Famous Engine – JavaScript library for animations and interfaces - <AUTHOR> http://famous.org/ <comment><USER2> The bit that I find most impressive is the mixed mode demo ... [http://famous.org/learn/MixedMode/index.html](http://famous.org/learn/MixedMode/index.html) ... Putting an iFrame on a 3D model and still being about to use the page that's loaded is cool. The problem with that is that there are so few use cases where you'd actually want to do that.

<comment><USER3> 2 years ago... [http://learningthreejs.com/blog/2013/04/30/closing-the- gap-b...](http://learningthreejs.com/blog/2013/04/30/closing-the-gap-between- html-and-webgl/)

<comment><USER4> You should have raised 30mm in funding for three.js ;-)

<comment><USER5> I still use three.js for most of my visualization projects. That is some good tech. Ashes of Papervision risen better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I tried to build a website with the "old" famo.us, but it was slow going, once you'd got past the initial setup. You're on your own for widgets!

Also, "famous" or "famo.us" is a BAD name. Sorry, but you can't google for help or tutorials. Google for "famous websites" or "famous tutorials", see what you get. :-/

slow going.

<comment><USER7> Famous Engine is a complete rewrite.

0.3 was doing a lot of unnecessary matrix multiplications on a frame by frame basis. It also produced a lot of garbage, resulting into a frame drop every time the GC ran.

Famous Engine produces basically no garbage at all. It has an event based system for updating transforms.

I apologize for your bad experience with "old" famous, but please keep in mind that we started from scratch.

(For disclosure I am an employee of famous)

<comment><USER8> That's interesting, but none of the complaints the poster you're responding to brought up had to do with matrix multiplication or garbage collection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone actually managed to loop animations on the web without putting the CPU on fire?

It was my task recently to optimize some animations (done with Web Animations polyfill) and even though all the profilers showed that CPU is doing almost nothing (GPU animated all the stuff) Chrome was using ~25% of CPU all the time which resulted in a noisy fan after a minute or two.

I feel like I'm missing something here, I believe there must be a way to do it…

<comment><USER10> Same here on Firefox 31 on Windows 8.1. 25% used on my dual-core i5 with HT. This just sucks.

Years ago I added a 'snow' animation JS libary to a custom website which let little snow flakes drop during winter time. All just for fun. It turned out to be fun only for a few days until I got the first complaints about users not being able to use their computers anymore and mobile devices being barely able to scroll anything.

I also believe that there must be a better way for simple animations.

<comment><USER11> The site used 100% of my old Core 2 Duo's CPU on Iceweasel / Jessie; brought the machine to its knees. LOL js.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The landing page isn't janky this time around--that's an improvement. I was hoodwinked by the last media blitz, so I'm very shy to play with Famo.us a second time around. Elephant in the room: What has been learned and improved from the previous false-start(s)? For me, a "Hey, look at me!" is insufficient this time around, but I would find a list of improvements convincing (bonus points for some interleaved JS wisdom).

</comment><comment><USER13> Famo.us is really fast, but the minimal snabbt.js does most of the same animations tricks and is very easy to use. It includes a minmal physics engine. [https://github.com/daniel- lundin/snabbt.js](https://github.com/daniel-lundin/snabbt.js)

</comment><comment><USER14> From a development efficiency perspective, Famous is not as good as Angular or React. From a rendering perspective, it's not as good as three.js. It's not yet a leading tool. Jack of all trades, master of none. Maybe it will make more sense when VR platforms become mainstream.

<comment><USER15> What was released today was a rewrite of the Famous core engine, so you can't really compare it to Angular or React. Three.js is a far better comparison, though the two have different specialties since Famous isn't trying to be pure WebGL.

The Famous team is working on a framework that will interface with their core engine, making things far cleaner at the application level while facilitating less painful integration. Comparing that to various client-side frameworks will definitely make sense.

<comment><USER16> To expand on this, Famous's Node class [0] is rather like a DOM node, except far more powerful. You could imagine a React component that renders a tree of virtual Nodes, diffs that with an existing tree, and transitions properties accordingly. But that will be built on Famous, just like react-canvas [1] needed the canvas API to exist. Baby steps.

[0] [http://famous.org/docs/core/Node.html](http://famous.org/docs/core/Node.html)

[1] [https://github.com/Flipboard/react- canvas](https://github.com/Flipboard/react-canvas)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why does this look like Three.JS code? It seems to have very similar capabilities (although Famo.us seems to have less features) and even the code seems to be familiar to me as a ThreeJS guy.

Also I'd argue that ThreeJS can make for better looking results:

[https://clara.io/view/193070f2-e8af-4afc-a531-9d82338b5288](https://clara.io/view/193070f2-e8af-4afc-a531-9d82338b5288)

<comment><USER15> Code that deals with 3D space tends to look similar. Design patterns that work in such contexts tend to be common sense.

Three.js can make far better looking results currently because it's a full- fledged, mature 3D engine. Famous isn't designed to compete with that. It's really intended to sort of merge DOM and 3D content so you can use both in a unified manner.

Also, trashing someone else's product while plugging your own in the same breath is simply poor taste.

<comment><USER18> * Also, trashing someone else's product while plugging your own in the same breath is simply poor taste. *

Tone says a bit about people at famo.us

<comment><USER15> I'm not an employee at Famous, nor have I ever worked for them in any capacity whatsoever.

In fact, I found Famous via working on a personal project that heavily utilized the Three.js CSS3DRenderer.

While I love Three (and by extension MrDoob) very much, the experience left me with a healthy appreciation of what the Famous team is going for. I've tried to do the very same thing myself (fuse DOM and WebGL), and quickly realized all of the pitfalls involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Quite slow on Chrome...

At least they gave up trying to build an entire website with it =)

Edit: Looked at top and Chrome is using like 60% CPU when the famo.us page is loaded (and nothing else). Ouch. (2.4 core 2 duo)

</comment><comment><USER20> I am sure that iPhone users are not your target audience, but the site is almost unusable because of the large header and menu bar at the top of the screen.

</comment><comment><USER21> Opera 29 Android: first two demos on the home page ok, last two demos black. Chrome 42: same thing. Firefox 38: same but much slower. Stock browser (4.4.2): everything works, a bit slow. I'm really surprised: this should be the most old browser on this tablet. Drivers integration?

<comment> TD-Linux On a Nexus 7 2013 and Firefox, all of the demos work but are quite slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't see random letters and console is screaming about errors left and right. Firefox 31.

<comment><USER23> Why are you 7 versions behind?

<comment><USER24> Probably the last Firefox ESR release: [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/organizations/faq/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/organizations/faq/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like their new branding and docs. It looks really easy to get up and running, but the basic "hello world" isn't working for me..

npm install -g famous-cli && famous init my-first-project && cd my-first- project && famous project deploy

..and nothing happens. Did I miss something obvious?

Also, I'm curious: are there any big companies using famo.us? Are there any non-trivial famo.us applications that we can look at?

<comment><USER7> * "famous init my-first-project" starts a new project

* "famous project deploy" deploys your application to hub. It gives you a snippet that can be used in order to embed your widget on a website.

* "famous dev" starts the development server.

Deploying your widget requires an account, did you register via `famous register`?

That being said it should have given you an error message if that's the issue. I can't seem to be able to reproduce this.

Can you file an issue on [https://github.com/Famous/famous- cli](https://github.com/Famous/famous-cli) or post the platform + node/ io.js version you're on here?

Thanks.

(For disclosure I am an employee of famous)

<comment><USER25> Sure. A nice error message would clear it right up

[https://github.com/Famous/famous- cli/issues/8](https://github.com/Famous/famous-cli/issues/8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tomh- Are there any examples of products that use the famous framework in production? The lack of case study examples on their website worries me a little.

<comment><USER26> They regularly spotlight apps on their mailing list[1].

For example:

\- World Cup App Spotlight[2]

\- InkaBinka[3] (Only the mobile apps?)

[1]: [http://us5.campaign- archive2.com/home/?u=4656ba2b0a364690c85...](http://us5.campaign- archive2.com/home/?u=4656ba2b0a364690c8530bc1e&id=3293122916)

[2]: [http://wc.complex.com/](http://wc.complex.com/)

[3]: [http://inkabinka.com/](http://inkabinka.com/)

<comment><USER27> Those two examples are really poor, the usability is terrible in both cases, and the effects are not impressive enough to be worth giving up core features like zoom and copy / paste.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, agreed. I looked at the football one and it reminded me of low quality Flash work circa 2006... until I had to close the tab because I was worried my MacBook Pro was going to melt my glass desk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I can see literally no text on chrome, and some capital letters are missing on firefox. All latest versions. Even without ad blocking

</comment><comment><USER30> Looks pretty good with the elinks web browser.

<comment><USER31> Hover animation is broken in Lynx, lamentable

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can't seem to get started with this. Their seed repo does not allow me to clone it with the git command. And when using the init functionality as displayed on the front page there is no way to actually setup the damn webserver.

Unfortunately, I am very displeased by the first experience. Chances are that this is also my last experince.

</comment><comment><USER33> Opening this page caused Firefox to go into a full swapfest mode, rendering the page unresponsive for several seconds.

</comment><comment><USER34> Hmm, how does Famo.us stack up to GreenSpck's GSAP? I've been tinkering with GSAP for the past week and have been pleasantly suprised with its capabilities, but I don't know if its the more performant of the animation libraries.

</comment><comment><USER35> Why is it called famous?

<comment><USER28> Because it always gets on the front page of Hacker News.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can't really see the code on the left, it's blocked by the big margins and the split with the webGL on the right. Enlargement gets rid of the margins but also makes the text in the code box bigger.

</comment><comment><USER37> I saw 4 demos, they all worked fine on Firefox and Chrome (uptodate versions). Bit heavy on the CPU, I imagine that impacts some machines' performance.

</comment><comment><USER38> The linked website makes my browser crash… (Firefox 31.6).

I don't know what it is supposed to be but if it is a web tech, it is clearly _not_ production ready.

<comment><USER39> The company I work for always only supports the latest 2 releases of firefox and chrome. I'm not arguing for or against this being production ready, but I don't think Firefox 31 support should determine whether something is production ready.

<comment><USER38> Firefix 31 is the current stable (ESR) version. Just look at how many people run it here in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am wondering the mobile strategy is completely abandoned because none of the examples work or look good on the iPhone. They have weird edgy / sharp borders. Didn't feel 60fps at all. Plus the mobile layout is completely broken. They seem to work fine on Macbook though. BUT the Twitter app example needs to go away. It just looks bad, OK!?

</comment><comment><USER41> Works fine for me, latest version of Firefox on Android and Windows.

(Slow on Firefox/Android, but that's to be expected)

</comment><comment><USER42> Two out of four demos on that page don't run on IE11. And all 4 have ugly scrollbars. Nice for demos but not yet for anything real.

<comment><USER43> They all work fine on Project Spartan, which uses Microsoft's new EdgeHTML engine.

<comment><USER44> Is that (Project Spartan) available for public download?

<comment><USER43> It is in the preview of Windows 10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This would be perfect for a chart / graph library.

</comment><comment><USER46> link error: Vertex shader sampler count exceeds the maximum vertex texture units (4).

</comment><comment><USER47> It's interesting how JS was created for animations, yet is typically failing even at that.

</comment><comment><USER48> Without adjusting uBlock settings I can't actually click the Github link up top. I can click all the other links. Must be something goofing up because:

Github

Not an important thing and definitely in the realm of `my fault`. The only script I see available to allow is google analytics.</comment>


BMW board member raises red flag on connected car privacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.fiercewireless.com/europe/story/bmw-board-member-raises-red-flag-connected-car-privacy/2015-01-16

<comment><USER2> > no auto manufacturer wants to be the first to risk a customer backlash by > releasing the information.

How I wish one of them would want to be the first to say "We won't release your data to third parties, without prior consent - no exceptions".</comment>


Craig Wright Willing to Testify Under Oath to CFTC That He Is Satoshi Nakamoto - <AUTHOR> https://comments.cftc.gov/PublicComments/ViewComment.aspx?id=61969 <comment> T-A So the money quote is "My name is Dr. Craig Wright and under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto I completed a project I started in 1997 that was filed with the Australian government in part under an AusIndustry project registered with the Dept. of Innovation as BlackNet."

Googling BlackNet leads me to a post, apparently also by Wright, which describes BlackNet as "a system which appeared in 1993 and which allows fully- anonymous, two-way exchanges of information of all sorts" and attributes it to Tim May:

[http://ohmysatoshi.com/blacknet](http://ohmysatoshi.com/blacknet)

So it's not Bitcoin, and Wright's statement only says that he "completed" (not design, start or build all of) it using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, which may well have been used by many people, in classic "I am John Galt" fashion:

[https://www.wiley.com/en- us/I+Am+John+Galt%3A+Today%27s+Hero...](https://www.wiley.com/en- us/I+Am+John+Galt%3A+Today%27s+Heroic+Innovators+Building+the+World+and+the+Villainous+Parasites+Destroying+It-p-9781118907535)

</comment><comment><USER2> Unless someone can prove they have the private key to the genesis block, then we should doubt their claim to be Satoshi.

<comment><USER3> Well the coins from the genesis block can't be moved, so it would be difficult to prove on that basis. However there are approx 1m BTC owned by SN, so a movement of some of the early coins would be relatively trivial for the real SN.</comment></comment>


Mountain range formation and tectonics in Mediterranean studied for first time - <AUTHOR> https://www.uu.nl/en/news/mountain-range-formation-and-plate-tectonics-in-the-mediterranean-region-integrally-studied-for-the <comment><AUTHOR> The research, coordinated by Utrecht University, reveals how a piece of continental crust the size of Greenland that once separated from North Africa plunged into the earth's mantle under Southern Europe.</comment>


Y Combinator Will Give You $1M to Try to Cure Aging - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/609963/y-combinator-will-give-you-1-million-to-try-to-cure-aging/ <comment><USER2> There is a lot of evidence that oxidative stress is a major "cause". But one has to look at what causes oxidative stress. There is a lot of scientific literature about this topic. Dr Dale Bredesen has a method (not a medicine) to successfully treat Alzheimer's: 9 out of 10 patients are cured. He is currently doing a larger study and might be interested in Y Combinator since his method has many variables and he wants to use software to make it available to many doctors.

</comment><comment><USER3> My aging would be much slower with 1M</comment>


A critique of The Black Swan - <AUTHOR> http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Books/taleb.html <comment><USER2> Taleb raises a lot of valid concerns about the state of mathematical finance. You wouldn't believe the number of financial models that assume normal or log- normal returns, despite a vast amount of evidence to the contrary. Value at Risk (VaR) is a terribly deficient risk metric, and I've never met anyone who actually believes that Black-Scholes is an accurate model for predicting options prices, yet both of these are widely used in the financial industry.

My problem with Taleb and all the attention he's been getting lately because of the financial crisis is that I think it's a logical jump to go from those criticisms to "these models are bad, because of black swans". Black swans are defined as unpredictable random events with large impact. 9/11 was a black swan, but I don't think that the financial crisis we're seeing today is a result of a black swan. Insurers ignored systemic risk and over leveraged based on bad asset pricing, but were those assets priced poorly because of black swans? I think that's a tough argument to make, because mortgage foreclosures don't seem nearly as unpredictable as say, terrorists flying airplanes into buildings.

There also seems to be a bit of observation bias in concluding that events are black swans. Prediction markets can't be right 100% of the time. To quote the article: "What does it mean to say such a prediction is right or wrong? In 2008, the day before John McCain was scheduled to announce his VP choice, the Intrade prediction market gave Sarah Palin a 4% chance. Was this right or wrong? Unlikely events will sometimes happen just by chance."

<comment><USER3> What other models can they use, though? Every other distribution assumes even more about the problem domain, and would thus correlate even worse with black swans. Sounds kind of like a no free lunch theorem for finance.

Anyways, do you know if anyone is trying to come up with something better?

<comment><USER2> There are other types of distributions which fit black swan type data better, such as power-law distributions, Gumbel distribution, etc. I don't know if research in extreme value theory is still a hot topic, but it tries to address these problems. Here is a paper on risk management and extreme value theory: <http://tinyurl.com/aa7t6m>

Here is a nice paper on risk measures, and points out some of the problems with VaR: <http://tinyurl.com/ar3336>

My apologies if you're unable to grok the contents of these papers...they're both a little technical but I can't think of anything off the top of my head that's more accessible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Statistical natural language processing is a very prominent example of a field which has developed effective methods for coping with "black swans" or the occurance of improbable events that have never been seen before.

If you take any large corpus of text and start counting the frequencies that different words occur you will rapidly notice that a _huge_ fraction of the words have never been seen before or occur only once. Biblical scholars called these words _hapax legomena_ instead of _black swans_. Methods for estimating the probabilities of these events go back to Alan Turning and his codebreaking work at Blechley Park. One need not assign zero probability to unseen events a la maximum likelihood.

Taleb's rants against VAR and mediocristan have always seemed like borderline straw man bashing to me. Sure there are many fools who believe in the gaussian or lognormal returns model, but the best knowledge in the field doesn't make these assumptions. Why doesn't he give authors like bouchard and potters who have built on mandelbrot's work their due? or does he?

<comment><USER5> I'm assuming you're referring to Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Potters.

Taleb does give credit to them in terms of them understanding the presence of fat tails and focussing on the failure of the gaussian. However, both Bouchaud and Potters, coming from physics backgrounds, believe that the tail-exponent can be calibrated accurately from a finite sample-set. When in fact estimating the tail-exponent (the 'alpha' of a power law process) is fraught with small- sample effects and one cannot reliably make decisions even when you do come up with an estimate of the tail-exponent. This is Taleb's main beef with the breed of physicists with power-law models.

The best paper to understand this is: Weron 2001: "Levy-stable distributions revisited: Tail index > 2 does not exclude the levy-stable regime" <http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/448515.html>

More on my website if you're interested: navanitarakeri.com

A Black Swan is not just a rare event - it is defined as a rare event with _high impact_.

Statistical NLP may handle rare occurrences well (are you talking about smoothing?), but, by it's very nature, a rare event in a block of text is not going to wipe out a library now, is it? So the appearance of a rare word in a block of text is hardly in the same class of problems as epidemics, wars, market crashes etc.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the interesting reply. Perhaps I'm guilty of not reading Taleb as carefully as I should have! I definately respect the guy's technical chops - he was mandelbrot's student.

I'll think a more critically the next time I see a straight line drawn on a log-log plot. I remember reading a sermon by cosma shalizi chastising physicists for making basic errors when estimating the exponent of power laws. I'm sure there's a lot of suspect results in the literature due to the error that you described :) maybe even a few bank failures.

Regarding the impact of rare words: misinterpreting certain rare words like "teratogenic" or "mesothelioma" could conceivably have a pretty high impact!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a very good response to Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

In fact, it may have already been on HN, that's probably where I first read it and have been trying to find it again, ever since.

Taleb is now turning up almost everywhere, so I thought people might find this interesting.

<comment><USER6> You might be referring to this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=353264>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This isn't really a... well, it is a critique in the european sense, but it is not really a rebuttal. Most of it agrees with NNT, and when it doesn't it's usually on a matter of form.

<comment><USER8> Wait. Are you saying "critique" and "rebuttal" are synonyms? I never thought so, and I've never even been to Europe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Calling an event "random" does not mean its causeless. It simply means its not predicable. Its not predicable because we don't know and/or haven't measured the relevant causes. Hence, Black Swan events are caused.

Perhaps it would be an interesting and profitable exercise to look for and measure causes of Black Swan events.

<comment><USER10> So long as people continue to confuse explanation with description-we'll have confusion. Math is description; science is description with comparison and the contrasting of said description(s). Then what is explanation? I have no clue but to say it is part of consciousness, and,in the case of homo sapiens, partial consciousness. To say that us(humans) with our four dimensional rules of calculation & perception can "know" the how of everything is no more proposterious than to believe the earth is flat. Put another way-scientists who too often reject a new theory put forth that challenges current theories or assumptions-it reminds me of religious zealots defending any challenge to their dogma</comment></comment>


There Is No Open Source Community - <AUTHOR> http://johnmark.org/tinosc.html <comment> a-fried-egg That's because there aren't enough people working in 'open-source' to really care</comment>


The Curse of Econ 101 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/economism-and-the-minimum-wage/513155/?utm_source=atlfb&single_page=true <comment><USER2> The thing that the Econ 101 demand curve leaves out of the minimum wage debate is that those extra wages have side effects that impact the curve itself. Workers who are paid more at their primary job may not need to work a second job and/or will have more money to spend at other establishments that also pay their employees minimum wage, driving back up the demand for workers. Also, workers who are less stressed about affording the repairs on their car, or making the rent this month, or paying for their kid's medicine, will be better and more productive employees, generating additional value for their employers. These effects are harder to measure and imagine than a simple demand curve. They encourage more automation, sure, but automation has side effects, too. It keeps prices from growing as fast, which means people can spend the money they save elsewhere on other products or services, which increase demand for workers in that industry/establishment; if designed correctly automation can make workers' lives better even if there don't need to be as many workers; and automation itself is a product that needs to be designed, sold, purchased, installed, maintained, and upgraded, all of which drive up demand for still other jobs.

Sure, there's a point where a minimum wage would be too high and would start causing drag on the economy, and while I personally don't have a handle on the economics required to calculate an estimate of where that point is, it's clear that we aren't anywhere close to that point. Historical minimum wages have been higher, and just basic common sense tells you that so long as inflation is happening, the minimum wage should also be going up to keep pace. The "living wage" standard that a full-time minimum wage job ought to cover basic living expenses for a typical family seems like an entirely reasonable standard that has the benefit of being somewhat possible to be objectively determined.

<comment><USER3> It's unfortunate how difficult it is to have a reasonable discussion about economic policy issues. What you describe is pretty obvious - yet most people that have a say in this issue treat it like it's a binary decision ("increase vs. don't", instead of "increase how much?").

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Supply and demand curves aren't observable: only their intersection, price, is observable. The curves also move about in unpredictable ways. So we've got this situation where unobservable quantities move with unknown dynamics in a noisy, unpredictable fashion.

In order to get anywhere with a statistical estimation problem as hard as that, you have to impose a _lot_ of prior structure. I'd be surprised if, much of the time, you didn't end up effectively assuming the answer you want to see.

I'd go as far as to say supply and demand curves are a pretty useless abstraction. I've watched two economists argue over whether the 2015 oil price slump was a supply shock or a demand shock: if they can't get that right, what hope do the rest of us have?

<comment><USER5> In all fairness, you are wrong about your first argument. Both demand and supply curves are empirically observable through auction mechanisms and market reaction tests.

I'd be happy to forward you to research on them if you are interested, but don't try and pose opinion as fact if you aren't in the field.

<comment><USER4> In some cases I agree that an auction will give you an estimate of what demand or supply would look like at different prices. Northwestern university used an interesting variant of a Dutch auction to sell its sports tickets:

[https://hbr.org/2013/05/any-business-trying-to- sell](https://hbr.org/2013/05/any-business-trying-to-sell)

But auctions are often impractical. Auction mechanisms that induce participants to bid their true preferences are complicated, and you're still forced to assume that the auction participants behave rationally and optimally.

In general, the point that I'm trying to communicate is that it's very difficult to disentangle supply and demand: much harder than most people realise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TL;DR The Econ textbook model of rising prices —> lower demand is incorrect for minimum wage labor. Areas that have raised minimum wages have not reduced employment.

I believe many economists (including this author) are missing the structural changes caused by technology. The labor market is not just humans any more, and if/when human labor prices go up, the economics of automation are even more attractive. Ask any robotics startup.

As the article states, the real dollar value of minimum wage labor hasn't gone up much in decades. This fact (combined with a relatively low unemployment rate) seems to puzzle many economists. But it makes a lot more sense when you consider the labor "market" to include robots and automation.

<comment><USER7> Funny how the same people who insist that we should raise the cost of cigarettes because, of course, it will reduce demand for cigarettes, and we should raise the cost of fossil fuels because of course it will reduce demand for fossil fuels, also insist we should raise the cost of minimum-wage jobs because...for great justice!

I like NN Taleb's skin-in-the-game take on it. The only people who get to vote on the minimum wage would be those who work at a minimum wage job or want to do so. Instead of other people getting them fired to signal their virtue, let the people who will face the consequences decide. If _they_ decided to raise the minimum wage, I would support it, too. If they decided they'd rather not, I wouldn't insist on overriding them.

<comment><USER8> Cigarettes and fuel are passive objects. People, including minimum wage earners, are economic actors that make decisions.

It's complicated.

EDIT: Or perhaps we've come to think of minimum wage earners as passive objects, no different from fungible cigarettes.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I don't think that cigarettes will work harder or gain more skills if they are more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Economic models usually assume free movement of labor when actually labor is quite restricted in its movement thanks to immigration laws. Capital is very mobile and can flow easily to where costs are low.

<comment><USER9> And not just immigration laws, but family ties, moving expenses, higher rents, etc, even within a country. There are a number of reasons it's harder to move labor than capital.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a Master's in Economics. In graduate classes, much of the work done in intro-level courses is tossed aside for more capable models that require a fair bit of calculus to understand. The easiest being the Solow growth model.

The intro courses delve into macro static models with at most 2 variables (think Keynsian Cross). In the graduate level, macro theory is taught as micro theory. While the deleterious effects of price controls still hold true at higher levels of economic reasoning, it's a multi-variate problem. With any price control, think of it as damage the rest of the people acting in the economy think of ways to route around. If a minimum wage increase takes place, perks can be cut without affecting overall employment levels as an example of how overall employment may stay the same.

</comment><comment><USER12> The claim that Econ 101 does not apply to the labour market is a pretty extreme claim. If the studies aren't showing a consensus, I'm betting on Econ 101. Note that below, jasode has pointed out that the 1994 Card & Krueger study was based on phone surveys rather than payroll data.

There is some real and interesting debate on the question of should the cost of minimum living standards be borne by companies (through the minimum wage) or governments (through straight welfare). I'd love to see a compromise where it was still economic to do low-value work that is currently not done due to minimum wages.

<comment><USER13> It's not really an extreme claim. Honestly, if you're speaking on economic issues and the model you're using only has two lines: Supply and Demand, you really shouldn't be speaking.

Here is a good little blog about how the S/D graph for labor is unscientific. [http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/an-econ-theory- fa...](http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/an-econ-theory- falsified.html)

<comment><USER12> You hit a nerve there.

1) The economy is everyone's business, especially when governments get involved. It is better for us all if things are discussed publicly, politely and with all views available (albeit, potentially rebutted).

2) Arguing that something that looks like a reasonably competitive market is not a reasonably competitive market is an extreme claim. Low-wage labour might not be a competitive market, but the evidence bar for showing that is still high.

3) Your article is a good read, but it has 2 bits of data that I'm already happy to agree with:

3.a) There is more going on with immigration than supply and demand; skills transfer is a big deal and I would expect migrants to have more gumption because they have shown some initiative migrating.

3.b) Raising the minimum wage obviously doesn't always have a "big immediate negative impact". The magnitude of the negative impact might be fast, slow, big or small based on how carefully the minimum wage is set. But the politics of minimum wages don't look like they are being imposed on the basis of a straightfoward economic case. They are being set first by politicians, justified second by some economists.

<comment><USER13> >2) Arguing that something that looks like a reasonably competitive market is not a reasonably competitive market is an extreme claim. Low-wage labour might not be a competitive market, but the evidence bar for showing that is still high.

Why do you believe it looks like a reasonably competitive market? Tons of studies have been done on minimum wage effects and the conclusions are at least indecisive. If this is a reasonably competitive market why is it so hard to definitively show that? It's not like it's hard to prove competitive markets - anyone can do a study where you take say gas stations, lower the price per gallon at one and watch them pull more customers.

>the evidence bar for showing that is still high.

Surely the evidence bar is just as high to show that it _is_ a competitive market? This is another problem I have with Econ 101 - the idea that the default state of a market you don't understand is competitive is a political idea, not an economic one.

>1) The economy is everyone's business, especially when governments get involved. It is better for us all if things are discussed publicly, politely and with all views available (albeit, potentially rebutted).

Sure, I also live in the world and exist in a physical system so it's also my business which interpretation of quantum physics is correct. But I recognize that my existence in a system and my understanding of it are separate so I don't walk around lauding the Copenhagen interpretation (or walk into any other dispute in physics) because I read a few pop-sci articles on it. I feel the same way here. The challenge for scientifically minded laymen in the 21st century is that you can't "know everything." I believe that's also true for economics and a humbling here would serve everyone well.

If you walked into an econ forum and found a thread about programming and it was filled with stuff about how functions are bad, no one needs version control and a bunch of quantum computing gobbledygook, you'd probably try to correct them. And when you discovered that they held these beliefs not because they didn't know anything about programming (although they didn't) but because these beliefs somehow validated their existing political view of the world and thus they couldn't be talked out of it you might throw your hands up. My previous comment could (rightfully) be interpreted as me throwing my hands up.

>But the politics of minimum wages don't look like they are being imposed on the basis of a straightfoward economic case. They are being set first by politicians, justified second by some economists.

Is that not exactly what is going on in this thread? A bunch of people with a fundamentally political disagreement about the minimum wage desperately hunting for economic validation of their belief? In this thread we are all the politicians in your example, stumbling into subjects we know nothing about and finding post hoc rationalizations for what we already "know."

<comment><USER14> Quality response, thank you. I think most people don't choose their ideology and when the only ideology you know is the one you were given, it is very difficult to see past. This leads to some very pervasive notions, particularly in social and economic views, that are steeped in mostly unchecked ideological bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The minimum wage argument assumes that corporations choose whether to hire based on an evaluation of the productivity of a worker. In reality, nearly all companies choose a wage by simply looking at their neighbors.

</comment><comment><USER16> >They concluded, "Contrary to the central prediction of the textbook model ... we find no evidence that the rise in New Jersey's minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state."

This is really the heart of it, people who are libertarian/pro free- market/Austrian economists simply reject any evidence that challenges their assertions about economics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology#Austrian_economics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology#Austrian_economics)

>Austrians argue that that empirical data itself is insufficient to describe economics; that consequently empirical data cannot falsify economic theory.

<comment><USER17> So a phone survey vs. the life work of multiple Nobel economists?

As far as evidence, if you've ever run a restaurant, you know what happens when you increase labor costs by 15%? -- You don't have a restaurant anymore. Or you end up with this:

[http://del.h-cdn.co/assets/15/31/1438287597-screen- shot-2015...](http://del.h-cdn.co/assets/15/31/1438287597-screen- shot-2015-07-30-at-338.jpg)

<comment><USER18> > the life work of multiple Nobel economists

This doesn't mean quite what you think it does. The Nobel prize in economics is unrelated to the other Nobel prizes. It is not awarded by the Nobel committee. It is given by the central bank of Sweden to economists that it likes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've felt for a long time that most of Economics is just political ideology masked as science. That's just me though.

<comment><USER20> This is partially true. Economics originated in the field of _political economy_ , which was at the time for lack of a better word, _bourgeois_. The political economists existed in a sense only to advise the government and monarchies on economic policy. When Marx set out to critique this field in his magnum opus which took thirty years of study to complete, _Capital_ , he criticised them of obsessing over superficialities and only observing appearance rather than to drop down to the essences of capitalism.

In this sense, economics is inherently political and ideological, its anathema is Marxism which is a critique of this political and ideological field, but not a substitute of its own. It is not an economic theory, nor a political economic theory, it is a method of critique which is anti-ideological.

<comment><USER19> That was an awesome breakdown. I've never heard Marxism described quite that way...but frankly, the only things I've ever heard about Marxism are the absolutely ludicrous things said by the right and the stuff I've found on my own. Certainly not a great deal of exposure.

<comment><USER21> Reading Marx (or some explanation of his work from different point of view) is interesting. I think most of his critics do not apply to this world but he do have an interesting point of view and adding some of his ideas into your personal philosophy. I found really good critics of Marx from a rather liberal philosopher. I forgot his name, it was at my college library, but i'm pretty sure that if you are interested in philosophy and in economics theory you should read some of his work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's a lot of words intended to obscure a very simple subject.

1\. Theoretically, a minimum wage will reduce unemployment, and the higher the minimum wage, the higher the impact. However, even in theory it has to be quite high to get meaningful impacts, given how noisy employment data is.

2\. The minimum wage in the US is quite low, and has very rarely been increased sharply. As a result, we've never really seen any large spike in unemployment, but we also have no reason to think we wouldn't if we ever did. Nobody has ever tried a minimum wage of, say, 80% of the median wage to see what it would do.

3\. Although not entirely conclusive, the data from the largest increases does seem to show spikes in the minimum wage. For example, the University of Washington released their study on the impact of Seattle raising their minimum wage from $11 to $13 per hour, and found that the reduction in hours was 3 times higher than the increase in wages, meaning minimum wage workers _lost_ $125 per month in earnings[1]. By contrast, the best studies which show no effect covered smaller increases or increases to a lower level (as a % of median wages).

For example, one of the most famous of the "minimum wage has no effect" studies was by Card and Krueger, and covered a rise in the minimum wage in NJ from $4.25 to $5.05 in 1992. Adjusting for inflation, $5.05 is around $8.90 in 2017 dollars. It's entirely plausible that $9 might not cause any measurable impact, but $13 would. In fact, there is some data which suggests that around 50% of median hourly wages is an inflection point at which point you start to see real impacts. And median hourly wages in the US is slightly less than $25/hour, which is slightly less than twice $13, so in fact that's entirely unsurprising.

> When the University of Chicago Booth School of Business asked a panel of > prominent economists in 2013 whether increasing the minimum wage to $9 would > "make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment," the > responses were split down the middle.

$9 is a level at which we'd expect to see a minimal effect. It's plausible to think that there might be SOME effect, or that there might be no measurable effect, and some studies have shown such an effect while others have not. It's not surprising that economists would split. But splitting over $9 would have an impact doesn't mean there's any debate over whether an impact exists at some level, and in fact, there is not. And it seems like $13 does have a measurable impact, and there's really no doubt that $30 or $50/hour would have a very major impact.

> The real impact of the minimum wage, however, is much less clear than these > talking points might indicate.

No. There is, at most, a debate over how big an increase it would take for the impact to become clear.

[1]: [http://www.nber.org/papers/w23532.pdf](http://www.nber.org/papers/w23532.pdf)

<comment><USER23> > 1\. Theoretically, a minimum wage will reduce unemployment, and the higher > the minimum wage, the higher the impact. However, even in theory it has to > be quite high to get meaningful impacts, given how noisy employment data is.

Er, wouldn't minimum wage have the opposite effect, theoretically? If there was a job that I would pay $1 for and someone was willing to do, but the minimum wage is $2, then that job is illegal and won't exist(well, it might, grey economy and all, but sticking to simple theory). This would increase unemployment.

<comment><USER21> Not if poor people have to work double hours to be able to live decently. I won't go deep onto the working mother issues (single mother with two job or mother with 2 jobs and a father with one but doesn't do anything with the kids as it is a "woman job") or how people working more than 50 hours a week is a net loss in productivity and a costly public health issue, but these problems can be solved with high enough minimum wages or universal income.

<comment><USER23> I agree but those are issues orthogonal to the basic rate of unemployment, no? You can have very low unemployment and still have a very poor country if everyone's working for pennies, and that's a real problem. IIRC too low unemployment could be a sign of an unhealthy lack of economic mobility - everyone's stuck in their job and they make barely enough to scrape by, so they're terrified of dropping out of the workforce to pursue education/creative endeavors/a new career.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I completely disagree with the article's conclusion. But, this is a pretty good article. It actually cites opposing views, including linking to them, and tries to make its case logically. Great writing!

That said, I'm not an economist, but when I see an issue such as this, in which leading economists disagree with some position, I don't think the takeaway of one article should be "I now know what the truth is". I mean as the article itself says, lots of leading economists think a minimum wage is bad. So if after reading the article your position is "well clearly I now know better than people who have spent their whole lives on this topic", you're being arrogant.

Also, from the economists I do hear on a regular basis, it's pretty clear that they're all very anti-minimum-wage. Obviously this is a self-selected sample, but I get the feeling that most economists aren't particularly pro minimum wage - they're either indifferent or at most think that there are some tradeoffs that can be made in favor of the minimum wage. But there are _tradeoffs_ , as in the econ 101 model isn't wrong. It's just worth it sometimes.

On the "empirical" question, I tend to side with Bryan Caplan here - there are studies going both ways, but since in almost every other situation basic supply/demand models are correct, there's got to be _really_ strong evidence against assuming supply/demand models work for labor, too.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is an interesting article that was cited, pulled out to highlight.

[http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin- aer.pdf](http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-aer.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't think that there is any point to having a minimum wage if the Federal Reserves' mandate of price stability is 2%.

</comment><comment><USER17> There is so much wrong with this article.

"Many companies can recoup cost increases in the form of higher prices; because most of their customers are not poor, the net effect is to transfer money from higher-income to lower-income families."

Higher income people aren't the primary customer for McDonalds (in the US.) If you raise a Big Mac price by $2, "rich" people might buy the same amount, but poor people will buy less and poor people are a much larger share of the Big Mac market than rich people, thus it would be a net loss.

"Even if a higher minimum wage does cause some people to lose their jobs, that cost has to be balanced against the benefit of greater earnings for other low- income workers."

This is just nuts. Some guy now makes $20k per year, but some other guy now makes $0 per year, instead of both making $15,000 per year. That's a net loss of $10,000 per year in economic activity. It makes one person slightly better off, while making the other person infinitely worse off.

The other interesting thing about this debate is that those arguing for higher minimum wages also tend to advocate for unrestricted immigration and so-called sanctuary city policies which necessarily results in a greater supply of lower-skilled labor. Without a minimum wage, immigration of lower-skilled workers would necessarily regulate itself as wages fall to equilibrium. You don't even need immigration law -- the free market would limit and allow immigration as wages moved. Essentially it would make the market for labor far more liquid.

Despite the article's derisive condemnation of "Econ 101," supply and demand is still a thing. An increased supply of labor means that the equilibrium price is now lower, which with the price floor of minimum wage means that there is an even greater surplus of labor.

The article seems to criticize so-called "Econ 101" while dismissing Nobel economists Friedman and Hayek. I'm pretty sure those guys were far beyond Econ 101. The author talks about how in the 1950s 1 and 3 workers were in a union, with the implication that the higher wages that resulted were good for society. However the author conveniently leaves out that the US had a poverty rate of 22.4% in 1959 and in 2015 that poverty rate was 13.5%.

Perhaps there's an argument to be made for higher minimum wages, but this article certainly hasn't made it.</comment>


Iranian Comfort Food - <AUTHOR> http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2015/the-iranian-comfort-food/

<comment><USER2> Might anyone have suggestions on where best to find delicious Iranian comfort food in the SF Bay area? There are quite a few Persian restaurants, but I haven't found any of them to particularly stand out. Personal recommendations from people who know the cuisine would be great.

<comment><USER3> going south bay is your best. there's a serious lack of good persian options in SF/Easy bay.

<comment><USER4> Where in the south bay?

I've only been a couple places and found Lavash to stronger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I skimmed down looking for recipes, but didn't see any. I guess I should say that I didn't see any before it dimmed the article and interrupted me with a modal.

Anyway, if anyone has recipes they recommend, I'm interested!

</comment><comment><USER6> [meta] I know topics on HN have been getting pretty broad beyond tech and startups. But, this is reeaaaalllly stretching...

<comment><USER7> Not have been getting, but have always been: [https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html).

The sole criterion for whether a story belongs on HN is: is it intellectually interesting. Breadth is the thing we care most about preserving here. Losing it would be the easiest thing in the world (not least because many don't see its value) and a sure way to dull the community.

Does food writing count? A recipe probably wouldn't, nor food photos à la Tumblr or Yelp. But articles about the history or economics of food, or new techniques in making it, or some unusual social aspect—sure, why not?

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the reminder, dang. I'll rephrase:

...are supposed to be pretty broad beyond tech and startups. But, I still think this is still reeaaaalllly stretching... It's a nice human interest piece with nice commentary on local customs and mouth-watering descriptions and pictures of food. But, not much else. Maybe I'd reading it too quickly, but I don't see much content that makes me think about much beyond "Those people seem really pleasant" and "That food sounds really yummy". Does it at least mention some unusual social aspects? Maaaaaybe a just bit...

I guess I'm in the minority here. But, I'll still occasionally reiterate my concern whenever I see lots of votes for material that feels like it's pushing HN closer to /r/MildyInteresting. Lots of easy upvotes for easy, no-topic, snacky links and stuff...

<comment><USER7> The risk of HN turning into r/anything is orders of magnitude smaller than the risk of getting stuck at a too-narrow local optimum.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Aurora Borealis Tonight - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41587712/ns/technology_and_science-space/

<comment><USER2> According to some Aurora forecasts, today is just "quiet". Maybe the spot is not correctly aligned with us? I know the original article says earth was "in the crosshair" but still. Anyone is more knowledgeable on this?

[http://www.gedds.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/Default.asp?Date=...](http://www.gedds.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/Default.asp?Date=20110216)</comment>


UK doctor shares a breathing technique for helping Covid-19 ill persons [video] - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.com/watch?v=HwLzAdriec0&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3Of7ru9NrRIbofuA0nxI3gSx7J4G5yTbn77Ly8_itKtnPdLKlKWx-xSlk <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry if the title is not accurate, I roughly translated it from French.

My wife is Covid-19 ill actually and it helped her sleeping so if it can help...</comment>


The fuel cell charger that generates electricity from water and salt - <AUTHOR> http://www.myfcpower.com/ <comment><USER2> The site says everywhere that it uses salt, but this is misleading. It's not table salt, it's a special salt. (Using table salt to generate energy is ridiculous.) For example, the site tries to ensure the product is safe because it only use salt and water, but it's not the salt that everyone imagines.

Now, if it uses a special salt, what's the difference between this and an usual AAA battery?

From the FAQ:

> _What is myFC Puck made of?_

> _The body of the Puck is an aluminum can that holds the binary fuel, Sodium > silicide and Sodium borohydride (CAS number: 12164-12-4 & 16940-66-2). The > aluminum can is then permanently attached to a plastic cap, which is used to > control the release of hydrogen gas to the fuel cell. After the fuel mixture > is fully reacted, the Puck will contain two benign by-products (sodium > silicate and sodium metaborate)._

> _Both by-products are chemically benign, non-hazardous, and safe. In fact, > these by-products are used in many industrial manufacturing processes and > many common household products (like concrete, detergent, glass, makeup, and > toothpaste) are produced using these materials._</comment>


Show HN: Easily browse starred repos on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://astralapp.com/ <comment> grif-fin Sign up or nothing. Nothing then ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯</comment>


A Nixon deepfake, a 'moon disaster' speech and an information ecosystem at risk - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-nixon-deepfake-a-moon-disaster-speech-and-an-information-ecosystem-at-risk1/ <comment><USER2> This Youtube channel has lots of other great examples of whats possible with voice synthesis today: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRt- fquxnij9wDnFJnpPS2Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRt-fquxnij9wDnFJnpPS2Q)

Some of my favorites include Sinatra singing ABBA's Dancing Queen [1], six presidents rapping the NWA classic [2], and Milton Friedman rapping 50's P.I.M.P. [3]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo_w4KGifug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo_w4KGifug)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAZVp-n-5TM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAZVp-n-5TM)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mUYMvuNIas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mUYMvuNIas)

<comment><USER3> I'm struggling to understand how they're great examples. They sound absolutely atrocious and nowhere near believable. They sound really, really bad, like something an amateur with zero editing experience could put together with cheap equipment. They're so bad they're difficult to listen to, especially the Sinatra one.

<comment><USER4> Agreed those are not the best examples.

This one (JFK reading the Rick & Morty copypasta) strikes me as much more convincing however:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkH2zEHJ2Ng](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkH2zEHJ2Ng)

<comment><USER5> The Trump/Darth Plagueis copy pasta got a chuckle out of me.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a fake, sure. Maybe it's not perfect, but the software is improving. So within a few years, I'm guessing that fakes will be indistinguishable from true recordings.

But this was based on the text of an actual speech written for President Nixen, to be delivered if the mission failed. So isn't it likely that he practiced it, just in case? And if he did, it might have been recorded, more or less accidentally. As Reagan's quip about nuking Russia was.

And so as others note, it becomes crucial to look at the historical context.

<comment><USER7> > As Reagan's quip about nuking Russia was.

Oh this is interesting, do you have any sources where I could read more about it?

<comment><USER8> While testing an audio setup in 1984, Reagan joked that Russia had been outlawed and "we begin bombing in 5 minutes".

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_begin_bombing_in_five_min...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_begin_bombing_in_five_minutes)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is one thing to make apocalyptic predictions - they could be reasonable conclusions of possibilities, unreasonable, or anywhere in between. They can be discussed on their own merit. Heck even why they personally conclude something may be discussed and considered, and something to try to understand even if disagreed with or considered wrong. But the "here is how you should feel" leading bullshit is a clear run-arround for critical facilities that takes far too many people.

Nothing makes me write a source off as a bad actor more than panic mongering that /tells you/ how to feel as opposed to leaving it to you to decide. It is not only a sure sign of a manipulator because of scared people being easier to manipulate. It may be unduly harsh, caustic, or sharp but I have absolutely lost patience for this tactic.

<comment><USER10> The Onion's take on apocalyptic predictions: [https://politics.theonion.com/conservatives-warn-radical- kam...](https://politics.theonion.com/conservatives-warn-radical-kamala- harris-will-impose-he-1844703306)

<comment><USER11> Did everyone forget about Prop 8 out here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was kind of expecting that this was going to demo some step forward, but this has all the same tells has the last several high profile deepfake demos.

> Voice is clipped

> Chin

> head bobbing

<comment><USER13> Knowing the speech was a fake and paying attention to it "skeptically" I noticed the double head-bob as an odd thing which seemed suspiciously convenient as a transition between cut-n-pastes.

Now I'm going to have to go and watch archival Nixon footage to see if the same thing is there or not :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What made it 'real' was the actual speech itself. It would have been hard to 'fake' that.

The 3 minutes of 'intro blast off' (that could have been 10 seconds) and the Flash-like landing page are really problematic.

<comment><USER12> An AI can't fake a speech about a subject they never spoke about... yet. Though, to be honest, I think it wouldn't be hard.

1) Collect a corpus of speeches.

2) Use style-synthesis techniques, just like in the art-style synthesis demos.

3) Input a speech about a spaceship disaster and run it in the "style" of Nixon.

<comment><USER15> > An AI can't fake a speech

Nonsense.

"It is with a heavy heart that we must inform you that Apollo 11 has failed to return from the moon. We have lost contact with our crew, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin. When they left earth seven hours ago their fate was unknown but now it is certain. They died as men should, ready to die for what they believed. This loss is a tremendous loss for our nation, for their families, and for mankind but their sacrifice was not made in vain: It is a testimony to courage, determination, and human achievement that will be remembered by all who witnessed it today and for all those who come for all time so long as man walks this world or any other. For this tragedy will not mark the end of space exploration; it will strengthen our resolve to continue advancing space technology and human knowledge. We have enjoyed the fruits of their labor and shared the pride of their achievement just as we now share their isolation and grief. We will honor their memory by continuing that work and by taking that faith and that dream into a future they will not live to see but helped to build. We will remember them and we will remember what they stood for: The greatness of man and the hope for a better tomorrow."

This isn't a first shot output, I had it retry a bit and guided it a little, mostly to get it to write a longer speech instead of a short quote. I think it's much better than I could have written on my own in a minute or two.

<comment><USER16> Wow, did you make this using GPT-3? Is the first sentence yours and the rest generated?

<comment><USER15> All the text in quotes was GPT-3 generated-- with a little help from me (e.g. when it went in the wrong direction-- e.g. ending the speech too early-- I made it go back and try again or clipped out the dumb part and had it continue).

I prompted it with some mission description and said that a speech was prepared for president Nixon that in case the astronauts were stranded.

GPT3 doesn't yet do consistently GREAT output without some guidance, partially as an artefact of the generation procedure. But with a little help it does very well.

The issue is that if you just take the most likely symbol it'll rapidly go into a loop of just copying text or other degenerate behaviour. So instead, everything uses the model by sampling it-- taking less likely choices by chance weighed by the model output. Unfortunately, that means that an unlucky draw will occasional paint it into a corner. If you see that happening you can just go back and try again and you get much better output.

If that is a fair comparison depends on what your application is... if you need to to run unsupervised, it isn't consistently great. If you just need a first draft out of it or some raw ideas to turn an hour writing task into a 5 minute one, it's great for that.

I don't think this kind of manual assistance is much of a cheat either-- a real speech writer also gets exactly this sort of help from others.

[And FWIW, I did this via the GPT3 based mode in the ai dungeon video game. ... I don't have access to the GPT3 API.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was expecting the Walter Cronkite part to be the fake thing here in a clever twist.

They'd pass through the Nixon questions and then say "Alright, but what about Walter Cronkite?" My true advocacy would be to use another contemporary big three anchor from the era as the deep fake, then show the real Cronkite footage during the quiz at the end

That's the real lesson IMHO, not if you can tell when you're prompted to listen for it, but when you aren't.

</comment><comment><USER18> People have been doing this since the cannonballs photo in the Crimean War.

If you think a fully fabricated video is the key to lying to people I have a poker game you can join.

Here's a discussion of how far you can distort video today, in a way that is way more subtle and harder to rebut than a total fabrication:

[https://youtu.be/tEGqepsFTbI](https://youtu.be/tEGqepsFTbI)

</comment><comment><USER19> If deepfakes are so good, why do they always look and sound so crap?

<comment><USER20> They don't need to be perfect. They just need to be convincing.

Consider MP3 files. Any audiophile will tell you that a compressed MP3 file is a piss-poor representation of the true sound. The best experience is to listen to a band live, then vinyl, then FLAC.

And yet the majority of people listen to MP3 files. They strike the right balance of file size and sound clarity for an overwhelming amount of systems, doubly so since online streaming took off. So now that people have become accustomed to the sound of MP3, they are not used to anything else. They are convinced that an MP3 file is the "true sound" of the song.

Right now deepfakes is in its infancy. Personally I think it is improving at an alarming rate. If I shared the moon video on Facebook I am willing to bet most people would think it is real. They don't notice the clipped speech, the subtle double head nods. Their minds are not as critical of video as you and I are. So to them, they are convinced it is real.

What happens when only machines can detect if something is authentic or a fake? What happens when not all site administrators scan for videos and fail to mark them as illegitimate? What happens when courts use deepfakes unknowingly as evidence to convict someone, or impeach a president, or fire a worker for sexual harassment? We have already seen what happens when "verified" twitter accounts are compromised - what if a CEO puts out a video announcing some controversial new endeavor, or admission to fraud?

There are very real concerns about this technology and I believe it will very soon become a weapon that takes misinformation and turns it into very real consequences.

<comment><USER21> Misinformation is already a huge issue; deepfakes can only exacerbate and compound the issue in ways we can't even imagine at this time.

Imagine deepfake used to create false alibis, 911 calls, etc... That's probably not even the tip of the iceberg in coming years.

The fact we went in KNOWING it's a deepfake gave us an unmeasurable advantage/bias. For uninformed individuals that "stumble" upon this on the web, one can only imagine how it'll playout. This thought actually terrifies me... imagine a hypothetical (and conservative) 10% overall improvement AND production price reduction to this video every 6-12 months.

@SamuelAdams: Wish this site had a messaging system. Would be interesting to have a 1 on 1 discussion on this topic with you.

<comment><USER20> You mention phone calls. Right now robocalls are very common. But what if those random calls legitimately sounded like your parents, or your spouse, or your kids. Furthermore, what if they sounded like they were in real trouble and really needed money fast? This technology opens up whole new arenas to more legitimate scams.

<comment> kube-system This is already being done to scam high profile targets.

Example: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2019/09/03/a-voice...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2019/09/03/a-voice- deepfake-was-used-to-scam-a-ceo-out-of-243000)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is absolutely remarkable.

<comment><USER23> Definitely felt a little off, but if I didn't know that this was a deepfake, I would probably accept it as real. As usual, I don't know if that fits more in to the "remarkable" or "disturbing" category.

<comment><USER24> Eh, I'm not entirely sure I would have. The effect is near identical to when you have one person behind another, pretending to be the front person's arms and hands - the motions just don't match up right.

Maybe people who use faces more than full body language are more affected by this particular one?

<comment><USER23> I kind of agree, but it's hard to separate knowing that it's fake from my reaction to it. If this were presented without that context, I might feel like it's off, but not necessarily question it, especially if it came from a source I believed to be legitimate.

<comment> m-watson I also think, on top of all your points (which I agree with), keeping it shorter would make it more convincing. I think with the current usage of social media, short clips created through some synthetic means will be harder and harder to identify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I remember watching a TV ad where Michael Jordan around the age he was when he retired played 1-on-1 against himself as a college player. This was 15-20 years ago & I wrote an essay for high school English class on how that ad shows we can't believe our eyes when it comes to what we see on TV. It was visually much more convincing than the examples I see here, so I can't help but think deepfakes haven't quite caught up with professional editing, at least not yet.

</comment><comment><USER26> For the majority of those on HN who didn't witness the live event this is a pretty good summary. It really took me back to that day as our entire family was glued to our black and white TV watching the man known to all as Uncle Walter. Watching President Nixon twitch a bit was the only tell that this wasn't real.

Got me to imagining the video where Eisenhower confesses D-Day was a failure, the actual speech he wrote does exist.

</comment><comment><USER27> It works as a PoC, and it could fool me if I saw it at the edge of my vision, on my kitchen's TV. But otherwise it _looks_ odd, and most importantly it sounds like the weirdest vocoder in existence.

We still can't truly fake instruments, never mind the human voice.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Beyond this illegal and harmful use of face swapping

Is face-swapping illegal? What law is it breaking?

</comment><comment><USER29> I really hate the fake static in this video - as a 7-yr old I watched the moon landing in 1969 and nobody's TV was that bad! If I had a TV that bad I would either repair it or throw it away!

</comment><comment><USER30> My website has 40+ celebrity and cartoon voices:

[https://vo.codes](https://vo.codes)

I'm working on voice conversion (voice to voice for TeamSpeak/Discord) now.

<comment><USER31> Any chance you would be willing to share the (finetuned) models? For science? I'm interested in detection and want to look at artifacts common to speech audio generated by different models all based on the same overall implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896996](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896996)

</comment><comment><USER33> Deepfake stuff is not a threat, it's a vaccine. There finally is a chance people will realize they can believe nothing and nobody, news lie and mislead and they absolutely have to triple-check everything before they take that in consideration.

<comment><USER34> This destroys democracy. Because you can't check everything yourself, or even a tiny amount of things, so you have no meaningful basis on which to tick that box on the ballot.

<comment><USER33> You never had it. It has always been an illusion. Now this just got harder to ignore.

<comment><USER34> Great. Now what?

<comment><USER35> Trust in media with a reputation. Trust in journalism to unearth attempts of deceit. Quality journalism and reputation will become more important and powerful than ever

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 3m06s to 3m15s seemed a bit cheesy and stagey

</comment><comment><USER36> Has something positive came out from the world of IT in the last 20 years?

</comment><comment><USER37> It happened

</comment><comment><USER38> Bullshit. Easily 80% of broadcast news today is fake, either overtly, or by omission. It only exists to advance a narrative, not to inform or support debate. As Denzel Washington quipped: "If you don't watch the news, you're uninformed. If you do watch the news, you're misinformed."

The ability to produce fake news artificially as well won't tip the scales even slightly, because nobody with a brain trusts the "news" anyway.</comment>


The Inevitable Death of VMs: A Progress Report [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/papers/kell18inevitable-preprint.pdf <comment><USER2> Very interesting. Had to point the irony though

> A key hypothesis of the liballocs design is that existing VMs may be > retrofitted onto it at fairly modest effort, rather than being thrown away > or substantially rewritten. A previous partial retrofitting (of V8) exists, > but is challenging to maintain; therefore, input is sought on alternative > candidate VMs for use as retrofitting targets.

<comment><USER3> In all fairness to the author, casually maintaining any major changes to V8 or Chrome for more than a month is borderline impossible. The whole codebase undergoes massive churn on a release-to-release basis. There are projects like LibCEF that have the rug pulled out from under them every release or two because some major subsystem got completely overhauled.

So, the difficulty of maintaining the v8 changes is kind of meaningless. The fact that it's possible at all is the interesting part!

<comment><USER4> Thanks! Indeed I should have said "no more difficult to maintain than V8 in general... i.e. well beyond a researcher's means".

<comment><USER2> Ah, that makes sense.

"V8 changes such that alterations in general are difficult to maintain."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> tl;dr this is a two page description of Stephen Kell's liballocs library [0]. Basically, it's wasteful to install jvm, python interpreter, and electron. He's advocating that new languages use (u)nix infrastructure (processes, files, etc) as much as possible. His library is supposed to assist with this by providing process level gc. It provides a hierarchal view such that a caller allocates objects, rather than flat memory.

I don't know enough to have an opinion on this. As an alterntative view, consider listening to Cliff Click describe the challenge the jvm faced when it had a more permissive ffi [1].

[0] [https://github.com/stephenrkell/liballocs](https://github.com/stephenrkell/liballocs)

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

<comment><USER6> I personally disagree. The differences between the language specific is high enough that a fully general VM is impossible without also incurring all the downsides of a language specific VM. Python and Java each have a distinct standard library. The end result will be that you have to install 'supervm- java-std' and 'supervm-python-std' instead of openjdk and cpython. JVMs tend to be very memory heavy in exchange for higher performance for java code, whereas the python interpreter is slow but more memory efficient because it relies on C code to accelerate CPU and memory intensive applications.

<comment><USER4> Not sure whether you're disagreeing with the paper or the commenter's summary of it. As you could probably guess from the title of the paper, the goal is _not_ a new "fully general" VM.

An analogy I sometimes use is pre-IP internetworking. If you wanted a new cross-network application, then of course you could in principle build application-layer gateways, but the economics simply didn't work. It took a carefully engineered "hourglass waist" to fix the economics. The goal is to create the equivalent for language implementations. And the whole point is that "one super-VM" is not the recipe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> GitHub repository: [https://github.com/stephenrkell/liballocs](https://github.com/stephenrkell/liballocs)

I read the paper imagining a kind of COM implementation (apartments/marshalling/...)? But the Github readme makes it seem more like a kind of tagged malloc wrapper.

<comment><USER4> Ouch. :-) There's a lot more to it than that, though wrapping malloc is certainly one part of it. (Reminds me I should finish my blog post on why wrapping malloc reliably is way harder than it should be.)

But the key idea is to avoid introducing new abstractions -- anything that liballocs formalises should be commonly "lurking" in there already. So types and allocators are OK, but apartments would not be. It's not a new programming model... the newness should be at the meta-level only, i.e. ways of _describing_ what existing code already does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that the author makes no mention of CLR, Microsoft's attempt at the same thing which has been around for 20 years.

<comment><USER4> True that the CLR is not mentioned by name, but it is covered. I invite you to read the text again, and especially the following bit.

"Specifically, we should aspire to package language implementations in a way that renounces 'one true VM', instead allowing first-class interoperability with the host environment (perhaps at modest drop in performance), the same interoperability with other VMs past and present, and tool support which 'sees across' these boundaries."

The CLR simply doesn't do these things, as witnessed by the debacle of "Managed C++" and the usual FFI wrapper tedium of "explicit P/Invoke". It is a classic "one true VM", albeit more language-inclusive than a single-language VMs.

<comment><USER8> Surely it was an _attempt_ at all these things, it just didn't work out. For instance, I remember controversy that new Windows APIs would only be accessible via .Net.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to see the topics of soft-realtime and lightweight threads addressed.

</comment><comment><USER10> I expected this to be about system virtualization, not language VMs. Interesting though, but not my area of expertise.

<comment><USER11> > I expected this to be about system virtualization, not language VMs. > Interesting though, but not my area of expertise.

The blatant reuse of abbreviations and terms is one of my pet peeves.

For example, VM can mean Virtual Machine, Virtual Machine, or Virtual Memory. Yep, three completely distinct things, two of which are helpfully referred to under the same expanded name as well. Do you know all three? mroche has helpfully disambiguated between Virtual Machine and Virtual Machine already, but in case you need help:

Virtual Machine means a computer split up into many different fake systems, each running a guest OS. Xen is an example of a Virtual Machine hypervisor.

Virtual Machine means a completely fake CPU packaged with libraries and used to run a high-level language, to facilitate things like garbage collection and language-level security. Java runs on a Virtual Machine, quite imaginatively called the Java Virtual Machine. Now, what would we call a Java execution environment which could run as a Xen guest? (Don't strain yourself... )

Virtual Memory means lying to applications about how memory works, to present a completely flat address space without such annoyances as caching or other programs or the operating system disturbing application programmers, who are quite disturbed enough.

Now, let's take all of those concepts, refer to all three of them with the same abbreviation and two of them with the same name entirely. I suppose I should feel lucky to live in this time: Soon, we'll be calling them all Bruce, to cut down on confusion.

<comment><USER12> Your first two "virtual machines" are actually not that different.

Sure, xen simulates the same CPU type as host, and talks to host via block devices and raw sockets, and each guest includes the full OS and filesystem; while Java VM simulates a completely different CPU, and uses host's OS for filesystem and TCP/IP access. They seem pretty distinct.

But you are just looking at the sides of the spectrum, and there are plenty of things in the middle.

\- With Xen, you can boot directly into user app, without any OS, filesystems or separate libraries. Is it still "fake system" if the thing you are booting has no chance of running on a real hardware?

\- Qemu/kvm, which is normally used to emulate processors, supports "virt", "a platform which doesn't correspond to any real hardware and is designed for use in virtual machines." Does this start to sound like JVM for you?

\- There are an actual, physical chips which execute Java bytecode directly (like picoJava). Does this put Java VM into "hardware emulation" category?

\- On, and there is UML (user mode linux) project -- it emulates a virtual machine with its own fixed memory pool (like xen), and can use host's block device (like xen), and raw networking (like xen); but it can also use host's filesystem (like JVM), and it uses host's kernel for thread scheduling (like JVM). Where does it go?

\- Oh, and there is a Smalltalk. The older versions had garbage-collecting VM (like JVM), but it had its own device drivers (like xen) and filesystem (like xen).

There is a reason we call of them "virtual machines" \-- they have lots of things in common.

<comment><USER13> I'd also add that I believe the usage in the title here is a little obscure -- I think almost any generalist programmer (i.e., not someone who exclusively works in program language VMs or in system VMs) would assume "VM" refers to a system-level virtual machine.

At one point I interacted with the JVM and its quirks on a daily basis, and I never started referring to it as "the VM", it was always "the JVM".

I suspect in large part _because_ they're not that different from a systems perspective, I assume "VM" to mean the more generic of the two!

<comment><USER14> The usage has changed over time. Go back 15 years, and I'd expect people would more commonly associated "VM" with the language VM. Of course, that historical development fits well with the high-level claims made in the paper.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. There was a time where the system-level virtualizer was "the hypervisor", but I was still in school then. ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


FCC Votes 3-2 to Punish Comcast for Interfering with BitTorrent - <AUTHOR> http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/08/fcc-rules-against-comcast-bit-torrent-blocking

<comment><USER2> From the link:

 _There is one aspect of Friday's FCC ruling, however, that seriously troubles us. Consider how the FCC got here. In 2005, without any authority or guidance from Congress, the FCC announced a "policy statement." Now, in 2008, it decided that it has the power to enforce the policy statement and announced an "enforcement framework" that will be applied to future complaints. Again, all this without authority or guidance from Congress. As Commissioner McDowell put it in his dissent from the Comcast order, "Under the analysis set forth in the order, the Commission apparently can do anything [to regulate the Internet] so long as it frames its actions in terms of promoting the Internet or broadband deployment." Can the FCC be trusted with that kind of power? Remember, historically, the FCC has been subject to "regulatory capture" -- in other words, over time, they end up doing the bidding of the very telecom giants they are supposed to be regulating._

Way to establish precedent, guys. :/

From the FCC's press release (PDF linked inside eff.org page):

 _Ruling on a complaint by Free Press and Public Knowledge as well as a petition for declaratory ruling, the Commission concluded that Comcast has unduly interfered with Internet users' right to access the lawful Internet content and to use the applications of their choice. Specifically, the Commission found that Comcast had deployed equipment throughout its network to monitor the content of its customers' Internet connections and selectively block specific types of connections known as peer-to-peer connections._

I'm concerned that this gives AT&T, et al. everything they need to effectively lobby the branches of government that _should_ be making laws of this type and say "See! This Network Neutrality thing is preventing us from managing our bandwidth and saving us (and our customers) money!"

I'm not very comfortable with this ruling in that regard.

Disclosure: I have a financial interest such as employment, contracting or stock in a company that is involved with the technology in question. Unfortunately I am not comfortable revealing who or what the relationship is because they're not public about their role in this matter.

</comment><comment><USER3> I for one, welcome our new Comcast-punishing FCC overlords.

Wait, I got that wrong: I _greatly fear_ putting the FCC in charge of regulating ISP's, with the fantastically-awful job they are doing with regards to the telecom and television markets. Wolf-in-sheep's-clothing comes to mind....

<comment><USER4> Right. So a lack of real competition enables abuses by corporate behemoths. Solution? Bring in the government behemoth.

What about enabling real competition?

<comment><USER5> I think the best way to encourage real competition is to decouple infrastructure maintenance from service provisioning. The internet infrastructure is a natural physical monopoly which doesn't make sense to duplicate several times over. But the current impracticality of having multiple service providers over common pipes sets up the abusive monopolization we are currently seeing. Unfortunately the behemoths seem content with the status quo of commingling those two businesses.

We're caught between the wolf and the bear, and I don't see a good way out. Seeing the FCC make a strong move to protect Net neutrality is heartening, but seeing them make a unilateral decision to assume more regulatory power makes me nervous. I really don't want to see the FCC start making decisions about content in addition to decisions about technical implementations. Regulate the frequencies, not the airwaves.

<comment><USER6> I don't see the FCC stretching for that yet. They've made no overtures toward censorship, in fact, this move is fairly anti-censorship, as it essentially prevents ISPs from engaging in that.

The FCC has generally regulated content transmitted over public airwaves. And while I personally disagree with even that, they don't interfere much with stuff that comes over cables.

<comment><USER5> The FCC (and to some extent, Congress) has been making overtures towards granting itself power to regulate content on the private Cable networks for some years now. I'm wary of any censorship, so it's one of the things I have to bring up when looking at the FCC's new rulings here.

<comment><USER6> That may be true, but this in particular doesn't seem to be any attempt at censorship (in fact it's the opposite) and we can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think the best quote in the article is: "[A] polar bear makes a great bodyguard, until it decides to eat you."

</comment><comment><USER7> I punished them by canceling my service. Why do we need to get the FCC involved?

<comment><USER3> ... because 90% (or more) of their customers don't even _know_ that Comcast has done anything wrong, let alone has the real ability to understand the consequences of what they've done or why it should stop.</comment></comment>