For Authors Who Abandon Their Publishers: Give Me A Break - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/29/self-publish-and-be-damned/

<comment><USER2> There are a lot of authors who seem to have Stockholm Syndrome.

(I'm still fuming at about a half dozen of them who filled my inbox after I made a blog post about my love for Kindles and total, comprehensive lack-of- care for publishing houses. One of them explained, at length and with much profanity, that her publisher was her customer and I was just some slackjawed idiot allowed to read the book. I can only assume that she was saying what many think, because otherwise the "write a paying customer and tell them they should not be allowed to buy your product" trick those folks were pulling was just freaking bizarre.)

<comment><USER3> I could see that being true from a certain perspective. Many authors see themselves as being in a strange B2B market, where they function as manuscript producers, whose job is to sell manuscripts to manuscript-consuming businesses. The fact that the manuscripts are then used as raw-material inputs to manufacture products for a different market (printed books sold to readers via bookstores) isn't irrelevant, but can feel a bit disconnected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article's only alternative to a publisher is to "do everything yourself"—but that's not at all realistic. Most non-publisher-affiliated authors today _contract_ their editor and marketer, just like they contract their agent. This is the future for publishers: turning into talent agencies authors hire from for market rates, rather than "owning" a stable of authors (and their works) and paying them peanuts off those works' earnings. This is what publishers really fear: not being made irrelevant, but being forced to the other side of the table.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. I'm not sure why these days, a writer can't find themeselves an editor. I was publishing a website and it wasn't so hard for me to find a friend that I paid for three progressive sessions of editing.

<comment><USER6> Sure they can find them, but at what cost? Having a full-length book (200 pages in 9 by 6) edited is going to cost $5000. Plus $500 for a jacket design, $5000 for marketing, a 1000 in expenses left and right - before you know it you're out 10k _before you even sold your first copy_ , and not counting the hours you put in.

Compare that to a published author: if you're an OK writer (no superstar but still sellable) you get a 10k advance (so that you can actually, you know, buy food and pay rent while you write), don't have to spend the 100's of extra hours in coordinating all the other tasks (during which you can work on your next book...) and generally live a much more secure life, with (much?) less risk.

Most authors are just regular people who want to put their kids through school and live a good life, not ball-to-the-wall entrepreneurs who are 'going to make it big of crash' or whatever business bravado strong talk is in style this week. I don't understand where this hate against publishers comes from - don't people see that they're being used by people like Godin who, once they themselves have become successful the traditional way, are going to tell people that that's not the way to do it, and oh buy my book on how you should do it nowadays?

PS no offense but if your frame of reference is 'I was publishing a website', let's say you weren't quite in the same spot most authors are (depending on the website, but when I assume your was 'average'...)

<comment><USER5> no offense taken... sounds like there is a market need for some web based disintermediation? calling ycombinator...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love Paul Carr, but he's wrong on this one. He may indeed love his publisher, but I have seen, far too often, struggling authors fighting with their publishers just to maintain control over their own works, much less get proper remuneration. Certainly, the problem is not as bad as it is in the music industry, but unless you are a fabulously successful author, you essentially enslave yourself to a publisher, and give up the copyright to your own creative works.

Sorry, but the world is changing. It hasn't yet hit the publishing industry nearly so hard as it has hit the recording industry, but it will. Two things in particular almost guarantee it:

First the digital revolution. The Kindle / Nook / etc., are not fads anymore than the iPod was a fad. The publishing world is going digital.

Second, the publishing world will always have real ink and paper books (this is my industry, BTW) - but the technology is shifting rapidly toward print-on- demand. Lulu.com, with their fleet of Xerox iGen presses and web-to-bindery workflow has led the way giving everyone the ability to publish hard and soft covers one at a time, and make a profit doing so. I am already seeing mainline publishers doing similar for older works which are not economical to print on conventional presses. These works used to go out of print. Now they are being made available once more, because the publishers suddenly are able to print them at a profit, even if it is just one book for a single customer. But ironically, the more they embrace this technology, the more readily available it will be to smaller and smaller shops.

Self-publishing - long an expensive proposition - is quickly becoming the norm for new authors, and it is only a matter of time before the marketing of such books will move to the web. Authors already tend to form their own communities, critiquing one another's works and encouraging them to improve and advance their art. The ability to do this on the web gives them a natural platform from which to market their works to a worldwide audience, without a publisher of any sort playing middle-man.

<comment><USER8> _but unless you are a fabulously successful author, you essentially enslave yourself to a publisher, and give up the copyright to your own creative works._

No you don't. In fact, if your publisher asks you to assign your copyright to them, what you _should_ do is walk away, very fast, and let the appropriate folks know that there's a scam artist on the loose. (Unless you're in a work- for-hire agreement, which is a whole different kettle of fish -- but not something you should stumble into by accident.)

As for self-publishing becoming the norm for new writers ... you may be right: but that doesn't mean self-publishing will become _a successful career path_ for those who take it. There are some fundamental differences between the music biz and writing which weigh the dice heavily against authors going it alone. (For example: bands can make money off live gigs and merchandise while using CDs and MP3s for promotion -- but when was the last time you went to hear some middle-aged guy read from his latest novel? And _paid_ for the privilege?)

The real rent-seeking middle-men in the publishing business aren't the publishers, but the distribution chains and customer-facing retail outlets -- of whom Amazon and Lulu are two. They chow down around 60-70% of the revenue in the retail book trade. My reading of the "why not publish it yourself?" propaganda is that it's promoted by POD imprints and folks like Amazon, who anticipate getting much more favourable terms from sole traders and clueless wannabes than they can currently obtain from the major publishers. _Sure_ you can self-publish -- but you're still going to have to deal with the retail distribution supply chain. And there be dragons ...

<comment><USER2> Can I recommend JA Konrath's blog to you? He is big on self-publishing, primarily because his one-man backlist is currently paying him six figures just on Kindle profits, a sharp improvement over a decade of miflist published authordom.

Ironically, I am writing this having tasked switched from one of your books on my Kindle. I love Amazon. They gave me the Kindle, from which springs joy and happiness and space Nazis. Your publisher? Meh, adds less value to me than the hosting company for a blog I'm reading. (I understand that they edit, whee, but it matters nothing to me whether the editor works on salary for them or on contract for you.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> eh, honestly, I think the publisher-hate is as much from non-authors than authors.

Now, of course, if you are an author, and you don't need what a publisher provides, by all means, go at it without a publisher. Modern technology now means that many of the things that were the exclusive domain of the publishers are now available to even us little guys.

But, speaking as an author, I /do/ need what the publisher provides, therefore I went with a publisher rather than going it alone. And this is common and valid as well.

Now, in my field, Technical books, very few authors expect to more than pay for the pizza consumed while writing. Anyone remotely qualified to write a technical book can likely make a lot more money in less time consulting.

You write a technical book to educate people, and to give yourself credibility. Really, trading away the bulk of the money in exchange for that credibility would be a good deal by itself; the fact that the publisher also takes care of all the minutia of actually manufacturing the books and getting them out to the stores is just gravy. Hell, in my case, the publisher talked me in to writing the book in the first place, and rode me until I actually finished it; something I almost certainly would not have done on my own.

I mean, to give you some idea, "The book of Xen" took me and a guy who is better than I am three years to write. We've sold something like two thousand copies. Even if we kept $30 a pop (about what amazon sells the thing for) that's only $60,000; maybe half a year's pay for one of the two people doing it (counting benefits, etc...) Now, we wern't working three years full time, but it was more than 6 months full time, and this ate some of our best and most productive hours.

Now, of course, in reality, my friend and I split 15 percent of the wholesale price, which is something like half the cover price, so we earned considerably less than we would have if we could have moved that many books on our own and paid zero for printing.

Yeah, if you are Knuth, you move a lot more books than I can. But, if you are Knuth, you can also make a lot more money doing other things. Would you give Knuth a cut of equity to sit on your board? I would.

So yeah; money (at least money directly from book sales) is not the reason why anyone writes a technical book, so it doesn't really matter that the publisher takes a cut.

The number one thing a publisher brings is:

Credibility.

Next time you are at a cocktail party, mention you are working on a book. I guarantee, the first thing someone sizing you up will ask is "do you have a publisher?"

I mean, there are many other useful things my publisher did for me, but the credibility is at the top of the list. Even assuming near superhuman levels of perseverance, enough to hire and supervise a good editor, etc... I still couldn't gain that credibility by myself.

Figure out how to replace the credibility function of publishers, and you will have a reason for technical authors to publish indie.

</comment><comment><USER10> This article was interesting, but it didn't present any particularly novel points of view. Yes, I know publishers provide services for authors, but it seemed as if the author repeated the same points over and over and completely glossed over the counter-arguments. He mentions the greater freedom that self- publishing allows, but then completely dismisses it and doesn't mention it again.

For a persuasive piece, I thought it was weak. Personally, I would have rather had him interview a few people who were self-publishing and a few representatives for publishers and gotten both sides out there, rather than just the publisher's point of view.

</comment><comment><USER11> Publishers are hit or miss. I wrote a tech book for Packt a few years ago, and while I wouldn't use the expression "disaster", I do have trouble finding any value they added.

I got lots of complaints about the typesetting. I was required to write the book in _Word_ , and that's what they used for typesetting. The book looks like a big Word doc printed out. If I had self-published, I would not have made such an elementary mistake.

I got lots of complaints about various grammar/spelling issues. Guess what guys, those were "edited" into the final version without my approval. _I_ don't use expressions like "do the needful".

I got lots of complaints about the overall flow of the book. I had technical reviewers, but nobody commented on this part. The technical reviewers were not instructed to do anything but check that I spelled "sqlite3" as "sqlite3" and not "sqltie3". They did that, but some deeper insight would have been helpful.

Finally, I noticed the book was up on TPB before it was actually published. Can we say, "leak"?

So anyway, there are lots of publishers out there that are happy to take 95% of your income. This is a poor deal in most cases.

(Best part is, there was a second edition of my book that came out not so long ago. I asked to have my name removed, and I'm glad it was. The new edition is basically my original text, with occasional mis-grammered boxes that say things like, "The above advice is wrong." It's like someone published their superficial notes, and called it a second edition. LOL.)

</comment><comment><USER12> The system works for him, he's got his. Why would someone who's won the old- boy-network lottery want to tear down that edifice?

</comment><comment><USER13> My summary: Publishers do a lot of things authors need. They're like companies that "hire" programmers in a way - they give programmers a more direct route from "writing code" to "making money". Sure, some programmers could go and create a startup, but the vast majority prefer working for someone else.

In a similar way, publishers provide authors with a few important things:

* Editors

* Fact-checkers

* Marketing

* A filter for the public against bad books

* Legal help and protection

* Most importantly, _an advance_. This means guaranteed money for the author, regardless of the book being a success. Publishers can afford this by "funding" lots of authors. Without this, a lot of authors could probably never keep working long enough to make a decent living.

My biggest takeaway is that there are a lot of problems going from the old world of publishers, to the perhaps-inevitable future. Startups which attack any of the things above which publishers provide authors, but do so in an innovative way, could become huge and successful, and help define the future.

<comment><USER14> It's suddenly struck me how important an advance is. It seems that there's lots of money to be made by giving people who aren't good with money a small slice of future income right now, see the music industry, publishing and payday loans.

That last one just strips away all the pretence and is a usually fairly bad deal loan. The others build up a whole industry to justify the money they take.

Maybe there's a future in VC for authors/musicians?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My startup is a site for aspiring writers so I get to hear different sides of this argument a lot. I, for one, am completely certain that e-books and self- publishing will not sound the death-knell of big publishing houses. Once the publishers get used to the concept of digital, it'll just be another avenue of sales for them.

I say this for most of the reasons Paul lists in this article, but the big one is this: Publishers act as gatekeepers to quality. If anyone with a pulse can publish an e-book and sell it online, it's impossible to tell if the book is good. The only way to find out is to read it, which to many is a huge time commitment. If you're going to commit a few days of your time to something that you hope will entertain or enlighten you, you sure as hell don't want to waste that time on a sub-par book. Buying a book from an established publisher guarantees that _at least_ an objective third party has read this book and thinks it's worth other people's time, and that same third party has edited the book to ensure a certain level of quality in the writing, grammar, and spelling.

On the other hand, spending $19.99 on a PDF file called "Eternal Moonlight: The Vampire Chronicles" that you downloaded from a random guy's blog has no guarantee that anybody but his mom signed off on it. Does anyone want to waste a weekend reading that when they could read something that at least a small committee (the publisher) has decided is worth your time and money?

Finally, the marketing and legal aspect is huge as well. I interact with many authors every day. They don't understand that writing the book is only half the battle. As with any business venture, _marketing_ is just as, if not more important than, the act of writing. You can write The Great American Novel but it'll die in a landfill if nobody knows they should read it. Writers assume that if they write something truly incredible that cherubs will descend from the heavens and magically lift their book into the hands of the slobbering masses without any effort on the author's part. This, of course, is a fantasy, and publishers provide the incredibly important marketing muscle to promote a great book to an already media-saturated public.

So, in short, having spent the last few years surrounded by authors, publishers, and web 2.0 entrepreneurs, I'm totally confident in agreeing with this article because I've been making these exact same points for a while now myself :)

<comment><USER16> I think your 'a committee approved this book' bit is completely wrong. I have seen a TON of really, really bad books that got published through large publishers. I've also ready really, really good books that got rejected for them.

Publishers don't publish what they think is good. They publish what they think will -sell-. It's quite a bit different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish the author had divided the market into fiction and non-fiction for purposes of comparison. I don't have numbers, but I suspect non-fiction titles will be relegated to dead tree pulp in far greater numbers than fiction. I think Amazon eBook sales figures reflect this.

</comment><comment><USER18> Publishers are damn thieves, at least as far as educational textbooks go. A decent portion of a student's budget is in books. It's a waste of money and tree pulp. Full disclosure: I teach a programming course or two at a local university.</comment>


(Gizmodo, Lifehacker)WTF, Gawker? You Redesigned All Your Sites? - <AUTHOR> http://yourseosucks.com/2011/02/wtf-gawker-you-redesigned-all-your-sites/

<comment><USER2> Usability-wise they're horrible. I'm not so sure it's going to hurt their rankings though. They're using the #! in URL structure to conform with Google's AJAX crawling rules [1] and Google is linking to the pages in the SERPs.

Now they have screwed themselves in an entirely different way. Google has indexed their staging server [2] which is now password protected and outranking their site [3].

[1] [http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting- started...](http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html) [2] <http://www.google.com/search?q=site:stage.gawker.com> [3] <http://www.google.com/search?q=flubbed+because+she+was+drunk>

<comment><AUTHOR> didn't get that [2] and [3] parts, But the design is so bad that makes me stop going there instantly. Engadget just got a not shared 24/7 user.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just got the [2]. [3] still not clear thougt

<comment><USER2> The original author says that they won't rank, but the pages are ranking in Google with the #!. The problem is stage.gawker.com is ranking instead of gawker.com.

Click the first result in [3] and it will ask you for a username and password.

<comment><USER2> It looks like the main domain is ranking for everything but the most random queries. Interesting to see the AJAX crawl in action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> They just made one of my favorite sites, Gizmodo useless.

Cheers, It would be incredibly hard to make me stop going to Gizmodo an Life Hacker(browser thru it the whole day for as long as I remeber) but YOU DID IT !

</comment><comment><USER3> Ironic that their front-page article has a montage of cans of Coca Cola CLASSIC.</comment>


Show HN: Express-routemap – Print express routes in terminal - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-routemap <comment><USER2> could this be another morgan.js or some other hack around that that offers more</comment>


Why hasn't LinkedIn banned disclosing emails in comments? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6647975...](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6647975714538700800?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A6647975714538700800%2C6648741298754985984%29)

<comment><AUTHOR> Assuming that most people would not be comfortable with walking through a city square with their email address taped on their back, how do users justify sharing personal contact information (attached to their academic and professional profiles) in posts that are known to go viral? Has LinkedIn enforced any measures to prohibit unwarranted mass data collection for profit?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What software does Linux need? - <AUTHOR> C++ developer, soon to be recovering from surgery. I thought I might use this time to work on a project.<p>What software is missing from Linux? I've written a text editor and a window manager in the past. <comment><USER2> Not sure if this is a great project if you are recovering and don't have some type of CNC mill to test it on -- but the state of open source "CAM" software is clunky.

"CAM" is computer aided machineing and it is software that takes a 3D model and a lot of machine parameters in, including size of the cutting bit and etc, and produces "g code" which is movement instructions for a computer controlled mill of some type.

It is the equivalent of the "slicer" in 3D printing.

But for milling or subtractive manufacturing there are many more details, and there needs to be a way to visualize and simulate the toolpath, and edit it by hand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I will be in bed :-)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: where to ask trivial programming questions - <AUTHOR>

Greeting
I am trying to learn programming on my own but find myself getting stuck a lot. For example, I just wrote the simple maxLine program from K&R as an exercise, the compiler, gcc, gives me the following error when I define a symbolic constant MAXLINE=1000 in the code, but happily compiles the code when I use int 1000 directly:
maxLine.c:21: error: expected expression before '=' token
so my question is, is there a good website/mail group where I can get help on these kind of issues, something very trivial to experts but could take me hours to figure it out.
thanks <comment><USER2> <http://www.stackoverflow.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> I find IRC is great for general questions like these. people don't mind helping newbies and since it's so ephemeral you don't feel bad asking lots of beginner questions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Stackoverflow is a great resource and I would definitely use that for tougher questions as opposed to basic syntax errors. IRC is better suited to this type of question.

Before even using IRC I would google it. Google will get you on the right track most times if you just google the compiler error. They usually only come up when you mess up in a particular way so you should be able to intuit what's going on. Though on this particular error it just means that you messed up on the syntax of the define statement. (hint no equals... #define MAXLINE 100) The third or fourth result is someone with the exact same problem.

</comment><comment><USER5> You will find a good introductory book on programming a great deal of help. Try to pick one that has examples of compile commands and makefiles.

Another alternative is to take an OSS project and read, make changes. Typically all the makefiles, etc are correctly setup. There are some excellent videos on-line as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> look for a mentoring or tutor list for your language

<http://rubymentor.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl>

<http://railsbridge.org/>

<http://www.railsmentors.org/>

and python

<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/>

<comment><USER7> I didn't check the others, but that last one is really advanced:

        Archive        View by:                    Downloadable version
       January 2027: [Thread|Subject|Author|Date] [Gzip'd Text 597 bytes ]

I just _so_ like the idea of an archive from 2027 ...

<comment><USER8> The January 1980 thread was amazingly prescient...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the help, everyone!</comment>


The Hackers Summer Training Guide – Part 1 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.paymill.com/hackers-training-guide-1/

<comment><USER2> Great input! Thanks!</comment>


Facebook didn't mark ads as ads for blind people for almost 2 years - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1800064/for-blind-facebook-users-ads-havent-been-labeled-as-ads/ <comment><AUTHOR> I left the title alone, but as far as I can tell, this is still the case unless screen readers have adopted some type of workaround (I don't personally use one).

I was trying to update my ad blocking filters for the new layout, and I thought I would do a quick search for how screen readers were handling it and found this.

</comment><comment><USER2> > Facebook has been at war with ad blockers since at least 2016, when Andrew > Bosworth, then the company's VP of Ads & Business Platform, said in a blog > post that Facebook's ads were so "relevant," "well-made," and "useful" that > Bosworth wrote, "we'll also begin showing ads on Facebook desktop for people > who currently use ad blocking software"—in other words, overriding the > user's software with code tricks.

This excuse is so disingenuous that it would have been better to have said nothing at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder when there will be good visual screen readers that don't look at html anymore.

</comment><comment><USER4> Most screen readers read out part of the URL, and that would make it clear which links were ads.

Having a separate label simply wastes the readers time.</comment>


Show HN: Eat the News – A text extraction playground for global RSS feeds - <AUTHOR> https://extractarticletext.com/online-extractor/ <comment><AUTHOR> Extract article text from RSS feeds around the globe en masse.

Mini guide here - [https://www.reddit.com/r/webscraping/comments/fbknv4/extract...](https://www.reddit.com/r/webscraping/comments/fbknv4/extract_article_text_from_rss_feeds_around_the/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)

</comment><comment><USER2> Articles given via RSS feeds usually don't contain ads, right? Might it be possible to use content with no ads from RSS and the same content from the home webpage with ads to build a text extraction model that works beyond RSS?

<comment><USER3> There are AI solutions that can work on the HTML and manage to avoid the ads. Checkout [https://blog.scrapinghub.com/extracting-clean-article- html-w...](https://blog.scrapinghub.com/extracting-clean-article-html-with- autoextract)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is this actually for?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main API extracts text from news pieces, blogs, PR content, and other text-heavy pages with a GET request.

The free account gives you access to a GUI where you can paste/upload your URLs to extract text from. The "playground" is a collection of RSS feeds with links you can extract text from, to try out the capabilities of the API.

<comment><USER4> Right I understand what it does, but what is it for? Why would someone want to do this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Personal use case was compiling a news dataset to train a topic model.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DoorDash still hasn't changed its tipping policy - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/20/20825937/doordash-tipping-policy-still-not-changed-food-delivery-app-gig-economy <comment><USER2> This is incredibly annoying. Whilst I don't really agree with tipping, it's a strongly ingrained cultural norm in the US, and what I _really_ don't agree with is lying to your customers. I made a DoorDash order just a few minutes ago and it was the first time I had tipped cash to a delivery driver. The driver seemed to be pretty pleased. I'd use an alternative delivery service but I'm not sure which to use, and none of them seem to have the market penetration doordash has here in the NW.

<comment><USER3> I stopped using delivery apps because of the tipping. I hate it and I'm doing my best to avoid it.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately when you're in suburban US and you can't or don't want to drive, you're stuck with little other choice sometimes...

<comment><USER4> Can't you just call the restaurants themselves? Or did they stop their own deliveries?

<comment><USER5> A lot of restaurants have switched to delivery through third-party services, which is a shame because the quality of service has really gone down. The treatment of the workers is also significantly worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be honest for them to simply remove tipping from their app. You don't tip the UPS guy who delivers packages, why should the social consensus be to tip the DoorDash guy who also delivers packages. Pay them more to make up for it.

<comment><USER7> UPS guy has a union and gets paid a living wage. DoorDash can't afford to do the same.

<comment><USER8> Should we let the market forces play that out? No tip, less incentive to join Door Dash as a driver. Also fix the minimum wage laws.

<comment><USER9> If you let that play out DoorDash goes out because in reality it isn't feasible to sustainably deliver to your doorstep in minutes.

UPS does it in a 1 day timeframe and not with food which could get cold or something and they deliver to a lot more houses at once.

While DoorDash targets 1 customers house and lets 1 biker drive there. If you want to pay for him to have a fair wage then you probably wouldn't order from DoorDash anymore because it's too expensive

<comment><USER10> That would exactly be letting the market play out.

At the moment tips are a hidden cost that customers don't see or think about when they order.

It effectively allows Doordash (and others) to present their service as being cheaper than it really is.

If presenting the full cost upfront means people stop using the service then it simply means that there is actually no viable market.

<comment><USER11> > If presenting the full cost upfront means people stop using the service then > it simply means that there is actually no viable market.

There are plenty of food delivery companies (eg Deliveroo, Wolt, FoodPanda) in countries without a tipping culture. Go to any European capital and chances are you'll see loads of brightly-coloured cube-shaped backpacks cycling around — so the companies seem to be doing OK.

<comment><USER10> I am in Europe and use Deliveroo from time to time. There are several of these companies here, indeed. This does not mean that any of any of them are doing OK in terms of bottom line.

According to figures from end of last year Deliveroo lost £185m while making £277m in sale... Any 'normal' business would have collapsed even before getting there.

These companies are like Uber and Lyft: The business case is very shaky and they are facing employment law pressures at the same time. So we'll see...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How is this not wage theft?

It's been a very long time since I've waited tables, but a company keeping tips in this way is (or at least was) in serious violation of US labor laws.

<comment><USER13> Doordash says they never keep tips; they pay drivers the full amount of your tip always, plus some extra if you don't tip enough. You can argue that's not the right way to look at it, but it's hard to argue that it's factually wrong in a way that'd violate labor laws. No worker is getting less of a tip payout than the amount you tipped them.

<comment><USER14> Aren't tips taxed differently than wage in the US? Anyway you can also see this as DoorDash always paying the wage and pocketing the tips. When the user tip goes towards the wage it's no longer a tip. If they were taxed differently it would be obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> of course they haven't. Why would they? There is no penalty for just lying to their customers and continuing to profit from it.

<comment><USER16> I feel like there's potential for a class-action lawsuit there on behalf of the customers.

<comment><USER15> for...?

<comment><USER17> Bit bit where they tweeted "We're going to change this" back in July, and got a bunch of press for it? [https://twitter.com/t_xu/status/1153867334685089794](https://twitter.com/t_xu/status/1153867334685089794)

It shouldn't take a month to switch your tipping model to work the way it does for the rest of the industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've just tried to avoid the gig economy generally now.

It is all about pushing risk onto "contractors" and customers.

</comment><comment><USER19> Tip cash.

What, you can't be bothered? It's a faff?

Someone's job is to cart shit around the city, for you. To literally be your bitch.

Step up.

<comment><USER20> What is it, in your eyes, that makes their job more worthy of tipping than any other job?

It's a job, they get paid. I ordered something that cost $X including delivery, I expect that to be the final total, not $X + "step up".

If they're not getting paid enough, enforce a higher minimum wage (it is also a US-specific issue; tipping isn't the norm in a lot of other developed countries and the world doesn't end).

<comment><USER21> They're worthy of tipping because they get paid shit-all.

As you say, the actual answer here is tightening minimum wage laws so that they're actually effective, but given the state of DC these days I'm not holding out hope.

So I tip.

<comment><USER22> If nobody tipped, restaurants and services like DoorDash would be forced to pay employees more or nobody would take the job. Yet, we've made it into a cultural thing, so employers have dropped wages (and gotten legal protection for doing so) accordingly.

That being said, I think asking for a tip before a service has been rendered is really weird and really screws up whatever sense there was in tipping.

I find it increasingly hard to tip for things like DoorDash because I'm already charged directly for the service separately from the product, so that signals to me that the person is already getting paid. I don't tip my package/mail delivery person, so why should I tip my food delivery person?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you cared you would tip cash. The thing is, people don't care.

<comment><USER24> It is inconvenient to carry cash though. I would gladly tip cash if I didn't have to drive to an ATM just to get it thereby defeating the purpose of having something delivered.

<comment><USER25> Why not keep a few hundred dollars in cash in a drawer for when you need it?

<comment><USER26> It just means you have a lot of 1s and 5s laying around as you usually want small denominations for tipping, which (in my opinion) is a lot of cash to have in the house. It also means that at some point, I'm walking away from the ATM with a few hundred dollars in my pocket, which is not something I like to do from a safety perspective.

<comment><USER4> I'd still want the cash available just in case the power goes out for a few days.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Waymo released a 360-degree VR representation of what its robocar sees - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/watch-waymos-carseye-virtualreality-view-of-the-world <comment><USER3> This shows much the same info as Chris Urmson's TED talk in 2015.[1] Simplified for a non-technical audience, cleaner graphics, and without Urmson's clips of the vehicle encountering such things as someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a turkey with a broom. The tech video is more informative. It shows more of how sensing and planning interact. "Fences" appear in the graphics showing the keep-away area for a moving obstacle such as a bicycle.

Waymo is going at this right. They sense as much as they can, build a detailed 3D model of the world, and only use machine learning to help classify objects. Classifier failures aren't too serious; the obstacle still gets avoided, but you might not get as smooth a ride as the behavior prediction won't be as good. Compare Tesla's self-driving videos.

[1] [https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_sees_the_road)

<comment><USER4> There's still the issue that self-driving cars are too courteous compared to normal drivers. I wonder how/if they'll fix that. Imagine sitting in a self- driving car that can't "push" itself through traffic; or imagine sitting in a car behind that car ...

<comment><USER5> I'm also thinking of how human drivers will quickly learn to exploit this and get a feel of how to push the algorithm to get a slighgood advantage. Like, advancing a bit and stopping or getting a bit closer in order to merge in front of a self driving car.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, the self-driving car has a lot of cameras, good for collecting evidence, which may scare human drivers.

<comment><USER6> Maybe, but there are quirks you can exploit. Getting hit in the back of your car, for example, usually means fault is with the car behind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clearly this is an orientation video that is going to play in the waiting area for people who are using a self driving car for the first time. Its calm, everyone around it is calm, and nothing unexpected happens during the entire video.

I of course want to see the video where the human drivers do things that human drivers do. They illegally pull out of left turn lanes to go straight, they fail to stop when they turn right in the intersection you are about to enter, they make an illegal u-turn when they realize they turned the wrong way. What does the car do when someone tailgates it? What does it do when pedestrians step off the curb but then don't cross? Watching how the car navigates those situations would make me feel a lot better than watching it drive around where everyone was following the rules.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. Or a car stopped blocking your lane so you need to break the rules and go into the on coming lane to pass. So many odd situations are possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Having the rendered car's view visible to passengers inside is a very great idea for at least the first couple generations of self-driving cars, and especially being as prominent as they are in this car. It helps get people comfortable with the idea, and feel better knowing the car is picking up on everything in its surroundings.

I'm a bit skeptical about if those are real graphics though -- they look quite detailed beyond what I feel the 'sensors' can see, but maybe I just underestimate this technology.

The screens are also (unfortunately) a great place to blast ads at a quite literally "captive" audience, but I digress.

<comment><USER10> It wouldn't surprise me if they were dummy or dramatically simplified graphics just to make people more comfortable. Planet Money had a show on this topic a few years back - [https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...](https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=427467598)

They drew a comparison to the early days of elevators, when everyone was terrified of them, especially after transitioning away from having a lift operator controlling it. The solution at the time was the big red emergency stop button.

<comment><USER11> The first elevators in Europe (mostly legacy ones in Germany now I think) that never stop and don't have doors still terrify me. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When there's 1000's of cars in one area blasting LIDAR and RADAR at each other, will there be interference issues?

<comment><USER13> Disclaimer: I'm not involved in AV, but I have a telecommunication background that let me do some (hopefully) not too stupid guesses on how a LIDAR can behave here. If some expert in the field can give more authoritative feedback that's be even better.

Looking at [1], a typical LIDAR uses 10 ns pulses, at 140 kHz for pulse rate. So one LIDAR uses only 0.14% of air time. A LIDAR is also a rotating device, looking at reflections only from a narrow angle at any give time (how large this angle? TBD). That also reduces the risk of looking at another reflection in the right direction at the right time. Raw collisions should be rare, even in a crowded environment (you're 1000s of cars is extreme, 100s will already be very crowded).

Then if it's using the usual techniques for signal detection, each pulse is encoded with a randomized pattern, so that a LIDAR can recognize its own pulses reflections using correlation. So a given LIDAR will only consider reflections using the right coded sequence. That will further reduce the risk of wrong interpretation, depending on how many bits in the synchronization sequence.

Lastly, at 140 kHz you can do quite a lot of filtering and still have a fast update. If by extraordinary bad luck another reflection comes from the right direction in the right time window with the same sync pattern, this would create an odd input that's unlikely to fit with one's own echo pattern, so could be filtered out. And it's not likely to last long considering all that has to align.

That's my armchair analysis based on a quick search and a single set of slides ;) But it's enough to see that interference is not likely to be a problem. And I would expect this question to have been considered by AV LIDAR experts in much more detail.

[1] [http://web.pdx.edu/~jduh/courses/Archive/geog481w07/Students...](http://web.pdx.edu/~jduh/courses/Archive/geog481w07/Students/Marcoe_LiDAR.pdf)

<comment><USER14> I think the problem is more the analog side: If your sensor is saturated by too much light, it might not be able to pick up on your signal anymore. Direct LOS to another high-powered source is probably a lot brighter than what LIDAR normally detects. Then, all the reduction from sync pattern etc don't apply, and the sensor might be blinded considerably longer than the actual signal length if driven to saturation.

<comment><USER13> Possibly yes. I was assuming an RF-like behavior where there is indeed saturation of the A/D converter but the blinding doesn't last more than the interfering signal (or negligibly so). But these are for timescales in multiple of us not ns. For ns level time scales maybe it's a bit different, but if it's not too different the low air time usage would avoid problems here too. The blinding pulse would mean an angle between two circles in space (angle from the interfering direction, circles corresponding to distances associated to the blinding pulse start/stop with respect to the last interfered LIDAR own previous pulse transmission) would loose any echo and become blind. With the vehicles moving such a "lost patch" would not be fixed either, and interpolation based on past and surrounding data is possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Direct link to the 360 video: [https://youtu.be/B8R148hFxPw](https://youtu.be/B8R148hFxPw)

</comment><comment><USER16> Drives fine on what seem like a perfect looking place in perfect weather and perfect drivers

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone know if these types of vehicles have special power requirements to support the onboard CPU/GPU? Just curious.

<comment><USER18> A quick google search [0] suggests that the alternator can provide 200 amps of power at 15V, so I doubt it (but I don't know).

[0] [https://www.quora.com/How-much-electrical-power-do-cars- supp...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-electrical-power-do-cars-supply-while- the-engine-is-running-Will-anything-be-damaged-if-other-devices-are-operated)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe I'm just skeptical of the SDC hype...

But I'll take all of this a LOT more seriously if there was a serious effort in V2V / V2I (vehicle to vehicle/infrastructure) systems - AND - if semi trucks that take known and constant routes were being deployed.

It seems obvious to me for SDCs to be a Railroad v2 at first. Vehicle takes a long distance and known route back and forth. Seems far easier and immediately makes money.

</comment><comment><USER20> Have they solved the issues around navigating through the drive-thru lane at a restaurant?

</comment><comment><USER21> You can see something similar in the computer history museum in mountain view

</comment><comment><USER22> All I can think of when watching this is the crime fighting potential.

<comment><USER23> "Halt and stop resisting, citizen 9874653792! Google has observed you engaging in the consumption of unauthorized plants. Prepare for re-education factory enrollment."

What could possibly go wrong?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Since the video said the robocar could predict where other object were going...any chance of a video where the robocar swears and call another drive a f*cking idiot? I would watch that video...

</comment><comment><USER25> The Tesla video with "Paint it Black" was much cooler.

Tesla Autopilot Full Self-Driving (Paint It Black soundtrack) - <USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeyH734JQD0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeyH734JQD0)

</comment><comment><USER26> I understand Google/Alphabet is doing the "absolute regulatory minimum" here, as it usually tends to do in everything else, but what's the point of having a self-driving car with a wheel you can't access in case of a self-driving system breakdown?

The manual control should be easily accessed by the passengers. Will Waymo even allow people to sit in the front seat at the wheel and allow them to control it whenever they want?

<comment><USER27> The reason why the steering wheel is there is due to these cars being modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans. It is easier all around just to leave the wheel as it.

There is no need for a passenger to take manual control. If the car or the self driving system has a problem. The car will pull over and another Waymo self driving call will arrive to allow you to complete your journey.

<comment><USER28> > If the car or the self driving system has a problem. The car will pull over > and another Waymo self driving call will arrive to allow you to complete > your journey.

So if a (perhaps malicious) environmental configuration consistently causes Waymo cars to fail, you'll just collect an ever-increasing number of them at that point?

<comment><USER29> A lot like ants encountering the inside of a freezer. In this case, though, a human is going to be told "there is a broken car here someone has to come collect", and they will hopefully notice if they see two or three of them at the same location (seeing as how cars don't travel instantly so there is time to notice stuff in general).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A tool to test horizontal layout and maximize your conversion rate - <AUTHOR> http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/horizontaloverlay.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Quick note - this is a follow-up to the blog post:

[http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/test-your- horizonta...](http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/test-your-horizontal- layout-to-maximize-conversion-rate-with-our-free-tool/)

Anybody rolling out left side buttons / left side forms?

</comment><comment><USER2> This overlay displays the horizontal distribution of attention on the average website?

That's about as helpful as telling me the average age of an Internet user. Or a visitor to my site views 1.4 pages on average.

It's a statistic, sure, but it's not very actionable.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very actionable - knowing where the sweet-spot of user attention distribution lands can help you implement a test.

EG - Check out <http://whichtestwon.com/archives/2208> \- BabyAge moved their "Add to Cart" button right into the hot area, and drove up actual SALES by 17%.

Purpose of the chart is to help you see in a design exactly where users are naturally looking, and build a test around that.</comment></comment>


Giant Fans to Cool Great Barrier Reef - <AUTHOR> https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/giant-2-2m-fans-to-cool-great-barrier-reef-20171207-p4yxi5.html <comment><USER2> Giant fans to cool a multi thousand kilometer long reef.

The level of stupid here is so high you can't really say anything meaningful about it.</comment>


Ask HN: Help a webcomics player developer by having a comic strip made for you.. - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
As well as trying ot be a webcomics author, I am currently developing an innovative web application and a file format for an opensource player for web comics (BD or bandes dessinées in French).
In order to go forward I need 49 more participants who would like to have a free custom webcomics on their blog to illustrate one of their post.
The reason why I need you is because I need to build those comic strips from scratch.
I could do it with my own stories but that would not prove anything. What I need is pages that already have been published and already have an "internet history".
I could pick up the pages by myself and if nobody shows up that what I will probably do.
But I thought I could first test the water and offer a nice free comic strip to people who might want it. After all, christmas is not very far :-)
I will publish more specs about this web comics player and the way I envision the future of webcomics online soon. But it's a bit too early in the process for me to do it right now.
The full instructions are on this page:
http://bou.me/bespoke-comics-for-your-website/
Please have a look. I welcome any feedback.
Thanks for reading
Thibault Baradat-Bujoli
London, UK <comment><USER2> Clickable link: <http://bou.me/bespoke-comics-for-your-website/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot. I didn't know how to do it.

<comment><USER3> Just FYI: don't worry, it's not possible to create clickable links in text submissions. URLs in comments, on the other hand, are automatically converted.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft and Yahoo Agree to Amend Search Partnership - <AUTHOR> http://info.yahoo.com/press-center/article/microsoft-yahoo-agree-amend-search-130000454.html

<comment><USER2> This seems to be the key takeaway:

> First, Yahoo will now have increased flexibility to enhance the search > experience on any platform, since the partnership is non-exclusive for both > desktop and mobile.

Bing keeps getting add revenue and yahoo is free to either buy, develop or partner with another search company in the mid to long term.

It looks like this is business as usual. It was rumored that Microsoft might have to put up a large chunk of cash to keep this deal. It looks like Yahoo blinked first here.

> Yahoo will continue to serve Bing ads and search results for a majority of > its desktop search traffic.

Interesting that they single out desktop traffic and leave out mobile. I'm not sure if this is microsoft thinking that mobile isn't worth the trouble for add revenue or if yahoo thinks mobile add revenue is too important/strategic to give up....

> Microsoft will become the exclusive salesforce for ads delivered by > Microsoft's Bing Ads platform, while Yahoo will continue to be the exclusive > salesforce for Yahoo's Gemini ads platform.

I'm not entirely sure what they are getting at here. Was yahoo selling bing ads on Microsoft's behalf before?

<comment><USER3> my guess would be that they were showing Bing Ads on Gemini.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My general sense of the revised partnership doesn't really surprise me. On an open webinar a while ago a Yahoo! rep seemed particularly passionate about the Gemini platform and its room for growth while (IIRC) rather vague in response to questions surrounding Bing ads vs. Gemini. Gemini's early integration with tools like Marin Software also indicate a strong interest in driving use of this product.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does that means microsoft won again?

if yahoo just got the bing ads from an ad network, they would be paying cents per click and keeping the rest. with the deal, microsoft is the only source of ads, and keep a huge chunk.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish they would partner up with duckduckgo. But then, yahoo wouldn't get the advantage of tracking people for ads.

<comment><USER7> Microsoft is a provider of search results, while Yahoo and DDG are both primarily consumers/frontends for search. What kind of partnership would Yahoo and DDG have, if they don't complement each other?

<comment><USER6> Microsoft is also a front-end for search - Bing.

DDG has their own algorithms and indexing for providing search results. Not sure how that partnership would be any different.</comment></comment></comment>


Autism and Evolution - <AUTHOR> https://hms.harvard.edu/news/autism-and-evolution <comment><USER3> I don't quite buy that autism will be shown to be genetic. I think it's an environmental factor. The rate of increase in autism is pretty much exponential:

[http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111102/full/479022a/box/1.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111102/full/479022a/box/1.html)

Now that's a very scary chart if you start to project that curve into the future.

Here's another one. Not saying this is the cause, but it is a cause for concern. We have many similar patterns of environmental factors increasing with autism prevalence, which makes the likelihood of it being environmental stronger than something else.

[http://images.medicaldaily.com/sites/medicaldaily.com/files/...](http://images.medicaldaily.com/sites/medicaldaily.com/files/styles/full_breakpoints_theme_medicaldaily_desktop_1x/public/2015/01/05/autism- prevalenceuse-glyphosate.JPG)

For example it took a long time to figure out that lead in gasoline could lead to cognitive decline. BPA and phtalates is another recent discovery, which cause hormone distruption.

What else do we have today that is yet to be figured out, and what is the likelihood that we have something similar brewing that we do not yet know about.

<comment><USER4> My cousin had debilitating autism that was greatly diminished by removing wheat germ from his diet, so I partially buy the environmental take, but on the other hand it is a disease that is correlated with parental IQ, where a higher IQ leads to more likely incidence of autism. I don't think it's a coincidence that the rise of co-sexed secondary education and finer grained sorting with institutions like Harvard and MIT getting an even more concentrated amount of intelligent people.

<comment><USER5> Since this thread is about evolution, we might even say that the evolutionary pressures we currently face in the developed world actually favor mild variants of ASD.

It might be because some ASD traits help people become more successful in the information economy. Asperger's people often thrive in well-paid occupations such as programming and data analysis where spontaneous social interaction is widely acknowledged to hurt productivity.

Or it might just be a side effect of a society that places a lot of emphasis on intelligence, making it more likely for a person with high IQ to seek a mate with similarly high IQ. The more smart people "inbreed" among themselves, the more ASD cases we will naturally see.

In either case, since evolution is whack-a-mole, this will lead to not only mild ASD but also more cases of severe autism if they are caused by the same set of genes.

<comment><USER6> I have not seen any evidence that Asperger Syndrome or mild autism leads to well-paid occupations. For sure, there is some anecdotal evidence (which I find unconvincing), but I haven't come across anything more solid, like a research paper or study. If you've seen something along those lines, please post a link.

I do believe that children with Asperger Syndrome often see the symptoms grow less severe as they age. Perhaps with lots of hard work and a good support structure, some of them people grow to enjoy above average success. It seems entirely unreasonable (and to my mind somewhat cruel) to credit this success to Asperger Syndrome itself.

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

<comment><USER7> What appears to be Aspergers now is very similar to spending lots of time on the Internet and then trying to interact socially afterwards. It's quite difficult to appear neuro-typical after a surfing session, and for today's kids, Aspergers is the 'New Normal'. Aspergers was even taken off the DSM-5: [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/05/autism_spectrum_diagnoses_the_dsm_5_eliminates_asperger_s_and_pdd_nos.html)

<comment><USER8> aspergers was lumped into autism, it wasn't made non-diagnosable. Previously the criteria for aspergers were the same as autism but without delayed language development. Now they decided that distinction wasn't worth singling out with a special diagnosis so it's considered autism regardless of language delay. Those who had aspergers are now considered to simply have autism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Similar: [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160815064944.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160815064944.htm) Schizophrenia emerged after humans diverged from Neanderthals

<comment><USER10> The incredible part about that detail would be that in any other animal much of Schizophrenia's symptoms would be subclinical, in that language and socialization expresses most of Schizophrenia's detriments.

The paper is really about emergence and transmission of the disorder, and not so much about why humans find faults in those afflicted by it. But consider solitary animals, or apex predators. That they'd be schizophrenic, and construct distorted understandings of the world around them probably wouldn't matter, as long as they manage to hunt for food and produce offspring. No one would care about what a bear thinks of the origin of the universe, or how realistic its outlook of its own future is.

I realize that Schizophrenia has other debilitating effects, but it also affects people in varying degrees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I went the other way with it: high-functioning autism is a component of more- evolved humans. The autistics are more rational, often less selfish in my anecdotal experience, and cause almost no harm to others vs baseline. A world full of them would've largely eliminated famine, pollution, war, violent crime. It would be a fraction of what we see. Further, autistics and introverts are often behind many great advances that push progress of our species forward. That would increase greatly.

So, I've always thought of us as the next thing after homo sapiens. Jokingly call it Neosapiens from a cartoon as it was a cool name. Not likely to actually happen but a nice example of how the world might have been better. My ideal one, though, preserves the different types of people with two modifications: built-in mechanism where causing harm to others makes individual experience personal pain; built-in need to connect outside local sphere to reduce isolationism. These two would keep world more interesting than the safe, autistic one while also eliminating many problems. Just two, small changes in the brain.

<comment><USER12> OTOH, a world full of people with autism might never be able to come together and build large group projects. Autism might work well for creating in the computer+Internet age (but I have doubts that non-autism traits are totally unnecessary), but much less likely to work in lower-tech society.

<comment><USER11> "OTOH, a world full of people with autism might never be able to come together and build large group projects. "

This was a problem for the Autreat conference. It was made by autistics for autistics. The coordination required to create it was a big problem. I wonder if things would get better if they were the norm. I'm not sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So are Asperger / ASD mutations, a step back, step forward, or a step in a different direction (evolution?)

<comment><USER14> Evolution isn't directed.

<comment><USER15> It sounds as though you are speaking from the standpoint that genes mutate at random in all and any "directions" (net). However, non-successful genes are eliminated, so in the effective sense it is (gross). The direction of evolution is towards being "more suitable" for a particular environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article says 1-5% of the ASD cases they looked at were related to the "HARs" (human-accelerated regions). The most important thing to understand about autism is that it isn't a single condition, but an umbrella category with a bunch of conditions grouped into it.

It's a trait (trait cluster, really), analogous to intellectual disability or giftedness, rather than analogous to a condition with a single known cause like trisomy 21. See [https://intellectualizing.net/2013/12/17/book- rethinking-aut...](https://intellectualizing.net/2013/12/17/book-rethinking- autism-variation-and-complexity/) and [https://intellectualizing.net/2015/06/04/why-it-matters- whet...](https://intellectualizing.net/2015/06/04/why-it-matters-whether- autism-is-a-trait-or-a-unified-condition/)

Once we understand that autism isn't a single condition, a lot of the ways the public (and researchers) talk about autism turn out to be kinda nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER16> There have been instances of biological twins where one winds up with autism and another doesn't. So to the extent that autism has a genetic component - <USER2> is just that - a component.

<comment><USER17> That does support non-genetic factors to some extent, but the existence of such twins matters less than their frequency, because twins don't always have identical DNA (mutations can occur after they separate).

<comment><USER12> If autism is caused by an individual mutation (not alredy present in the parent genome) it would be amazing that the mutation is so common, but not currently of a known form (like trisomy).

<comment><USER18> It could be that there are many genes and many mutations possible to cause it, which means two people with autism would almost certainly not share the same mutation. This would make it quite difficult to work out what the mutations are.

(There is one mutation that causes something like autism, fragile-X)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> After spending some time with an individual that has autism, I feel like there's an underlying process to 'normal' cognition that spans a gamut from Schizophrenia to Autism. A shaky metaphor to the neurology might be how equivalent logic circuits can be made from corollary gates. It's as if one condition skews toward signal powered gates vs source powered gates. I.e. more concrete vs 'out there'... Just a quick thought.

<comment><USER19> (Forgot to explicitly say, the failure modes are different: an inactivation that inhibits gracefully (simply forgetting) vs activation independent of actual signal (spurious thought). False negatives vs false positives.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Chimps are social creatures, but they're different from humans. They don't > live in compact cities of a million people. That requires extraordinary > social behavior."

I don't think cities are a result of social behavior, it's more the result of economic behavior. Cities are clusters of box apartments, which don't really demonstrate social behavior.

</comment><comment><USER21> So DNA is mutating... and we believe its evolution ? Then why are certain groups seemingly evolving at different rates ?

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

Food ? Environment ?</comment>


Wildfire Revealed Hundreds of Blackfoot Sites in Canada - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/kenow-fire-blackfoot-archeology-sites-1.4765349 <comment><USER2> Url changed from [https://www.archaeology.org/news/6826-180730-canada- blackfoo...](https://www.archaeology.org/news/6826-180730-canada-blackfoot- camps), which points to this.</comment>


Groups Spend Most of Their Time Discussing the Information Already Shared by Members - <AUTHOR> http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-improve-group-decision-making.html

<comment><USER2> This is highly unsurprising. You can extrapolate it to online venues like this one - most of the articles are actually a reply in some ongoing global dialogue, and over time those topics tend to calcify into a set of repetitive memes.

I don't really think we can escape this unless we constantly reform into new groups.</comment>


Creating the Founders' Dilemmas Course - <AUTHOR> http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6555.html?wknews=02072011

<comment><USER2> While I respect much of formal education, as I was reading this article it struck me again just how slow and expensive it is to go to something like Harvard Business School compared to just using your brain and taking advantage of all the amazing free stuff on the Internet. I've read tons of accounts of businesses, founders dilemmas, market studies, case studies, etc. all for free on the web. I don't even have to drive anywhere, fill out any forms, jump through any bureaucratic/academic hoops, etc. Not to say it's completely superior, because it isn't, but it makes traditional university education look increasingly antiquated.

<comment><USER3> What I'm going to Business School for is not so much the curriculum, but the chance to interact with other like-minded people, get acquainted and also share knowledge and insight (I hope!).

It's also very valued outside the enterpreneurship world, if you ever want the job security (not to mention the network you should make, that should give you some job offers).

I'm starting in April (at ORT here in Uruguay), I hope it lives up to my expectations :) .

<comment><USER2> Then I think you're going for the smartest reasons. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I truly believe there will be a lot of great information in this course. My only worry is this will be more of a course filled with the insights of Quora- type questions and less of something grounded in entrepreneurship as a science. I mean isn't this course just a survey and not really much of a sound curriculum?

That being said, entrepreneurs who are in b-school tend be a little more risk averse so having a course like this may bring some of these risks (aka dilemmas) to light.</comment>


Show HN: Caffee – Make your roadmap available in Slack - <AUTHOR> https://caffee.io <comment><AUTHOR> Caffee v0.1 is now live and looking for beta testers!

Caffee is a new and better way for product teams to connect with the rest of their organisation, by

\- making your roadmap available, searchable and navigable right in Slack

\- collecting and attaching feedbacks to items of your roadmap

\- sending relevant and timely notifications when you make progress

Our mission is to bring your product team closer to their users and stakeholders by building an engaged community around your product. We're only a Slack app right now, but we have big plans for your team.

Any feedback greatly appreciated!</comment>


Ray Tracing: WebAssembly vs. JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://matt-harrison.com/raytracing-webassembly-vs-javascript/ <comment><USER2> I use Firefox Quantum 61.0 too on my mid-2014 MacBook Air. The numbers are very close to the ones in the blog.

Safari performed well in this test. Firefox's JS performance and Chrome's WASM performance seem to be abysmal.

Firefox 61.0 WASM: ~21fps, JS: ~2.2fps

Chrome 68.0 WASM: ~14fps, JS: ~5fps

Safari 11.1.2 WASM: ~23fps, JS: ~6fps</comment>


ArchiveTeam is Not backing up Soundcloud - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/888093838107189249 <comment><USER2> had this gotten very far? last I saw there wasn't much progress made.</comment>


AT&T is screwing customers by almost tripling a bogus fee - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/06/27/att-screwing-customers-almost-tripling-bogus-fee/ <comment><USER2> Another considerable cost of doing business is losing it over bullshit like this instead of providing a superior service and charging what you would expect for it.</comment>


A sample of brilliance - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/30/a-sample-of-brilliance/ <comment><USER2> I have to say that this blog has become one of my favorite. It's a great way to stay up-to-date with advancements in the field or to know about interesting things from the past.

If you ever read this Adrian, please don't stop!

</comment><comment><USER3> Did the javascript rendition of algorithm S match? It looks like it will add any random int, regardless of whether or not it's already in the set, whereas algorithm S checks that that random int does not exist in the set. Or have I missed something?

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems like the distribution of S will be different to the the others. Guessing the probability of picking card N is greater than picking a card less than N. I haven't given it much thought.

</comment><comment><USER5> This post totally flew off my head. Didn't even get a gist of what's going on.</comment>


Humans Who See Time (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/04/02/the-rare-humans-who-see-time-have-amazing-memories/#.V1uC7-bpFav.facebook <comment><USER2> I wonder if that can even be called synesthesia. Sounds more like how visual- oriented people would think of time.

For me, it's kind of an ellipse in front. The spring is on the right, the fall is on the left, the summer is on the top, and winter below. When i think of a date, i look at where that date is located. And vice-versa, the events are located somewhere, and looking at them gives me the date.

Kind of like this [http://i.imgur.com/7PJMf9O.png](http://i.imgur.com/7PJMf9O.png)

I later worked out a way to tell the day of the week by a date based on this.

Every month is marked depending on the offset of it's first day from january's (assuming january starts on thursday, which is 0). For me it's | - -/ \--| kind of symbol marks, on one side or the other of the ellipse, which denotes the 0, 1, 2 and 3 days off.

Next is an image like that that you need to memorize: [http://i.imgur.com/dpfn2lX.png](http://i.imgur.com/dpfn2lX.png) \- a month on a calendar page, monday thru sunday, with thursday in the center. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 are the centreline of thursdays.

2016 starts on friday, the offset of the year is +1, and it's a leap year, so every month after feburary gets another +1.

Today is June 12th, 2016.

June is -3 (look at the year ellipse).

12th is -3 (look at the image #2 ).

2016 is +1 and leap year is +1 (have to keep in mind).

Sum it up, you get -3-3+1+1 = -4, ring it 7 is +3. Add to thursday, and it's sunday.

Another example: September 13th, 2014.

September is -2.

13th is -2.

2014 is -1.

Add up to -5, ring it 7 to get +2, which is saturday.

It may sound hard, but a few hours of practice would make it automatic, especially if you are a visual type.

<comment><USER3> My mental image of a year is a vertically-reflected version of yours.

<comment><USER2> I wonder what determines it.

I can remember first thinking about it (around the same age i figured out how to move my eyes) as a ribbon of days going around in a spiral. Eventually it settled into the ellipse/rectangle thing i described.

I often felt that the summer is something you climb up to (end of school, exam season in university, etc), and then after some smooth relaxed sailing you drop down towards the winter again (no more free time, got to do school and so on).

However, i can't quite say if that determined the orientation, or the metaphor came from the orientation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've not read the actual paper (paywall) so this could just be a problem with the reporting about it, but it doesn't sound to me like that test they did on the 183 people that involved asking them to visualize the months and then reconstruct that visualization on a computer screen, and then later found that when asked to do the same thing four months later and were prompted with one month placed in the same position they had placed it the first time, 4 of the 183 recreated the same layout they did the first time suggests time-space synesthetes.

I'm not a time-space synesthete, for instance, but if you asked me to visualize the months and then represent that on a computer screen I would not just randomly toss the months around. I'd decide on some logical ordering and arrangement and use that. Ask me again 4 months later, even without prompting me by pre-placing one of the months where I placed it before, and I'd almost certainly recreate my original arrangement.

I probably would not choose a spiral, but from what the article quotes it doesn't sound like it was the shape of the visualizing that the authors consider to be significant. It was the consistency of the visualization across trials.

The second test, where they tested how well people could memorize and recall an unfamiliar spatial calendar seems much better.

</comment><comment><USER5> I visualize not only discrete amounts of time like months or days as some sort of circular (or rather elliptic) strip but also pretty much any kind of sequence of contiguous numbers.

I almost can't believe it's really that uncommon because - from my point of view - it just makes sense. How would you imagine time or numbers if not in a visual, spatial manner?

I suppose for humans arranging objects that come after another in a spatial order that expresses this relation comes pretty naturally, given that we're very visual creatures and we're used to the 3 dimensions of space we perceive.

</comment><comment><USER6> The year's a circle, roughly. December is at 12 o'clock, March is at 9 o'clock, and I move around it in a counter-clockwise direction. September through December are a little more squished together than the other months. May through August are a little more spread out.

I thought everyone experienced that, until a thread on Reddit about 4 years ago (and I still don't think that it's as rare as the title implies).

<comment><USER7> Interesting. Mine goes clockwise, with the line between December and January at 6 o'clock.

Agree I doubt it is really as rare as the article makes it seem.

<comment><USER8> Mine is the same as yours: a circle with months going clockwise, Jan/Dec at 6 o'clock.

It occurred to me a couple years ago that thinking of the calendar like this might not be something everyone does. I asked my friend how he thought of it and he said he saw it as a LINE.

<comment> semi-extrinsic I see the months in a year as a sort of sine wave, with december at the bottoms and july at the tops. I guess it's like a combination of the linear and circular view.

<comment><USER9> Same here! But when thinking about weekdays, it's just a circle with Sunday at the bottom. Days themselves fill up vertically...I never realized how much of a hodge-podge collection of visualizations I've been using.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't this mental model of time fairly common? If you don't picture the year as a circle or donut, what do you think of when considering the year?

<comment><USER11> It's interesting reading all these different ways people have to picture a year.

I simply don't visualize it, I think of it as an abstract concept and don't try to put a picture on it. If I had to think of an image the first thing that would come to my mind is a boring old paper calendar, but that's not something I would naturally think of.

<comment><USER12> >I simply don't visualize it, I think of it as an abstract concept and don't try to put a picture on it.

Right. When I'm asked "what happened in January", I just think back to January. There's no mental picture or anything; I just select for January. Typically I'll use some significant event markers and a sort of relativistic system to remember when things happened (e.g. x happened before y but after z, and I know y was in February and z was early January). No imagery ever comes in to play.

This is really tripping me out that so many people think so differently.

<comment><USER13> >I just select for January.

So, you have a time-series database model? Because that's pretty cool. Especially if you're running mentalSQL queries.

SELECT '*' from MEMORIES where MONTH = 'January';

<comment><USER12> I mean, yeah, that's what I feel like is going on. I think it's more like when somebody says the word "January", I pick up that it's a tag in many contexts, one being time, and start picking information associated with that tag. If the "active context" is time, then I'd start thinking about what happened around that time, what's coming up next January, etc.

The same happens, for instance, if somebody says "the park"; I don't get a mental image of the park, I just start thinking about things associated with it (typically things that happened there).

I can do the whole "visual memory" thing, but it's a conscious process that I have to focus on, rather than something that comes automatically. That's not to say my visual memory is bad, just not default.

I always figured this was how nearly everyone thought, but after reading this thread I'm questioning it now.

EDIT: also there's some kind of search tree balancing going on, I think. Because sometimes you may ask me what happened in January, I feel like I sort of mentally go over everything and do a quicksort type of process? But only if there's a lot of past events that aren't already associated with the January tag? I don't know it's hard to explain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I experience time as a series of revolving problems: painful awkward spring yields to sweaty sleepy summer yields to deathly gloomy fall which decays into desolate hostile winter... yet for a week in March one imagines the world good, a splendid week of hope.

</comment><comment><USER15> The headline seemed perplexing, but after seeing the article's illustration I was shocked to realize that's me (sort of).

Whenever I think of time on a scale of at least weeks, the mental picture I have is circular. The center is always the house I grew up in. Months aren't represented as just colors, but images: views of the yard surrounding the house, based on the season a particular month corresponds to. Perspective changes based on the timescale I'm focusing on.

As a kid I used to picture numbers in color, mostly as gradients. On the number line, the hue would change subtly about every ten numbers. That went away shortly before adolescence though.

Granted, these are all purely mental images—there's no spatial or perceptual component as in the article. Unfortunately no exceptional memory or recall abilities either.

</comment><comment><USER7> Weird, I generally assumed most people visualize the calendar as a circle when recalling dates. I've always been good at associating dates with events, but never would have thought the circle had anything to do with it.

<comment><USER16> I don't think i picture it at all in the same way that synasthetes literally "see" other senses, but I do picture a year as a 2d row divided into rectangles. I don't see it as a circle because I see no connection between the end of December and the January of the same year. The next January starts at the beginning of another row entirely unconnected to the previous year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I didn't realize this was rare. I think of a year in an ellipsis with January at the far left, June at the far right. Years are a giant ribbon of various colors.

I thought everyone had some kind of mental model of time. Though I am able to remember great details just by "pins" on my ribbon, and there is an ellipsis for each year ("oh yeah, that was in June of 1996" etc) so I guess it works well for me. I just didn't know it was that rare.

</comment><comment><USER18> Do these people "see time" or do they simply have a great memory for dates and times? "Seeing time" is trek-level Xmen stuff. I expect someone who can perceive gravity waves, someone who can witness relativity in action. Doctor Manhattan had such a perception. That isn't the same as someone who is very good at remembering artificial constructs such as dates and calenders.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. The title is misleading because it gives the impression that these people have some supernatural awareness of the timeline while that's not what's happening here.

What this article depicts doesn't seem all that rare looking at this thread. I can relate to some of these experiences as well and while I am a spatial thinker, I definitely don't have synesthesia, I wish I did.

And here is a (non-exhaustive) list of people with synesthesia.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I do that. Didn't know it was that uncommon. Maybe that's why I never had the discipline to keep a calendar.

<comment><USER21> I did some googling out of curiosity and was actually kind of surprised to find out that, statistically, synesthesia affects about 3-5% of the population. Certainly uncommon, but not as rare as I expected.

[http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/14073/1/p5469.pdf](http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/14073/1/p5469.pdf)

[http://www.daysyn.com/Types-of-Syn.html](http://www.daysyn.com/Types-of- Syn.html)

Unfortunately, couldn't find that much data on the specific kind of "time- space" synesthesia that was mentioned in the article. Bummer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I also see the year (not "time") as roughly a circle going round my body, but vertically not horizontally as in the illustration. Also, the circle is pitched at an angle so that I view it from my left side arcing over my body (at a height of about a tall tree in front, with the future in front).

Each month has a colour but no shape, they are all more like a volume of air. It rotates so that a given month is going through me, with future months going high in the air in front and previous months there but not visible. The months through November to January are more acutely curved. Each week is also a circle and each day has a colour but the weeks are all the same circle instance, not individual ones.

I don't have a good memory at all and none of my memories are in the circle.

</comment><comment><USER23> The comments on that page are more fascinating than the article itself. Many people chiming in and describing their own personal brand of time/calendar visualization.

<comment><USER24> And how similar they are. I do not relate to them in any way, but there seems to be something there. I'm the kind of person who has to be reminded what month it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Time is not seen. However one does, or does not, spatially relate the pittance of that which we call memory is hardly what could be construed as 'seeing time'. Try light from the circular construct that is the surrounding universe and then you will get a perfect picture of time. I've witnessed it and it is a mindblower to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER26> Weird, I think of time as more like an unending river going forwards and backwards, and as it goes away from me it spreads out and becomes hazy and less certain. More of a spatial vector than a loop as in this illustration. But I can't say it's a strong visual image, more of a sense like smell or hearing.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have this. I see the year as a donut with December at the bottom.

I've thought about building a GUI calendar and a smart watch face for this. Has anyone attempted / seen something like that?

<comment><USER28> I thought this kind of thing was "normal" for some people on par with how many have photographic memories, or almost innate math abilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I see time as a 3D wall. Very hard to explain.</comment>


Philosophical Proof for the Human Soul - <AUTHOR> https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-the-human-soul/ <comment><USER2> The flaw in the argument is that the author jumps from a conjecture that it may be possible to achieve consciousness via mechanical computation, to the assumption that all mechanical computation is consciousness. I don't think that necessarily follows at all.</comment>


The SEO Dominance of Zillow - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-seo-dominance-of-zillow/

<comment><USER2> Clearly Zillow is quite dominant, but I'm not sure that I agree with the final sentiment of all traffic becoming mobile traffic sooner rather than later.

Mobile is growing like crazy, but there is a saturation point where your phone is not the best device for certain kinds of activities. Tablet isn't necessarily the best device either.

I don't think that an app store strategy is going to be the next big thing for Zillow or Trulia. I think that handling mobile well is important, but I wouldn't bet the farm on mobile when it comes to real estate.

It's jut not a foregone conclusion that desktops and laptops are totally disappearing anytime in the next 5 years.</comment>