying the best candidate for Waldo is the goal. In this situation simple correlation (or even more efficient correlation methods: MMCF, OTSDF, QCF, etc) can give good results (except on that all waldos page...damn that's even hard for a human) most of the time.

To make a euchre analogy - you don't pass on a biddable hand, and you don't waste your trump cards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And here is the discussion mentioned [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3367865](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3367865)

</comment><comment><USER7> You could also prioritize your search area, assuming you're searching official Wheres Wally? images.

"53 percent of the time Waldo is hiding within one of two 1.5-inch tall bands, one starting three inches from the bottom of the page and another one starting seven inches from the bottom, stretching across the spread."

[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/11/where_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/11/where_s_waldo_a_new_strategy_for_locating_the_missing_man_in_martin_hanford.html)

<comment><USER8> "53% of the time, Waldo appears in an empirically determined 25% of the page"

If you repeated this with random data, I expect you could find the same results: this does not constitute evidence that Waldo is placed in those bands with priority.

You can mathematically say that 100% of the time, Waldo appears in 0% of the page (defined by individual points rather than areas). This equivalent statement clearly has no predictive power.

In my opinion, it would not be reliable to use this on novel Waldo images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the time of writing this, the top answer has exactly 1337 upvotes.</comment>


How Art History Majors Power U.S. Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-06/postrel-how-art-history-majors-power-the-u-s-.html

<comment><USER2> His professors "stressed that they weren't there to teach us a soon-to-be obsolete skill or two about a specific language or operating system ... but rather the foundations of the field, for example: characteristics of languages and operating systems, how one deals with complex projects and works with others, what is actually computable, the analysis of algorithms, and the mathematical and theoretical foundations of the field, to pick just a few among many. That education has held me in good stead and I've often pitied the folks who try to compete during a lifetime of constant technological change without it."</comment>