Ask HN: What about a GitHub profile tells you a developer is quality or not? - <AUTHOR> Trying to learn every day. <comment><USER2> I think it's a pretty bad idea to try to judge a developer from their github profile.

For the vast, vast majority of developers (no matter skill level), their github profiles are somewhere between "non-existent" to "a collection of weirdo stuff I played around with for a few minutes five years ago that doesn't reflect my professional output or interests at all". It just doesn't have much correlation to anything.

I've got several things on github, but even then it's not really representative of anything. If you look at my profile you'll see that it's a mess of random projects and toys in random languages. But it doesn't reflect how I spend most of my time.

There are a few niche cases where a github profile might matter - like if you are a consultant that specifically works supporting a OSS project and you want to show evidence of that to potential clients. But otherwise, don't worry about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted. I got this misconception hanging around at a coding bootcamp for a few weeks.

I got a job on my own as a Jr. Developer and all they wanted to see was URLs to things I'd made and explaining to them how I built them.

I want to keep progressing. So I should just focus on making more stuff, describing my process in blog posts, and writing technical tutorials to help beginners get at least to where I'm at?

<comment><USER2> Yep. I agree with patio11's comment. I've had more success due to writing technical blog posts than anything. It's way more useful / beneficial then fluffing up a GitHub profile.

I have several GitHub personal projects in the 1000 star range and literally no one looks at that or cares at all. It just gets me an unpaid side job answering users questions and reviewing PRs.

But people email me all the time about stuff I've written online and that has often led to new opportunities. Plus writing online is also tons of fun for me and a great way to keep learning new things.

<comment><AUTHOR> This thread has been invaluable. I'll keep this in mind as I rebuild my personal site, showcase my work, and write a few technical articles to help other people get to where I am.

Glad I asked! It's amazing the depth of experience you can glean from here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would never take negative signal from a GitHub profile, because for many, many developers, that will not be a meaningfully sized or representative example of their professional output. There exist many employers where you can do excellent work for many, many years and never OSS a single line of it.

I also think that the developer community far overestimates how much "have a good Github" is worth in terms of creating career equity, both because the people who you attempt to influence via it are largely not developers and, to the extent they are developers, are unlikely to spend hours looking at your Github profile trying to extract signal from it. You can probably get superior results for far less effort by writing ~3 good technical blog posts. (Do what makes you happy, naturally, but to the extent that getting well-paying exciting jobs generally makes people happy I'd recommend almost everyone treat having a small number of technical blog posts like exercise, in the "simply too useful not to do" bucket.)

<comment><USER4> Any tips for what to target in those three technical blog posts? Would something rudimentary like 'how to create your first react application' be less impressive than something like 'how I cured cancer with the blockchain'?

<comment><USER5> Speaking by as a hiring manager, I'd be very interested in a blog post that a) defines a real world problem you are facing, b) describes your approach to solving the problem and c) provides details of the actual solution. Basically, you are answering a key interview question for me.

Also, I'm not looking for a cure for cancer here. It can be something that you faced in your notmal developer life, or it could be a silly personal life thing. The key is to show me how you go about solving problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Revamping my personal site and portfolio, thinking of how to best pitch myself as a designer-developer with previous experience as a technician and in sales.

I will try to do each of those for each item in my portfolio to highlight my design thinking and technical acumen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a hiring manager, I used to want to see a profile that competed with my own (at the time).

Now I've learned that (1) burnout is real, (2) work CAN be intellectually stimulating enough to not create that OSS desire, and (3) eventually your job ends at 5 and life takes over.

With that said, I WISH more developers opened issues on the projects they've used.

All too often I've seen people drop one dependency for another due to an edge- case.

Even a simple issue explaining the problem, providing a test case or sample code would be great as an indicator to how a developer approaches problems and seeks help.

<comment><USER7> > I WISH more developers opened issues on the projects they've used.

Tangential, but I wish I had the ability to rename GitHub issue titles on other people's projects, or that at least the maintainers would do this. There's too many "Help thing no work plz assist" that needs to be renamed to a useful description of the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm amused by all the "nothing" responses.

At Google, a candidate was referred to our team but had chosen to do all his interview questions in Python. This left me unable to discern "Can this candidate write code in C that actually understands memory handling and pointers?". Luckily, he had a GitHub repo for his work on a FUSE layer he had written that demonstrated that not only could he write in C, he also had reasonable commit hygiene (good commit messages, reasonable granularity, etc.).

I would never begrudge someone for having an empty GitHub profile (mine is unimpressive), but I've definitely both decided for and against candidates given the extra data it provides.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted. I got the Google foobar challenge a year ago while on a flight to Seattle. I didn't finish it because I was still a noob at the time (it happened when I googled a few things about Angular 2). Will I ever get it again or did I blow it?

I would ideally like to work at Amazon or Google, both companies have had a major impact on my quality of life and I would love to contribute in a meaningful way.

I still get weekly emails for job openings at Google but I've done a lot of adventure travel in the last year between entry-level tech jobs and had to work through some personal issues before I could get back on my 'A-game' for expanding my skillset.

What advice/tips can you offer me about making a quality portfolio site from what you've seen at Google?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have hired and let go of big time OSS developers before, with hundreds of packages they had written or maintained. Ultimately there was no correlation between their impressive Github resume and their ability to work as part of a team delivering product to customers, focusing on what matters to the business.

It seems to me that working on distributed OSS projects with strangers on Github or working on personal projects in one's spare time is a very different experience from how most software development shops are run, so there's only so much overlap there between the skillsets.

It does show you that the person knows how to write some code with no clear scope or deadlines, but that's a pretty low bar for most places.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think Github is a tremendous resource, but while Github profiles can give a positive signal, they are not sufficient for negative filtering.

Many, especially older developers it seems, only begrudgingly have a profile for tickbox judgments encountered during job seeking. The best developer I ever worked with just didn't care about bothering with a Github profile, and the worst guy I ever interviewed had an expansive profile, including a repo with 80+ stars that was trivial and terribly coded, and our team's conclusion was that he got his bootcamp associates to star it.

At the end of the day it's a private company seeking a profit, and it's a little ridiculous that it's become defacto mandatory for proving you are a good developer, in the same (somewhat annoying and unfortunate) way that FaceBook has become defacto mandatory for proving you lead a social life.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent point. I asked this question based on two experiences:

1.) after attending a coding bootcamp for 6 weeks (didn't finish) and being around a lot of people who believed it to be important to 'job placement'.

2.) after someone I know who first asked to join their startup started to question by abilities because 'your github doesn't have much there. are you sure you know what you're doing?'

Looking back, doing some HN searches, and after reading this thread...the bootcamp community in general sketches me out. And that guy having no technical skills, was not in any position to evaluate my skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't judge as a developer's quality based on their github profile. What a github profile does give me, is credibility to the claim that they are passionate about software.

When during an interview someone says they are passionate about software engineering and they have a github profile that reflects this, it gives me a reason to believe this person. But, I take the attitude that 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. When another person makes the same claim but with an empty github profile, I don't assume this person is lying. You can usually tell if someone is passionate or not by the way they talk abot their previous projects as well.

That being said, a well-used github profile is not a reason to hire someone and neither is an empty one a reason not to. Some of the best people in the field that I have had the chance to work with had zero, or close to zero, github contributions.

\---

From the other side (the 'looking for a job' one), when interviewing with a company I worked for some years ago - they did ask me for a link to my github profile and some open source code I did. But the company made most of their software open source and they believed strongly in OSS. I believe this was done not to judge a person for the quality of the work, but rather to get an idea if the person also liked OSS.

</comment><comment><USER12> Im an experienced developer who doesn't really have much on my github profile. One or two contributions to open source projects that I've used and a handfull of issues created or commented on. Most of my code is private. I'm not sure what, if anything, someone would take away from that, other than I'm not that active in the open source community.

<comment><USER13> thats more than me :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> * Do they have their own projects or do they contribute to others?

* How interesting are those projects generically and in the context of what I would need this developer to do?

* Are these projects actually used by anyone? Are there pull requests, etc?

* Does the developer actively keep working on existing projects or move around? I.E., are these learning vs hobby vs commercial?

* How is their readme? Does it exist? Is it sufficiently complete to convey meaning?

* How is the code organized? Is it reasonably laid out? Do they make use of third party packages and tools? Does it seem like they are re-inventing the wheel?

* Does the code work?

* Is the language chosen the right language for the job? Are they using idioms of that language or more generic ways of expressing loops, vsriables, etc.?

* How extensible is their design? Does it feel krufty or is it a pleasure to read?

* Is the code novel? Are they re-inventing the wheel or are they actually fulfilling a need?

* Are their projects wide and varied in scope and tools?

Those are a few things off the top of my head. Not an exhaustive list.

<comment><USER15> The idea of someone telling me I chose the wrong language for the job in a hobby project makes me want to delete all my oss code.

<comment><USER16> As long as you understand idioms, programming paradigms in general, and good patterns in specific languages (e.g. list comprehension in python, prototypal inheritance in js, metatables in lua, etc.) you shouldn't be afraid of showing off your stuff in X language.

I know good Java developers that have become really good front-ends.

<comment><USER17> Well Java doesn't have a stigma attached to it like COBOL or BASIC does. What about those of us who have _terrible_ QBASIC code they wrote when they were 14 on their github/bitbucket/etc profiles? I'm not going to hide that; it's public because it's useful. (I intend to dig up more terrible code I wrote and put it up)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nothing.

The presence of a high-quality, well-rounded set of projects in GitHub is mostly indicative of the fact that the candidate in question has the spare time to work on Free Software. That's a lifestyle thing, and not relevant to the hiring decision.

</comment><comment><USER19> Nothing.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nothing. IMO, the only thing that a Github profile itself tells me is how often they spend time interacting with Github and writing code.

The code within their Github repositories, on the other hand, can say a lot. But I won't spend too much time perusing it; I'll probably look at their resume, see "Oh, they can write Ruby and Golang and have a Github account", view their Github repositories, see their code, say "Okay, they can write ruby and golang" or "Oh no, they can't" and move on.

</comment><comment><USER16> I know experienced developers that have few or none activity in GitHub at all. So, it depends.

You could find developers that:

1\. write good code and are active in the community

2\. write good code and are not active in the community

3\. write ok code and are active in the community

4\. write ok code and are not active in the community

5., 6., etc., (... you get the idea)

So, with number 2, you could see an empty GitHub profile and perceive it as low quality, but that's the wrong perception. See `pyrophane` comment as example.

Obviously on a hiring process a GitHub profile with activity is a great plus, but, again, it depends.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's one take, in order of increasing quality:

1\. Participates somehow in popular open-source projects, by posting bugs or updating wiki entries.

2\. Opened merged PRs for popular projects that fix bugs or add test coverage.

3\. Opened merged PRs that add new functionality.

4\. Is one of the maintainers of a popular OS project.

5\. Created a popular OS project.

<comment><USER22> Define popular. For example: No one really uses reactos in production and a significant number of hn commenters are disappointed its not a js framework. Yet I would consider legitimate contributions there to be similarly interesting to contributions to any other OS (Linux, Minoca, BSD, etc). I'm fact, I suspect much of the work to be done for reactos is far more interesting than the work to be done on reactjs, despite the latter being leagues more popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It depends on the size of the company.

\- big companies: it's all about eliminating fake Resumes. they only use your web presence as a background check since they already have their own hiring process in place to evaluate a candidate (whiteboarding crap). In other words, they ain't care

\- small companies: they will dig deeper since they don't get many Resumes on their desk. In this case, it will be about code quality, complexity, comments, design, etc. think of it as a coding assignment. It's much faster to pretend that the assignment was a project you've already worked on in the past. The evaluation criteria are the same as a coding assignment.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nothing at all. Some of the best developers I have ever worked with are not interested in writing OSS software in their spare time. They want to spend time with their family instead. I feel the same way myself.

</comment><comment><USER25> Unfortunately, the signals for hiring you get from GitHub aren't great. It could help more junior developers to show off some things that they've built if their initial resume doesn't have the experience people are looking for.

</comment><comment><USER26> Haven't githubs new interface made it almost impossible to investigate what a developer has written? For example, on my profile page I have 32 repos. But 29 of them are forks of other projects which I haven't added anything to.

<comment><USER27> You can filter these out actually. When you go on someone's profile, and then to the "repositories" tab, there is a drop-down menu that reads "Type: All" from which you can select other repository-type filters, namely forks, mirrors, and sources (the user's own repositories).

It's somewhat imperfect as not all forks or mirrors are marked as such by github (if, say, it's a fork of a repository not originally hosted on github), but it works in the vast majority of cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've never known a developer with an impressive github profile.

I've worked at startups, and banks.

Thats 20 different people at least ... and all pretty good imo.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've been told I have a "good" github profile. What I've found is that it doesn't go very far in interviews.

<comment><USER29> It's good for getting interviews I think. Most people inviting me to interviews bring up my Github and it gets mentioned in beginning of interviews frequently than not. It's a good "opening salvo". It's a positive if you have it but not a negative if you miss it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nothing

</comment><comment><USER31> Something other than github. Especially self-hosted gitlab or similar.</comment>


A* Pathfinding - <AUTHOR> http://www.richardssoftware.net/2014/01/pathfinding-iii-putting-it-all-together.html

<comment><USER2> Very cool! Engine development is fun - I liked programming the 3D hardware on the Nintendo DS using the raw hardware register interface. Thinking back, it was a lot of BS hoops to jump to! I should look into using C# and DX to maintain my sanity.</comment>


AI Grant: Get $2,500 for your AI project - <AUTHOR> https://aigrant.org/ <comment><USER2> Dupe [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851806) (167 points, 13 hours ago, 33 comments, currently #17 in the front page)

</comment><comment><USER3> The AI Grant fellowship has been an awesome experience so far; I highly recommend applying if you're on the fence. The grant itself is useful (and this round includes $20k of Google cloud credits!) but equally valuable is the community that Nat has curated around the project. There are a lot of great folks working on AI from all sorts of places just a Slack message away. Now that Daniel Gross (YC's AI-focused partner) is involved as well, I'd expect that community to continue to grow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Care to elaborate on your experience? What project is yours? Also: what do you think it takes to get a project accepted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      The 10 Fellows below were chosen from more than 450 applicants.
      Each will receive $5,000 to pursue their project, no strings attached.

      ...
      Liam Atkinson, a neural network to generate puns.
      ...

video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6vyIuwXNrQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6vyIuwXNrQ)

Solving the real problems...

Would only be better if it also supported innuendo, and outputted the results as animated GIF's.

<comment><USER5> I think it's great that the grant exists; it was the catalyst to get me working on my own project. But seeing the list of final qualifiers (many of whom boiled down to "use a neural network for x") left me disappointed. I was hoping to see some revolution, not evolution.

<comment><USER6> I think the point of those kinds of small grants is not to revolutionise anything, and not even to evolve anything necessarily. Rather I think the purpose is just exactly what you experienced. Get people off the metaphorical couch and start tinkering with the technology you want them to tinker with. If the grant can motivate them to spend their time on learning that technology then the grant-giver's goal is accomplished, for the very small price of $5000 per person.

<comment><USER5> I understand what you're saying. What I was meaning was I was hoping to see more variety in ideas. If they called it "mlgrant" then fine, no problem there. But AI is such a large field that I would've hoped to see tinkering in other areas.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HTML Purifier - Filter your HTML standards-compliant - Anti XSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.htmlpurifier.org/ <comment><USER2> It allows the <img> element by default, so it's wide open to XSS in IE6 and older versions of Opera -- they treat <img src=url> identically to <script src=url> when the response from the url has javascript content.

You really can't let people embed images from arbitrary domains, if only to prevent getting goatsed later.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you, I have taken note of that and will change the configuration accordingly.</comment></comment>


Voice Pitch Predicts Labor Market Success Among Male CEOs (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://scprod2-lb.mccombs.utexas.edu/~/media/Files/MSB/Departments/Accounting/Centennial/MPV_PSYCI_07262012.pdf <comment><USER2> We see similar outcomes with height. I've always wondered how much the gender gap in income—if any—was driven by differences in height. Are people negatively biasing women because they are women or are they biasing against shorter people in general? Meg Whitman was 6'1". Marissa Meyer is 5'8". Sheryl Sandberg is 5'8", Elizabeth Holmes is 5'7" Indra Nooyi is 5'9".

<comment><USER3> It isn't, there is an enormous body of evidence demonstrating that the gender pay gap is driven by overt sexism and institutional barriers. This evidence is far more compelling than speculation about height.

<comment><USER4> I'm very sceptical of this explanation. Sexism probably still plays a role, but not nearly as big a role as population-level average differences in personality/interests.

Some interesting papers: [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761774171...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719?journalCode=pssa&)

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886917305962?via%3Dihub)

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijop.12529](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijop.12529)

<comment><USER3> Even if you assume all this research is correct, why are people with certain characteristics or interests that are disproportionately associated with women get rewarded less economically? Also sexism.

<comment><USER4> Well if you _read_ the research you would see that it actually boils down to choices people make. So that's sort of like saying that the choices women make are de facto sexist because... they're women?

<comment><USER3> No, I'm saying the economy rewards the choices men make. Women get paid less because employers pay less in female-dominated fields.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alternatively: Women are free to choose professions without having to concern themselves about making money.

Evidence:

1\. Women make these choices _more_ in richer and more egalitarian societies. Your explanation makes the opposite prediction and is therefore contradicted by the data.

2\. Women care a _lot_ more about how much a prospective partner earns.

2a. This is not due to women being "unable" to support a partner because they get paid less: the preference gets _stronger_ the more a woman earns, not weaker.

3\. Women care a lot more about predictable work, part-time work and no overtime, all of which depress earnings. (see [https://scholar.harvard.edu/bolotnyy/publications/why-do- wom...](https://scholar.harvard.edu/bolotnyy/publications/why-do-women-earn- less-men-evidence-bus-and-train-operators-job-market-paper) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't read the whole article, but my first question is if they controlled for direction of effect.

The "winner effect" is a known phenomenon when people succeed in competition their body starts to produce more testosterone (for men).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner_and_loser_effects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner_and_loser_effects)

<comment><USER6> Short term testosterone would have little effect.

However voice pitch is highly social and situational... it could still all be correlated. Someone who feels confident and feels like they "won" might subconsciously lower their voice in other interactions.

To give another example, men tend to subconsciously lower their voices when talking to a woman they find attractive. There's a lot of other things going on than just the physiology.

<comment><USER5> >> Short term testosterone would have little effect.

Calling BS on that. Doubt you looked that up.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4LbafuDmI4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4LbafuDmI4)

<comment><USER7> The effect the article refers to probably lasts hours to a day.

The doses that FtM transgender are taking are higher than the normal male range, I'd estimate.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that's what I was referring to as short term - hours to a day. The linked YouTube video is a year. If a cis-man was to take a similar dose (and thus say, have double physiological T levels) they would certainly not notice their voice changing the next days.

Most transgender medicine protocols target physiological levels of the hormones for the desired gender. It gets a bit more complicated with transwomen, because women have a tremendous range of variation during each cycle (never mind pregnancy), and because high estrogen levels can suppress testosterone on their own (so you don't need a separate medication to do that)... so there are different schools of thought as to the best way to do it.

Targeting physiological levels is done mostly because that seems like a good idea a priori. One of the joys of being transgender is being part of an ongoing science experiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I enjoyed imaging the abstract being read aloud by Elizabeth Holmes with her clownish deep voice she worked to portray in the later stages of her fraudulent career. It's funny how these perceptions and findings sometimes line up.

<comment><USER9> Yes, Elizabeth Holmes was a fraud. But choosing to lower your voice to have a more commanding presence does not seem fraudulent not particularly "cartoonish" to me. Regardless of ones feelings towards Margaret Thatcher's policies, Thatcher was most definitely _not_ fraudulent, and her lowering her voice was almost a virtual necessity in her political era.

<comment><USER10> I think part of the problem is that Holmes's voice sounded artificial. To be effective, generally speaking, you would imagine the voice couldn't sound like you were trying to speak with a deep voice. (But surely studies have been done on this. Does it matter?)

But I agree with you. I've always "dressed up" in work situations, for example, because people respond more positively to me when I look sharp.

I think it witheringly stupid that people would assess my competence based on something so tangential, but if they are going to have a prejudice, why shouldn't I make it a prejudice in my favor (by dressing well instead of whatever I want to wear)?

Short men should be wearing hidden heel shoes, too. Those inches are worth a lot more money than the shoes are. Etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This isn't particularly convincing, given that it's such a small and skewed sample and the effect is so small. The average CEO in this sample operates a firm of 8B and makes 8M - the effect they found was 30M for firm size and 19K for annual comp for each percentage decrease in pitch. It's quite likely that merely adding, say, Steve Jobs or Michael Bloomberg into the sample would've been enough to reverse the effect. Also, what would be much more interesting is if CEOs as a group were substantially different from the general population in this regard - but they are saying the median CEO wasn't at all extraordinary.

To the extent that there is an effect, I think the causality may be the other way - voice pitch isn't an immutable characteristic of each speaker but situational. One well-known effect is that people tend to speak with a higher pitch when talking to relatively high status people and a lower pitch when talking to relatively low status people. It seems quite possible that CEOs of larger companies perceive wall street analysts and investors as lower status than CEOs of smaller companies do, causing this discrepancy. It seems far more plausible than lower-pitched men being CEOs of disproportionately larger firms, without the same effect holding up across the entire professional spectrum.

</comment><comment><USER12> > To identify a set of executives for analysis, we start with a list of male > CEOs from the Standard & Poor's 1500 stock index analyzed by Engelberg, Gao > & Parsons (in press). We restrict attention to only male CEOs because of the > sexually dimorphic nature of voice pitch (Titze, 1994) and the poor > representation of female CEOs among S&P 1500 firms (Bertrand & Hallock, > 2001).

> We intersect the Engelberg et al. (in press) observations with the Mayew & > Venkatachalam (2012) CEO speech corpus, which is derived from publicly > broadcast telephonic earnings conference calls archived in the Thomson > Reuters StreetEvents database (www.streetevents.com).

> The median sample CEO is 56 years old, operates a firm with $2.427 billion > in assets, and is paid $3.692 million annually.

> A test of mediation using the product of coefficients method for large > samples following Preacher & Hayes (2008) confirms firm size mediates the > effects of voice pitch (Z=3.15, p=0.002).

The paper states that a lower voice is perceived (by everyone else) to be a better leader. Sounds reasonable enough, I guess. The statistics then show that the lower the voice, the better the compensation of the CEO and the larger the firm the CEO runs, with a strong correlation. This is where I scratch my head a bit.

A couple of thoughts for why this may be, all guesses, really:

1) Listed companies on the S&P 1500 are mostly very mature and the CEOs may not do much of the value creation. Other people (CTO, COO, CFO, etc) might be doing most of the value creation with the CEO holding the company together. (This is in contrast to many tech companies - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc - who are strategically involved in the company. It is their strategic directional leadership that they bring in that people trust, rather than how they make you feel when they talk)

2) In mature markets that aren't tech related, innovation is not a strong factor of growth, it's usually intangibles like connections, communication, convincing people, alignment, deals, etc. Having a "leader voice" can have a strong impact to get buy in from everyone, internal and external.

3) There may very well be a physiological link between a lower voice and strong leadership qualities, rather than just the perception of it, who knows? Or people who have a lower voice get innate advantages in leadership due to people trusting them more and them having an easier time because of that, kind of like a flywheel effect.

4) The statistics may be wrong. This doesn't seem to be the case with how they designed it.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is intriguing -- I would guess that a successful strategy would be to short stocks with high growth that have a CEO with "evolutionarily advantageous" traits (height, attractiveness, depth of voice) ... and go long stocks with high growth that have CEO's lacking these characteristics:

The company with the "suave" CEO is likely building revenue as a result of sales and people charisma rather than core innovation.

<comment><USER14> >The company with the "suave" CEO is likely building revenue as a result of sales and people charisma rather than core innovation.

Yes, because tall people can't have good products too...?

<comment><USER15> No, that is not implied in the parent comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I remember reading another article that CEO who looks stressed and anxious on their video call with shareholders perform better than ones who look regular. Definitely an interesting subject.

</comment><comment><USER17> A quick google search shows thyroplasty to be a great investment!

<comment><USER18> seems like gore-tex is all over hacker news this week. From corneas to voiceboxes.

<comment><USER19> I mean, gore-tex (ePTFE) has been used for medical implants for decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does pitch get lower with age? That would correlate with larger companies tending to choose more experienced CEOs.

That aside, there are other forms of biases, like people preferring better _looking_ leaders (based on socially perceived ideals on height, color, religion, hereditary status) and so too will they prefer better sounding CEOs.

<comment><USER21> Here's to hoping 58 is the age where my voice changes and I get a high power executive position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would buy a voice-training app for this

<comment><USER23> Whats a good one?

<comment><USER22> Apologies: I meant, if one existed and someone recommended, I would like to purchase it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can you run voice filters with Skype for interviews?

</comment><comment><USER25> Subconscious gender/racial biases, which absolutely everyone has, are so devilish because they take conscious effort to overcome.

<comment><USER3> There's a ton of overt misogyny and sexism in the U.S., nothing "subconscious" about it.

<comment><USER26> This is an uncharitable interpretation of the comment about sexism & racism. I'm African American, yet the last time I took an implicit association test it showed I'm biased against African Americans. Yeah there's a lot of conscious bias in the U.S., but we live in a culture with deep seated misogyny and racism that can effect even well meaning people.

<comment><USER27> Implicit bias tests are not valid at the individual level.

[https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/7/14637626/implicit- as...](https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/7/14637626/implicit-association- test-racism)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another way in which rigid, patriarchal gender roles hurt men as well as women. Straight men should be far more critical of sexism and misogyny than they are. This attitude is directly tied to oppression against women in the workforce.

<comment><USER28> That's a rather sexist statement telling men what they should be thinking.

<comment><USER3> It's not sexist to point out that men historically have held disproportionate cultural, social, economic, and political power and continue to do so to this day.

<comment><USER29> And historically men have fought wars, guarded borders, done very dangerous jobs, and so on.

Most men have not held power. A top 1% of men held power, and 99% of men did dirty and dangerous jobs at the bottom of the hierarchy, and worked worse than animals to try to provide for and protect their families.

Men give up seats on lifeboats for women, yada yada yada. Trying to frame this whole thing as "men vs women" is ridiculous, because men are so incredibly in favor of sacrificing themselves for women. Clearly other issues are involved than some "pure evil sexism".

<comment><USER3> I didn't frame it as men vs. women. I framed it as challenging patriarchy, which is a system and ideology of male dominance and control.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gobblebook: On Lord Byron and Ada Lovelace - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n12/rosemary-hill/gobblebook <comment><USER2> For an alternative take on Ada Lovelace (the mother of programming) and her relationship with Charles Babbage (the father of computing), check out Sydney Padua's awesome graphic novel: "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" [0]. Steampunk romance with difference engines and a guest appearance from Isembard Kingdom Brunel ("You look like you need an Engineer"). It's not as serious as the OP, but I love it, especially Babbage's "War on Error".

[0] [http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/the- book/](http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/the-book/)

<comment><USER3> I second this recommendation. Although at first glance it may seem like a superficial light hearted take (which it certainly manages to pull off) it is at the same time an extensively well researched book with loads of references, footnotes (omg, the footnotes!) and copies of letters and other text. An altogether impressive book by an obviously obsessed geek.</comment></comment>


Paul Graham just donated $1M to Flexport.org - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/typesfast/status/1241036939907624961 <comment><USER2> Is there a second source for this besides somebodys twitter?</comment>


339 Bytes of Responsive CSS - <AUTHOR> https://blog.koley.in/2019/339-bytes-of-responsive-css <comment><USER2> Good, but I'd replace that font with the default:

`font-family: -apple-system,system-ui,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI",Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif`

It'd remove the unnecessary font and still look good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Default fonts are certainly the best thing to have. I am a sucker for "Fira", so included that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's nice but really, the problem with css (or what's hard difficult about it) is not designing a single page that has a single column of text with some titles. Any large css files that this is supposed to counter will probable have very similar (and as small) css rules for that same thing. It becomes hard when you need a grid, templates, images, and other more complex designs.

<comment><USER4> > It becomes hard when you need a grid

CSS includes a grid. It works in every current browser.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but that's only easy if you choose to ignore the 1 in 10 users that it doesn't work for, which is too many for most real world use cases, especially for something as fundamental as the layout of the page.

<comment><USER6> Not everyone needs to have the same experience. A common pattern is to make a responsive layout where CSS Grid isn't used on the smallest screens and that's the default. Many of the browsers that don't support CSS Grid are mobile ones anyway but even in a desktop browser they can get a not-ideal but usable layout.

<comment><USER3> you are right, and that is a great solution if you don't care about offering the actual experience to all users. If the original problem you need to solve is "using css to style a website so all users have the expected experience" then you need more than 5 lines of css.

<comment><USER6> "The" actual experience is a myth, all users are not going to have the same experience no matter what, that's one of the points behind responsive design. What I was presenting was an alternative to ignoring CSS Grid because someone thinks it doesn't have sufficient browser adoption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is a small accessibility problem with the CSS presented on this page. The author set `text-decoration: none;` on the links, relying only on color to identify them. This should be avoided.

C.f. [https://accessibility.oit.ncsu.edu/it-accessibility-at-nc- st...](https://accessibility.oit.ncsu.edu/it-accessibility-at-nc- state/developers/accessibility-handbook/mouse-and-keyboard-events/links/do- not-remove-the-underline-from-links/)

<comment><USER8> Also related, the link/background colour combination fails WCAG contrast guidelines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1\. Please do not import external resources from Google Fonts if you don't have to. (Hint: You never really have to.)

2\. If you want to use as little CSS as possible, simply use `sans-serif`. Otherwise try this font stack: [http://markdotto.com/2018/02/07/github-system- fonts/](http://markdotto.com/2018/02/07/github-system-fonts/)

2\. Fira Sans is actually quite nice, but please do not use `font-weight`s below `400` for continuous text. That's really hard to read.

3\. Since only the `300` weight is imported, the entire text will be thin – even headlines and `strong`.

4\. Please leave the link text underlines for accessibility: [https://webaim.org/techniques/hypertext/link_text#underlinin...](https://webaim.org/techniques/hypertext/link_text#underlining)

bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com did a better job.

</comment><comment><USER10> 339 bytes which load an additional 241 bytes of CSS to load a 53k custom font...

What is the point people are trying to make with titles like this? It's like claiming "50 bytes to make a website" after you figure out that you can just iframe Google.

<comment><USER11> The less code you write the less you have to maintain.

Or at least that's how I understood this. Not attempting to save the few kb of network traffic, rather trying to reduce the complexity and the amount of code one has to maintain in the future.

<comment><USER10> That may be true, but in this case simply listing a few system fonts in their order of precedence resulted in less code to maintain since you lose the import directive. See the updated article.

In general, the way I see it, relying on code and data from a third party at run-time is a liability. The code and data you no longer have to maintain is now impossible to audit because the vendor may replace it, stop providing the service, start using it for tracking etc. at any moment. It's code that you _should_ be maintaining but _can 't_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is it with all those reduced font/background contrast styles? To me these are terribly hard to read. As a matter of fact a large part of my Stylish/Greasemonkey sets are just there to get back decent contrast on text.

</comment><comment><USER13> Similar project yesterday

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19607169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19607169)

</comment><comment><USER14> I really don't like that Google font. Too lightweight and hard to read.

And if readability suffers, I'll rather take the crude original motherfucking website over this.

</comment><comment><USER15> You can save _three more bytes_ by making the background color #eee. ^^

<comment><AUTHOR> 339 was a more interesting number than 336. I like odd numbers. I'm odd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why such thin grey text? Why sacrifice readability as a matter of principle? What's wrong with black on white, like a regular f*cking book or newspaper?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because paper is paper and screens are different. The white paper is slightly on the grey side compared to white on screen. And that hurts to look at for long.

Thin text is a personal preference that I made here. No principles there.

<comment><USER17> It becomes an accessibility problem, because the contrast is too low, and not all eyeballs are the same. Low contrast combined with a thin font makes it very difficult to read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here is something similar: [https://github.com/vladocar/Basic-CSS-Typography- Reset](https://github.com/vladocar/Basic-CSS-Typography-Reset)

<comment><USER19> This is spectacular, thank you. It's small enough to just inline into the webpage and provides a nice enough experience to just leave it alone for a very basic page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sometimes I wish some of those markdown viewers would come with such an effective CSS. For example, the KDE document viewer Okular can display markdown files but they look just awful.

Once I tried finding the source of the Okular style but ended up creating a custom script to convert Markdown files to PDF files with a custom CSS (via Chromium...).

</comment><comment><USER21> All this CSS minimalism reminds me of Dan Luu's post about Web Bloat: [https://danluu.com/web-bloat/](https://danluu.com/web-bloat/)

His website is refreshingly light and fast, but that's still no excuse for Times New Roman. Maybe it's a retro irreverence thing.

<comment><USER22> Times New Roman is fine - serif fonts are supposedly more readable - it's the line widths that kill me here - figuring out which line you're due to start on next really disrupts flow

<comment><USER23> You can resize the window and the text flows to fit, which is something a weird amount of websites prevent you doing. You can ctrl+ to increase font size if it's too small, or ctrl- if it's too big.

I dislike the white background, but otherwise it's very readable for the way I use web browsers -- one of some open windows.

<comment><USER10> Browsing the web using half of 1600 pixels in width is a surprising amount of pain in the ass, but perfect for CSS-free sites. It seems that designers tend to design for full screen, which I guess reflects their own workflow, but not at all mine as a programmer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there anybody here who is deeply in the frontend rabbithole and can recommend a JS free CSS framework that we can use for a project where readability & UX matters a lot? Somebody recommended material.io but is it not JS free. I was wondering if there is a JS free CSS framework that looks great.

<comment><AUTHOR> My personal favorites have been Bulma and Getskeleton.com.

Somebody in the comments recommended tailwind.css

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A nonoffensive version of "better motherfucking website"?

<comment><USER26> Ughn, I really thought that this rah-rah pseudo-masculine tough guy aesthetic was something we've collectively moved on from?

<comment><USER27> it's obvious satire and a lighthearted joke with a kernel of truth. chill :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is CSS considered responsive if there are no CSS media queries? I didn't see any media queries in the authors css script.

<comment><USER29> It's "responsive" in the way a single column of content can be responsive. Really the only gain was that a max-width property was set, so content won't stretch to the edges of your desktop display.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Personally, I hate max-width which is a way to waste the screen estate, I think.

<comment><USER20> Kinda funny... While I _understand_ your point I _feel_ the opposite. I hate it when people do not include a max-width because then I have to care about it. Yes, the Firefox reader view makes it quite easy, but I still prefer having a ready-to-read layout by default.

But you are right, in this case, it all comes down to personal preference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nice, I just would use a brighter black for the font. Try #565656

<comment><AUTHOR> That wouldn't go well with the font I was using. Fira Light is very thin as it is. A lighter shade of black would affect readability on certain screens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> fork of the fork JSFiddle: [https://jsfiddle.net/abmnyjdc/1/](https://jsfiddle.net/abmnyjdc/1/)

</comment><comment><USER33> 7 CSS declarations and you too can include a Google tracker in your website. No thanks. Host your assets yourself.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's ironic that the author chose to use a page that loads 1.5Mb of data, including 12 separate stylesheets, to write about a minimal stylesheet.

<comment><USER35> Yep ... the first thing I did was to see if he was "eating his own dog-food". As an aside, I'd recommend against putting the linked site on a projector at work (or at least look at it first to determine whether it fits your organization's culture).

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'd recommend against putting the linked site on a projector at work

Is it because of the linked site?

<comment><AUTHOR> @purerandomnesss OP here. Copied that from [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

I think, I should probably change the text.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google CTF 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://capturetheflag.withgoogle.com/#FAQ <comment><USER2> "[...] WORLDWIDE, EXCEPT FOR QUEBEC, CRIMEA, CUBA, IRAN, SYRIA, NORTH KOREA, and SUDAN"

Huh? What's wrong with Quebec?

<comment><USER3> Laws: [https://www.thebalanceeveryday.com/why-are-so-many- competiti...](https://www.thebalanceeveryday.com/why-are-so-many-competitions- void-in-quebec-896835)

<comment><USER4> Bureaucracy at its finest!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for flagging (heh)! I had no idea this was happening but I always learn so much. Bummer there's no beginner quest, I never did get around to finishing last year's challenges.

<comment><USER6> I'm a bit in the same boat - I'd like a heads-up that something like this or last week's "Crack Me If You Can" is coming up, without drowning in a sea of other NetSec/InfoSec/OpSec/PhysSec chatter. And ideally, more than 24 hours before it starts, so I could arrange my schedule and responsibilities around it better.

Is there something I should be subscribed to that would do this? Everything I've seen so far is a one-off ("subscribe to XYZco hackathons") or swings the other way to kitchen-sink levels of inclusion (DEF CON, Black Hat, etc.).

<comment><USER7> Sounds like you'd be interested in [https://ctftime.org/](https://ctftime.org/) if I understand you correctly. Contains list of current and upcoming CTFs going on as well as write-ups for them when finished. Decent site for people trying to expose themselves to as much CTF competition as possible.</comment></comment></comment>


Nazi Blueprint for North American Holocaust Acquired by Canada Archive - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/25/nazi-north-american-holocaust-book-canada-national-archive <comment><USER2> Its just a demographic of jews in north america. Does not refer to holocaust at all. Hardly a blueprint, but it has hitlers library tag, so clearly it was his next step...</comment>


GraphChi - Disk-based large-scale graph computation - <AUTHOR> http://graphlab.org/graphchi/

<comment><AUTHOR> GraphChi brings web-scale graph computation, such as analysis of social networks, available to anyone with a modern laptop or PC. It saves you from the hassle and costs of working with a distributed cluster or cloud services. We find it much easier to debug applications on a single computer than trying to understand how a distributed algorithm is executed. If you do require the processing power of high-performance clusters, GraphChi can be an excellent tool for developing and debugging your algorithms prior to deploying them to the cluster. GraphChi supports most of the new GraphLab v2.1 API (with some restrictions), making the transition easy.</comment>


Is it OK to Want to Make Money? - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2010/12/7/ok-to-want-to-make-money

<comment><USER2> "Wanting to make money" = "wanting to thrive".

Of course you do. Anyone who doesn't is a fool. It's not only 'okay' to want to make money, it's the only sane way to be.

Don't get me wrong. I've always said 'I don't work for money. I love doing my job.' but if they didn't pay me, I'd go elsewhere and do my job. Money is a vital component of living today and it's very hard to move forward (as a person or business) without it.

</comment><comment><USER3> An excellent book on this topic is _Thou Shall Prosper_ by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. He examines why the Jewish culture is disproportionately wealthy and much of the reason lies in their positive attitude about business.

</comment><comment><USER4> Of course you should want to make money. But money should always be the means to the end, never the end. As soon as money becomes the end to someone, that person has lost sight of what's really important in the world.

From that point on that person isn't living life any more, they're just playing WOW with better graphics. "Must farm more gold..."

</comment><comment><USER5> Western capitalist society was built on the very idea that it is OK to want to make money and to innovate (it was a new idea at the time). To think otherwise places you either back before 1800 or in Sweden.

If you would like to learn more I recommend the book "Bourgeois Dignity: A Revolution in Rhetoric" by Deirdre McCloskey.

<comment><USER6> "or in Sweden"

Really? Volvo, Ericsson, Saab, Husqvarna, IKEA, Skype, MySQL, just to name a few. It would have been hard to pick a worse example country to make your point.

Believing in a robust social safety net is orthogonal to wanting to make money and innovate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I want people on my team that want to make money, who know how to make money and won't get to a certain point and say, "well we made 100m let's all go sit on the beach!".

</comment><comment><USER8> _Money should not be the ultimate objective_

Why not?

<comment><USER9> Well, if you're poor enough that having that money means an important change in your lifestyle, then sure: In the short term, making money is a sound goal.

But once you've got money — not even "fuck you" money, necessarily, maybe just enough to go day to day without money being a central worry – then suddenly money becomes a really shallow final goal. What are you going to do with it that you can't possibly do with the money you've got? What is that money really doing for you? Why bother hoarding when what you have is enough?

Especially if you're an entrepreneur, used to turning your ideas into profit. A desire for more money can ruin a sound, integral idea. Some businesses kill themselves because even though they've _got_ money they need _more_. Others don't necessarily die, but they're given a chance to do really cool things and pass up on them because they'd rather stack onto the money machine.

Out of all the things in the world I could be reaching for, I can't imagine many things more boring and unnecessary to reach for than money.

<comment><USER8> Well, I doubt anyone whose motive is money is passionate about green ink on paper. So, it's redundant to say money should not be the ultimate motive.

The point is that more money brings more opportunities. You know like starting your own space exploration companies. Worked out well for Bezos, Branson and Musk. You don't make so much money without it being a motive.

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination." - Oscar Wilde

<comment><USER10> I agree that money brings opportunities, but then the opportunities are the interesting thing, not the money. So, if your ambition is to start some fabulously expensive ventures, then you will no doubt need to pursue money with the greatest energy... but even so, the money is only there to serve your ambition.

To quote a story from my father's Nasrudin story site:

 _How much_

 _In overseeing your possessions it helps to have a long term view. Not too long though. This reminds me of a story:_

 _Every child can imagine the cavern of Ali Baba. But who on earth could have been able to picture the treasuries of Tamerlane? What is robbing a caravan compared with plundering twenty-seven kingdoms? For instance, eight hundred camels were insufficient to carry the gold pillaged only from Damascus. Nobody ever counted the wealth ravished from India… Rivers of gold and silver poured over the gravel of diamond and pearls at the feet of the Master. It was said that the loot gathered by Genghis Khan's hordes ended up in Timur's hands too. In Samarkand, like all over the empire, endless numbers of palaces, gardens and treasury chambers belonged all to one man – the Emir. Everything belonged to him._

 _Then, one cold winter day, on his way to conquering China, the old tyrant drunk too much arak and died. Unexpectedly, for the Iron Emir seemed immortal. After this event, Nasreddin hastened back to Horto, his childhood village. Even there, the death of the emperor was on people's lips. Everybody wondered what wealth was bequeathed to his heirs by the great Tamerlane, richest man on earth._

 _"Hodja," asked Camal the barber," you lived at Tamerlane's court, spent your day in his presence and luxury, saw his possessions. You must know. How much did he leave?"_

 _Nasreddin, closed his eyes in concentration and counted for a while in his mind. At last he opened his eyes and said:_

 _"Everything!"_

see <http://tenner.thinkhost.com/stories/index.php>

<comment><USER8> That's a nice fable. But it also reminded me another thing we could use a lot of money for is to make such fables meaningless.

Like by funding cryonics and friendly AI research - <http://lesswrong.com/tag/cryonics/>

<http://singinst.org/>

<comment><USER11> If you want to live forever you will certainly need to solve the problems which normally come with aging. You will also need to deal with the problem of the sun burning out in X billion years and the heat death of the universe.

I hope you have a lot of money.

<comment><USER8> Like they love saying around here about scaling, _that will be a nice problem to have_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Um... Duh. Seriously. I want to make money, I want to make enough money to stop thinking about wanting to make money.</comment>


How many great minds does it take to invent a telescope? - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/how-many-great-minds-does-it-take-to-invent-a-telescope <comment><USER2> It's fascinating to learn about the transitional period of the Scientific Revolution and just how all these various advances and changes in thinking actually happened. It's usually a lot more complex than we think of now.

The article's mention of optical problems in early telescopes is actually quite an important one when it comes to the history of geocentrism vs heliocentrism and the Galileo affair. One of the objections to heliocentrism is that if the Earth moved then we should expect to see stellar parallax, which was not observed (certainly not with the observation technology at the time). The Copernicans responded by positing that the stars were extremely far away, but you can imagine how such an evidence-lacking response would seem like trying to explain away one hypothesis by adding a new one. But in addition, the geocentrists seemed to have solid observational evidence on their side: the apparent diameter of stars when viewed through the telescope either implied that the stars were close enough that we should be seeing parallax with 1600s-era instruments, or that the stars are far away and all absurdly giant in size.

It turned out that the manufacture of the telescopes themselves created an optical illusion now known as an Airy disk ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk) ), which makes the stars look like disks and thus have a misleading apparent diameter. It wasn't until 1835 that this phenomenon was understood!

For anyone interested in the long and complex history of geocentrism, helicentrism, Galileo and his contemporaries, I have to strongly recommend reading the nine-part series of posts "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" by SF author Michael Flynn. It makes for a wonderful bit of weekend reading, and you'll come out of it with a great appreciation for the slow, methodical process of scientific understanding:

Part 1: [http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic- smac...](http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic- smackdown.html)

Table of Contents: [http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic- smac...](http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown- table-of.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yesterday : how can messed up glass deliver any kind of respectable observations?

Today : how can messed up <foo> deliver any kind of respectable observations?

</comment><comment><USER4> Inventing a telescope require many great minds, but inventing a whole universe from scratch might not require intelligence. Think about that</comment>


Ask HN: Who are your favorite SaaS thought leadership bloggers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> To clarify: I really enjoy Groove's Startup Journey blog by Alex. I'd love to know if you guys have any great ones you read as well.</comment>


U.S. Congress Recognizing Asteroid Resource Property Rights - <AUTHOR> http://www.planetaryresources.com/2015/11/planetary-resources-applauds-u-s-congress-in-recognizing-asteroid-resource-property-rights/ <comment><AUTHOR> Linked to this instead of the bill itself ([https://rules.house.gov/bill/114/hr-2262](https://rules.house.gov/bill/114/hr-2262)) because I think this link provides more context.

The full title is "Planetary Resources Applauds U.S. Congress in Recognizing Asteroid Resource Property Rights", but I dropped the first three words so that it would fit into the HN title.</comment>


Male Scent May Compromise Biomedical Research - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/04/male-scent-may-compromise-biomedical-research <comment><USER3> Richard Feynman spoke specifically to this point in his Cargo Cult Science piece:

[http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html](http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html)

"That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using-- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running."

<comment><USER4> First, thank you. I have been looking for this for years! Now i have something to search for to find the paper.

I worked in a rat lab for a while that tried testing smells. It was impossible to get data, but sure enough, the professor insisted that stuff was there and published weak papers that were rejected thoroughly. We had about 15 rats and at least 50 major variables to test, if not more confounding variables.

I used to read PhD comics as a salve, and then realized that it was a shield. So many grad students feel so badly precisely because they know that the science is crap and no-one will read it anyway because we all know it is crap[0][1]. The rule is getting to be; If the P-value is at 0.05, flip a coin; heads I read it, tails I eat lunch.

This isn't just isolated to the ivory tower either. The public sees this and not just from friends and family. These back and forth studies screaming 'coffee is a super-food' and then 'coffee is poison' are an example. They give the public an impression that we scientists don't have a clue. And, true, we may not, but allowing the press to scream these things for funding and publicity's sake is a tragedy of the commons. Yes, I know, you can't expect everything to be perfect. But what we have is so very far from that (and yes, I know, China or India are waaay worse). Still, to see in the grad student's eyes that they know the last 6 years were total crap is tragic, especially when the professor insists it isn't to new students and older ones know they can do nothing to persuade the new ones differently.

[0][http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-t...](http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists- think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble)

[1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._A._Ioannidis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._A._Ioannidis)

<comment><USER5> > These back and forth studies screaming 'coffee is a super-food' and then > 'coffee is poison' are an example. They give the public an impression that > we scientists don't have a clue.

I think that is more the fault of the type of science journalism the public is exposed to. The paper says "compound extracted from coffee found to enhance cell uptake of flavonoids in mice" and the media screams "coffee: the new superfood?"

Weak science is one thing, but no matter how strong the science is you can count on the media to get it wrong.

<comment><USER4> True, but then you have a responsibility (according to Dr. Feynman) to go back out there and state the limits and facts. Not to just sit by and throw up your hands and say 'oh, it's just clickbait, who cares, everyone knows it is BS'. That leads the public to think scientists don't care and it leads grads students to think it's ok that your research gets maligned and strewn as long at it's 'publicity.' Science is better than that, as least to Dr. Feynman. Personally, I agree with him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This kind of response by lab animals to stressors in their environment reminds me of the "Rat Park"[1] experiment, in which rats who were stressed out from being kept isolated in small cages (rats are social animals) had a tendency to become addicted to morphine, but those who lived in a pleasant environment did not.

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

<comment><USER7> BTW, Stuart McMillen made an excellent comic about Rat Park. I think it may have been linked on HN before, but just in case:

[http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat- park/](http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a great video about these sorts of effects called Lullaby For A Mouse: [http://vimeo.com/33803995](http://vimeo.com/33803995)

The basic gist is that most research done on mice (and other animals) is complete crap:

\- Almost all laboratory mice are morbidly obese and get little to no exercise.

\- They're all starved of social contact.

\- The variations in the daily schedule of the researchers mess with their circadian systems.

\- The results vary enormously based on how the researchers treat the animals. The title comes from the fact that one of the researchers started singing to his mice in order to get better results.

<comment><USER9> I worked in a laboratory with mice for about two years after college.

* None of our mice were morbidly or even slightly obese (I know because I had to cut them open).

* The mice lived in groups of up to 6 in a cage, which I don't know how it compares to their normal situation, but it's not "starved of social contact."

* I don't remember how we dealt with the mice's circadian rhythms, but I think that we had the lights on timers for this.

* Research is inherently subject to variation. There might be compelling reasons why results would vary based on how researchers treat their animals, but I think it would depend a lot on what kind of experiments were being performed. Stating that in a blanket fashion, I think, is misleading. Biological science is just plain hard, and many experiments fail, often with no clear explanation why. That someone could get frustrated enough to start singing to their animals is not an indication that mouse research is inherently flawed.

At the end of the day, a vast quantity of scientific knowledge is owed to mouse research. Denouncing it as "[mostly] complete crap" is just plain false.

<comment><USER10> It's good that the lab you worked in had good standards in place but can you be sure this is the case for most labs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The hypothesized mechanism is very interesting. Perhaps mice vary their behavioral response to pain depending on how safe it is to express distress from pain. VikingCoder has already given the definitive comment: further controlled experiments will tease out how important this effect is over what range of behaviors. There are many, many, many kinds of mouse experiments (I am currently doing reading on behavior genetics research on learning and intelligence and fear and aggression in mouse model organisms), and some will be more influenced by what the interesting preliminary report here suggests than others.

See the book _How Genes Influence Behavior_ [1] for a fascinating description of how we can learn about human behavior by studying mouse behavior (and even by studying fruit fly behavior!).

[1] [http://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-genes- influence-b...](http://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-genes-influence- behavior-9780199559909;jsessionid=D71B0EC416B75938EC3C4BB81BDB7183?cc=us&lang=en&)

</comment><comment><USER12> Why inflict pain instead of pleasure ?

From my experience experiments on animal subjects tend to focus on negative responses. Beside specifically testing negative agents, is there a logical reason for this approach ? Why not measure attraction instead of avoidance ? Do mice exhibit visible joyful facial expressions vs the grimacing this article describes ? It sounds silly, but couldn't we measure how much we delight the mice ?

</comment><comment><USER13> I think this serves as a good example of (one of) the issues with animal testing. The scientist in this article doesn't think that we need to "redo decades of animal research", but it certainly casts doubt on previous results.

In general, testing on animals isn't effective. Considering the amount of suffering it inflicts on animals, I'm not sure that it's morally defensible. The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection has a [good resource][1] on the issues.

[1]: [http://buav.org/humane-science/key-criticisms/](http://buav.org/humane- science/key-criticisms/)

</comment><comment><USER14> It's clearly not just the male scent, because it gets cancelled out by the female scent. There's obviously more to this.

<comment><USER4> Huh? How can scents be canceled out?

<comment><USER15> In the original article, the effect that the male scent had on the mice was cancelled out by the female scent also being present - not sure of the actual mechanism, but it's not the actual 'scents cancelling out'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe researchers should then just always use suits, or at least put on a clean shirt each time before getting close to the rat cages and handling them.

<comment><USER17> You are being down voted because people are amusingly misinterpreting the kind of "suit" you meant

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This could certainly be plausible. Fairly rigorous studies. Just needs to be repeated in other labs

</comment><comment><USER19> > _"It's a primordial response," he says. "If you smell a solitary male > nearby, chances are he's hunting or defending his territory." If you're in > pain, you're showing weakness._

I don't know about those results, but this explanation sounds preposterous: it doesn't work if you're hunted down by a lioness (which does the hunting while the male lion sleeps); it also doesn't work if you're spotted from the air by an eagle (which is one the main hazards if you're a small rodent).

Why does every behavior has to be explained in terms of survival, we'll never know. Stephen Jay Gould was so good at debunking those easy explanations; how I miss him.

<comment><USER20> Lions hunt alone. Lionesses usually hunt in packs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> 2 Theories:

1) It's the brain's way of telling the body: "Another male is nearby, do not show weakness or submission because that male may try to dominate you and you may end up getting into a fight or dying." I'd assume this evolutionary response would only work for same species scents. Apparently it works between species. Men have a tendency not to get into fights with confident men.

2) During a fight with another male, the mind needs to ignore pain in order to continue on and win the fight. In all species, males who didn't have this trait lost battles, died, and did not pass on their genes. Males who had this mutation didn't let the pain get to them, went on to win the fight, lived, reproduced, and passed on these characteristics.

<comment><USER22> a theory I had :

perhaps due to past generations of male experimenters, mice have developed a central nervous system which deadens pain in the expectation of a painful experiment when exposed to male scents.

<comment><USER23> What would be the selective advantage of pain resistance in the context of a lab environment? It seems to me like the rodent's chance of passing on it's genes would have no correlation with resistance to pain.

<comment><USER22> That's a good question.

We know that pain stresses the nervous system, and that it also increases incidence of depression. Both pain and depression lower survival chances, as they both increase the chances for negative effects on the host such as sudden weight fluctuation, abnormal sleep cycles, and uncoordinated muscle control.

I have not worked in such a lab setting, so i'm unsure if any of the mice that survive experimentation are exterminated or repurposed.

If repurposed, one can imagine that a pain-reduction schema would be useful in such environments for the sake of species proliferation. Mice/rats better suited to the pain thresholds required of them would eat better, sleep better, and ultimately breed more.

Again, just an armchair theory and little more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Their conclusion that "Male odors seemed to act like painkillers" seems like only one of several possible interpretations?

My first reaction was that the possible presence of other male mammals provided a selection bias for individuals who _displayed_ less pain. Amongst individuals of the same species, showing pain would be a sign of weakness, obviously, but it might be a similar marker for possible predators. So perhaps all the animals are feeling the same discomfort, but those who sense other males are less willing to perform their discomfort behaviourally?

<comment><USER25> The article addresses this:

> Further testing showed that the rodents exposed to male odors were actually > feeling less pain, rather than simply hiding the pain they were in. The male > aroma ramped up their stress levels, which deadened the hurt. "It's really > astounding that such a robust effect could have been missed for so many > years," Mogil says.

Though, to be fair, they don't go into detail about how exactly they determined that the rodent was "actually feeling less pain"...

<comment><USER26> It's properly addressed in the actual paper [0]:

 _True SIA should be accompanied by decreased immediate-early gene expression in the pain-processing neurons of the spinal cord dorsal horn; we observed a dramatic (≥50%) decrease in Fos protein–positive neurons in mice injected with zymosan and exposed to male but not female experimenters or shirts (Kruskal- Wallis test statistic: 12.0, degrees of freedom = 4, P < 0.05; Fig. 2d). Much is known about the neurochemistry of SIA, which exists in opioid (naloxone- reversible9), non-opioid (cannabinoid-1 (CB1) receptor–mediated10) and mixed opioid/non-opioid11 forms. The male experimenter SIA seen here was found to be the latter, as it was blocked (observer × drug interaction: F3,56 = 2.8, P < 0.05) by the broad-spectrum opioid receptor antagonist naloxone (1 mg per kg body weight (mg/kg); P < 0.05), by the inverse CB1 receptor agonist AM-251 (10 mg/kg; P < 0.05) and by a combination of the two drugs (P < 0.01), at doses not affecting pain sensitivity per se (Fig. 2e)._

In other words, pain in mice is associated with a particular protein binding neurons in a particular part of the brain. The researchers showed that in mice handled by men, the proportion of those neurons bound by the pain-associated protein was significantly decreased, supporting the hypothesis that male- handled mice are actually experiencing less pain.

[http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmeth...](http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmeth.2935.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The original title seems both linkbaity and misleading, so we changed it. If anyone can suggest a better title, please do.

Edit: Ok, since most people who commented don't agree that it was a bad title, we changed it back.

<comment><USER28> Which? 'Male Scent May Compromise Biomedical Research' seems better than 'Experimenter gender is a confounding factor in lab animal research', but which was the original?

<comment><USER29> Yeah, the 'male scent' (original) title is better. When I read 'Experimenter gender' I was expecting to read an article about some sort of gender- originated cognitive bias.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe this affects only certain kinds of experiments. There is a reason why only male mice are used in experiments and why scents (peppermint) is usually used to denote context.

<comment><USER4> To elaborate, male rodents are typically used because they do not go through estrus[0]

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estrous_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estrous_cycle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It sounds like each test involved the same person both giving injections and sitting in the room. I wonder if they can somehow mechanically inject the irritant without human involvement. Then they could have male/female participants sit in the room without knowing if any animals are present. This would help distinguish whether the rodents were reacting to a general difference in scents, or males and females give off different signals when handling rodents.

</comment><comment><USER32> "Mogil's group discovered that this gender distinction alone [...]"

It's sex, not gender distinction. Gender - what you identify as, sex - <USER2> you are. Males that identify as females would still throw their test off. Yah, nipicking. And call me paranoid, but this seems to have agenda....

</comment><comment><USER33> Wow. I didn't really know there was an 'animal grimace scale'.

I have to say, after googling that a minute ago, I have actually become an superfluous animal testing opponent, after having suspected animal testing was done excessively.

I dare you to google it.

These researchers... what assholes.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is like the "Heartbleed" backdoor of the medical industry .. how many previously-though-defensible studies are now trash because of this? Its mind- boggling, to be honest ..

</comment><comment><USER34> We can only account for variables we can imagine, this is why science is so often proving itself wrong.

</comment><comment><USER35> This metaphorically reeks of being the sort of result that in six months will be quietly retracted. But at least there's a mechanism proposed that isn't utterly ludicrous...

(See expansion below, which describes why this triggers my BS meter. YMMV, but it's not just "reflexive".)

<comment><USER36> This is just reflexive HN negativity. As a pain researcher who's completely unaffiliated with the group that did this work, I find this to be an excellent paper - carefully done, with good controls, standard sample sizes for the field, and sensible assays.

People interested in more of the details can read the Nature Methods article here: [http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmeth...](http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmeth.2935.html)

It also fits into a long history of work out of the Mogil lab about the limitations in our current assays for pain. It's worth noting that this is by no means an easy problem. Pain is inherently subjective, and measuring and quantifying it in humans is difficult, let alone in rodents. The only way forward is more work like this - that carefully quantifies the sources of potential bias and error in our assays, and proposes solutions for how to get around them.

Edited to add: Vox has a good interview with Mogil that goes more into this. You can read it here: [http://www.vox.com/2014/4/28/5653444/mice-get-stressed- out-f...](http://www.vox.com/2014/4/28/5653444/mice-get-stressed-out-from- men#interview)

<comment><USER37> I'll take the liberty of rephrasing jerf's comment: this is the sort of paper I'll be more likely to believe after it's been reproduced by multiple labs. Until then, I'd just as soon not even be told about it.

It sounds too much like any number of "xxx affected by cell phone radiation!!1!!" results that historically have given rise to much panic, intense discussion, and clicking of links, but have never, ever, _ever_ proven to be consistently replicable. At some point, skepticism and even a bit of "HN negativity," as you put it, becomes the most rational response to initial reports of such phenomena.

<comment><USER36> My point is more that there are differing levels of the prior probability of a study being true. Yes, 'xxx affected by cell phones' stories are bunk, however, those stories tend not to be published in Nature Methods, tend not to come out of highly respected laboratories, and tend not to have voluminous documentation and results, with 9 Supplementary Figures.

I've been reading this paper closely over the past 30 minutes, it's important enough that I'm sure it'll be heavily discussed at conferences and meetings this year. I can't think of a single thing that these researchers could have done that they haven't done. They've approached the question carefully, looked into a ton of second-order explanations and effects, and provided a plausible discussion of how and why they see their effects.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Autonomous vehicles are just around the corner - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21737418-driverless-vehicles-will-change-world-just-cars-did-them-what-went-wrong <comment><USER2> We are at the peak of the autonomous driving hype cycle, and the trough of disillusionment is going to wipe out a few players, and see the massive consolidation of others. These start-ups are very capital intensive and once the funding environment shifts, it's going to be a big problem for a lot of them.

The initial launches of autonomous taxi services will be underwhelming - relative slow, sometimes frightening (there will be accidents for sure), and with limited deployment areas in limited weather. The novelty will wear off quickly, and then the real work is going to start.

There are basically going to be two ways to survive it - be part of a larger organization that can shoulder a long-term R&D burden to go from 'toy' to 'real infrastructure'. I can see Cruise and Waymo making it that way, unless GM gets cold feet.

The other survivors will be either super lean like Voyage, who went straight to revenue generating niches like retirement communities and rely on being downstream of the technical innovation being done elsewhere (no in-house vehicle or sensor development to cut down R&D costs and move quickly).

Or else they'll be in niches like logistics (e.g. Peloton, Nuro) where the parameters of the game are different, and the structure is more B2B than B2C.

One other play is the autonomy-tech licensing structure like Aurora is trying, but that's a hard sell, especially since they're dealing with German automakers who (from first hand experience in this domain in particular) are clueless about autonomy.

This is an incredibly exciting, risky time to be a part of this new, emerging industry. It feels in many ways like the very very early P.C era, where everything is very much still in play. I'm glad I made the career shift to get there.

<comment><USER3> > German automakers who (from first hand experience in this domain in > particular) are clueless about autonomy

You made me curious, care the elaborate?

<comment><USER2> Without revealing too much, German automakers have expertise primarily in logistics, with some expertise in automotive design.

There is a vast pyramid of Tier-1 and Tier-2 suppliers that feed into that logistics chain. A lot of those suppliers are promising automakers that they can deliver either components that feed into autonomy, or else autonomy in full. This fragments the effort across literally hundreds of small teams, many of whom have little to no expertise at all in the necessary disciplines.

Additionally, every German automaker also has its own in-house autonomy team, and the relationships between in-house, contracting, and supplier teams is chaotic. Many managers see autonomy as another way to build a small empire and make a name for themselves, and it just results in a huge organizational snarl.

The fact that this is an area no one knows how to execute on yet since it's brand new, coupled with these gross inefficiencies, will mean autonomy efforts from the automakers will be stillborn. They will eventually learn from it though, acquire the right teams, and get on with putting it into their cars just as they're doing with EV.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the answer. But "some expertise in automotive design" looks a bit of an understatement to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And in 5 years they will be "just around the corner" again.

There's so many hurdles before it becomes something that is commonplace or accepted, that really it's decades around the corner.

The technical hurdles to get to level 4 and 5 are just the start. Once you get past that, there's going to be a whole slew of legal and public opinion challenges.

The first time an autonomous vehicle is involved in an accident that kills a few kids, you'll have a Challenger level probe to figure out what happened and probably a whole revamp of safety measures.

Don't count your chickens yet.

<comment><USER5> Maybe. Where's our Challenger level probe for mass shootings?

<comment><USER6> Pending an accidental mass shooting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As to whether that corner is on this block is another matter. It might be within the postal code.

Taking on a great project that hasn't been attempted before presents great challenges along the way that couldn't be anticipated.

These forecasters mean well but have no idea.

</comment><comment><USER8> We haven't even begun.

Gearheads will refuse to let go of their cars. They love driving and maintaining their vehicle. They'll argue that no robot can drive better than they can, no matter how wrong they are.

Imagine a world where police no longer pull you over for speeding, running red lights, or other traffic infractions. The legal fight will be huge, as those easy revenue sources suddenly disappear.

There are hundreds of more fights and scenarios like this we haven't even begun to imagine, that will tie up progress in the courts for decades.

We're going to need a concentrated force focusing on this tech as the next thing we are going to do, and able to get out in front of these issues. Right now, I see autonomous driving as a thing that a few groups are seriously working on, while everyone else takes a passive stance, or dips their toes into the idea as a passing fancy and not a serious milestone to tackle. We need to move it past a novel toy, and in to a serious undertaking that we all need to be vested in shaping the future of.

Because in my opinion, the automobile is the most efficient and prolific human killing machine we have ever invented. I feel autonomous driving is a step toward fixing that issue.

<comment><USER9> _" Imagine a world where police no longer pull you over for speeding, running red lights, or other traffic infractions"_

That's an interesting point I hadn't heard before. Are there stats for what kind of revenue various little cities, counties, etc, in the US are generating with speed traps, red light cameras, and similar tactics? Those tactics obviously lose to self driving cars.

<comment><USER8> _That 's an interesting point I hadn't heard before._

Exactly.

Because why would they? Why would we even need speed limits, if the computer it in control and proven safe at X speed, because it has a Y reaction time vs a human's Z reaction time.

<comment><USER10> people still need to cross roads

<comment><USER11> Waymo's car stops at crosswalks when people are on waiting.

<comment><USER12> Another problem, then:

If people see a vehicle has stopped for them to cross, they oftenbassume it's safe for them to cross. Unfortunately they are then less attentive to see if other lanes are following suit.

Pedestrians are constantly being hit in my "friendly" town where the culture has people stop for pedestrians even if the vehicle has right of way. But then the stopped vehicle blocks the view of another car in a neighboring lane, which keeps on coming.

<comment><USER11> Not a problem. That's not even a niche case and would be easy to train. The simple examples you're coming up with are the 99% situations that are readily trainable and have been. Literally the only thing stopping Waymo from production is the 1%... the situations that are so niche and unique that the Waymo AI hasn't seen them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes, and when we get around that corner, we will be told the same again. And when we get around that corner we will find a lot of car wrecks. And the next corner will be some auto insurance companies, lawyers, and politicians saying "Not on public streets".

Eventually enough people will figure out and/or admit that some of driving a vehicle on current public streets with current traffic occasionally but too often requires real, actual, full, no compromise, human intelligence complete with ability to read, hear and understand, and speak and be heard, to comprehend situations and plan and execute solutions. That's essentially full AI, no compromises, parlor tricks, claimed grand successes in narrow contexts, driving on roadways defined by electronics, etc.

<comment><USER12> You're assuming the driving environment will remain the same.

It's possible the convenience and cost savings of autonomous transport would be great enough that society would be willing to change its relationship with roads.

<comment><USER14> But that can't possibly happen overnight. Until every car on every road is an auto-car, we'll have a mix of auto-cars with ordinary, human-driven vehicles. And in that time, what happens?

<comment><USER15> We spend trillions of dollars over the course of a couple of decades, with major disruptions of our transportation network, along with the overall economy.

Smart roads are not going to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This isn't a stand-alone article. It's the introduction to The Economist's "Reinventing wheels" special report issue. There's no timeline given for "around the corner" in the headline. Instead:

> This special report will assume that the technological hurdles to full > autonomy can be overcome. It will consider the implications of autonomous > vehicles (AVs) for personal mobility, car ownership and carmaking, but will > also look at the wider economic, social and cultural knock-on effects. How > will everyday activities be transformed? How could AVs reshape cities? And > what lessons does the rise of the car in the 20th century hold for > driverless vehicles in the 21st?

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, all 10 first comments are negative about it. I wonder would these people would bet against it?

I would love to bet in favor of the article.

<comment><USER18> MIT PhD grad, former Tesla Autopilot software, currently at Waymo.

I will bet against the article. You will not be able to buy a L4 self driving car in the next 5 years, at minimum.

<comment><USER19> I don't want to buy one; I want to be able to summon one on demand. Same timeline?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >> BCG, a consultancy, reckons that by 2030 a quarter of passenger-miles travelled on America's roads will be in shared, self-driving electric vehicles, reducing the number of cars on city streets by 60%, emissions by 80% and road accidents by 90%.

Besides the fact that it's obvious how these nice, tidy, exact-multiple-of-ten values are unlikely to be accurate, that last 90% in particular was totally pulled out of thin air and without any experimental, theoretical, or other justification whatsoever.

That's according to a study on the safety of self-driving cars, by the RAND corporation, _Driving to Safety; How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability_ :

[https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1400/RR1478/RAND_RR1478.pdf)

Quoting from that (bullet points, sidebar on first page):

      Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds
      of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions
      of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of
      fatalities and injuries.

      Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing
      fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years
      to drive these miles—an impossible proposition if the
      aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing
      them on the roads for consumer use.

      Therefore, at least for fatalities and injuries, test-driving
      alone cannot provide sufficient evidence for demonstrating
      autonomous vehicle safety

In other words, forget about knowing with any degree of certainty how much safer autonomous vehicles are than humans (or even if they are safer at all) before they actually hit the road. And let's all admit that if we're eager to see self-driving cars in mass use, it's because we think the tech is cool and not because of any justified belief in their safety.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm sure people are thinking/working on this but it seems that nobody is talking about the infrastructure improvements that would likely be necessary to support fully autonomous vehicles (smart roadways, etc). To me, this should really be a two-pronged approach; the vehicle and the environment. Trying to engineer a vehicle to successfully navigate an environment soley designed for human cognition seems like a losing battle. But, if roadways were fitted with a myriad of sensors and communication networks which couldn't be thwarted by a can of spray paint, I think the success rate of the actual autonomous vehicle would be much better.

<comment><USER2> Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is a legitimate take.

My thinking is this is two-pronged. It won't make sense to make the infrastructure investment until there are sufficient proof points that this is 1.) something people want and 2.) something that's economically viable.

It's likely that the early geofenced version of passenger autonomy will demonstrate what further infrastructure is needed and how much it would cost.

One interesting side point; dedicated lanes for autonomous traffic are already being proposed on some roadways, particularly interstates in the U.S and highways in Europe. The economic benefits from autonomous logistics (e.g. trucking) are more readily capturable, so the infrastructure investment might make more sense there up front.

<comment><USER21> He's getting downvoted because not many people talk about "smart roadways" since it became clear that sensor-based machine learning autonomous vehicles were commercially feasible, and dare I say inevitable.

Good autonomous vehicles don't work primarily by sensing and detecting the roadway, they work by sensing the _environment_ and having a complete, detailed 3D map of drivable areas, matching their environment to the map as they go along. This only requires annotation of the terrain, not clear road markings or anything like that.

The 3D detail of the environment _is_ the smart roadway. With always-on GPS and an _incredibly_ detailed map of the environment stored on a honking hard drive in the trunk, there's never a question where you are in the world.

In fact, now that I think about it, this makes _reduced_ infrastructure possible, since you don't even need things like signs or streetlights in an all-autonomous world, and can even get by with narrower lanes.

<comment><USER2> I work in autonomous vehicle R&D, and if we had an environment filled with reliable sensors it would considerably simplify our problem.

There is no such thing as a _complete, detailed 3D map of driveable areas_. Most current efforts rely heavily on high resolution, large scale, semantically labeled maps, but on any given stretch of road this is only a first approximation of the environment. Live sensors embedded in infrastructure that could pass along real-time information and updates, particularly from directions our on-board sensors can't capture, would be very useful indeed.

And yes, road markings are part of the semantics we use.

<comment> shaki-dora I don't think the two of you are actually disagreeing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Autonomous vehicles will make it much safer to be a cyclist, a pedestrian, or a child near a road. These are some positive changes I am really looking forward to.

Imagine knowing that if your child runs in the road, the cars will stop? Safety is a great feeling.

</comment><comment><USER23> Unfortunately we're walking around a circular structure

</comment><comment><USER24> Autonomous vehicles are already here and have arrived a couple of decades ago. They are referred to by the umbrella term "rail transport". There are whole transportation networks all around the world, including the US, that are entirely driverless.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems)

<comment><USER25> Autonomous != driverless

<comment><USER26> The link posted above mentions completely driverless trains as well (grade 4).</comment></comment></comment>


Bizarre iMessage bug deletes last word of certain texts - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/26/4270608/imessage-bug-deletes-last-word-certain-texts

<comment><USER2> Wow, here's a pretty good explanation that makes sense: [http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=17197603&po...](http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=17197603&postcount=64)

"The problem is that the message app, thinks the phrase will fit in a one line bubble, but it actually puts the last word on a hidden second line.

It works with these two phrases because they are the exact width needed, and it is not based on character count, but character width. For example, "l" is skinner than a "w".

…

Even the phrase "I old ube the next Obamac " will truncate the last word, because the string width is exactly the same, because all the same characters are being used."</comment>