Increasing Popularity of MIT OpenCourseWare - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/year-end_stats_from_mit_point_to_increasing_popula.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d23422ea755b53b%2C0 <comment><USER2> I currently work in Higher-ed and I'm really excited to see what the long term effects of things like OCW and the Khan academy are going to have on education. The simplest benefit is mediocre teachers will have a harder time hiding their incompetency, and all students will have access to the best teachers. When I took my algorithms class I followed along with the MIT lectures. My prof was okay, but nowhere near the level of competency of the L from CLRS and Erik Demaine.

More interesting is the challenge these things pose to the authority of the entire system of higher education. What's going to happen when most top student at non-top schools get most of their lecture materials from someplace else? I can easily imagine a near future where most interested undergrad calc students learn from Sal Khan and only show up to class for exams. What does a degree mean when one student has done the exact same course work as another only for free? Autodidacts previously had suffered somewhat from lacking structured course work, but that problem is resolved. If you're motivated enough you can design your own education path which will most likely be more efficient than traditional ones.

The obvious answer for higher-ed is to capitalize on what OCW and Khan can't offer: office hours, peer interaction, working on a research team, and lab time. Unfortunately, universities are almost incapable of rapid adaptation to change (we still put on silly medieval hats when we graduate).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure I'm not the only person on Hacker News to have taken advantage of OpenCourseWare. If any of the MIT folks are reading this thread, I'd just like to offer my sincere thanks for the good work you do.

</comment><comment><USER4> There was a minor controversy on campus when OpenCourseWare was being rolled out. Some students thought opening up the courses was unfair since they worked hard to get in and paid $30k+ per year to attend MIT.

I'm glad these folks didn't win that debate ;)

I'm currently working on a startup to push what MIT has done even further. If you're willing to provide some feedback, then drop me an email for a preview.

<comment><USER5> can u tell us what exactly you're trying to do ... thx

<comment><USER4> Sorry for the teaser! The site will be a one stop shop for online learning from high school to college, to working professionals.

I've set up a live video platform to connect experts in specific subject areas to interested students with an integrated payment system for teachers that want to charge for their time.

We also plan to roll out a few exciting features for college students. We'd like to connect students studying a specific subject to be able to easily interact with other college students studying a similar subject. So if you were studying 6.001 at MIT we could connect you either via live video or a stackoverflow like Q&A site to other students at Stanford studying a similar course.

I hope this conveys the essence of the site. I'm not yet ready for the full launch, but stay tuned....As I mentioned before, drop me an email if you'd like to preview and give some feedback.

<comment><USER6> Wow, that sounds great. I'd be very interested in this. Do you think you may have plans for taking the age range down also? I have two kids - 8 years old and 3 years old and a great resource for all the basis, as well as some more advanced topics would be really useful

<comment><USER4> I eventually want to focus on younger kids. But I want to be super careful screening any teachers that would be allowed to teach young children over live video, so this may take a while for me to find the right instructors.

Shoot me an email, and I'll let you know when I have something appropriate for your children. You can also check out the site in the meantime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Between programs like OCW and Khan Academy, how long can education costs continue to increase at their current rates?

I can't imagine students in the future accepting paying $50k? $60k? more? per year when the opportunity exists for inexpensive and high quality programs online. Maybe a lower cost hybrid program would work (to allow for better peer and faculty interaction) or at least the acceptance of an online degree. Probably not immediate future - but I imagine that changes to our higher education system will come.

<http://www.collegescholarships.org/research/student-loans/>

<comment><USER8> Presumably at places like MIT the credential value of a degree is still worth a lot, particularly for those looking for careers in credential-reliant sectors such as academia, but one wonders for how long second- and third-tier institutions with low or no credential value can continue when excellent and free programs like this are so widely available.

<comment><USER9> I asked this of a friend who went to SVA in New York for graphic design. He said that the real benefit of an excellent, yet expensive, college, is in learning from real people and having the course tailored to the current situation. He said the students, while talented, weren't any different from those at another college. Sure, you can learn how to design by yourself, and many of the greats have, but it's much more efficient to learn from a master.

Feedback, really. A good college is partially about good company, and partially about great professors.

Right now there's a ton of information, but it's tantamount to books, and PBS videos. Once there's an online college, to help guide the student _through_ the material, there'll be a real revolution. Until then, OpenCourseware will strictly be for those who know where they're going.

<comment><USER10> I agree completely. I'm a CS student at MIT and I've used OCW here and there to supplement courses or to fill in when I've missed a lecture, etc. It definitely helps and it's nice to have all those resources. I think it's a great service. But honestly, I think the value of my education comes from being around tons of people who are really brilliant (and make me feel dumb heheh). Seeing a problem set online and working on it by yourself is way different than working with a group of people and seeing how they think and gaining new perspectives. Also, of course, going to college is far more than just the in-class education. There are research opportunities, competitions, etc... and the social aspects obviously. I also have the option of going to office hours, talking to TAs/professors, etc. Interaction is what's lacking in OCW but maybe that's something that will happen in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The downside of OCW is that, as good as it is, I often find it frustrating because of what's missing from the content for a course.

For instance, I don't find ppt slides very useful by themselves, without the additional context that would be provided by the lecturer.

If you attended the lecture, the points in the slides could help you remember the details. But if you never heard the details, it's often not clear what you're supposed to make of the points in the slides.

For instance, a slide listing sort algorithms for large datasets might mention bubble sort. If you know about bubble sort already, you might assume (probably correctly) that it's there as a joke or as the "definitely wrong choice". If you don't know anything about bubble sort, you might assume it's given as a perfectly valid algorithm like the others listed.

Since it's free, my grumbling is limited. But it does frustrate me at times.

<comment><USER12> Aren't a lot of the OCW Lectures available as well? Doesn't that resolve the issue.

<comment><USER11> It's highly variable. Some classes have full video, which is great. Others, perhaps the majority, have much less material. That's part of why it's frustrating.

You see an interesting course listed. You go to the page for the course. Then you click around and it turns out that there isn't much content posted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> About a year ago there was a rash of pessimistic opinion articles on how technology has done little to nothing to further education in the U.S., and that attempts to modernize schools have mostly failed.

But a couple of months ago I came home from work early and my kids, 3 and 5, who are home-schooling, were both sitting in front of computers learning the alphabet and arithmetic, respectively, and having a blast. My wife was monitoring them and preparing the 5 year old's language lesson from a curriculum she found online.

The thought struck me that technology may have done very little for traditional education, but it just may have completely revolutionized education for my kids. I'm excited that they'll be able to explore any interest they have in a depth that was unavailable to me as a child for lack of resources.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. We're Americans living in Argentina (<http://homeschoolargentina.com> though not frequently updated); we're homeschooling three kids, and one of the programs we use (among many) is EPGY, a program through Stanford University for kids as young as six. It brings together kids from all over the world for incredibly hands-on teaching from world-class professors.

The resources that our kids have access to such as this make an education that wasn't even possible a decade ago almost trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> While we are at it, don't forget about <http://academicearth.org/>. They've done a great job of wrangling all of these sites together. Something nice about being able to jump from circuit design at MIT to Civil War lectures at Yale in just a couple clicks.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like Gilbert Strang's math courses, and Robert Gallager's Digital communications.

On the other coast, I like Stephen Boyd's Linear Dynamical Systems and Convext Optimization courses quite well. I wish Stanford would do more like these.

<comment><USER17> Yes, the Robert Gallager lectures on Digital Communications I. So nice to see lectures from one of the key people that made the field what it is today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> i wish there was institutions who could start giving diplomas/degrees based on exams passed from these course-wares ... though University Of People is doing a fantastic job and we need few more of those so that education is FREE for all no matter what socio-economic condition you come from as far as you have passion for the subject you can earn a degree or even a masters (No GRE , No GMAT or no other entrance exam BS)...

I salute to the people who conceive and implement this kind of ideas...

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd never heard of it, but I've just signed up for one via iTunes U. These look awesome. It will be interesting to see where the world of education goes in the next decade. Personally I'm looking for resources for younger children (5-15) for my own children

<comment><USER18> This is one of the only things that really annoys me about these courses, is that they are often only available via iTunes U. I don't have, nor do I want, iTunes. I shouldn't have to fire up a VM to access "open" content. I deal with it but it bugs the crap out of me.

<comment><USER16> Actually, I believe all OCW courses are available via YouTube, or for download at <http://ocw.mit.edu> as MP4.

Stanford's SEE course are available via YouTube, download, and bittorent.

I like watching them on my iPad off the grid. So having them in iTune-U is nice.

<comment><USER18> Cool. There are other Uni's that do not provide other options however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice: lecture notes on computational complexity: [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-405j-advanced- comp...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-405j-advanced-complexity- theory-fall-2001/lecture-notes/)

</comment><comment><USER20> >OpenCourseware might have been investigating a pay-wall ... So that would've made it 'courseware'. Even though the material is worth a modest fee, I am glad to find out that it will remain free. Not for my own pockets well being, but for others who don't have even those few bucks to spare.

</comment><comment><USER21> I love the MIT OpenCourseware. But, Most courses don't have videos yet.

Also, I like Kahn,s approach more. You don't need to see the lecturer, but you need to be able to clearly read the blackboard. Also, colors are nice.</comment>


BBC iPlayer: Viewers now need TV licence to watch catch-up - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-37226030 <comment><USER2> How long till we need one for an internet connection in case we happen to watch BBC content elsewhere online.

<comment><USER3> Unlikely to happen but seriously why the fuss over the licence fee, it's approx 40p per day for a number of radio and TV stations without advertising. You can pay £50 per month for sky and still get ads or £10 for Spotify with no ads but only music access. The licence fee is cheap compared to what you get for it.

<comment><USER4> While I'm a big fan of the BBC, I have absolutely no interest in most of those radio and TV stations. Their news service is great, and they have some reasonable factual/documentary programmes, mostly on BBC 4 and Radio 4.

Unfortunately more effort seems to be put into singing, baking, dancing and fiction :(

<comment><USER3> The point of the BBC is to not only provide for the lowest common denominator bit to provide airtime for things that would not otherwise be made. There is probably little commercial value in playing the music that BBC 6 music plays or for the Archers on radio 4, but because of the licence fee they can make these without having to worry about the commercial success of it. Whereas a radio version of ITV would make it and cancel it after 1 series when the ratings were too low to bother continuing.

Yes BBC prime time is too concerned with reality type TV but if they were putting out something that was more niche in these time slots they would also come in for some flak. At least they can counter it with decent ratings showing that people are watching what they produce.

In addition BBC World Service is a fantastic service and something that does not have a commercial comparison, it will never exist without the license fee and is of huge international value.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Only Nuclear Energy Can Save the Planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/only-nuclear-energy-can-save-the-planet-11547225861 <comment> pl-94 A good benchmark for nuclear vs wind turbine is France (2nd country with the most installed nuclear power) and Danemark (Can run almost entirely on wind turbines). Well, France is producing about a factor of 2 or 3 less CO2 than Danemark.

Another important point. France is producing still far too much CO2 because nuclear is just about 20% of its energy consumption.

So let's not focus on electricity, but let's stop using fuel for transportation and gas for heating.

<comment><USER2> Personal transportation is one thing, but the figures for overseas shipping, airplane exhaust, and animal farming constitute well over 30% of total GHG emissions. It's scary. Nevertheless, eliminating fossil fuels in personal transportation (about 13%) is a necessary step.

Another benchmark: Canada's largest province, Ontario, gets 60% of its electricity from nuclear. It has more than twice the population of Denmark, and one-fifth that of France.

EDIT: I misunderstood. I see now you were comparing a nuclear-dominant country with a wind-dominant one.

<comment> pl-94 Airplane is just 2% of world CO2 emissions. It makes sense of course to reduce it, but at the world scale, farming and coal are the real burden!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Building nuclear reactors takes a long time. At this point it's probably too late to start without pursuing many different strategies to reduce our carbon output. I don't think we have enough time left for a painless transition to carbon neutrality. If we had started in earnest when it was first clear that global heating is happening, so forty years ago, we would have been able to switch to alternative power sources with a lot less economic impact. But by now only radical changes to our way of life can limit (not prevent!) global heating. The longer we wait, the larger the risk that we hit some nonlinearities that our climate models have failed to take into account.

<comment><USER4> In the US it takes about 14 years for a new fission plant. You can make a lot of PV panels, wind turbines, and storage in that amount of time. You will also get economies of scale benefits and technology improvements.

<comment><USER5> You should compare all aspects. How much land it uses, how much energy it produces over 50 years, how dirty is the manufacturing process (solar panels involve extremely toxic materials to be made) etc... Its not black and white.

<comment><USER3> Rooftop solar doesn't use any additional land and the US has vast tracks of mostly uninhabited deserts.

I would be very interested in a comparison between solar and nuclear regarding their manufacturing. It's not like nuclear fuel pellets grow on trees either. Do you have any sources perhaps?

<comment><USER6> Helen Caldicott's book (linked above) has quite a bit about this. One aspect of nuclear that's never brought up is that the mining process is carbon- intensive (all gas powered machines) and very dirty. It pollutes the surrounding environment terribly. The entire process of producing uranium pellets is really toxic and unsafe.

Another aspect that's never counted in the costs of nuclear power is _decommissioning_. This gets passed onto the consumer in the form of rate hikes -- after the plant has been turned off! There has never been a real assessment of the costs of nuclear power that includes all these factors.

<comment><USER5> > One aspect of nuclear that's never brought up is that the mining process is > carbon-intensive (all gas powered machines)

So is the process of making solar panels: there's so solar powered machine manufacturing the solar panels after all! However I would wage the ratio of carbon consumption over the lifetime of a nuclear plant is extremely favorable compared to the lifetime energy output.

> in the costs of nuclear power is decommissioning

How about the costs of recycling/destruction of solar panels? They don't last forever (far from that) and you also need to take in account that the cost of solar panels (already heavily subsidized in many countries) does not include that kind of things either. As for decommissioning nuclear plants, it's not "unknown" in any way, there are already multiple cases in the US and in Europe where plants have been stopped and decommissioned and the economic impact can be estimated and calculated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The only thing that can save most of humanity is a method that can scrub 100M metric tons of green houses gases from the upper atmosphere on a yearly basis.

If the earth's climate were a person it would be 5ft tall, weigh 600lbs and eat 15,000 calories a day, and the plan to save it would be to have it reduce its food intake to 12,000 calories a day. We are not fixing anything, the earth's climate would just get fatter a little slower.

<comment><USER8> The solutions are already in front of us.

Solar, wind and gas for electricity. No more coal. Technology already exists. Side effect: cleaner air.

Electric cars and trucks for transport. Technology already exists. Side effect: cleaner air and better cars.

No more beef. Pork, chicken, insects and plants instead. Technology already exists (has for thousands of years). Side effect: less water use, healthier diets.

Mostly these things would come faster with a broad enough carbon tax, instead they are coming slowly. I'm completely certain that we could do all of the above in 5 years.

At most the above would entail minor inconveniences for the average person. It just takes the political will to place a minor inconvenience on a population whom you hope will still vote for you.

<comment><USER9> >"It just takes the political will to place a minor inconvenience on a population whom you hope will still vote for you."

And this is why the future is looking so grim, unless we can somehow convince the population at large to accept this inconvenience.

The public tends to vote for people who _decrease_ inconvenience, and shun those who propose to increase it.

How can we change the minds of millions/billions of people away from that mindset?

<comment><USER10> It's a minor inconvenience to you - because you'd want those things to happen even if there was climate change was not a thing.

It would be as if someone suggested saying a prayer before going to bed would save the world. What's the problem, it's a 2 minute prayer? And yet a large number of people would be up in arms about it.

I understand that you're shouting "Science" before telling people how to live their lives. Hey, maybe it will work. But it's profoundly political and even if they don't articulate it as such that's how people will see it.

<comment><USER9> I'm not telling people how to live their lives. I'm saying that in order to not fuck up the environment even more than we already have, there will need to be massive changes to the way we live our lives, and that we'll need to accept a level of inconvenience that a lot of people won't be comfortable with.

And yes, it is political, because the only way we'll be able to counteract climate change is by concerted, collective political effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Speaking as someone who lives off grid: solar technology today is more than good enough to solve this problem, but people will have to adjust their lifestyle to consume less energy. Switching to a finite off grid battery bank it's remarkable how quickly you adapt to just doing less energy intensive stuff.

<comment><USER12> Personal solar installations are the least efficient and least reliable form of renewable energy. It's great for people like you who are really motivated to do it, but telling people to demand less energy is not a solution to the worlds energy demands. I highly question how responsible it is to promote such a patently unviable solution as being a realistic way to meet global energy demands.

<comment><USER13> It does have two appeals though:

1\. Decentralized generation may be good for the network. Even if we have large utility-owned solar plants, it would be better if you can put a few hundred square metres in each neighbourhood, rather than 500 square kilometres together in the middle of nowhere. Reduced waste of energy from transmission- wire resistance, and less load on old/fragile parts of the grid if most of the current is being drawn from a nearby solar farm.

2\. A way for consumers to hedge on electricity prices. From a financial perspective, there's not a big difference between "You get this 20-year lease/financing for a 5kW solar setup for $80 per month" and "You're contracting for 900 kilowatthours per month for the next 20 years, at a fixed rate of about 9 cents per kilowatthour, regardless of inflation or rate hikes."

<comment><USER12> It's appealing for lots of reasons. Consuming clean energy that the sun freely deposits on your roof is a remarkably appealing idea. But sadly it does not appeal as a realistic solution to energy demands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bill Gates gave an interesting TED talk on this subject[1]. He said that in terms of the real politics, the only way to move to 100% renewable energy is to make it cheaper than fossil fuels so the naysayers have no reason to object. To that end, he has been investing heavily in TerraPower, a company developing a new kind of nuclear reactor that promises to be much safer and use the depleted uranium from other power plants as fuel.

Unfortunately, TerraPower recently received a major setback. It took them 10 years to secure a deal with the Chinese government to build one of their prototype power plants there, and now the Trump administration's aggressive stance toward China has killed that deal. Hopefully they'll be able to find another arrangement before they run out of funding.

[1] [https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates?language=en#t-814991](https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates?language=en#t-814991)

<comment><USER15> [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542686/terrapower- quietly...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542686/terrapower-quietly- explores-new-nuclear-reactor-strategy/)

"six years after it was founded, TerraPower has not yet produced a working prototype. Last week, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the company revealed that it is now pursuing a different advanced reactor concept: a molten chloride reactor"

That was 2016. Any improvements since?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are 3 possibilities: we go extinct we lose civilisation, we do just fine. Science does not us 30 years, it gives us 12, nowhere near enough to build nukes. With the loss of coordinated civilisation, whatever spent fuel pools, will dry up and catch fire. Spent fuel needs 3 decades onsite before it can be moved anyway. So to prevent all the SFP's putting their toxic load into the atmosphere, and killing everything bigger than bacteria, we need to decide to take an alternative to the scorched earth policy.

<comment><USER17> To clarify - your argument against nuclear energy is that the world is going to collapse in 12 years;therefore something with a 30 year investment and maintenance cliff is foolish? Because it may start post-apocalyptic wasteland fires?

Also what are SFPs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What about:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Molten_sa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Molten_salt_storage)

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=solar+thermal+p...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=solar+thermal+power)

</comment><comment><USER6> Everyone in this post (or any other on HN) that brings up any anti-nuclear facts gets downvoted and I'm sure this comment will be no exception... but here goes.

Nuclear is not safe. Every plant has had accidents and leaks. Nuclear power is uninsurable and no insurance company will touch it. Major accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima cannot be cleaned up at all -- ever. Nuclear is not carbon neutral. Mining and processing uranium use lots of carbon-powered machines. Nuclear waste is a problem still unsolved and, IMHO, unsolvable. And nuclear is not cost effective so it relies on huge government subsidies.

Many countries are pulling away from nuclear power for these reasons.

A great resource for anyone interested in some facts about nuclear which are not widely discussed should check out Helen Caldicott's book, Nuclear Power is Not The Answer: [https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Power-Answer-Helen- Caldicott/...](https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Power-Answer-Helen- Caldicott/dp/1595582134)

<comment><USER3> Nuclear waste is mostly a political problem. We could build breeder reactors and burn up 99% of the so-called waste, leaving behind only short lived isotopes. We don't because of proliferation fears.

I'm also reasonably sure that nuclear still produces a lot less carbon dioxide than coal or gas fired plants, even if you account for mining operations.

Safety is indeed a problem, especially with the old designs we're running now. But you have to weigh the risks of localized disasters with the risk of catastrophic climate change.

The main problem is the high cost of nuclear plants and the long time it takes to build them. It is entirely unclear whether investing into new plants right now makes sense, or whether we should rather dump the money into battery storage. What doesn't make sense though is turning existing nuclear plants off, as we did for example in Germany, or building new coal plants instead of new nuclear plants because base-load plants are still necessary.

<comment><USER6> The reason it's so expensive and time consuming to build plants is precisely because of the safety issues. This is the elephant in the room when it comes to costs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In its argument against solar the article makes on fundamental mistake: It does not take into account that prices for solar-panels are falling exponentially (1/2 every ~6 years).

</comment><comment><USER20> I visited Chernobyl last month. Nuclear energy is not the future.

<comment> pl-94 Good point. Do you know many people died in Chernobyl? 31 during the accident. 11 since ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster)). Do you know many people died every year with fine particles? 2.1 millions. Nuclear is even competitive with solar panels in terms of death. ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents))

Death is of course not the real measure. But it gives you a real insight of the dangerousness.

<comment><USER21> >11 since

You're wrong. You'd better to reference to following articles: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_dis...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disaster#Long- term_health_effects)

<comment> pl-94 Good to know thanks. It remains an immensely lower level than coal or fuel.

<comment><USER20> Yes thanks I do know how many official deaths there were and I also know that alternative numbers in the low thousands are still under reported.

We met with a variety of people there and the coal miner deaths alone are in the thousands. Liquidator deaths are far closer to tens of thousands.

Oh and you think Chernobyl was bad as it was? If the inital coal miners hadn't been sent down in the first few days you would have been looking a far far far worse explosion that would have irradiated (and effectively made unihabitable hundreds of kilometers). So bad the USSR was plannning on the basis it would have had the radiation effects expected of a 4+ megaton nuclear weapon. Oh and to top it off they assumed the explosion would have also destroyed and set off the other still working reactors...

Nuclear is not the answer.

<comment> pl-94 Well comparison of Tchernobyl has its limits also. For sure now coal miners would not be sent on the core. But also, nowadays, nuclear power is a much more mature technology. 3rd generation (EPR) are extremely safe: it can resist to a 8m-height wave or a plane crash!

Anyways, even by accepting a death roll of 4k (the biggest estimate of death for nuclear power) over 70 years, it has a lower death rate than wind turbines or PV ([https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys- deathprint-a-price-always-paid/)). Energy has a human price, and nuclear is definitely not the most costly energy source.

The goal of our generation is to live in a world where coal and fuel are never used. Coal represents 36% of world CO2 emissions and kills every year several millions of people. But coal is one the cheapest and most reliable energy source, while being generally well politically accepted by populations.

To remove coal, when you can't install hydro, you need nuclear. Please don't tell me wind turbines will save us from coal, because Danemark has enough wind turbines to run (and a perfect spot for offshore wind turbines) but no real storage tech, and thus its burns a lot of coal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Don't sleep on space solar power.

<comment><USER23> It seems unlikely that we'll invent that before it's too late. Nuclear is feasible today.

<comment><USER22> Sure, bet against human ingenuity, that's a good bet!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there a non-paywalled version?

</comment><comment><USER25> Solutions that concentrate control in the hands of a centralized authority? No thanks.

I prefer solar, which is still highly underutilized and way easier to keep independent of central control. And wind, and hydro. And I just take the headline to mean that somebody at the WSJ stands to profit from a (unlikely) nuclear power resurgence.

BTW for anyone who brings up the problem of the sun not shining at night, that is a solved problem, with the ongoing advances in and availability of battery technology.

<comment><USER4> This is a good point. Local energy co-ops can create their own solar farms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I remember one dude wanted to cover moon with solar systems and then take that energy to earth with some laser or smth. He said it will require 1trln dollars but it will cover all people energy needs. I suppose nobody wanted to risk such money and people with oil business didn't want it to succeed.

Now I think we should diversify and make more nuclear power plant. Also while it's building think about more ways to make energy. I dunno why scientists didn't figure out great way to make energy.</comment>


Blood from young animals can revitalise old ones - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21724967-might-be-true-people-too <comment><USER2> This was shown to be an inaccurate conclusion from the study. Since the animals were sewn together, more than just blood was shared. Organs, motility, behavior, etc. [http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/11/22/young-blood-does-not- rev...](http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/11/22/young-blood-does-not-reverse- aging-in-old-mice-uc-berkeley-study-finds/)

a new study must be done where only blood is transmitted periodically without those other factors in the picture.

<comment><USER3> Haha, based on all the complaints above about selling blood, people are unlikely to accept sewing humans together.

<comment><USER4> Is it really so different than blood transfusions, which are not even blinked at by most people anymore?

Some might be squeamish about it at first, but they'd probably get used to if they saw a pressing medical need for the procedure, just like they got used to so many other medical procedures that were controversial when they were first introduced.

<comment><USER5> Probably it's not necessary. Just exchange blood through tubes, and if you ever need to leave you can just disconnect it. Sewing people together seems a bit extreme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think older civilizations may have discovered something like this and put it into practice, giving rise to the myth of Vampires.

The Vampires of lore are described as very old people who suck the blood of youngsters to stay alive. The parts about them fearing sunlight, or garlic, or whatever, might just be based on side-effects of this cure for ageing. The inaccuracy of "sucking" instead of transfusion, might be because nobody survived to recount the exact way in which vampires took their blood and what they did with it. All they knew was that bodies of young people would sometimes be found, drained of blood and with tiny syringe-like marks on their necks.

In fact, they might still be among us, ruling our world from the shadows :-)

<comment><USER7> Hum, no. If you you drink someone's blood it goes trough your digestive system and it's processed that way, it doesn't become your blood, just provides you some nutrients.

Besides you do that almost everyday, i.e. eat animals younger than you and in certain cuisines part of their blood.

This here is something very different, allowing the blood to be used _as is_ from an young individual in an older one.

<comment><USER6> I did mention that the part about drinking the blood might be an inaccuracy of the Vampire legend. It's obvious you can't just drink it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yup. This was the subject of a recent episode of the documentary Silicon Valley on HBO :p

<comment><USER9> > documentary

I see what you did there :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not going to end well. Human trafficking is already a seriously bad condition in most societies - with this kind of science, I doubt that the black/grey markets are going to ignore the fact that there are very, very wealthy people out there, willing to pay for a little youth or two.

This really speaks to the ethics of science, and technological morality. The world simply isn't ready for some of these major advances in human life sciences. If, in ten years time, we see the underbelly of human experience exposed as rows and rows of coppertops, pumping vital energy into the matrix, I won't be at all surprised. I hope my kids don't have to live in that world, though.

<comment><USER11> Come on. Let's start with a positive comment.

(I think this is one cause of our technological stagnation. Every article about a new technology has a comment like this at the top.)

<comment><USER12> What technological stagnation?

> _Through our scientific and technological genius we've made of this world a > neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make > of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we > will all perish together as fools._

\-- Martin Luther King

Every time someone makes a comment indicating a modicum of social progress, there's a response like yours not getting it. They're not against technology, they're just for things like a decent world to live in, _too_.

But why not be like Steve Seagal in that MAD TV sketch instead? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_l-4rAUAzQ&t=1m32s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_l-4rAUAzQ&t=1m32s) That's our response to Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Konrad Zuse, Joseph Weizenbaum and many others. Just wait until they die, then lie to ourselves that we aren't stuck at a set of stairs they climbed, but that this slide into the basement is an elevator that goes up and is much more efficient than the stairs.

Ever noticed how the greats don't seem to obsess much about having to die at some point? Maybe they did but kept it to themselves, or they wrote a lot about it and I just missed it. Anecdotally at least it seems that the people who would want immortality are those it would be wasted on, while those that are hard to let go would not accept it. We're like cancer to the tapestry of life, we don't see the beauty of the life around us, we just want to have MOAR of our own. The more mediocre the person the more likely for that to be true. We can do without honey bees, fuck yeah, but we can't do without prolonging the lives of people who didn't grok it in the time they had. Let's loop the broken sounds of all things, maybe in a loop they will be less broken.

If you want a positive comment, make a positive situation, and I'll cheerlead gladly.

<comment><USER4> _" Ever noticed how the greats don't seem to obsess much about having to die at some point?"_

This probably greatly depends on the person. For instance, John von Neumann, one of the brightest and greatest (though in many ways still very flawed) people I know of, was terrified of death.[1]

Many great people past and present have sought immortality, or at least ways to extend their lives. They did not want to "go gentle in to that good night".[2] This desire to prolong life is so nearly universal in humanity that it has become an archetype (the quest for the water of life). Some people, to be sure, do seek to transcend that desire, and perhaps actually manage to do so, but it happens so rarely that it is often considered evidence of saintliness.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_neumann#Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_neumann#Death)

[2] - [https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good- ni...](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night#poem- content)

<comment><USER12> Was Marcus Aurelius a saint? Was Einstein?

> _Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, > although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous > egotisms._

Am I? When I was 9, I cried the whole night because I realized that thousands of years of future adventures, including space travel and meeting aliens, will go on without me. I got over it.

In that poem notice words like "because", "might have", and "too late". If your words did fork lightning, if your deeds did dance in green bays, if you learned early to not grieve the sun, how does this apply? If you haven't made piece with death early on, what kind of life are you living, and how would merely extending it help? What you consider saintly I consider the mere minimum. My own life is neat, but if compared to _all_ of life, it's a pixel in a movie frame. Why be a stuck pixel?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There were lots of headlines about this last year, most involving Peter Thiel[1]. It sounds a bit like a tabloid vampire headline.

"The Blood of Young People Won't Help Peter Thiel Fight Death" [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exkdee/peter-thiel- young-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exkdee/peter-thiel-young-blood- anti-aging-research)

<comment><USER14> "The Blood of Young People Won't Help Peter Thiel Fight Death" \- Not with that attitude!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm excited to see capitalists and oligarchs become literal blood suckers. Reminds me of the blood boy sketch in Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER16> That was based on real events though, aren't Silicon Valley people also using Ketamine to cure depression?

<comment><USER17> There's all sorts of lore about constructive drug use in Silicon Valley start up culture but it's not as prevalent as people say it is

I've never seen anyone microdose LSD or take Ketamine for Depression, hell, most of my coworkers don't even smoke marijuana recreationally or otherwise.

It's just that weird drug use makes headlines and headlines makes money

<comment><USER18> > I've never seen anyone microdose LSD or take Ketamine for Depression, hell, > most of my coworkers don't even smoke marijuana recreationally or otherwise.

Or maybe they don't tell you.

<comment><USER10> Or maybe he just doesn't have much exposure to the drug-using classes in this world, because anecdotally over 30 years of involvement in the computer world, I've met far, far more people who think they are enhancing their performance through drug use than those who don't.

Its extremely common in the hackrrspace scene to encounter developers who are using 'smart drugs' to stay up for 3 or 4 days at a time, or who think that a bump of speed at the right moment can make all the difference in the world to the codebase. Of course, I'm yet to see a case where this so-called boost in productivity is actively achieved, but it seems this isn't as important a fact to the guys in the lab coats ..

<comment><USER19> Exactly.

A friend in collage used say a little alcohol would help him calm down and code. A few decades later he accepted that he was just an alcoholic. Another friend refers to nicotine as his work drug...

20 years ago I met a guy who said he was using LSD to avoid wasting time sleeping and to boost his creativity. IMO, it's the same deal where people self justify whatever drug they want to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So Elizabeth Báthory was just a little before her time it seems.

</comment><comment><USER21> This isn't a new issue, ethically speaking.

[http://reason.com/archives/2001/04/18/the-case-for- selling-h...](http://reason.com/archives/2001/04/18/the-case-for-selling- human-org)

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't see why they can't go forward with blood scrubbing in a few years. Oh wait, isn't this dialysis? There must have been some study of dialysis patients.

</comment><comment><USER23> This submarine story has been in the news for awhile. From what I can gather this transfusion has only worked in animals. Also, there is a company that is performing these transfusions for a fee. This article and other is designed to make you feel the narrative "rich people are like vampires ". When you think about what you are reading it really "rich people are having transfusions that may have no medical benefit. Also, none of these articles state that blood has a shelf life. If it isn't used then it is thrown away. For example there is usually a large amount of blood donations that occur when there is a terrorist attack . Most of the blood is discarded because they don't have enough time to distribute it correctly. In effect they are buying garbage.

</comment><comment><USER24> > _... older animals may also benefit from having their blood scrubbed by > young kidneys and livers, which mere blood transfusion would not offer._

What of transplant patients that receive a kidney or liver transplant from a younger donor?

<comment><USER25> I'd guess that side effects from the immunosuppressants that they have to take cancel out any positive effect. Also, typically you don't give organs to geriatric patients, they're too valuable, so any age difference won't be very large.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Young blood treatment: [https://www.ambrosiaplasma.com/](https://www.ambrosiaplasma.com/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Noone has mentioned the movie 'The Island', which hit this topic in a broader sense. Clones used as replacement parts.

I guess its different only in that as a group 'the young' are distinct from 'the clones'

I'm also reminded of a legend from southern africa that HIV could be cured via sex with a young virgin.

</comment><comment><USER28> This reminds me a lot of Jenn Schiffer's talk at XOXO last year.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wewAC5X_CZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wewAC5X_CZ8)

</comment><comment><USER29> Saw this headline and immediately thought to myself "Gavin Belson was right?!" Haha

</comment><comment><USER30> I think Bart's blood revitalised Mr Burns once.

</comment><comment><USER31> Soooo you're saying I should get a blood boy?

<comment><USER32> Blood bag, please. Let's use gender neutral descriptions

<comment><USER33> (In the UK at least) "bag" is a derogatory term used for older women. Just sayin.

<comment><USER3> In the movie, the blood bags seemed to be mostly young men?

<comment><USER32> Thank god someone got the reference

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> One thousand terror movies that involved blood transfusion could not be wrong after all

</comment><comment><USER35> The title gives me quite the Orphan Black feeling here. Very interesting.

<comment><USER36> I was reminded of The House of the Scorpion, which seems to have similar themes to Orphan Black.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I love spoiling the plot of Dorian Gray for people. Never gets old.

</comment><comment><USER38> This sounds like a cyberpunk story.

</comment><comment><USER39> We are going to be written into the history books as the decadent vampires who ran earth into the ground.

<comment><USER40> Meh. Elizabeth Bathory used to bathe in the blood of her servant girls, and Vlad Tepes impaled his enemies and used their viscera as a dipping sauce. Now _that_ is decadence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Perhaps UberEats can pivot to UberBlood? Fresh young blood of the right type on demand via app. Blood boys can be regular Uber drivers when blood demand is low. You're welcome Uber.

<comment><USER42> But for UberBlood it will be $3/h instead of $2/h?

<comment><USER43> Depends on surge pricing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Two Words: Blood Boy

</comment><comment><USER45> I need a blood boy.

</comment><comment><USER46> So blood of young people will be a real currency of future? Bloodcoin?

PS OMG, I googled and discovered that bloodcoin already exists.

</comment><comment><USER47> Side note: Speaking as a male blood donor, donating blood has benefits for the donor as well. Particularly because we're not regularly performing blood regeneration, there's a number of benefits related to it. And that pint is fresh, new stuff. :)

<comment><USER48> Is there any research that confirms this. I ask because I hear it everywhere. But it feels too convineant an excuse to make people give blood :) (voluntarity in most cases)

<comment><USER49> I've always wondered if it's a viable wight loss technique. There must be a certain amount of energy that goes into blood production. And losing wight by sitting still for a while is the holy grail.

Market it right and the billionaires might even be able to charge us to give them blood.

<comment><USER50> >wight loss technique

wight

<comment><USER49> Don't assume English is everyone's first language. It happens to be mine, but don't assume everyone is sober either!

<comment><USER50> I just thought it was funnily relevant. You know, drink enough blood and you just might turn into wight...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Worlwide SMS provider? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
Can anyone recommend a good web-based SMS provider to use?
I really, really like the look of twilio and it seems to be the gold standard but it doesn't fully support New Zealand.
I'm wondering what the best & most cost effective options are for New Zealand and Singapore? Doesn't necessarily need to be a short code but must support replies.
Thanks <comment><USER2> Twilio is getting better but still doesn't cover everywhere. We use Telesign ( [http://www.telesignmobile.com/](http://www.telesignmobile.com/) ) for our international clients, except for Thailand where we use SMSThai ( [http://www.smsthai.net/](http://www.smsthai.net/) ).

The international SMS situation currently kind of sucks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Having not found much of anything, we're going to roll our own gateway. It seems to be the only way and extremely cost effective. Probably just using some variation of Android SMS gateway software.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had great experiences with Nexmo (www.nexmo.com). I believe they do two- way SMS these days, too.</comment>


New open source tech Marathon wants to make your data center run like Google's - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/09/04/new-open-source-tech-marathon-wants-to-make-your-data-center-run-like-googles/ <comment><USER2> _at a broader level, projects like Marathon tie into the greater move toward software-defined networks, storage and even data centers. Companies are trying to replace expensive gear with commodity gear powered by smart software, and being able to automate cluster management and failover is certainly part of that equation._

At least this part is spot on.

They _seem_ to be focused on ZooKeeper (both are Apache projects). I'd very much like to see a decent comparison of Pacemaker/Corosync @ [http://clusterlabs.org/wiki/Main_Page](http://clusterlabs.org/wiki/Main_Page), ZooKeeper @ [https://zookeeper.apache.org/](https://zookeeper.apache.org/), OpenReplica @ [http://openreplica.org/](http://openreplica.org/) .. particularly given that the former is what I am most familiar with and what larger Linux businesses (RedHat, etc.) seem to be focused on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Won't Docker be able to take this type of efficiency to a whole new level?

<comment><USER4> No. Docker just supports provisioning containers. Take a high level view of a data centre with 10,000 machines, you need orchestration software that knows about and automates these 10k machines, which ones are online/offline, utilization, storage, networking, current state, power distribution (what happens if a racks power drops out?), etc and then provisions these containers onto that hardware. Think of this orchestration software like a brain, and it knows about the current state of things, keeps a watch on what is happening in the data centre, fixes things when they go bad, and knows where to put things when you want to do something.

      Docker --> hardware
      Orchestration software --> Docker/LXC/VM/etc --> hardware

An additional example would be dotCloud (makers of Docker), they have orchestration software sitting atop Docker, which knows about users, machines, etc and then provision these docker instances on AWS hardware.

       dotCloud (orchestration software) --> Docker --> AWS EC2 (hardware)

There is a great wired article (linked to below [1] and in the OPs story), which outline how Google uses this orchestration software in its day-to-day operations. There is this great diagram [2], which shows Omega (Google's orchestration software), and how it deploys containers for images, search, gmail, etc onto the same physical hardware. There is an amazing talk by John Wilkes (Google Cluster Management, Mountain View) about Omega at Google Faculty Summit 2011 [3], I would highly recommend watching it!

ps. Orchestration software has a global view of resources across all machines, so it knows how to get the best utilization out of all these machine (think jigsaw puzzle). You submit a container profile to the orchestration software, things like instance lifetime, cpu, storage, memory, redudance, and the software will figure out where to place your instances.

[1] [http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/google-borg- twi...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/google-borg-twitter- mesos/all/)

[2] [http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/wp- content/uploads/2013...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/google-omega-info.gif)

[3] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZFMlO98Jkc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZFMlO98Jkc)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! That clears things up. I appreciate that.

P.S. - Not to Justin but others. Funny, you ask a honest question on here and people downvote you...sigh.

<comment><USER5> I think Docker is great but it's been so overexposed on HN that there's a bit of a backlash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" Marathon launches two instances of the Chronos scheduler as a Marathon task. If either of the two Chronos tasks dies -- due to underlying slave crashes, power loss in the cluster, etc. -- Marathon will re-start an Chronos instance on another slave. This approach ensures that two Chronos processes are always running._"

So basically, it's a distributed crond. I could be wrong, but I don't think this will make your datacenter run like Google's.

<comment><USER7> Really, it's mesos that "makes your datacenter run like Google's," while Marathon is a framework built on top of it that provides distributed service management (think distributed upstart). Mesos is in part based on ideas from Google's Borg cluster management system.

The basic idea is to provide the abstraction of a single machine to developers, who can say things like: I want to run this program on 40 cores with 100GB of memory, and the system will find those resources across the cluster, create a cgroup with your resource limits, and start your services. It also provides various tools for writing distributed services, like an implementation of PAXOS.

<comment><USER6> But Mesos already provides distributed service management. Why is Marathon doing it too? And why do you need Chronos if Marathon performs the same functions?

<comment><USER8> Chronos is the "cron" for the cluster. Marathon is the "upstart" for your cluster. You can start Chronos via Marathon.

<comment><USER6> Yes. I get that. Except Marathon can do 'cron-like' things too. So can Mason.

Mason manages cluster applications. So does Marathon.

Mason can juggle task resources. So does Marathon.

Mason is a framework. So is Marathon.

Mason has a scheduler. So does Marathon.

The only thing Chronos does, at all, is run jobs on a schedule, distributedly. Which Marathon and Mason can do too.

So can someone please explain to me _why_ you need all three??

\--

Look, here, at the infographics in the middle of the page: [https://github.com/mesosphere/marathon](https://github.com/mesosphere/marathon)

What they're saying is, Marathon will move your jobs to a new server when one dies. Okay, cool. But Chronos can do that too. And Mesos can do that too!

\--

I'm pretty sure all these tools are a giant troll by Google to get its competitors to burn R&D time on reinventing tools that already exist and aren't necessary.

<comment><USER7> If you think these tools aren't necessary, you probably haven't managed a cluster with thousands of machines and hundreds of users. I imagine that every company in that situation has an ad-hoc implementation of distributed cron and distributed upstart (I know we do).

Without something like Mesos, you generally will run different things on your cluster by statically partitioning it (these ten racks run Hadoop, this rack runs our website, this rack runs Spark because some engineers wanted to try that out, etc.) or by running everything together (typically done with your distributed file system, but can be problematic with more compute-oriented services).

The mesos approach is to stop thinking of your cluster on a machine-by-machine or rack-by-rack basis, but instead as just a giant pool of resources. It's a very powerful abstraction that greatly increases the number of machines and developers that are manageable.

<comment><USER6> I'm familiar with the concept behind it. My problem was with how they all seem to do the same things, and nobody yet has pointed this out; everyone just accepts the fact that they're mostly redundant and moves on.

I've managed SSI clusters, MPI clusters, and clusters of dumb app servers of varying sizes (10 nodes to 10,000). If you really want just a giant pool of resources, you can do much worse than an SSI cluster, but nobody wants to spend time working on a hard problem, so instead we dick around with task- shuffling job-runners inside the components that were written by the hardcore programmers that work in the kernel. But I guess we do what we can with what we have... (I blame Linus's team for not merging openMosix when they had the chance!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, how does this compare to the Corosync/Pacemaker cluster stack?

<comment><USER7> I'm not familiar with those tools, but from the clusterlabs website it looks like they're solving a different problem. Mesos is primary intended for use on clusters with thousands of machines and heterogenous application needs. It provides resource isolation and scheduling as well as some components that make writing distributed systems easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Skimmed through the article and I didn't find any evidence of "making your data center run like Google's". More specifically: I didn't see any live data connections to the NSA.

<comment><USER7> What value could this possibly add to the discussion?</comment></comment>


Apply HN: 8Yet? – Social in old fashioned way, i.e. face2face - <AUTHOR> Problem: Online social networks have killed people's ability to have deep, meaningful conversations. People value quantity over quality, speed over depth. We talk in emojis, LOLs, likes, shares because that's fast and easy. Teenage girls get up in the morning and reply dozens of snapchats without even reading the content. Fear of missing out has driven us spending hours everyday catching up with all the social feeds. At the end of the day, we're still left with an empty feeling that we're ever more isolated than ever. When I go out with my wife for dinner, we ran out of things to say in a few minutes. The silence is unbearable and we desperately reached out to our phones as our savior. Voice, the way we communicate to each other for hundreds of years, is facing distinction.
Solution: Actually I don't have a solution. Changing people's behavior is the hardest thing in the world. But I figure we can take baby steps toward fixing the problem by having a tool that allows you to meet up with different people nearby for lunch to practice small talks and regain your ability to talk like it's 1995. You can practice the same joke over and over with different audience until you nailed it. Then you can go home and impress your partner.
Product URL: https://goo.gl/41DhCI <comment><USER2> We didn't have iPhones in 1995, but television filled the same role. The result was no better. It was probably worse.

We'd spend hours watching TV, often while simultaneously being really bored. _I can hum the theme song to "Eight Is Enough";_ nothing found on Facebook is more terrifying than that.

<comment><AUTHOR> but you can't carry your TV around like cell phones. I still feel the problem is worse now a days. Also when you are watching TV with someone, at least you're watching the same thing together, which often spurs conversations. Now everyone is fixated to their own phones, each person has no clue of what other people are reading on their phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How would this differ or gain an edge on the several existing portals, groups and apps based on socializing? E.g. avenues like meetup.com, which has several groups, including some for different social needs. There are also many online groups/clubs based on matching people (randomly and interest based) for socializing around meals.

<comment><AUTHOR> My goal is to have a tool that is fast and easy to find people to hang out with nearby (easy as calling Uber). Meetups are usually formal gatherings where someone gives a speech on some topic. And only group owners can call meetups. While my intent is to have more casual gathering where anybody can initiate a meetup call for others to join.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd actually like to start a device-free "Startup Social Club" in San Francisco, where people can go to chat with real humans around them directly. Mail me if you're interested in this...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Will this end up being a dating app? Would that be a bad thing?

What happens if you get paired with someone you don't like?

Do I get to see who I eat with before meeting them?

How do you make money?

<comment><AUTHOR> >> Will this end up being a dating app? Would that be a bad thing?

Old version of my app was one to one match (tinder style) which has a strong feel of a dating app. Current version is for small groups to get together. That still could be a way for people to find dates. Personally I don't feel it's a bad thing. My ultimate goal is to provide a tool for people to gather and social like it's pre-digital age. Because personally I feel that face to face meet up provides 10x better satisfaction than reading feeds online. Whether it's dating or professional networking, I don't mind.

>> What happens if you get paired with someone you don't like?

"life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." If you don't like the person you met, don't see him/her again. :) Again, the app works as small group meet up, so hopefully one of them is fun to hang out with.

>> Do I get to see who I eat with before meeting them?

Right now you see a picture, a short bio that user provides and the person's interests. All as information to break the ice when meeting face to face.

>> How do you make money?

I don't know... People are used to paying nothing for apps. I'm still in the stage of testing how many people have such needs. All revenue models are just theories until there are ton of people using the product.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> there's a known bug that tapping the "no plans nearby" card will cause the app to freeze or crash. A fix in in the review by Apple.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable URL: [https://goo.gl/41DhCI](https://goo.gl/41DhCI)</comment>


Ask HN: Javascript Framework Alternatives to Sproutcore/ExtJS/Cappucino - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to build a rich internet application and would like the web app to closely resemble a desktop app. Besides the three frameworks I have listed, what other frameworks exists to build something like a 280slides.com UI ? <comment><USER2> What exactly are you looking for in the framework? One of the three frameworks you have listed will probably work if you want build something like 280slides.</comment>


The Prophets of Cryptocurrency Survey the Boom and Bust - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/the-prophets-of-cryptocurrency-survey-the-boom-and-bust <comment><USER2> The article compares Cryptocurrency to Religion, roughly speaking.

First, there was financial chaos in 2008. Then with a bang, our Lord Satoshi Nakamoto solved the double-spend problem and created Blockchain, and He saw that it was good.

Second, you have your prophets: Vitalik who is an "alien sent to help us all" and Joe Lubin who has "seen the light". These are men that have been revealed something about Blockchain that no one else understands, thus them being a "9 out of 10" in terms of how much they understand the Blockchain. You can never truly be a "10 out of 10" because that spot is reserved for our Lord, Satoshi Nakamoto. But Vitalik is a Higher prophet than Joe because of his closer connection to Satoshi, having been so involved with Bitcoin so early.

Then you have your priests, there to aid the prophets: Vlad Zamfir, performing the ritual of computational wizardry in the corner of the room as the common folk surround him and praise Satoshi. Emin Gun Sirer interpreting the Holy Whitepaper out loud and vulgarizing its content for the masses.

Then you have the Temple: Twitter. Great truths such as "ok can you guys stop trading" are recorded in the Gospels (IRC archives), and propagated and interpreted throughout the Twitter Temple by the priests.

Fourthly, you have your warriors, guarding the Temple: Jimmy Song with a cowboy hat, planting his foot on the ground, pointing at the heretics entering the Twitter Temple and charging with religious fervor: "Shitcoin! Scam! Get out of the temple!".

All the while, the Blockchain glows mysteriously as our coal plants feed it more and more energy. Perhaps when the Messiah comes, we'll learn that Blockchain was a parody of Humanity all along...

<comment><USER3> I think most national currencies are based on religious-like beliefs and mass delusions to some extent. Take the USD for instance. With "in God we trust", and you have your great leaders and "prophets" i.e. founding fathers such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin printed on the back, governed by a government that is bound to the "commandments" i.e. the Constitution...

All the while, the Whitehouse mysteriously glows as the nation's printing press is busy churning out a few more batches of fiat in secret.

<comment><USER4> It's all about manufacturing shared realities.

For example, a corporation doesn't really exist independently outside of human minds, but we often act as if it does.

<comment><USER5> > For example, a corporation doesn't really exist independently outside of > human minds, but we often act as if it does.

Not only that, we go so far as to enshrine its rights in law.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it strange that journalists tend to use singular boom and singular bust, and rarely mention that there's been at least 4 major boom/bust cycles, each one bigger than the previous ones.

[https://i.imgur.com/ZQJfwp3.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZQJfwp3.png) (Source: [http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/](http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/))

<comment><USER7> I got out after the first bust in your chart. Should have doubled down. Hindsight is 20:20!

<comment><USER8> Indeed but how about now?

<comment><USER7> No more clue now than then!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone fairly knowledgeable about the Ethereum ecosystem I am pretty impressed by the mostly accurate portrayal of the social intricacies of the scene. I wonder how long this took to research.

</comment><comment><USER10> it's remarkable how stable bitcoin has been recently. It actually has less volatility than even tech stocks. The vast majority of people who trade bitcoin and other currencies seem to have very little (less than 10k or so) , so this is not enough move the price much. The only way bitcoin can go up a lot is if institutions and large funds buy it at once. Otherwise it's just stuck in a really tight trading range.

<comment><AUTHOR> The interesting bit about the stability is the fact that 12,000 new bitcoins enter circulation every week. The miners have to sell in order to pay the power bills (or they are simply holding since the mining has centralized to the bigger players with deep pockets).

So, how is the price remaining stable then? The general thought I've seen is that they are selling on private markets and it is the institutions and funds that are buying them up.

<comment><USER11> There are private individuals, a.k.a. 'whales', that have millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin to sell. These people can't sell on the exchanges we hear about because these exchanges do not have buyers on them wanting to buy huge quantities of Bitcoin.

You can't just go along to an online exchange and sell millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, not only is there the problem of finding a buyer but there is also the problem of price. You could find people only wanting to pay a hugely discounted price with the 'market price' falling due to the surplus availability. This is not in the interest of a 'whale' as a big sale could render the rest of the portfolio to be worthless.

Instead of trading 'over the counter' these people are 'serviced' by an entirely different breed of traders that attempt to match buyers and sellers. These intermediaries try to get their percentage, however, as soon as buyer meets seller the need for the middle man and his cut is eliminated. These sales also take a long time to organise, so it is more like trying to sell a house than buying some candy at a convenience store. In this sales environment the price is different to the headline price and not as volatile. Much like house sales though there is a huge likelihood that a given sale will not go through.

Your stereotypical Bitcoin bore only really dreams of getting the 'Lambo to the moon'. In the bigger scheme of things a fancy sports car isn't really that expensive, it is just a bit of bent tin with a fancy paint job. These greedy dreamers are not currently trading their little coin things, they are in the same boat as the 'whales' that can't sell, they are just 'Holding On for Deal Life', a.k.a. 'HODLing'. They might as well be praying for rain.

The price is 'stable' not only due to the problems of large and small 'investors'. There is always the hope that some regulatory approval will come along to make it so that institutions and funds will enter the market. As things currently stand Bitcoin is a 'commodity' whereas every s4itcoin is a 'unregulated security'. So it could be Bitcoin that is undervalued and, when the institutional investors come along, the 'asset' will reach its true value of '50K'. That is the dream and the hope that keeps small time Bitcoin bores HODLing on to their imaginary stores of 'wealth'. This time next year they will obviously be able to pay the deposit on that second hand 'Lambo' proving them to be wealthy.

We are sharing this planet with a cargo-cult group of Bitcoin believers that will not let their dreams be shattered. They no longer talk of 'ICO' blockchain things, they have also kind of given up on the general population becoming the 'greater fools' that will buy their imaginary coin things at a huge premium from them. There really is just this belief in Bitcoin getting to be magically approved by financial authorities and them being able to see a return when mythical institutions buy big shortly thereafter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Despite the obvious jealousy? hatred? distaste?, a very interesting response. I didn't consider that the ETF's might not actually be for the investors, but might be more interesting for the people wanting to exit their large bitcoin holdings. Good point on that.

Have you heard the news about the Coinbase/Circle stablecoin? What are your thoughts there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not transforming the world, but too many people who said bitcoin was worthless when the price was $600 are claiming to be prophets because the price is ten times that.

<comment><USER13> They were half right. Bitcoin has been a monumental failure in every respect except price. They hit the nail on the head about Bitcoin's technical and economic merits even if they dramatically overestimated the rationality of the market.

<comment><USER9> That is absurd. It's working Internet Money that you can use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> (Related) I've always gotten a chuckle out of this TechLoaf joke: [https://www.techloaf.io/2018/05/29/bitcoin-enthusiast-in- the...](https://www.techloaf.io/2018/05/29/bitcoin-enthusiast-in-the-office- talking-about-bitcoin-62-34-less/)

</comment><comment><USER15> BTC still around $6K, wake me up when it's at 2k or 10k please.

<comment><USER16> How long are you planning on sleeping? Could be awhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So many words so little meat... I can't stand articles that read like books.

<comment><USER18> Stop reading books that are wordy and not meaty.

<comment><USER19> Selecting Fitzgerald was his first mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Story author is Nick Paumgarten. Staff writer at the New Yorker for 13 years. Seems to favour stories on sports talk radio, internet dating, a bit on the WEF (World Economic Forum). His Twitter (grand total of 20 tweets) has a mugshot of a motorcycle.

Not what I would consider to be a credible authority on economic theory or cryptocurrencies. I'll take this story like I have most from the New Yorker: cursory homework done by an upper middle class person who was born and raised on the US northeast coast.

<comment><USER21> Did you read the article? The entire point of the thing is to talk about crypto from the perspective of someone who doesn't know much about it at the outset.

He investigates it and reports back, as a proxy for the reader.

<comment><USER22> > He investigates it and reports back, as a proxy for the reader.

And that's enormously valuable.

People are often dismissive of The Economist, since many of the writers in its anonymous collective are young Philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) graduates from Oxford, and what do they know. But they're smart, and by virtue of their association with The Economist and its network have access to world class experts, and they can talk to them on and off the record, and synthesise the gist of some development or controversy in an excellent short article.</comment></comment></comment>


The Charlie Rose Brain Series - <AUTHOR> http://www.charlierose.com/view/collection/10702

<comment><USER2> I randomly stumbled across these when channel hopping at 4am a month or two ago and was captivated. It's a great series and the format of having a panel of experts discussing a subject with only casual prompts from Rose is great (a format that works well with the BBC's In Our Time podcast too).

<comment><USER3> Are these episodes available online somewhere? Does PBS put them up?

<comment><USER2> You can watch them on the site linked with this post. It's not entirely obvious but you click on the main frame when you go to a specific episode and it brings up a Flash video player.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you enjoy this series you will love _In Search of Memory_ by Eric Kandel the co-host of this series.

<comment><USER5> Don't forget his Six Flags commercials, too: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PDIBTS_xDQ>

Or am I the only one who couldn't get past the resemblance?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also, PBS Closer to truth series - more philosophical in nature though, awesome nonetheless. <http://www.closertotruth.com></comment>


Early Days on Street View - <AUTHOR> http://ambivalentengineer.blogspot.com/2014/07/early-days-on-street-view.html

<comment><USER2> Pages Jaunes (Yellow Pages France) had street view in March 2002. I used it to work out how to get from the train station to accommodation on arrival. Two problems though on arrival train partial strike so travel agent arranged a car and Page Jaunes assumed a side exit of Les Halles railway station was the main one. Still earlier than 2005, and to quote archive.org "2 200 000 photos de villes" [https://web.archive.org/web/20020326031423/http://photos.pag...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020326031423/http://photos.pagesjaunes.fr/) and voila! [https://web.archive.org/web/20061130215611/http://photos.pag...](https://web.archive.org/web/20061130215611/http://photos.pagesjaunes.fr/1/c/tbf/user=ciweb;uri=fUTX2MwEBgEwkP2TsqIHH4eE5LTWJ+4ToFEsAyPkKw0p+fj/0ZR13n3I64MxCbJX8/YOafKvvlfPeVrSmySYP0aTVEsVi6IdeSIUzCu9i8yDL+/9WQ87nWHpR8rdR3ZHbjuOVlrCSLKDAJU+3lfvtd5uVMd3jyDaHy9gRdbfuiTOV20LSzscxw==) and [https://web.archive.org/web/20051012124517/http://photos.pag...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051012124517/http://photos.pagesjaunes.fr/1/c/tbf/user=pjphoto;uri=eaXxyuHMF4JzfqnMYt7DQ+O0dIL53V+dOPm4HNDC4CnFvkNO8RYVrcLFE2A8UaTVYR1U+/PjHt8=)

<comment><USER3> So you could actually walk down the street like SV? In 2002? Wow.

<comment><USER2> I went through old emails and I was using it in early February 2003, so not quite 2002. I showed it to a number of people and some said, well, it's interesting but will never take off, others thought it looked really useful. One comment "Hey there is a boulangerie (bakery) right where you are staying!", this is cool. (Pity the bakery went on holidays just as we arrived). As others pointed out it was buildings only, so I knew what to expect to my left and right, but had, for example no idea how wide Boulevard de Sebastapol was but I did know there is a KFC on the left (still is looking at Streetview now). One good thing about the pagesjaunes solution was that they walked rather than drove the streets. As my journey was along Rue Berger (from Chatelet les Halles heading towards the Pompidou Centre), the 2014 Streetview experience is pretty hit and miss.

Still I thought it was cool, and even took a bunch of photos (Digital, brand new Sony Mavica writing to CDRs in the camera) of the walk from the station, duplicating what I saw before setting out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _WiFi packet payloads:_

> So in theory, we should have just grabbed the header. However, a single > wrong line in the configuration file caused us to grab the packet payload > too. Had we ever audited the data on the disks, we would have found the bug > and fixed it, but... nobody ever noticed. Oops.

That is Google's official opinion of the story.

Some european countries (Germany, Austria) bag to differ. Google captured all WiFi data (unencrypted & encrypted). As a result of the _war-driving_ ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_driving](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_driving) ) Google StreetView cars were banned in these countries (Google had to delete the harddrives) and as a result there is a huge empty spot on the StreetView coverage in central Europe (only a few cities in Germany, no street coverage at all in Austria): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_in_Europe#Co...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_in_Europe#Controversy) . Some attacked the car: [http://www.austriantimes.at/news/General_News/2010-04-08/223...](http://www.austriantimes.at/news/General_News/2010-04-08/22317/'Google_Street_View'_driver_escapes_axe_attack)

one of many news articles about this issue on heise.de (German): [http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Datenschuetzer- Street...](http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Datenschuetzer-Street-View- Autos-scannen-private-Funknetze-Update-984118.html)

Google promised to delete the captured WiFi data but failed to do so: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9432518/Google-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9432518/Google- we-failed-to-delete-all-Streetview-data.html) , official letter: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9432552/Google-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9432552/Google- Streetview-data-letter-in-full.html)

<comment><USER5> I have a hard time believing that Google deliberately set out to capture wifi payloads. Apart from the obvious illegality, what use would they possibly have for such data? Google already knows an immense amount of detail about its users.

They screwed up (twice, if you count failing to delete the data) and thats a serious matter. But deliberately wardriving _entire countries_? Hard to believe.

<comment><USER6> I think there's a middle ground here - first off, is it that obviously illegal? Is there an expectation of privacy, similar to eavesdropping on a conversation at the table next to you?

I think it is _now_ , but if we go back to 2007/2008, it might not have been.

And it might not even have been malicious - the Google engineers doing it might have said, "Hey look, if x amount of wifi data is good, X amount has got to be even better!". After all, they're data junkies, and might have decided to capture chunks of data wholesale with the best intentions (and maybe not even any clear ideas of how to use it).

I'm not trying to justify their actions, just trying to posit a scenario where Google did intentionally capture wifi payloads without requiring that they had a malicious purpose to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate to be a critic, but to me the remarkable thing with Google's Street View is how stagnant the interface has been. They have collected so much data, but using it is still so painful, really a last resort. It is impossibly slow to explore an area. Heaven forbid you click on the wrong side of an intersection and have to click a half dozen times to cross the street. There has to be a better way.

I am not sure how much they have rolled out, but Microsoft has been much more innovative in presenting Street-View-style imagery, e.g., using linear panoramas along a street instead of a series of spherical panoramas.

<comment><USER8> This. Google has so much data at this point they should be actively converting it all to pure 3D (structure from motion etc). With tango on the horizon there will be a point in time phone could know where its at by simply comparing geometry, or at the very least augment camera view with accurate directions based on the scene geometry, and not crude 'somewhere this way' gps+magnetometer Arrow. They could also use this data to augment self driving cars, so its a no-brainer.

Google Earth is PATHETIC right now, sparse hand made badly textured blocky models of few selected buildings in a capital of European country? Really Google?

I sure hope they have a group inside google working on this already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What was the difficulty in making the camera unit watertight? I'm guessing a simple solution like transparent globe would cause reflection problems but why couldn't each camera be housed in a rubber-tight casing? The lens could be made waterproof by design and everything else would be in a sealed rubber glove. I'm not implying that the guys who mapped the entire world in 3D couldn't figure out how to waterproof cameras. I'm asking what the core engineering problem was in attempting to waterproof these cameras.

<comment><USER10> First you need the thing to be optically clear. Then you need it to be watertight even with 100 MPH winds blowing on it. And once that's done, you'll find water inside anyway. Condensation can easily form in a closed container which moves at varying speeds through varying temperatures and has water cooling it suddenly sometimes. You may even end up needing a heater inside the thing before you've got it perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone have a mirror, it looks like Google was not happy about this being discusssed:

> _Down until I 'm done talking to Google about this post. _

<comment><USER12> Awesomely, google have a copy of it:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:436bNO2...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:436bNO2sB2IJ:ambivalentengineer.blogspot.com/2014/07/early- days-on-street-view.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, I didn't realize that Amazon Blockview (part of A9 at the time) was so short-lived. I used it all the time in Seattle when it was running.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why didn't the team just bolt together off-the-shelf DSLRs for this?

It seems like a lot of the low level problems were already solved by commercial camera makers many years before.

Even today with the R7, why not just bolt together Gopros and manually set the Aperture, ISO and shutter speed. You'd get better quality images, waterproof cameras and they'd be significantly cheaper.

It's a shame to see a talented engineer distort the truth about Wifi packet collection, especially after Google were shown to have acted deliberatly (rather than "a single wrong line in the configuration file") source: [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/new...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/news/google-knew-camera-car-software-could-capture-online- data-7792533.html)

<comment><USER15> The beginning of the article mentions using off the shelf parts, with terrible results. I'm sure if it was that easy and they got decent results from it, they would not have expended so many resources custom building stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd be interested in an open source solution for displaying our own streetview-type imagery. The county I live in is quite rural so Google hasn't yet driven our streets. In 2011 the County's public works department paid a consultant to drive the public roads in a streetview-type car. The county has all collected imagery and point clouds, but only outdated software to view it in. I've hacked together a proof-of-concept that loads the panoramic images into a web browser (using three.js) to pan around and zoom. But I haven't figured out how to overlay the road centerlines yet to be more Google-like.

</comment><comment><USER17> > "I went on to develop aerial cameras for Google, but that story will have to > wait for Google to publish some details."

I'm wondering what, if anything, that statement has to do with the Skybox acquisition, or if the two are previously-unrelated parts of an overarching aerial imaging plan.

Google is so far ahead of others in mapping it is downright scary.

I read somewhere speculation that Apple's iBeacon could be used to create precise indoor maps of public or semi-public spaces. But then I read about Project Tango, and wonder...

<comment><USER18> I suspect those aerial cameras are for airplanes; it's been known for a while that Google Maps doesn't just use satellites.

<comment><USER19> Or balloons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ahh yes, the ladybug, we had a few of those back in 2005-6. One of my colleagues strapped one to the top of a car with a GPS and drove around downtown. We wrote a java applet (and eventually had a flash version) to navigate the capture sequences, eventually integrated with Google Maps. Someone also strapped it to a robot and did our school's campus (or at least as far as the battery would go). Good times.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great story of a fantastic project; Street View is still the main difference between Google Maps and other alternatives (Bing has "Streetside" but with a much smaller coverage; and AFAIK OSM / Mapbox have nothing).

What an excitement it must have been to work on such a project! Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER22> > and AFAIK OSM [has] nothing

Some of us are working on fixing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There are a few more comments by the author on Google+: [https://plus.google.com/+StephenShankland/posts/GGQdgLPn8J5](https://plus.google.com/+StephenShankland/posts/GGQdgLPn8J5)

</comment><comment><USER24> The things they were doing with cameras reminded me how Android started out as a camera project and not a smart phone. I wonder if there's any relation...</comment>


Detecting Cancer Metastases on Gigapixel Pathology Images - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1T58bZ5vYa-QlR0QlJTa2dPWVk/view <comment><USER2> Seems like pathology is a white collar job that could be replaced by AI. But the pathologists I know are not worried about their jobs, (honestly, they _are_ worried about it, but for other reasons - mostly changes in the US healthcare system).

Its hard to imagine no human in the loop. My guess is that in the future, there might be fewer pathologists, or may be the same number, just spending time doing different things (perhaps reviewing results for tests we haven't heard of yet) or just validating what the machine thinks. This being one of the tools that makes them more productive.

Between the growth of medical technology and the aging population I don't think they will every worry about finding work.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I do not think either that doctors need to worry much. AI will change our jobs for the better, that is pretty sure. Maybe we will earn a little less, but what of it?! Putting us out of work would mean handling the huge amount of technical details involved in our daily jobs. People (and HN is no exception to that) really, really underestimate that. The biggest problem is the amount of rigorous feedback you need to train an efficient system. The medical system is a long, long way from having such information retrieval capabilities. And then you have the physical procedures... Robots are also still have a long way to go on that one!

<comment><USER4> Unsurprisingly perhaps I'm not so sure. Could you elaborate on the processes you allude to? I'd be very interested.

A pathologist I know attends cancer surgeries and analyses biopsies while the surgeon waits to make a decision. Very little process there, but a fair amount of time and hence cost and risk. A robot here might improve outcomes and costs, and seems reasonably realistic. And the surgeon is not immune from the threat to jobs posed by robots.

Another role I can imagine in pathology might be for a human to randomly spot- check diagnoses made by image analysis. That would become comparatively very mundane and potentially low paid. And since humans tend to perform worse than AI in some image analysis tasks, I can envisage a time where the robots are trusted 100% and the humans are seen as anachronistic.

In summary, I guess, complex processes might not protect jobs, but make them a clear target for efficiency improvements.

<comment><USER3> I am not saying medicine entails complex processes in terms of intellectual capabilities. Quite the opposite, actually. The complexity I was speaking about is that of actual physical procedures. Most specialties span a much larger range of activities than one imagines at first glance. For example, pathology does involve looking at surgical samples under the microscope, but that is only the final step in the process. You first have to describe the specimen macroscopically, and make sense of its original location and orientation in the body. Autopsy, a process akin to surgery, also falls in the realm of pathology. Granted, some specialties will be easier than others to automate. But the complexity of the machine feedback processes that will have to be implemented are currently overwhelming in most specialties. We will see a long period during which AI facilitates our work, without replacing us, due to lack of integration in the workplace. You mentioned surgery as difficult for AI, but interestingly it is one of the fields where feedback will be easier to implement, since patients rarely undergo surgery without extensive imaging first. But in many technical procedures (anesthesia, intubation, catheterization, bronchoscopy, etc...) you often perform without fixed patterns, and orient yourself using the (quite variable) patient environment and symptoms.

There is no question this all will be automated someday. But it is far more complex than working on a car assembly line. We are not there yet.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the reply. I didn't known that autopsy was a pathology discipline.

Personally I suspect that many medical roles will be broken into sub-roles and semi automated. Humans will remain with stop/go decisions and overview, for a while at least. I think we are probably in agreement.

Incidentally, I agree regarding surgery, perhaps I was unclear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related to this vaguely, I wonder how easy it would be to code a cell counting app for a phone.

Awhile back, I designed and printed a case for my phone that could fit over the lens of a microscope allowing me to take pictures/videos with it. One technique that researchers use to estimate the number of cells in a dish/suspension is to aliquot a small amount and place it on a hemocytometer. Essentially, this is a slide with etched grids; counting the number of cells in the area allows you to estimate the larger population. It is tedious and depending on the number of cells, easy to mess up.

I'd imagine that phones now are powerful enough to analyze this. I don't know whether a live-imaging setup is capable as I am no expert in phone tech. But taking a picture, thresholding to remove noise, etc... seems like it could be done.

<comment><USER6> I dabble in computer vision. (e.g. [http://git.io/fluidAR](http://git.io/fluidAR)) If you share some example photos I could give it a try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The blog post[1] is probably more approachable if you don't have a background in both ML and cancer research.

[1] [https://research.googleblog.com/2017/03/assisting- pathologis...](https://research.googleblog.com/2017/03/assisting-pathologists- in-detecting.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I was first author on the pigeon paper referenced below. It was a lot of fun to do, but afterwards, we found that a convolutional neural net with transfer learning could outperforscale interaction with them at the UCDH level. Already there is interest in working with Chris Polage on his C. difficile activities. m them, at least on mammogram images.

</comment><comment><USER8> Oops. Inadvertantly merged two messages below. See if you can figure out the insertion sites...</comment>