A 17 Year Old with Severe Autism and His Six Completed Coursera Courses - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coursera.org/post/51976868541/not-impossible-the-story-of-daniel-a-17-year-old-with <comment><USER2> As someone with an autistic sibling I find feel-good articles like these immensely frustrating to read.

As you read them, just keep in mind that there is no agreed-upon definition of "autism" or "Asberger's Syndrome". (Nor does autism exist on a defined one- dimensional spectrum, contrary to popular belief.) Each individual is wildly different. So "severe autism" in one person might mean that person can't talk. In another it might mean they have seizures. In another it might mean they can hold a conversation but can't tie their shoes. The media tends to gloss over this major issue, and in so doing it wrongly connects many poorly-understood discrete neurological disorders.

The upshot is that even though it may be great that this particular individual benefits from Coursera, the vast majority of "autistic" individuals I have come across are not capable of processing anything that might be taught in a college-level course. Coursera cannot help them, although perhaps some more basic technologies might.

For those interested, my father has written about these general points here:

\- Autism and the Media [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-s- greenspan/autism-and-th...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-s- greenspan/autism-and-the-media_b_560906.html)

\- Conceptualizing Autism: "Cloud" vs. "Spectrum" [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-s-greenspan/autism- concep...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-s-greenspan/autism- conceptualizing-au_b_586546.html)

\- Major Obstacles for Adults with Autism [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil- s-greenspan/understanding...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-s- greenspan/understanding-autism-in-a_b_527697.html)

<comment><USER3> As a fellow sibling of a severely autistic individual, I concur on all points. The word, which connoted a depressingly debilitating constellation of symptoms in cognition, communication, and perception when my sister was diagnosed, has been redefined year by year inside and outside of the psychiatric community until it means very little, subject to self-diagnosis based on perceived social anxiety among high-performing, high-IQ individuals who are able to initiate conversations, appreciate comedy, lie convincingly, have relationships, and master smalltalk.

She will never take part in the debate about whether an 'Aspie' gets to call themself 'ASD' or 'Autistic' or 'HFA', because she is not able to understand or speak about such topics; She will never be able to campaign against the 'neurotypicals' efforts to create a cure or prevent the condition from occurring. She will never be able to read how Jenny McCarthy cured her son of his seizure disorder or decide whether it constituted autism or speculate about thiomersal.

People like her are not able to speak up for themselves, and they've been quietly robbed of a word for their conditions. In some circumstances, this is extremely problematic; Seeking help from the state hinges on such words. The 24/7 caretakers that have been required since my family reached the breaking point has only been possible with a lawyer and a series of lucky breaks in state funding & local politics - with 2013's definition of 'Autism', the planets might not have aligned the same way.

Autism was _never_ a terribly precise syndrome. Mental health is full of '6 out of 10 symptom' checklists; I like to visualize them as 'constellations' rather than clouds, because they exist on their own - we just draw the lines along things that seemed to be clustered. It is the particular looseness of the Autistic Spectrum that's allowed linguistic creep. I don't assert that early-childhood regression, severe cognitive disabilities, barely-lingual, no eye contact, compulsive behaviors, self-harm, stimming, problems with loud noises, and seemingly random inappropriate decisions like disrobing or running into traffic or poking a stranger or trying to enter an interesting-looking house are the canonical Autism. However, they constitute _something_ , something almost completely different than many of the people I meet who claim to be autistic, and the language has progressively failed us in description.

<comment><USER3> I would add that facilitated communication is one of the most tragic things I can imagine - equally so for the family and the facilitator who realizes they've been speaking the whole time. The picture accompanying the story is a textbook FC pose - we can only hope that's not what's going on. One almost wants to leave a long-time FC believer alone - delusion may be better than the emotional footprint of a debunking. Autism itself is emotionally brutal enough; If I learned I'd been helping my sister communicate desires and express opinions and write poetry for years as some kind of sick puppet master, I'd kill myself.

<comment><USER4> First of all, I don't mean to insult you or your expertise on the subject. I know very little about autism spectrum disorders and nothing about this "facilitated communication" debate.

However, that Daniel's parents are unconsciously inventing his written voice and, therefore, inventing virtually everything we know about his cognition seems to be a huge assertion to make with very little evidence. The article says the parents would "hold his hand _while he spells_ " (emphasis mine). I could see parental bias (a la ideomotor effect) playing a role in guiding the subject when the answer is one choice out of several discrete options, but it seems impossible for that kind of placebo effect to play out in spelling words, where the sequence of letters would have no meaning to the parents until a word or morpheme was already complete or almost complete, let alone sentences. Has research indicated that facilitated _spelling_ can and, as you suggested, normally _does_ just result in the parent talking? I really hope the answer is no...

<comment><USER5> I'd recommend watching the PBS documentary Prisoner's of Silence. Transcript: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/transcripts...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/transcripts/1202.html) Part 1: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXw8Ksvyt5Y> 2: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19eAMcgn2QU> 3: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHqRTDW9Irk> 4: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PctmzkrJmcg> . It shows just how the facilitator bias plays out; when they do a blinded study, where they show both the facilitator and the subject a picture, but only sometimes show them the same thing and sometimes show them different things, it winds up being what the facilitator sees that gets typed, not what the patient sees.

People doing this kind of facilitated communication, had previously written entire sentences, paragraphs, poems, and so on this way. And it was all, as far as the experiments show, the facilitator, not the patient, who was really writing it. Some of the facilitators had no idea; they really thought that it was the patient writing everything, and they were just helping support the patient's hand. A few of them renounced FC after this, realizing it was just them subconsciously writing for the patent, but some continued to persist in their belief that it really was the patient writing despite the strong evidence to the contrary.

Have you never had an experience where you attributed reasoning to a pet's actions? Sometimes we can tell what a pet wants, and so we can reason about what they are doing; sometimes we might be wrong about it. There are plenty of cases where you have a good guess based on other information, like the pet getting hungry at the appropriate time. If you tried doing "facilitated communication" with your pet, and really believed that it worked, you would probably wind up spelling out things like "I'm hungry" when it was hungry; and then take that as evidence that your pet really was writing that, not you.

In fact, this kind of reasoning is used all the time in research that shows that you can teach animals human language, or sign language, or the like. You get researchers who learn a lot about the animal; learn about its attitudes and ways of non-verbally expressing itself. Then they start reading things into the signs or sounds the animal makes, and present it as evidence that they've taught the animal language. But if you do any kind of experiment that takes that particular researcher out of the picture, or provides a reasonable level of blinding, all of that ability goes away, and you hear them talk about how "well, they can't perform under these kinds of stressful situations."

You might think "well, so what, it's at worst something harmless that makes the family feel better." But there have been cases where via facilitated communication, kids (or based on the above research, their facilitators), have accused their parents of sexual assault. Fathers have had to move out of their houses and fight long legal battles on the basis of an accusation that, most likely, was simply made up by prompting of the facilitator. Believing that facilitated communication works without strong evidence that it's the patient and not the facilitator in control can have some serious consequences.

But if you point this out, especially in relation to a feel-good FC story like this one about someone completing college level coursework through FC, you just sound mean and contrary. I would love to believe that advancing technology and therapeutic methods allow people who cannot learn via a conventional methods to have access to knowledge they never would have otherwise. But given the lack of strong evidence that FC really works, these feel-good stories sound more like people just trying to sell more snake-oil than an actual breakthrough.

<comment><USER6> (<http://www.damninteresting.com/clever-hans-the-math-horse/>) is a real life example of that sort of bias in play. Its a bit more of a fun read than the PBS documentary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Facilitated communication hasn't been scientifically validated.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication>

If you look at the picture in the article, he isn't even looking while his father guides his hand.

<comment><USER8> "Not scientifically validated," is being awfully generous. It doesn't work, plain and simple. The facilitator is the one responding in 100% of cases.

You not only can see the father guiding his hand, but Daniel isn't even looking at the board. I would challenge anyone to respond to a question by poking at an iPad, without looking, while someone else holds their hand.

<comment><USER9> Because a autistic person don't look directly to you don't mean is not looking _at_ you. Is very common to them of see "away" and pay attention to thing in front or in a side.

The problem is, is VERY hard to decipher what a autistic person is doing and why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also recommend the Frontline documentary which debunks facilitated communication.

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/transcripts...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/transcripts/1202.html)

<comment><USER11> Great read, thanks. The part that most astounds me is how the facilitators could be totally unaware that all of the thoughts were coming from their own heads. It just seems like it would tip you off to notice that everything the autistic person was "saying" was something you were thinking.

<comment><USER12> This is why Ouija boards are so creepy; it's easier to attribute the behaviors to outside forces than parts of our own brain we aren't consciously aware of. It disrupts the illusion of a cohesive "self", which we kind of need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Judging from the photo, that might be facilitated communication* and this raises the question, /who/ completed these 6 Coursera courses.

* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication>

</comment><comment><USER14> "He suddenly learned to answer questions by picking the answers out, one letter at a time, on a letterboard."

I hope that this letterboard is now a computer keyboard instead...

I think online chat must be a fantastic way for autistic people to communicate, at least given what I have read in books about it. I once read about an autistic person who was unable to speak to people but he could write them, but this book was from the eighties (titled "If I could talk to you"). That really made me wonder if that person is posting on the internet today.

<comment><USER8> It is done with a computer, in this case it appears to be an iPad. The problem is you have a facilitator, "steadying" the hand of the person who is communicating. In reality, the facilitator is actually guiding the person's hand, most likely without being aware of it themselves. It's easy to see why parents believe this method works. If you had a non-communicative child, and were suddenly told, just by pointing at this board, your child can talk to you, and his first words are, "I love you dad," you'd want to believe that more than anything else.

<comment><USER15> "and his first words are"

One of my kids had some pretty serious medical problems resulting in some speech delays. This is just barely before "all problems must be solved via a tablet" era. So the speech therapists were all into sign language and then pictograms and eventually he started talking when he got around to it. Other people are like "yeah my kid started talking just out of the blue one day" and I'm all feeling that's like throwing lego pieces in the air and they come down full assembled, although supposedly it happens. Anyway I'd be really suspicious of any first words other than "more" as in candy and treats and toys and stuff. Carb addiction sets in early I guess. Basic needs were discussed long before discussions of kissing up to mom and dad.

Watching kids learn language makes me wonder about the standard sci-fi trope of humans and space aliens learning language via math or sharing physics constants. Probably adult human vs adult space alien will learn each others language via sharing pr0n pixs and pixs of junk food. Actually that kinda resembles what I've seen on 4chan. That would make a very interesting sci fi story if the concept were expanded on. For better or worse I think Hacker News is probably not a primary choice location for space alien first contact, compared to say facebook, youtube comments, or 4chan. Presumably space aliens would have their own little weird green space alien 4chan and would come to the same conclusion, thus a realistic tolerance and shared understanding would result.

I suppose this will lead to the inevitable start up idea of creating a space alien attracting social network. Or just buy reddit rather than develop it as a startup.

<comment><USER16> > _"I'd be really suspicious of any first words other than "more" as in candy > and treats and toys and stuff."_

It's pretty interesting to see what words people pick when their vocabulary is very limited (like, 5 or fewer words). When my son had severe speech delays, we focused on teaching him signs like "hungry", "more", "diaper", and "help".

I was actually quite grateful to have played a game called "Og" where players take on the role of cavemen, typically with vocabularies of that size. We learned, through experience, that words like "I" and "mom" are nowhere near as important as "food". I, too, would be suspicious of first words (for someone with severe delays) that weren't addressing specific momentary needs.

> _"yeah my kid started talking just out of the blue one day"_

Mine had some very sudden increases in his speech. There was about a month- long period where my list of all of his spoken vocabulary ballooned from about a dozen words to well over a hundred. I wouldn't say it was "out of the blue", but instead the result of quite a bit of intensive therapy, focused communication from all of the adults in his life, and his own growth.

<comment><USER17> For breastfed babies, a very common first word is usually a variation of "ma". For my daughter, her first word after "mama" was her brother's name (Noah). Then they learned the bottom rung of Maslow's Hierarchy via sign language at school (more, please, thank you, milk, food, mom, dad, child).

<edit> Both of my kids had sudden rapid improvements in speech at some point, too. I can't remember, when, and I know it happened earlier with my daughter than my son, but I still remember the day my son was answering a question and started with "Actually, ..." and then later on, "Even so, ...". He was two. Close together siblings are fantastic teachers!

<comment><USER18> Children learn words, and say them, but then don't bother repeating those words until they've built up a vocabulary of about 200 words.

So that's one reason for one of the language-jumps.

But it is fascinating. My son has one phrase which he speaks with a local accent, but the rest of his language is different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looking briefly at this it seems this is classic facilitated communication.

Unfortunately this it a form or magic some families of autistic children get tricked into believing and it is quite sad Coursera is perpetuating this awful lie.

</comment><comment><USER20> Coursera's hiring designers and engineers (frontend, infrastructure, analytics, mobile)! Join us in making a difference.

<https://www.coursera.org/about/jobs>

(I'm part of the team there =) )

</comment><comment><USER21> Disclaimer: I am on the Autism Spectrum... at most times higher functioning but I have my days where i can be obsessive or sensory issues and other things to the point of not really being functional.

Autism is a spectrum... sadly the parents of children that have a harder time communicating want to claim those on the spectrum that can communicate aren't autistic or don't know what its like to be a lower functioning autistic. The higher functioning ones get upset at parents who claim they are not autistic.

Its bad seeing so much infighting in the Autism community. If people as passionate as those in the Autism community were to work together they could accomplish a lot. But because of the infighting trolls like Autism Speaks are the ones speaking for the Autistic Community while were all having this private war.

</comment><comment><USER22> Heartwarming read. Glad to see that people with disabilities can truly benefit from online education.

<comment><USER12> As long as there is another person available full-time to caretake and facilitate?

<comment><USER23> uhh thats still definitely a 'benefit' if true...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is an article with similar thematic in the lastest "new scientist": [http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829194.300-rise- of-t...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829194.300-rise-of-the- autistic-workforce.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> What's you excuse? - I don't have one - I only successfully finished about 3 courses, while I got 2 finished but with below required percentage and started about 10.

<comment><USER26> That's awfully condescending and presumptuous, don't you think? I've taken zero Coursera courses (but did take the original AI course with Norvig and Thrun), but have been busy taking max credit loads at school, TAing, becoming the lead dev at a startup, and starting my own startup. I'm sure a ton of people here can say something similar. MOOCs are great--as highlighted by the article--and I intend to take more. But there are other worthy things to do too. "The good is the enemy of the best."

<comment><USER25> I don't want to judge anyone but myself, but when a guy with severe autism is able to finish 6 courses and I am not, it doesn't quite matter that I am full time employed while trying to build 2 startups, being married, having a kid and getting involved into local community by being an active member of the second largest political party in romania

<comment><USER27> This is incoherent. You are comparing a deficit in literal ability to complete the courses (through some sort of disorder) with an inability to find the time to complete them. Just because someone is "autistic" does not mean that you necessarily ought to be able to achieve more than them, especially when there are wildly divergent constraints for both of you. There is no logical basis whatsoever for your assertion.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content - <AUTHOR> https://netflixtechblog.com/optimized-shot-based-encodes-for-4k-now-streaming-47b516b10bbb <comment><USER2> It's really too bad that they haven't rolled this out for 1080p too. Their 1080p video quality is god-awful compared to Amazon. They may even have made it worse: from the "ladder" comparisons, it looks like they jump to higher resolutions at lower average bitrates now, so if you're stuck at 1080p you're going to be getting worse quality after these changes than before.

Also, something that's kind of weird about all this is that encoders (x264, x265, etc) already have their own rate control algorithms that decide on a frame or scene basis how many bits to use. Netflix taking an approach like this is equivalent to claiming that they're capable of doing a better job than these codecs in an automated way - so why not just contribute the code needed to achieve these improvements back to the projects they're using?

Last, it's very weird to select individual frames from an encode and not a selection of frames. The comparisons purport to show that the lower bitrate encode is better than the higher bitrate encode, but in fact (if I understand how they're using rate control correctly) what they are showing is _a single frame_ in the lower bitrate encode that uses _more bits_ than the same frame in the higher bitrate encode. So it's arguably not a fair comparison. And even with that, depending on how sensitive you are to artifacts, some of the "optimized ladder" encodes still look worse.

Edit: here is an example of what I mean when I said that they may have made the quality at 1080p worse. If what you end up watching is the highest bitrate 1080p available, you would get higher quality on the old latter than on the newer one. [https://i.imgur.com/rzPR7Sh.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/rzPR7Sh.jpg) Actually, on some of the examples, even 720p on the older ladder is better than 1080p on the newer one!

<comment><USER3> > _It 's really too bad that they haven't rolled this out for 1080p too_

Maybe they will? But it matters most for 4K performance, so that's where they started?

> _encoders (x264, x265, etc) already have their own rate control algorithms_

But they simply operate on a stream without taking future frames into account. This does a first entire pass on the film holistically to determine where keyframes should go and settings per-shot. It can't be backported to codecs because they work linearly.

> _And even with that, depending on how sensitive you are to artifacts, some > of the "optimized ladder" encodes still look worse._

The artifacts look worse only because it's zoomed in so crazy far. On a cinema screen, the additional sharpness will be clear, the artifacts not so much.

<comment><USER2> > This does a first entire pass on the film holistically to determine where > keyframes should go and settings per-shot. It can't be backported to codecs > because they work linearly.

Given that x264 already has a 2 pass mode, I don't see why that is necessarily the case. Even CRF mode uses mbtree by default, which is a pretty complicated rate control algorithm. x264 also has pretty intelligent keyframe determination, I almost always see I frames on scene transitions.

> On a cinema screen, the additional sharpness will be clear, the artifacts > not so much.

I think it's probably the other way around. The closer you are to a screen, the more likely you are to notice increased resolution. But if there are large patches of the image full of artifacts, you'll be likely to see that even far away.

<comment><USER4> > Given that x264 already has a 2 pass mode, I don't see why that is > necessarily the case. Even CRF mode uses mbtree by default, which is a > pretty complicated rate control algorithm. x264 also has pretty intelligent > keyframe determination, I almost always see I frames on scene transitions.

x264 will not align keyframes across resolutions and encodes. In addition the pershot encodes optimize more than just idr frame placement. They also optimize other encoder parameters such as aq.

> I think it's probably the other way around. The closer you are to a screen, > the more likely you are to notice increased resolution. But if there are > large patches of the image full of artifacts, you'll be likely to see that > even far away.

That isn't how this works. It's not a strict tradeoff between more artifacts and less sharpness by changing resolution. Downscaling -> Upscaling is simply another form of lossy compression. It may look better or worse than using those bits in another spot.

<comment><USER2> > x264 will not align keyframes across resolutions and encodes. In addition > the pershot encodes optimize more than just idr frame placement. They also > optimize other encoder parameters such as aq.

Sure, that's true. (Though I don't know why it matters that keyframes aren't aligned.) But at the end of the day the point is that Netflix has a better rate control algorithm, and this _could_ be built into x264, even if it might require a significant amount of work. (Which I'm sure the x264 developers would be willing to do for a substantial quality improvement.)

> That isn't how this works. It's not a strict tradeoff between more artifacts > and less sharpness by changing resolution.

Of course it's not a _strict_ tradeoff. It's a loose one. And yes, it may look better or worse. That's really my only point in that section of the comment: that bumping up the resolution earlier in the ladder as they're doing is not a pure win, and it may look worse to some people depending on their viewing conditions.

<comment><USER4> > Sure, that's true. (Though I don't know why it matters that keyframes aren't > aligned.) But at the end of the day the point is that Netflix has a better > rate control algorithm, and this could be built into x264, even if it might > require a significant amount of work. (Which I'm sure the x264 developers > would be willing to do for a substantial quality improvement.)

You can't ABR adapt without aligned GOP boundaries.

> Of course it's not a strict tradeoff. It's a loose one. And yes, it may look > better or worse. That's really my only point in that section of the comment: > that bumping up the resolution earlier in the ladder as they're doing is not > a pure win, and it may look worse to some people depending on their viewing > conditions.

Of course not, that's why the perform an analysis of both options and select the better one. That's what the algorithm does...

<comment><USER2> > You can't ABR adapt without aligned GOP boundaries.

Yes, that's true of course, but not really relevant to whether you could port Netflix's work on scene-adaptive rate control to x264. Maybe you'd lose aligned GOPs... but for a lot of purposes (offline?) that doesn't matter.

> Of course not, that's why the perform an analysis of both options and select > the better one. That's what the algorithm does...

The _only_ point I've ever tried to make on this subject is that in some cases this approach fails. "Perform an analysis" is such a high level description that it misses the fact that this is being done according to some objective metric that may disagree with an individual viewer's personal preferences or viewing environment. In fact, just because an objective metric says 4k > 1080p doesn't mean the difference will be noticeable at the viewing distance the viewer is at, whereas the additional artifacts introduced by moving from 1080 -> 4k without a significant bitrate increase may very well be visible!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Sometimes we ingest a title that would need more bits at the highest end of > the quality spectrum — even higher than the 16 Mbps limit of the fixed- > bitrate ladder.

From just a cursory inspection using my Apple TV 4K, 12 Mbps is their target bitrate but their ceiling was ~16 Mbps.

That's still only a third of what AppleTV+ offers (36/48) and only 2/3 of Disney+ (18/24). Netflix is still higher than Prime Video (10/14). HBO Max was the lowest quality, allowing only 8/10 Mbps for their HD streams (which _generously_ doubled HBO Now's infamously low 4/5 Mbps bitrate).

<comment><USER6> I've noticed that ATV+ looks the best, which is much appreciated.

However, what has been driving me insane with _all_ these services is how the bitrate is completely inconsistent throughout, depending on network congestion. Every service I subscribe to will "automagically" lower the bitrate if the network can't handle it.

Which is fine, I get it. The thing is, it's the _only_ way to watch anything, and depending on the content, it can absolutely ruin it. I'm on Comcast, and Netflix will constantly ping pong between 480p and 1080p, and is very unpleasant to watch. It's ok for some shows, but certain ones like Planet Earth 2 become unwatchable (to me).

I really wish there was a setting to add a bit of wait time before playing to avoid this. ATV+ buffers a bit more than the rest, but has the same issues.

Edit: To clarify, this issue happens both wired and wireless. The main contributor to the inconsistency is the time of day I decide to watch.

<comment><USER7> On my phone it lets me download Apple TV+ content. The files are shockingly large compared to what Amazon Video downloads are. A 1 hr clip was maybe 800mb in prime, but a few gigabytes from apple. (I don't have any on my phone atm, but a quick search is telling me episodes of "For all mankind" are ~4GB and an hour long) It looks noticeably better, a massive step up that is completely worth the extra bytes.

On my desktop I always rent stuff through iTunes just cause I can download it in advance, and don't have to deal with buffering or reduced quality.

<comment><USER8> There is a setting in Prime Video to download the highest bitrate which is often around 4GB for a 2 hour movie, iirc. Totally agree with you on the download in advance rentals. With good enough internet it makes the experience of rentals so much more enjoyable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks amazing and while I would like to enjoy such quality and am willing to pay for the premium plan (in fact I do already), I still can't watch the 4K content even in a world where I accept DRM modules in my browser, because some DRM plugins seem to be more equal than others.

<comment><USER10> I am shocked at how many people watch Netflix in their browser. I have multiple different ways (AppleTV, Xbox, TV Smart App) to watch Netflix on my tv, and at least 2 of them support 4k.

<comment><USER11> I don't have a TV, so if I watch Netflix it's in a browser.

Most people don't realize this but you can only watch Netflix in 4K in a browser if you're using Microsoft Edge on Windows or Safari in macOS 11. In fact, you can only get _1080p_ if you're running Chrome in Chrome OS, or IE, or Safari. All other browsers, including Chrome and FF on macOS, Linux, and Windows, are stuck at 720p.

Their blog post[0] from 2017 sounded hopeful for higher resolution video on Linux - they wrote "We... look forward to high-resolution video being available on more platforms soon" almost immediately after announcing FF on Linux was supported - but in hindsight it's clear that what they really meant was what you point out - support for things like Apple TV, Xbox, and TV Smart Apps.

[0]: [https://netflixtechblog.com/update-on-html5-video-for- netfli...](https://netflixtechblog.com/update-on-html5-video-for-netflix- fbb57e7d7ca0)

<comment><USER12> What differentiates Edge from Chromium on Windows?

Edge hasn't been around as long as Netflix has provided in-browser service, I'd have thought Chrome w/ Widevine would have been part of Netflix' success.

<comment><USER11> Edge supports PlayReady in addition to Widevine. PlayReady is what gates the higher quality stream. No idea what the technical reason is for this.

<comment><USER10> Honestly the whole thing is stupid. 4k videos of everything on Netflix are available on the high seas. What's the point?

<comment><USER13> Right now stripping Netflix's 4K DRM is possible but it requires buying a new Nvidia Shield TV for every release you do. If you could strip the DRM without buying expensive hardware every time people might be slightly quicker to release the entire 4K Netflix catalog.

<comment><USER10> That is interesting how does that work where you have to sacrifice a shield per release?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That seems like a pretty impressive achievement!

Question for anyone here:

What do you use to play 4K/HDR? I have an Apple TV 4K, which can do 4K Dolby Vision playback and looks ok, but the Apple TV tends to have some jittering when streaming certain shows (very noticeable in panning shots of animation). The sound quality is also noticeably worse on my set with it (it doesn't seem to be able to do direct pass through to my AV unit, always PCM/decoded on the Apple TV).

On the other hand I have a a Shield TV that does direct pass through of audio and sounds much better, and also seems to do video playback without that occasional jittering. It does not seem to support Dolby Vision though. Additionally the UI is very, very, very laggy after recent updates.

Does anyone use anything that doesn't have either of these issues?

<comment><USER15> I use the native apps in my Samsung Q70 TV. They are really good, and I rarely find a need to use my 4K Apple TV anymore. Even the Samsung Apple TV apps, and the AirPlay 2 support is excellent.

As it is, Apple has screwed up HDR on the 4K so badly that it's very difficult to make it work smoothly without also screwing up HDR on other devices.

<comment><USER14> The difficulty for me is that my TV doesn't have enough HDMI inputs (LG B7). I use 7 through my yahamah receiver, but have struggled to get ARC (audio from the TV through the sound system) to do-exist with also also having everything else go through the receiver.

<comment><USER15> I have a Yamaha receiver also. Occasionally I need to power-cycle the receiver or the TV to get ARC to work again, but other than that, I've had no problems with it. I run everything through the Yamaha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What exactly is shot-based encoding doing here?

Even old XviD would reliably always insert a new I-frame / start a new GOP on a scenecut, and perform global rate optimization based on scene complexity within the target ABR parameters.

<comment><USER17> Their older articles talk more about shot-based encoding specifically (and before that, per-title encoding) as they applied it to their non-4K content:

[https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a- perceptual-v...](https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a-perceptual- video-encoding-optimization-framework-e19f1e3a277f)

[https://netflixtechblog.com/per-title-encode- optimization-7e...](https://netflixtechblog.com/per-title-encode- optimization-7e99442b62a2)

A few relevant points:

\- Their previous systems used fixed keyframes, so wouldn't be using scene- change detection at all (I presume this was to allow predictable chunking across different codecs)

\- Since reliable streaming performance is a pretty big deal for Netflix, they probably have quite tight restrictions on VBR modes, which make them not work as effectively since they have less "room" to work with

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The best (worst?) example I know of this going horribly wrong is the title sequence for the Big Bang Theory, which speeds up as it goes along and then cuts to the cast.

Math, science, history, unraveling the mystery <as the pixels start to unravel>, it all started with a Big Bang. BANG (Bang, your Screen is a riot of random pixels. Oh wait, here's the cast instead!)

Then I caught an episode on another service, maybe Netflix? The transition wasn't awesome, but it wasn't awful either. It only glitched for a frame or two instead of a few seconds. Clearly better heuristics were in play.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's great. I'd love to see how they fare on this glitter which seems to destroy all compressors: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=MG_Lyg74UlU&t...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=MG_Lyg74UlU&t=130)

(I saw a similar problem with a famous monarch butterfly footage that I don't have time to chase down)

<comment><USER20> Wow, that really was awful. Does this sort of thing require kind of like a specific optimisation to fix, or is there a general technique that would fix this and other stuff?

<comment><USER2> Codecs with better understanding of what a complex scene looks like (and allocates more bitrate accordingly) will do better, and codecs that are better are blurring away details instead of blocking will do better as well.

Keep in mind this is on Youtube and uploaded by some shitty clip site, so it's a very biased example. In this case there are four lossy encode steps involved: master -> bluray -> clipsite's master -> Youtube encode. Youtube in particular has absolutely horrific, just inexcusably bad bitrate even at the highest quality they'll give you. I'd have to see what the original Bluray looks like in this case to see if there's really a problem worth worrying about here.

<comment><USER19> Actually I first saw it on a plane and wondered how we have gotten to this stage where obviously garbled video is ok to give to paying customers. Yes, more bits will solve this, bit it's still a great example that breaks encoding assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And if they would start providing 4K or at least 1080p to Linux users I might consider subscribing again. Streaming services are popping up left and right while at the same time turning into their own specific guettos of supported platforms and features. Makes you almost value the role of the traditional network aggregator. Maybe the market will eventually consolidate or organize itself so you can buy a full service from a single provider that knows what it's doing technically.

</comment><comment><USER22> Still getting crappy 2.5 MBit/s visuals on an "HD" plan on a gigabit connection in Sweden. Not impressed with their real-world image quality. I don't think you should need to buy a 4k plan to get proper 1080p with a decent bitrate/image quality.

</comment><comment><USER23> It sounds like Netflix might not be doing the horrible thing YouTube and Twitter do where they treat low-resolution (e.g. standard definition) content as being less deserving of bitrate with only higher resolutions allowed to climb the bitrate ladder? For those sites I have to upscale SD content to HD resolutions when uploading just for it to be allowed a less paltry bitrate.

I fear people who grow up in the age of streaming might not realise that DVDs had good video quality because streaming services seem to hate SD content.

> As a side note, we do have some additional points, not shown in the plots, > that are used in resolution limited scenarios — such as a streaming session > limited to 720p or 1080p highest encoding resolution. Such points lie under > (or to the right of) the convex hull main ladder curve but allow quality to > ramp up in resolution limited scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER24> Since the credits can run for 5 minutes or more these days, those can be optimized by converting to a font rather than a bitmap of the screen. Transmit the font, then transmit the text. Should be able to get gigantic compression this way!

</comment><comment><USER25> If only they would spend this much effort optimizing the quality of their screenwriting.

<comment><USER26> Are snarky comments like this really necessary or relevant to what's being discussed here?

<comment><USER25> No, they aren't. I usually resist the urge, but it's been a long week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Without understanding all of the technical details, am I the only one who finds Netflix's quality on Android insufferable? Technically, I guess it's Full HD but the packing is so aggressive that any scenes with just a bit darker sections will instantly be blocky and pixellated. Is there any way around it? Honestly it's not worth paying for as it's almost unwatchable.

</comment><comment><USER28> Not supported in Linux, presumably, since you can't even get anything higher than 540p or 720p in Linux due to Widevine DRM restrictions.

<comment><USER29> Well, you _can_. Just not from Netflix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Do other people have the same issues I have with streaming dark content? I watch a lot of horror, and the compression on Netflix and Shudder (and probably HBO + Hulu) causes really horrible banding in dark scenes.

Literally if they could just fix this I would have no problems with streaming quality.

</comment><comment><USER31> Any idea why none of these services supports queueing some movies you'd like to watch, downloading them in the middle of the night in astounding bitrates, and allowing you to watch on your TV? As far as I can tell only the mobile apps support this, not the "streaming boxes."

<comment><USER32> The streaming boxes probably don't have enough storage to hold much. There's Kaleidescape but it's very expensive.

<comment><USER31> Why not give them enough storage? 32 GB of flash is more than enough and now you get to sell a whole new generation of boxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Now they only need to offer the 4K streams on an affordable plan for single household customers. It's unfair to pay for the 4-stream family plan to get 4K for double the price of the single stream plan!

<comment><USER34> That's not going to happen, Netflix need to push their ARPU up quite significantly in the next few years given how much cash they're burning (and they explicitly promised shareholders they would stop doing last year).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Uhh, so we're supposed to be happy about a variable bitrate and quality because it saves them some bandwidth? This isn't a feature for users it's a spin on a feature for the corporation.

<comment><USER36> > so we're supposed to be happy about a variable bitrate and quality because > it saves them some bandwidth?

yes, because it saves you money - netflix could be increasing its subscription cost, or it could keep it down as the subscriber base grows, by using technique like this.

As long as you don't notice the difference, what's wrong with them saving some bandwidth?

<comment><USER37> Why is raising their subscription price the alternative? Wouldn't Netflix's capability to negotiate peering/transit deals grow along with their subscriber base?

<comment><USER36> as bandwidth grows, people's choice is to keep upping their fidelity. If the subscriber base was OK with a 480p video, they would've seen it. And negotiating peering/transit deals are fickle and isn't guaranteed to work as cable companies may be playing politics/business games to squeeze netflix.

Therefore, a technical solution is the next best option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wow! That is crazy. Love how they use "The Dirt" to show it lol. Guess there are few rockers @ netflix lol.

</comment><comment><USER39> Yet they still can't properly render 21:9 content on a 21:9 display. You get a shrunk picture with black bars on all sides. Even their "Originals" or N-Series or whatever they call it now have this problem.

Here's hoping someone from Netflix is in the comments and can act on it, because their support system hasn't done anything in the 2 years since I brought it to their attention.

edit: Actually, I tried to track down the film used in the new encoding (I think it's The Dirt from the signs and dates seen in the frame captures) so I could screenshot for comparison. It actually worked in 21:9 fullscreen.

Was it the new encoding? I saw this problem up until this past week, most recently on Maniac but I checked that show and it's no longer an issue.

From the post I suspect it was this adding in extra blacks at top and bottom on 21:9 content in the old method:

> with fixed 4K resolution bitrates — 8, 10, 12 and 16 Mbps — regardless of > content characteristics

But I truly don't know what it was. I just know that video no longer ignores 40% of my screen real estate by watching on a 21:9 monitor since sometime last week.

THANK YOU! That has been annoying me for years.

But Please add 3440x1440 to your testing. It's not shown in those charts.

</comment><comment><USER40> Maybe I missed something but, scene-by-scene encoding--a model similar to scene-by-scene color correction--for feature films destined for digital release has been a thing since DVDs first arrived in the late 90s.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is incredible!

also, what is the movie or show sampled in that blog?

</comment><comment><USER42> Wow! Those optimized encodings look really good.

</comment><comment><USER43> How many titles on Netflix are available in 4K? I did a quick search and it's either incorrect or there's not that many, mostly original Netflix content.

</comment><comment><USER44> TL;DR: More 4K adoption lead to higher traffic costs for us, so we have to optimize that.

</comment><comment><USER45> ELI5?

Edit: Why the downvotes?

<comment><USER46> Instead of one optimization profile for a whole movie, Netflix is detecting when the shot of a movie changes (the camera "cuts" from one shot to another) and beginning a new optimization profile specifically for the content of that shot.

At least, that is my understanding.

<comment><USER47> That sounds so intuitive that I want to follow up with the question: Why isn't this the default? Is detecting a cut particularly difficult?

<comment><USER48> Coarsely detecting cuts is relatively simple - look for large frame-to-frame differences (e.g. encode however -> find large frames surrounded by smaller ones -> done, it's as accurate as your perceptual compression is). There are a number of ffmpeg-using tools out there doing this and other "cut to / from black" detection and it's _pretty_ good. Not good enough for a human to say "yeah, these are all scenes", but probably good enough for picking things to re-encode like this.

The harder part is the significantly increased compute use due to re-encoding things multiple times, to detect these cuts and to try to find the best encoding. Heuristics there can be arbitrarily complex and re-calculate any number of times. I imagine it hasn't been done earlier just due to cost, though maybe they've recently achieved a better heuristic.

edit: ah, great, they link to a "dynamic optimizer" post that goes into this in some detail: [https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a- perceptual-v...](https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a-perceptual- video-encoding-optimization-framework-e19f1e3a277f)

<comment><USER49> Seems to me that if the frame-to-frame difference isn't big enough to detect that way, it's not likely to benefit from a new I-frame, yeah?

<comment><USER48> That's the basic idea, yeah. It falls apart in a couple places, e.g. when the cut or fast-fade goes to a _very_ cheap frame like a mostly solid color, and it may not detect stuff like whip-cuts (since a whole chunk of frames are expensive), but so many scenes in so much of media has single-frame cuts that it's well within that "good enough" range.

And for dynamic encoding like this: when it's wrong, it's not visually worse in that scene than choosing that sub-par encoding _for the entire movie_ , which has the same "choose the best encoding" problem as individual chunks have. I assume it'd be relatively rare for it to result in anything worse than a one-shot strategy.

\---

ffmpeg will let you easily do frame-to-frame-diff logic that lets you chop videos into scenes, for example: [https://video.stackexchange.com/a/30701](https://video.stackexchange.com/a/30701) I'm not sure how much it handles compressed-frame differences, but it shouldn't be too hard to build around it. Just might be a bit beyond bash- friendly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Will The Office look better is all that matters

<comment><USER51> Never really understood this meme. Imagine liking a show so much that it's one of the only things you care to watch, yet depending on streaming services to watch it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I wish I knew what any of this meant but it sounds awesome

</comment><comment><USER52> A lot of those graphs seem to show that video quality at 1920x1080 is going down significantly. Does that mean you now need to be on their most expensive plan and using one of their approved devices/platforms to continue receiving the same video quality, now only obtainable with 2560x1440 and higher resolutions?

<comment><USER14> How'd you get that out of the article? I read it as scores the board, you're getting better quality at a lower bit-rate. They talked about being able to serve 1080p at the same bitrate they were serving 720p (where they talked about mobile devices).

<comment><USER53> All 4 of the Bitrate vs Video Quality graphs have two 1920x1080 data points on each line. All four graphs show the data points lower on the Video Quality axis under the optimized ladder.

Sure, the first graph shows 1080p at higher quality for lower bitrate to the 720p on the optimized ladder, but if I'm resolution-limited (on a phone) and Netflix isn't streaming higher quality and downsampling on the device, the changes here show that my perception of quality will suffer. (I feel for folks stuck with a 720p screen, if they're just streaming native resolution it looks like they'll be getting worse than previous 480p quality levels.)</comment></comment></comment>


FreeBSD built with clang now selfhosting - testers wanted - <AUTHOR> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.current/124678

<comment><USER2> I don't use FreeBSD, and I have no ill-feeling towards the GCC team who have done amazing things for the Free Software community (and lots of other individuals and organisations) over the years — but I'm quite excited to see how much progress Clang has made, and I begin to wonder whether maybe someday the Linux kernel will have _two_ supported compilers.

I hope Clang vs. GCC turns out to be like the Webkit vs. Gecko rivalry - competing in public, but sharing ideas and even code to help improve the state of the art for everybody.

<comment><USER3> That analogy is perhaps uncomfortably apt, considering how soundly Webkit is beating Gecko on every front except for self-aggrandizing wankery over hypothetical freedom. The only active non-XUL Gecko application is Camino, the rest died several years ago or switched to webkit, and Camino's been threatening to do one of those too.

GCC was architected by Stallman to be intentionally inextensible, as a means of enforcing their interpretation of the GPL through technical means, by denying access to intermediate representations. That policy has been at least partially reverted 20 years later with the release of 4.5 on Wednesday with some plugin support, now that the LLVM projects are about to eat their lunch.

<comment><USER4> The LGPL adopted by Webkit is much more restrictive than the MPL adopted by gecko (gecko still adopts GPL and LGPL, just because them it can link with GPL software), if you're blaming gecko for supporting Theora but not H.264 I must remember that the WebKit codebase do not includes an H.264 codec, it's Apple and Google that link the codec against webkit, any application that uses the bare WebKit will have to include its own version of the H.264 code, that said technically webkit is advancing much faster than gecko in some areas (WebGL for example).

Concerning gcc, were you reading the mailing list of the gcc project for the last 20 years or so? What you said about Stallman is a fairly serious accusation, and as such must be supported with facts, as far as I know Stallman wasn't even important among gcc developers in the last 10 years, also in the very beginning gcc was intended to be the compiler of the GNU system, the technical reality for compilers in the 80s was probably different from now.

<comment><USER3> Nobody else ships codecs baked into their rendering engine because that's a _fucking stupid_ thing to do, something you'd only do if you wanted to prevent users from using other codecs without forking the entire project. Everyone else links against an intermediary framework (QT, ffmpeg, gstreamer) and lets that dictate codec support. Chrome/Chromium does ship with a minimal libavcodec, but you can swap it out with a symlink to your system's full ffmpeg.

GCC was the canonical 'cathedral' project, controlled absolutely by Stallman through the FSF, a reign interrupted by the EGCS folks who had the gall to want a working compiler.

Mozilla may play up their whole 'community' angle, but they aren't very 'bazaar' at all in reality. Patches are unwelcome. A bunch of independent parties, most of them corporate enemies, contribute to the core WebKit project on a first-class basis. There have never been corporate contributors to Gecko, and they've repeatedly fucked over all the open source projects that used Gecko directly, to the point that only one is left (Camino). They don't even really support non-Firefox apps on top of XULrunner, including the ones they wrote themselves!

<comment><USER4> upvoted, really good response, but calm down man, it appears you're barking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IIRC apple is one of the primary contributors to the Clang project, yes? I wonder what motives they could possibly have for being so interested in compilers. Not to sound like a conspiracy nut, but is it possible that apple could impose a restriction on the iphone apps :"must be compiled with our own version of clang" etc?

LLVM is a great step forward in compilers but it's ties with apple and the recent devious deeds it is capable of is holding me back from contributing to LLVM.

<comment><USER6> I think there are a few issues.

One is that Apple likes control. They could hire the lead LLVM developer, own the copyrights, and use a permissive license, allowing them to exert a lot more control over the project.

Another is that Apple is allergic to the GPLv3. They have stopped upgrading to newer versions of GCC in recent Mac OS X releases, because they are afraid that the GPLv3 may prevent them from Tivoizing the iPhone and iPad.

And back when they were NeXT, they tried to release their Objective-C extensions to GCC as a proprietary patch, but wound up being forced to release them as free software by the GPL. They may want to avoid that sort of thing in the future. For instance, I don't believe they release as free software their implementation of OpenGL which uses LLVM.

So yes, I think it's entirely possible at some point in the future that Apple will say "you must use Clang to compile for the iPhone/iPad platform." And it may even be a special, proprietary version of Clang, targeted at a custom chip in the iPhone or iPad. They have worked very hard to have full control of the platform and toolchain, and made sure that it's all under licenses that will allow them to make it proprietary whenever they wish. They can't quite switch to Clang yet, as its C++ support is not finished yet (though it does cover enough to self-host), but once they do, I absolutely would not be surprised if they mandated its use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that objective-c extensions (and objective-c++ even moreso) thing went _so_ well for FSF too. Apple still ships a forked version of GCC (and binutils for that matter) because FSF never actually _took_ all the patches, so I fail to see what good it really did the community, especially now that there's a non-GCC compiler that is open, and has a mainline that supports ObjC.

<comment><USER6> I know people who write and deploy code in Objective-C on Linux. So while mainline GCC hasn't accepted the patches, keeping the compiler free _did_ help the community.

I don't believe that the FSF's tactics are correct in all cases. I think that they could do better about encouraging and not alienating certain developer communities. But software freedom is a very important goal, and they are one of the few groups out there truly dedicated to software freedom.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


This I Believe: A Manifesto for a Magnificent Career - <AUTHOR> http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/this-i-believe-magnificent-career-manifesto/

<comment><AUTHOR> From the (great) mind of Avinash Kaushik. Comes to me at a strangely opportune moment. I would like to add one more to the list ... possibly a bit meta: _Happiness is a choice._ (dwell on that)</comment>


A Hospital Giant Discovers That Collecting Debt Pays Better Than Curing Ills - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-18/a-hospital-giant-discovers-that-collecting-debt-pays-better-than-curing-ills <comment><USER2> [https://www.ripmedicaldebt.org/](https://www.ripmedicaldebt.org/)</comment>


Ask PG: Would YC fund applicants in close space as a previous startup?  - <AUTHOR>

How does Y Combinator consider startup applications where the idea is in the same space (yet with key differences obviously) to an already funded company? Is this just an absolute "no" or is it considered independently? I can see 2 situations: One where the applicant aims to develop (or has developed) a product that is a magnitude better than the previous startup, and the other where the applicant isn't a direct competitor, but may be confused as one by those not knowledgable in the industry. <comment><USER2> From <http://ycombinator.com/faq.html>:

Will you fund multiple startups working on the same idea?

Yes. If you fund as many companies as we do it's unavoidable you'll end up with some overlap. Even if you tried not to accept competing companies, you'd still get overlap because startups' ideas morph so much. The way we deal with it is that when two startups are working on related stuff, we don't talk to one about what the other's doing.

In practice it has not turned out to be a problem, because most big markets have room for several slightly different solutions, and it's unlikely that two startups would do precisely the same thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I can't believe I read over that.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Cost of not being on time? - <AUTHOR> I am always getting annoyed when people think it's acceptable to come 15min late to a meeting. Just considering a 4 engineers meeting that is a loss of 1 working hour. Over a year that can add up to hundreds of hours which is a significant cost for any company.<p>Apparently there are even worse cases where people come late and introduce cost (e.g. missing an appointment with an investor). I am curious if anyone has some stories to share about the cost of not being on time. <comment><USER2> This is perhaps relevant: [https://www.communicaid.com/cross-cultural- training/blog/how...](https://www.communicaid.com/cross-cultural- training/blog/how-time-can-cause-conflict-when-working-internationally/)

(But yeah, if the accepted norm is "meeting starts at the time in calendar," coming late is rude. OTOH, it could be a message, too: "I think this meeting is a waste of time and this is my way of expressing it.")

</comment><comment><USER3> Often, some minutes are used setting up a conference call, a projector or a presentation. I find this very wasteful.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, that's why someone should do that before the meeting but again most people assume that others will be late anyway. Than you get 3 high paid engineers setting up a beamer.</comment></comment>


The earliest domestic cat on the Silk Road - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67798-6 <comment><USER2> Interesting to read all of the methods for determining the health of the cat at the time of death.

Sadly, the "pathologies in the skeleton suggest that the cat from Dzhankent had a physically challenging life."

The good news is that people cared about this cat, "They carefully cared for and tended to this animal throughout its life, providing high quality food and medical care."

That said, the funeral for the animal was "expedient" in that it was basically left in a dump or "midden" (new word to me) at the end.

It is some comfort realizing how entirely human it is to care for cats. Though, it is also possible cat toxoplasma has just been incredibly effective.

<comment><USER3> A tiny lion defending your foodstock didn't need an infection whispering into pysche to be loved :3

Edit: also consider the entertainment they provide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one who was confused by title. Thinking it was about illegal animalnsales on dark web?

<comment><USER5> Cryptokitties, but you're buying cats on the Internet with Bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The world needs more of this kind of important research.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, you get domesticated cats where there are grain crops, but not with nomadic herding.

So this kind of thing provides information about the time of the transition from pastoral to agrarian societies.

<comment><USER8> > Yeah, you get domesticated cats where there are grain crops

Right. You need grain crops to make cheezburgers, after all.</comment></comment></comment>


Compare History's Most Interesting Minds - <AUTHOR> http://cafeset.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Cafe Set presents two random thoughts from two random thinkers. Philosophers, writers, artists, radicals and so on.

Doesn't tell you who said what until you choose which thought you prefer.

It's an absurd exercise, but the context of comparison forces you to think more critically about each statement.

Hopefully you'll discover some interesting thinkers.

Comment here if you'd like to see someone added. See Cafe Set's About section for criteria.

Cheers.</comment>


Robotic satellite gas attendant poised for space test - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/12244-shuttle-atlantis-robotic-refueling-experment.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The Canadian built set of robotic arms known as Dextre will be tested to see if it can refuel satellites in space extending their active lifetimes.</comment>


MapQuest launches Open Street Map powered site - <AUTHOR> http://open.mapquest.com/link/7-o3zg

<comment><USER2> Duplicate:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2012171>

No comments (yet)

<comment><USER2> It's changed - that submission now has lots of points and lots of comments.</comment></comment>


Anti-nuclear weapons group ICAN wins Nobel Peace Prize - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41524583 <comment><USER2> With three or more or less aggressive leaders in control of nuclear weapons, getting rid of them seems unlikely, yet more important than ever.

</comment><comment><USER3> It always surpises me how little people fear nuclear weapons. Given that it takes to launch only one of them to trigger the cascade and that there are some 15,000 of them around the world the scenario seems pretty believable. What's worse, virtually every doomsday scenario ends with nukes burning everyone alive.

Scared of global warning? Here we go: Icebergs melt, the sea level rises. Bangladesh is under water. 100M refugees flood India, Pakistan and China. Recall the political turmoil caused by couple of million refugees in Europe. How would it go if it happens at much larger scale in the area with three nuclear powers? Boom! You are fried meat.

Is economic inequality your nightmare? Are you afraid it can lead to similar outcomes as in 1914? Well, add nuclear weapons to the mix. Inequality causes political instability, political instabiliy ends up with nuclear weapons in the hands of weird people. Kaboom! There goes breathable atmosphere.

Nanotechnology eating the world? Antibiotic-resistant supergerms? Out-of- control artificial intelligence? Whatever your nightmare scenario is it always ends the same way. Catastrophe leads to chaos. Chaos leads to loss of control of nukes. One is lauched. All other follow automatically. Adieu, cruel world.

Now, this is a genuine question: How come that people, even intelligent people, like those on HN, are not scared shitless?

<comment><USER2> I'm not convinced that nowadays the launch of a nuke by a rogue party will lead to a chain reaction.

<comment><USER3> Why so? AFAIK the campaigns to move nuclear weapons away from the hair trigger mode were unsuccessful so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Serious , but somewhat rhetorical question. I don't expect an answer, certainly not a simple answer.

Why just nuclear weapons?

Shouldn't the scope be wider, say all weapons of mass destruction? But even then, conventional weapons become weapons of mass destruction when used in massive quantities (e.g.: massive aerial bombing during WWII).

So in a world without nuclear weapons, wouldn't state actors just go back to doing things nuclear weapons do but with conventional weapons?

<comment><USER5> Are there "conventional" weapons capable of leveling cities/regions, buildings and all ?

<comment><USER6> Incendiary bombs used against Germany[0][1] and Japan[2] arguably caused more death and destruction in single air-raids than the singular nuclear attacks on Japan; albeit with a use of greater manpower in the attacks themselves.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_Wa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_War_II#Battle_of_Hamburg)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II#The_attacks)

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo#Operation_Mee...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo#Operation_Meetinghouse)

<comment><USER5> How would it compare to modern fission-fusion bombs ?

<comment><USER6> We're talking orders of magnitude higher yields in modern nuclear weapons compared to the first ones which were roughly comparable to entire air armada's of bombers at the time.

There was a post to HN earlier this year of a site that would estimate damage and allow you to customize the yields, burst-height, prevailing winds, etc. I did not bookmark it as the results are too terrifying.

<comment><USER5> Found it. [http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/](http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For people wanting really great analysis of nuclear issues, check out Jeff Lewis's Arms Control Wonk podcast. There's three episodes analyzing the Convention on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons treaty amongst many other fascinating topics like missile defense.

[http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/podcast/](http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/podcast/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Hope triumphs over expectations.

Reminds me of the award going to Obama.

<comment><USER9> If they follow the example of previous laureates Obama or Aung San Suu Kyi they'll be enriching their own uranium within the year

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting... just the other day, there was a discussion concerning the physics prize being giving to three people (which is already bending the rules) when there are often dozens or hundreds of people involved. The will is quite specific about "person" for all of them.

[https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/will- full.html](https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/will-full.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> The ~7,000 warheads that the US and Russia still have are a clear and present danger to humanity, but I would hesitate to get rid of all of them and have world scale conventional war return. Maybe a few dozen very well protected and spread-out nuclear warheads and delivery systems per country would be the ideal situation.

<comment><USER12> I'm torn. The post-WWII era has been amazingly peaceful, but at what risk?

If nuclear weapons mean we avoid large-scale total war in exchange for, say, a one-in-a-million chance per year of annihilation, that might be worthwhile.

If they mean we avoid large-scale total war in exchange for a 1% chance per year of annihilation, that's so very much not worthwhile.

What are the actual chances? It's impossible to tell. I suspect it's closer to 1% than one-in-a-million but that's really just a guess.

<comment><USER13> At times, like during the Cuban missile crisis, we were definitely closer to annihilation than 1%.

This was of course largely avoidable if president Kennedy had chosen to stand down as his Russian counterpart was offering[1].

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/cuban-...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/cuban- missile-crisis-russian-roulette)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Beatrice Fihn, Executive Director of ICAN, called Trump a moron the other day.

[https://twitter.com/BeaFihn/status/915598750969712640](https://twitter.com/BeaFihn/status/915598750969712640)

<comment><USER14> Based on the Nobel Peace Prize's track record, that alone would have clinched it.

Honoring an anti-nuclear group at least seems to be in the proper spirit, compared to some of the more ridiculous awards in recent decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure how I feel about this. Nothing has done more to stop large powerful nations from getting in serious shooting wars than the background threat of nuclear retaliation.

<comment><USER16> Without nuclear weapons, I think there's a better than even chance the Red Army storms through the Fulda Gap at some point 1945-1960. If for no other reason than that all of the resources devoted to atomic weapons, and the requisite delivery platforms for them (submarines, ballistic missiles, intercontinental bombers, etc) would have been diverted elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> At least they probably deserve it more than Yasser Arafat.

<comment><USER18> ... or Barack Obama.

Or Aung San Suu Kyi, though she was awarded before she became complicit in an ongoing genocide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > But none of the nine known nuclear powers in the world - including the UK > and the US - endorsed it.

Proving that this group is completely ineffective and their peace prize is a joke. Just a bunch of bureaucrats who sit around saying "oh yes, nuclear weapons bad, pass the caviar please".

<comment><USER20> It's unlikely the US military was the part of the government that endorsed it. The US government is so big, so bureaucratic, that it's less a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and more like the right 300 hands are working in direct opposition to the other 400 left ones.

<comment><USER7> The U.S. representative was hanging out in the hall with a few of our supporters denouncing the working group while the treaty was being discussed. We know exactly what we're doing and it would be comical if it weren't so deadly serious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is disgusting. How do they deserve any reward when north Korea has atomic weapons, when Iran nearly had atomic weapons, and probably will have it after 10 years when the agreement is over.

Nobel prizes for peace have become "what is the biggest historical ironical joke we can make this year". Obama getting that prize for worse than nothing, then this.

<comment><USER22> When it comes to Obama, you can say that it was a prize that was given to encourage the president of the most influential country in the world to do the right things.

It was given early in his presidential term and may have influenced his decisions later on small and big things.

Obama didnt create war, he infact de-escalated one potential and many other smaller matters where the US was already engaged.

Personally I think it was fine.

<comment><USER23> > When it comes to Obama, you can say that it was a prize that was given to > encourage the president of the most influential country in the world to do > the right things.

One could, but the real reason that Mr. Obama received it was that he was not Mr. Bush. One may approve or disapprove of that fact, but it remains a fact regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is just plain silly. They might as well award the thing to my old friend Paul, who styles himself a peace poet, and writes shit poor poems about how we should all just, you know, not make _war_ on each other anymore. At least he really needs the money. Nukes don't go away because profiled do-gooders whine about them.

The litterature prize, btw, really, really, _really_ needs to go to Randall Munroe one of these years. Yes, I'm dead serious.</comment>


Adam and Eve – Adobe's Cross-Platform GUI Libraries - <AUTHOR> https://stlab.adobe.com/group__asl__overview.html <comment><AUTHOR> I came across this in a talk by Sean Parent (once lead developer of Photoshop). What caught my attention was his assertion that they were able to reduce the GUI code of Photoshop by 600x, from a Million lines of code to less than 2k. It uses a declarative UI, together with what they call the 'Propagator Model' which is an R&D project by Sean Parent & his academic collaborators. An excerpt from one of their papers explains the new ingredient:

> The combination of procedural and declarative program code has found success > in, for example, GUI element layout. The most familiar example is perhaps > HTML, CSS, and DOM combined with JavaScript. The QTk library [...], XAML > [34], and XForms [5] serve as further examples. Some of these systems, along > with rule-based systems such as Drools [27], Jess [11], and R++ [14], also > support concisely specifying declarative rules for maintaining consistency > across values in user interfaces. Property models are distinguished from > these systems by not only providing the ability to create rules that assist > introducing a valid result but also by providing an explicit model of the > dependencies these rules create. Inspecting the state of the model enables > generic algorithms (e.g., for widget enablement) for user interface.

[http://www.emarcus.org/papers/gpce2009-marcus.pdf](http://www.emarcus.org/papers/gpce2009-marcus.pdf)</comment>


Fatbergs to fuel: London's blockage-busting battle in the sewers - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/fatberg-london-sewer-renewable-energy-1.4400375 <comment><USER2> In Portland, we just removed 2.4 million pounds of grease from our sewer system.

[http://www.kptv.com/story/36854903/crews-removed- nearly-24-m...](http://www.kptv.com/story/36854903/crews-removed- nearly-24-million-pounds-of-grease-from-portland-sewer-lines)

</comment><comment><USER3> How is the sewage re-routed, anyway? I mean, if a core sewer gets clogged for 9 weeks, it's not like with cars where you can simply direct them to a parallel street?

Or do the workers have to blast the fatbergs while, basically, also standing in literal swimming turds around their legs?

<comment><USER4> Yes to the second sentence. They have hazmat suits and a lot of protection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Never complaining about my job again.

</comment><comment><USER6> > The company has been working with restaurants that cook with a lot of grease > to remind them to collect it and throw it out, rather than dumping it down > the drain. It has also instituted a campaign — "Bin it, don't block it" — > asking Londoners to help prevent fatbergs.

Is there no requirement that restaurants have grease traps?

<comment><USER7> Laws don't always motivate action. It seems fine to use a multi-pronged strategy.

<comment><USER8> It's also probably hard to enforce unless they catch them in the act.

I don't understand why restaurants are just throwing the grease away though. Companies will buy it, pick it up, and use it to make soap or biodiesel or other products they can sell.

<comment><USER3> > I don't understand why restaurants are just throwing the grease away though

Space, for one reason. The smaller the restaurant, the lower the amount of space that can be dedicated to a grease trap and a storage tank. In other places, the age of the building (or its construction, e.g. when it's without a cellar!) might make constructing one impossible. Or the restaurant might be in a tiny old street that is not reachable by a truck.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Richard Branson: "I had tears down my face and a $1 billion check in my pocket." - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140421230020-204068115-career-curveballs-embrace-change-or-become-stagnant <comment><USER2> As time moves forward, I find advice from the older entrepreneurs more and more irrelevant. NOT because it's bad advice, NOT because it's with ill intention, but simply because their situation, experience, and background is completely different from my own. So different, that I fear if I followed it, it'd have the opposite effect.

Of course, this is just my opinion.

<comment> k-mcgrady What in this post is irrelevant to entrepreneurs getting started today? It seems like pretty simple, standard business advice.

<comment><USER3> Positive psychology advise like "always be looking forward" and "embraced change or become stagnant" is great for newbies but those that already get it are looking for business advise like "execution strategies". Maybe some secret sauce. However time makes most of it commoditized and no longer secret sauce. So you are left with positive psychology advise & domain experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "LinkedIn Influencers"

<comment><USER5> Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin group. A self-made man. I suggest you read his book, "Losing My Virginity" before you dismiss him as a "LinkedIn Influencer"

<comment><USER4> I wasn't dismissing the fact that Branson's an influencer, I was dismissing LinkedIn's marketingey little attempt to bring him under their umbrella with that goofy title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stopped reading at "this is a series of posts by linkedin influencers" TBH, most of the time linkedin posts are only good if you want a laugh.</comment>


Elon Musk's twitter gets hacked - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1283495825998520320 <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23851275](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23851275).</comment>


Y Combinator Female Founders Conference LiveStream  - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDaqt9NzDUc <comment><USER2> To all the people kvetching in the comments... this is the live stream for "YC's Female Founders Conference" [1]. That's why "female" is in the post title.

I'm an ardent supporter of the effort, and I hope (much like startup school) that YC is able to make it into an annual event! Very inspiring! Also, my wife is in attendance. I look forward to hearing her reactions later tonight. If the live stream is any indicator, it looks like a really great event.

[1] [http://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-female- founders-c...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-female-founders- conference)

<comment><USER3> When people start whining about events or programs like this, I like to send them off to read "When I Moved Abroad"[1], a blog post by that was like flipping a switch in my mind that suddenly made these things make so much more sense.

[1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/it/2013/03/29/when-i-moved- abroad/](https://blog.mozilla.org/it/2013/03/29/when-i-moved-abroad/)

<comment><USER4> As someone who has lived for fairly long periods in a country that is not mine, this is exactly the sort of thing I seek to avoid. I try to hang out with the people from the region, _not_ people who I already can speak to in a familiar language. I try to absorb the local cultural contrasts and not try to shoehorn them into my own. ("Tell me again what the traditional Garistan Christmas cake is? " \-- Maybe they don't celebrate Christmas? Could it just be possible that they belong to another culture / religion?)

Always sticking with your own lot and never completely opening up to a new culture (in my opinion) isolates you and makes you look standoffish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those who wouldn't click cause it's "Female Founders" \- so far it's been just as inspiring as Startup School (even for me as a man).

<comment><USER6> I usually don't bother with links to things that are phrased in such a way as to suggest support of segregationist policies. I don't care about women in tech. I care about _people_ in tech.

<comment><USER7> > I don't care about women in tech.

I've noticed.

When you collect a few more life experiences, perhaps get a decade of career under your belt, you'll learn how toxic it is when monocultures form. You'll learn about the blind spots. The exclusion. The lack of productive conflict from varying ideas.

And perhaps at that point you'll learn why "caring about people in tech" means caring that no people feel actively excluded from its prosperity.

Until then, your callousness makes you emphatically the sort of dime-a-dozen, utterly common, entirely unoriginal personalities that make me want to walk out of this industry and lock the door behind me forever.

Good luck on your journey.

<comment><USER8> That's perhaps too harsh.

You hear from people who are physically handicapped that the thing they hate most is the contrast in treatment. They want to be treated normally.

A different person in a different perspective gets treated differently because they are viewed as different. A common complaint. Is he being empathetic or indifferent? I dunno, but it's hard not to say to yourself "Women are being treated differently, that is what is keeping them out, so I will endeavour not to treat them differently."

Is that misguided?

<comment><USER7> You're sure busy on this thread for someone who claims not to have opinions or skin in the game.

> Is that misguided?

Completely.

Being a woman isn't having a handicap. Being brown isn't having a handicap. At least it isn't to my mind. Is it to yours?

When you go and talk to people who are women or brown or some intersection of these, one thing that's clear is that they feel much more comfortable when interacting with other folks whose lives and paths look like theirs. Their life stories are different from those most commonly represented, so increasing representation means finding people who can speak from a common perspective.

And that's before I even get into the patterns of harassment and aggression that are reported to me consistently from every. single. female colleague I know. That's before getting into the challenges female founders face in presenting their companies to a VC industry that's overwhelmingly male and therefore under-equipped to evaluate a huge swath of verticals and opportunities.

None of this is abstract. All it requires is knowing people who aren't young, white males.

<comment><USER9> > Being a woman isn't having a handicap. Being brown isn't having a handicap. > At least it isn't to my mind. Is it to yours?

Is being handicapped a handicap? I can't walk. Am I handicapped when it comes to creating code, or starting an tech company? I'm not in my mind. Am I in yours?

> When you go and talk to people who are women or brown or some intersection > of these, one thing that's clear is that they feel much more comfortable > when interacting with other folks whose lives and paths look like theirs.

Good job of lumping billions of unique personalities into a single viewpoint. I'm sure some women and brown people feel that way. I'm also sure some women and brown people feel the exact opposite, and some women and brown people have an opinion that is neither of the two stated.

> And that's before I even get into the patterns of harassment and aggression > that are reported to me consistently from every. single. female colleague I > know.

Really? _Every_ single female colleague you know _consistently_ reports _patterns_ of harassment and aggression? Did you ever consider that maybe your workplace is broken, and not society? Why isn't your workplace getting rid of the harrassors and aggressors, or taking _any_ action at all to fix its obvious brokenness?

> All it requires is knowing people who aren't young, white males.

I'm not young, and I'm not a white male. But that's also irrelevant.

<comment><USER6> You disagreed with him, there's no way you could be anything BUT a young white male! Stop appropriating your own oppression!

(I also hated the disability metaphor.)

<comment><USER9> Actually, I am a young white male who is not disabled.I was just making those facts up to sound more convincing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Note the extreme lack of women commenting in this thread, as well as the lack of discussion of any of the substance of the livestream.

This thread is 100% nerdy dudes feeling offended by this event, plus other dudes attempting to counter this.

Is not this thread itself indicative of a giant problem?

<comment><USER11> ad hominem + sweeping generality FTW

Seriously though, I am not a proponent of gender restricted events, but I have not commented on this particular thread because I wanted to watch the content first, and it's not really the place for such discussions.

That said, others may feel differently, having not participated in prior conversations on this topic, and thus, the label you've applied to opponents is unnecessary and unfair.

<comment><USER6> I like how being a man is considered an insult these days. Woman who disagrees with feminism? Damn men!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany because it may contain music for which GEMA has not granted the respective music rights." (Quote YouTube)

<comment><USER5> This link works for me from the Netherlands: [http://www.livestream.com/femalefounders](http://www.livestream.com/femalefounders)

<comment><USER12> Thanks, it works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The event starts at about 37:20.

<comment><USER14> Direct link to that point in time: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDaqt9NzDUc&feature=share&t=3...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDaqt9NzDUc&feature=share&t=37m20s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks like a great event. Somewhat ironically, I'm a female founder and had an invite to do go, but couldn't go due to childcare.

<comment><USER16> I don't think that's a gendered issue. It's hard to be a founder and raise kids at the same time. Kids are a startup--a human startup. Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Never mind that this is called "Female Founders." I'm male and found this helpful.

<comment><USER18> highlight how silly it is to be sexist, doesn't it?

<comment><USER19> The goal is to attract female participation, not to deter male participation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Has been a great set of speakers so far. I connect most with Elli's experiences fighting through all the "No"'s founders receive to get to the point of fully believing what you are doing is going to work if executed as you understand it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Diane Greene is amazing! I think I can listen to her speak all day long

</comment><comment><USER22> My wife applied and I was surprised by the unseriousness of the application process.

If you've gone through the online YC application process, imagine you dumbed that down for a 10 year old who only had 10 minutes to complete it and only had to answer one question, along the lines of "Why is America the best country on Earth?"[0]

Here's the rejection email my wife got for those that are curious:

 _Thank you for applying to the Female Founders Conference. Unfortunately we couldn 't accept you this year. There was such a large number of applications that we had to turn away hundreds of people we would otherwise have accepted.

We will be streaming the event live on our website, and are looking into options for even larger venues in the future. We really hope you will apply again.

Best,

Y Combinator Team

[http://femalefoundersconference.org](http://femalefoundersconference.org) _

[0] Bonus points for anyone who gets that reference. :)

<comment><USER23> It was a very similar application to the Startup School application.

<comment><USER22> Okay, good to know.

In all seriousness, if that's the application, both the Startup School and the Female Founders Conference should just do a randomized allocation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was surprised it was only open to female attendees. Having the female role models is both important to females AND males since they need to support the inclusion of females. (And not spank the behinds of founders in VC meetings!!!)

<comment><USER25> Both experiences are useful.

I attended AdaCamp last year and it was fascinating. In previous AdaCamps they'd tried mixed-gender stuff. At mine, though, they did an "allies" track for guys (and any women who wanted to pop in).

It felt a little weird being excluded from the main track, but honestly, it made sense to me from the moment I arrived. Suddenly, for the first time at a conference, I was part of a small, visible minority. It was uncomfortable. Everybody was perfectly nice, but I was acutely aware that I did not look like everybody else.

That made it easy for me to imagine how empowering an experience it could be to for the women at AdaCamp to experience a women-only environment at the conference. It reminded me of the time I rode in Critical Mass: suddenly, because bikes vastly outnumbered cars, I felt free and safe in a way I had never experienced biking in the city.

So now I'm entirely in favor of things like this. To me, it's all part of tidying up the legacy of millennia of oppression of women. In 50 years, I hope it's not necessary. But for now, I say it's great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is this over already? I'm in the US and just getting "Please stand by."

<comment><USER5> It's not over yet, have you tried the livestream link? [http://www.livestream.com/femalefounders](http://www.livestream.com/femalefounders)

EDIT Now it _is_ over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> pg, please thank Jessica for putting this event on. My girlfriend is on her way to starting her first company after years successfully being one of the few women in the private equity sector as well as her graduate program at Stanford. I've only just watched the keynote from Jessica and this is exactly the message that not only she, but I, need to hear about starting a company (tech and/or financial for that matter). Hearing these stories builds confidence and it's what both of us need.

</comment><comment><USER28> I dislike the fact that females get a lot more attention because of their gender. If you want true equality you've to start treating everybody as equals and giving extra space for some just doesn't cut it.

I see this all the time in my country (I don't know if this is the case here) but females get a lot more attention in basically all areas of society and I don't think much good can come from that.

Well, I guess I'm just trying to write as a man in the extremely feministic country of Sweden I kind of feel left out and viewed as "not as important" as the counter gender. Since I am quite young and the feministic views here just has grown stronger with the years, this feeling has grown on me since I started elementary school.

Now in my twenties, I don't think it's that weird I think feminism is possibly one of the worst phenomenas in my country and the world in general.

<comment><USER29> staticelf, most of us here want that "true equality" that you refer to. But the unassailable fact of the matter is that _we don 't have it_ today.

Look around you: assuming you're in IT, unless you work in a truly remarkable place men considerably outnumber women. We (and I mean the egalitarian "we") have to do something about that.

I'd welcome your suggestion. But "start treating everybody as equals" is a goal, and not very prescriptive. How do we get from point A to point B?

(I upvoted you because your discourse is reasoned and polite.)

<comment><USER30> "men considerably outnumber women. We (and I mean the egalitarian "we") have to do something about that."

Why? What is that evidence of? You assume sexism presumably. Men and women are different and have predispositions to excel in different areas.

You know what would be really weird? A 50/50 split. Why is that the definition of correct?

Why are so few people rational about this?

<comment><USER29> Careful with that. You saw what happened to Larry Summers, right?

Seriously, I take your point about the differences between men and women. I saw the news tidbit a few weeks ago about the study on toddlers and the toys they prefer. I'm willing to treat those studies objectively.

Yet in the case I cited, _fewer than three percent_ of attendees at a technical conference were women. "Predispositions to excel" or not, that's a statistic too big to ignore, and there's something else going on.

<comment><USER30> Without looking into it the percentage that suggests no prejudice is unknown, so we don't actually know if 3% is where it 'should' be for that to be true, or the much assumed 50%.

It has no basis in fact is my point really. And I'm uncomfortable in applying sexism as a solution to perceived sexism.

Im confused why everyone isn't uncomfortable with that.

<comment><USER31> If I had to put my cynic hat on (oh who am I kidding? I never took it off) I'd say it's because the people who're 'comfortable' with any form of discrimination tend to benefit from it.

The men _currently in_ tech who support pro-female discrimination aren't going to be affected by it: they're already in tech, and they already had a chance to enter it before their asinine discriminatory policies came into effect. They benefit from feeling they've achieved some good (irrespective of whether they actually have). The same is true of powerful people who aren't dependent on an equal playing field, such as politicians, the wealthy, and current business leaders. Such people won't be affected by proposing a piss-poor solution, so if they can feel like a champ for doing so, then they'll do so.

A less cynical view is that such people are simply bad at logic; that they don't understand that you form theories from evidence, rather than using evidence to support theories. The trouble with all gender politics is that it's too emotional an issue. All parties feel threatened, and all parties feel that they're the ones being shafted. In an atmosphere so hostile to reason, I'm just grateful that no-one has jumped to gulags and gas chambers as a solution. Oh wait... [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Cutting_Up_Men](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Cutting_Up_Men)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder if anyone kept a note of the speeches?

</comment><comment><USER33> Q the electric club music for the break!

Really good talk though.

</comment><comment><USER34> *White Female Founders

<comment><USER35> This is even not close to true nor is it witty. You should stop making jokes on the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> When is the next Male Founders Conference? or is it already done?

<comment><USER37> that's the one they have every year that's nearly 100% male.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Granted I haven't met very many male SWE members... in fact none...

... but I'm amazed and saddened that this headline has gotten this far due to popular demand. "Please dear lord see how I and my company aren't sexist by watching this live-stream of our going over specifically-female founders".

<comment><USER39> This is probably a new HN record in mistakenly ascribing bad intentions, which is pretty impressive.

Perhaps people are interested in watching some awesome founders speak.

<comment><USER38> > people are interested in watching some awesome founders speak

Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does anyone have any proof that there are less women founders proportionally than men? How do we know it just doesn't boil down to the fact there are less females in the industry as a whole? And are women actively being discriminated against or do they just have other priorities than founding startups?

<comment><USER41> Maybe just women are smarter and they know that median outcome of startup is a failure?

<comment><USER40> or they are more risk averse because they want to save to start families.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When is the blue eyed founders conference? The left handed? Its an interesting watch for sure but what the hell. Pandering to a fashionable discrimination. When we all get over this as a society we'll be shaking our heads at it.

<comment><USER35> Replace "female" with "European founders." Would it still make sense? Is it ok to hold a conference for a demographic with common challenges and opportunities -- rooted in the fact they're from Europe?

You're sad.

<comment><USER12> I suppose it would make sense to educate founders from Europe about legal issues, cultural differences that make trip up in the US and stuff like that.

The female founders conference doesn't seem to be about "how to better get along with men", though.</comment></comment></comment>


Android Fragmentation Visualized (August 2014) - <AUTHOR> http://opensignal.com/reports/2014/android-fragmentation/

<comment><USER2> "Designing and coding layouts that work well across all these screens is hugely challenging." Says who ? Unknown screen size is something Android has embraced since day 1 and each time, writing that it is an huge issue just shows me that the writer does not know what he is writing about.

There are issues risen by the wealth of Android devices, but screen sizes is not one of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where others see "fragmentation", I see "choice".</comment>


Collection of Computer Science papers along with their summaries - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shagunsodhani/papers-I-read <comment><USER2> Some suggestions:

Add some way of marking which papers are good. Just because you read it doesn't mean it was worth reading.

Also, show the year of publication, if you can find it.

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 for both the suggestions

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> reading a paper a week sounds like an easy and useful challenge - might try this myself.

<comment><USER4> Depending on how in depth the papers are, and what your definition of "read" is, this might not be easy.</comment></comment>