Airbus' self-flying plane just completed taxi, take-off, and landing tests - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/airbus-completes-autonomous-taxi-take-off-and-landing-tests-2020-7 <comment><USER3> A friend of mine, a military helicopter pilot told me years ago, that Airbus can basicaly fly by itself, except for taxiing. It was about 15 years ago.

But then the airline prohibited to use the automated systems during take-off and landing, because the pilots don't get practise. But pilots need those practise if they should take over in emergency situations.

The same is true for automated driving. I always say, we will see automated railways and automated airplanes before we see automated cars.

PS: Because of some comments, Nuremberg had the first railways system to allow mixed traffic of automated and manual railways. Yeah, I know some of the guys doing the saftey certifcations for this.

<comment><USER4> There are already automated trains in Paris (one metro line), and I can think of several places in Japan with automated train lines as well (not the main ones). It's already proven technology.

<comment><USER5> > It's already proven technology.

Automated trains are just like elevators, except they move horizontally.

There used to be an operator on every elevator, but they have been replaced by electronics since a very long time ago.

<comment><USER6> >> Automated trains are just like elevators, except they move horizontally.

Really? I haven't heard of any elevators killing dozens of people lately. I haven't seen many elevators crash, burst into flames and effectively remove entire city blocks from the map. I haven't heard of people studying elevator operators for PTSD.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Lac_mega...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Lac_megantic_burning.jpg)

"Traumatic exposure and posttraumatic symptoms for train drivers involved in railway incidents"

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462444/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462444/)

>>Because of involuntary exposure to PUT [Person Under Train] incidents, the likelihood of train drivers to witness the violent death of a person is much higher than that of the general population, and that puts the train driver at risk of psychological trauma.

>>Of the 193 train drivers, 152 (78.75%) reported at least one PUT incident. Respondents reported as much as 14 PUT incidents/person, with a mean of 4 (SD = 2.83) incidents/train driver.

In all honesty, a train driver is more likely to see someone die violently in front of them in a given year than the average soldier.

<comment><USER7> All the more reason to take train drivers out of the picture.

<comment><USER8> Doesn't solve the problem of people using trains to commit suicide, which isn't certainly going to be solved by any amount of automation.

<comment><USER9> So? Nobody said that it would, just that drivers won't suffer the associated ptsd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Link to Airbus's press release: [https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press- releases/en/2020/06/ai...](https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press- releases/en/2020/06/airbus-concludes-attol-with-fully-autonomous-flight- tests.html) More info here: [https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/autonomy- aerial-mobi...](https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/autonomy-aerial- mobility.html)

Airbus has an "innovation" (R&D) department and they're looking into more ways to have computers do the routine parts of flight.

Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I can't imagine that they are thinking of the scale as BusinessInsider is when they write "self-flying". No one's proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly a plane completely would be insanity.

<comment><USER11> Would it be more insane than a self-driving car? Because to me, who knows nearly nothing about planes, it seems like it would be significantly easier to make a self-flying plane than a self-driving car. But obviously if something goes wrong the plane crash would be much worse than the car crash.

<comment><USER10> Depends on what you mean by self-flying, which is why I pointed out that BI probably has different ideas than Airbus.

To most people (and BI?) it will mean "taxi, takeoff, navigating/obstacle avoidance, landing". To the extent that driving a car isn't "what you see is what you get", flight is much worse.

In the simplest case of flight, you are in cruise (neither takeoff nor landing), and depending on what kind of airspace you're in you may need to: * listen to ATC for commands, and advise them of what you're doing, * avoid weather, * look out for traffic, * watch your gauges, * stay on a heading, altitude, and generally fly the plane. (This part is routinely done with autopilot.)

In short, if it seems easier, it's because pilots make it look so casual.

A thing they teach pilots is: "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate". This is the basic priorities for your attention. If you're pointed at terrain your priority is to fix that first. The point of autopilot today is to free you (to some extent) of that first responsibility, especially during routine parts of flight, so that you can do the other things. Airbus is looking for more things to automate to let pilots do more strategic thinking in general.

Contrast this with a car, which is probably more in line with what BI is thinking. The kinetic energies are much lower, there's no need to communicate, the rules for driving are pretty straightforward (get to where you want to be, without hitting other people, while respecting traffic lights and speed limits), and to top it all off, if the AI feels that it's in over its head than the car can just stop whenever and everyone can climb out of the vehicle.

<comment><USER12> A car can't just stop in the middle of an intersection. Turn signals and traffic lights are similar to air traffic control. The risk of collision is much higher in a car than a plane, this is why you see many more traffic accidents than plane crashes. In both cases the rules are get where you want to be without colliding with anything or making passengers uncomfortable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe one day we'll have pilots reserved for emergencies, but only on the ground like drone operators. Hotswapping between flights that need corrections as problems occur.

Obviously not going to happen tomorrow and needs more robust communications infrastructure over the deadzones of the planet but it's fun to imagine. I trust machines more than people, unless they're made by Boeing.

<comment><USER14> I would imagine something like Starlink could help with the deadzone issue?

<comment><USER15> Can Starlink work with a vehicle that is in motion? And at 500 mph? I had assumed that it only worked with a stationary transceiver.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps not initially, but IIRC, they use "digital" antenna so it should be upgradable to track in real-time. Perhaps even by an OTA update.

<comment><USER17> There is nothing stopping the use of a traditional auto tracking antenna either.

<comment><USER16> Except for accuracy, mechanical wear, price, and size.

<comment><USER17> Price is in five figures, and the others are not real problems. How do you think datalinks on military aircraft work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wouldn't trust a pilot to take over from the computer during a crisis if they've barely done any real flying in the past few years. Humans need practice to become and remain skilled. I'm worried about the effect of such systems on pilot skill.

<comment><USER19> "Russian jet crashed 'because captain couldn't land without autopilot"

[https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/16/russian-jet-crashed- captain-c...](https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/16/russian-jet-crashed-captain- couldnt-land-without-autopilot-9569770/)

<comment><USER20> The jet crashed because lightning hit it, the plane did not have an feature to drop fuel and landed over max landing weight and there are other reasons.

Metro is not the most reliable source of information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Old pilot joke: "The airplanes of the future will have a pilot and a dog in the cockpit. The pilot's job is to feed the dog and the dog's job is to bite the pilot if he touches anything."

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm all for this for the shipping industry and completely unmanned, but I'm not about to fly on this myself.

<comment><USER23> If you ever take commercial flights you are already being flown by autopilot, and have been for decades. It might give you comfort that there is a human pilot in the cockpit for backup, but it's only a matter of time before the human backup moves to a ground station.

<comment><USER24> The Boeing 737 max 8 software couldn't keep a plane in the sky with an army of pilots fighting to save their own lives.

I wouldn't get in one of these until there are better controls on this kind of software, it's not the same as autopilot.

<comment><USER23> There is a long list of entirely preventable human-caused accidents. Is there a reason pilot-caused crashes are less scary for you? Computer caused accidents will be fixed and won't happen again. Human-caused accidents will keep happening as long as experience is valuable.

        Aeroflot Flight 593 - pilot let his son fly the plane, 63 dead
        Germanwings Flight 9525 - (possibly suicidal) pilot deliberately crashed , 144 dead
        Air France Flight 447 - pilot caused airplane to stall, 228 dead
        Aero Flight 311 - both pilots got drunk, 25 dead

and this is just a random selection, there are long long lists of human-caused aviation accidents.

<comment><USER24> I'm not a luddite, if the software is ready and safer than people then I'd be okay with it.

There's a history of software _not_ being ready while people pretend it is and then it kills people (Therac-25).

I'm just skeptical that we'll know when it's actually safe.

<comment><USER25> Therac-25 wasn't a "it's not ready yet!"-type issue. It wasn't an expected or anticipated failure-mode - it only became a (literal) textbook case-study after people died and the industry has learned and improved as a consequence.

<comment><USER24> They ignored repeated failures and evidence of malfunction by saying it was "impossible" that it could be failing in that way.

Unexpected failure modes are the issue. The Boeing 737 max 8 failure being tied to one sensor would suggest the industry has not fully learned the lesson.

<comment><USER25> My understanding is that it was a UX issue - the "malfunctioning" was the system working as-directed by the user, but the UX was horrible for informing the user what they were doing.

<comment><USER24> It was a lot worse than that: [http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf](http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf)

That paper is long, but does a great job of giving the context and going deep on the details.

<comment><USER25> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought most of plane take off, flight, and landing were automated long ago... ?

[sorry, should have done more googling: [https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can- a-plane-land-automatica...](https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land- automatically) seems to say auto-land is there (but used very little) and no auto-takeoff]

<comment><USER27> There are other people talking about autoland, but it's actually meant to line the aircraft up with the runway and gently glide it down, and then the pilot deactivates it around 200-300ft off the ground to flare. It's not meant to perform the entire landing sequence autonomously. Autoland doesn't flare by itself, so while it can safely land the aircraft, it will cause a ton of stress on the landing gear that adds up to more frequent downtime for repairs.

<comment><USER28> Now that's just completely wrong. Airliners had full automatic landing capability for a long time, it's very often used when there's zero visibility at the destination airport.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe FedEx, UPS, and DHL should start first?

Possibly they could go to single pilot operation on freighters?

<comment><USER30> or Amazon with their prime fleet, I see then more willing to test this technology since they love cutting cost

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would not be surprised to see self-flying planes take off (pun intended) before self-driving cars.

<comment><USER32> It's a much easier problem, which is why planes have been mostly automated for a while now.

The equivalent for cars would be if we only allowed them on almost entirely empty freeways and highways, and on designated, fairly uniform and well marked parking lots directly off those freeways. Self driving cars can already do all that fairly well. It's all the fiddly bits that planes don't have to deal with (pedestrians, city roads, weird/bad roads and signage, lots of other cars, etc) that make self driving cars hard.

<comment><USER33> Don't forget planes all file flight plans ahead of time so not only is there more space, but it is relatively easy to check for potential conflicts before flights leave the ground.

<comment><USER34> Flight plans are filed in advance, but a flight plan is just a plan. It's an impossible task to predict where an airplane will fly in advance, there are so many variables involved.

Just some of the many reasons a flight will vary from flight plan:

-Avoiding convective build up (thunderstorm)

-Avoiding turbulence for passenger comfort (changing altitude)

-Unexpectedly high headwinds (changing altitude)

-A cold front causes winds to shift, so the runways in use change

-Low clouds limits arrival/departure rate, so holding is needed

-Snow removal from runways/taxiways

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Part of me wonders, in the future, how we'll view the attempts to automate pilots and drivers.

It feels like a natural step now in the technology but perhaps it'll be viewed like trying to make a robot ride a horse instead of looking to invent the car.

I wonder what the next order-of-magnitude leap for transport will be. Cheap, fast, safe. Hyperloop maybe?

Will we look back at holding on to air and road travel as a bit of a reckless endeavour?

<comment><USER36> If you took humans off the road and made the roads suitable for only automated cars it would be so much easier to automate, its only hard because we have to make it drive with the signals/lines and such that humans require rather than just broadcasting things like the traffic signal in an easy way for cars to understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> And when there's zero visibility?

ILS presumably - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system)

So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in an intelligent way?

<comment><USER38> > So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in an intelligent > way?

There's no need to do so since ILS autoland has been a thing for decades and can be used by many aircraft today (from both Boeing and Airbus)

All the 'self-flying plane' has to do is engage the Cat III approach if it is available and let the old and boring autopilot do its thing.

Alternatively, if Cat III approach is unavailable, it can do what pilots already do: divert to an alternate airport.

[https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land- automatica...](https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land- automatically)

<comment><USER39> In Cat 3 autoland the plane does the approach and landing manoeuvres but the pilot is still in control. Complete zero visibility landing is not allowed. Pilot needs to see something like 50 feet to see the center line and make sure that the plane is in touchdown area. There are also wind limits, almost no turbulence is not allowed and so on.

<comment><USER40> That's not entirely true. Cat IIIc is "zero zero" autoland capable with no decision height required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Does anyone think that if we go to ground-control backup pilots, they'll be monitoring second-by-second as if they're actually flying, and able to save a situation like US 1549? Or even other less dramatic urgent situations? At that point, why not keep them in the plane?

If you go to ground control monitoring -- the only point of it being that pilots could monitor multiple flights -- you are saying that the pilots are there to fix longer term issues (like flight planning, diversions), etc. Things that don't happen on a few second's timescale.

That might be acceptable on freight/cargo where losing a plane now and then is a risk you can deal with. Not with passengers.

I don't think anyone is willing to go that far.

<comment><USER25> Are there any real cost-savings to pilotless planes though? You'd still have a cabin-crew, too.

<comment><USER42> You save the cost of the pilots, and the cockpit (which would reduce the aircraft price and weight significantly, and increase capacity).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Mildly terrifying when we know how software is done at massive corporations like Boeing and Airbus : /

<comment><USER44> > Boeing and Airbus

I wouldn't even put Airbus in the same sentence with Boeing; they are using formal methods since 2001[0], whereas Boeing has outsourced its software to $9-an-hour engineers[1].

[0]: [https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf](https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf)

[1]: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max- software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> How bad does it have to get before the automated systems refuse to deal and a human has to land the plane? An engine gone? Two engines gone? Multiple engines gone and a really stiff crosswind? How good is it at landing in a blizzard on an icy runway? I know it never happens. Planes never land on the Hudson River, either. There's obvious value in making the happy path as safe as possible, and I'm certain full automation is the way to do that, but what are the current limits of automation?

<comment><USER46> Today's autopilots are designed to be as simple as possible.

The intention is that a pilot should be able to fully understand the complete autopilot algorithm and understand exactly how it should act in any situation.

Today's autopilot can't handle any emergencies at all, they are designed to disconnect when they detect something weird. They don't even understand aerodynamics.

I don't know where Airbus' new system lies, but if we actually designed a fully autonomous plane using modern traditional AI techniques (so no machine learning or neural networks; Just decision trees, adaptive aerodynamic models and predictions) then it could handle a wide range of emergencies.

It should be able to handle bad weather and engine out emergencies just fine, and should even be able to land in the Hudson River or anywhere else it has detailed maps.

These are all documented flight emergencies that any programmer of a fully autonomous plane would know about and test their software against in simulations.

The main areas where such fully autonomous planes would have issues are avionics failures, misleading sensors, emergency landings in areas with substandard mapping and unexpected aerodynamic failures (beyond what their adaptive aerodynamic model can handle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Whats the publicly available data on the crash rate of autonomous drones in the military, unrelated to targeted attacks. It is the best indication, noting that they fly in adverse weather and uncertain routes with possibly less visibility to fall-back systems, and on long-delay operators.

I would expect domestic autonomous flying to incur at least comparable rates of failure to the military for routine operations with root causes in weather, or systems problems, given the likely sharing of weather, and IT systems behind autonomous vehicles.

It would be interesting to see take off, cruise and landing distinctly to understand their risk profiles.

There is also the public perception problem: We tolerate a level of crashes in air transport, predicated on a belief the system is self-correcting. the 737 MAX was withdrawn from service. The lithium battery problem in the 787 was identified. The square windows in the Comet were identified as a root cause.

Will we tolerate a 0.0000001% effective crash risk rate, from autonomous vehicles with 400+ passengers?

</comment><comment><USER48> What's the error rate of pilots compared to computers?

If we, today, completely eliminated all human pilots for all flights on all aircraft and replaced them with the best automated systems available in one fell swoop would deaths increase or decrease?

I'm sure there would be incidents where "A simple software bug killed 200 people today".

I'm also sure that bug can be fixed, and there are also "dumb human error killed 200 people today".

I don't know if any amount of human skill, trained for an entire human lifetime, using the best pedagogical methods, with infinite resources devoted to training, can beat a computer in the long run.

Navy jets have auto-takeoff, tons of passenger planes have auto landing (which, apparently isn't as smooth as human landing), and planes spend most of their time on autopilot already. I think some military UAVs can do all or most of this stuff already. What are their accident rates compared to commercial airlines?

</comment><comment><USER49> This is just a deathly accident waiting to happen.

We don't have the technology to make airplanes or cars respond to truly unexpected conditions. We have instead a series of (very) sophisticated one- trick ponies, which isn't nearly the same thing than an intelligent system.

Whoever dubbed ML "AI" was a marketing genius.

<comment><USER50> It's not incorrect to say that automated technologies aren't always better than human operators. But that's not the measure we need to use. The question is does the _net failure rate_ increase or decrease? Say the automated technology fails 2x as much in unexpected failure cases, but halves typical failure rates?

Say an airline experiences 100 crashes a year due to unexpected failures, but 1,000 crashes a year due to expected failures (immense crash rates for any real airline, this is just an analogy). Using an automated technology might increase crashes from unexpected failures to 200, but reduce crashes due to expected failures down to 500. This is still a net decrease of 400 crashes. Assuming other things are equal, namely the severity of crashes, this is good outcome.

Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not rational. Things like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare people in a manner vastly disproportionate from their actual impact. It could be that the public has a lesser reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than an automated flight crashing.

Also, I'm not sure how ML or AI relates to this. It's not mentioned in the article, and I'd be surprised if any part of this system makes use of machine learning or AI. At most, maybe parts of the flight control systems are tuned with AI. But even then I'd be surprised if that's the case - <USER2> controlled flight controls has existed since the 1970s.

<comment><USER51> >Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not rational. Things like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare people in a manner vastly disproportionate from their actual impact. It could be that the public has a lesser reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than an automated flight crashing.

In an analogy to self-driving cars...even if the math is sound, people will take issue until the technology is universally so far above a human driver that the accident rate is neglible.

<comment><USER50> I'm not sure about that. Even if the accident rate is half, that's still an immense gain - over 10,000 lives saved each year in the US. Even if it's equal (or slightly greater than equal), the productivity boost would be substantial. Do we really think that people with hour+ long commutes would reject a self driving car with half the accident rate of a human driver?

<comment><USER51> I don't know, probably not, but to your point about people's fear being irrational, I can see people strongly rejecting the idea of dying to a software glitch they don't understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Dumb question but what is the benefit? I imagine pilots will still need to be there to take over during an emergency, so it won't save on pilot costs, right? And they can already lay back and relax during most of the flight so it won't really help with fatigue. Is the idea that autopilot can somehow take off with less risk than a human pilot? Can a human pilot take over sufficiently quickly if something goes wrong? Is pilot error during phases where such autopilot could've been running a source of accidents in practice?

<comment><USER53> I think the idea is you might be able to reduce the required number of pilots from 2 to 1 for some flights.

<comment><USER54> Germanwings Flight 9525

<comment><USER42> had 2 pilots

<comment><USER54> Happened when pilot was alone

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The hard sell here will be convincing passengers it's safe enough. Not sure if I'd be willing to fly on a pilot-less flight even if the airline passed the cost savings onto me.

<comment><USER56> > convincing passengers it's safe enough

This is a pretty tough problem, different than self-driving cars because people see driving as something easy, but flying is seen as hard (just look at the difference in training and salary between a bus driver and a commercial pilot). Trained pilots/meat-computers will soon be worse than an automated system 99.99% of the time, but in those strange 0.01% corner cases the meat- computer really shines. There are several cases like Flight 214 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214)) that computers would have helped, but there's still a few "Miracle on the Hudson" that any computer short of a general AI would have botched ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549)). It will take a lot of work to get to where people will accept an automated flight without a safety pilot on board, and if you have to pay a safety pilot to ride along, you aren't saving as much money.

> even if the airline passed the cost savings onto me

HA! Like that will happen. The only time that airlines "pass on cost savings" to the customer is when a low cost carrier starts offering service for the same route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Just certified to fly without co-pilot would save money.

Maybe freighter drone at first. Might be easier to get certification to fly in drone mode between remote airfields at first.

A350 freighter seems to be under consideration. [https://cargofacts.com/airbus-nears-launch- of-a350-freighter...](https://cargofacts.com/airbus-nears-launch- of-a350-freighter-program/)

</comment><comment><USER57> How many people will want to become pilots once flying (jets, fighters, etc.) is fully automated? Will it be difficult to find people to "take over" from the AI pilot in case of an emergency? I suppose you wouldn't need that many since it's unlikely there will be multiple emergencies concurrently.

</comment><comment><USER55> I feel like this could backfire from a marketing perspective.

Imagine an airline integrating pilot-less flights, then a competitor starts using the slogan "We use real pilots, because we care more about your safety than increasing profits".

</comment><comment><USER51> I wonder what this means in terms of security of the system? Planes are essentially missiles and allowing them to be accessible via a network could open the door to some pretty dangerous outcomes.

</comment><comment><USER58> >"perform normally pilot-flown maneuvers entirely on its own"

It's the non-normal exception cases where pilot expertise is really critical

</comment><comment><USER59> But can it serve Tomato juice?

</comment><comment><USER60> Would you get on a plane with no pilot?

<comment><USER20> Would you choose a plane with a pilot or without a pilot if a plane without a pilot is 5% cheaper? 20% cheaper? 50% cheaper?

<comment><USER61> Would you choose it if it were 0.5% cheaper?

Keep in mind that when you have a human pilot on board, they ultimately make all decisions about safety. And they have skin in the game. They are the ones who push back if they do not feel confident in weather conditions, or in the mechanical state of the aircraft to fly it. Would you prefer that those decisions be made by beancounters in a corporate office, who are more concerned about not having to refund people's tickets, than getting the plane safely from one destination to the other?

Compare the safety-obsession culture of commercial flight, versus, say surgeons - who, as a profession, aggressively push back on even trivial safety improvements - like checklists.

If the surgeon were killed every time they made a serious surgical mistake, you'd probably see a much better safety culture in that profession.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> What about the air-hostesses?

</comment><comment><USER63> > The European manufacturer just completed flight testing for its Autonomous > Taxi, Take-off, and Landing project in June after its flagship aircraft > successfully navigated each phase of flight on its own as pilots simply > watched.

Talk about training your replacement.

My little brother is starting pilots school soon, maybe I should talk him out of it.

<comment><USER64> You should because it's a terrible career, although really I think most pilots end up bailing out of the pilot career into good industries so in the end, no big deal. Let 'er rip and enjoy the view when you get it

<comment><USER65> Why is it considered a terrible career?

<comment><USER66> Low pay, horrific hours, limited opportunities to advance, doing the same thing a million times, dead-man's shoes, having to work against a schedule, living out of corporate hotels, unionisation, union-imposed seniority rules, shrinking market, pending automation... what is there to like about it?

Top pilots with the best seniority who can play the union game talk about achieving the same pay an undergraduate intern gets in a tech company.

<comment><USER67> While there's doubtless something to what you say, I don't believe there are _that_ many undergrad interns getting the pay of a senior pilot. You're thinking of an extremely select subset of tech companies.

<comment><USER66> Yes my comparison was with extremes... but I wouldn't bet against the average working pilot earning less than the average tech intern either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Poor pilots sitting and watching inside the plane the moment they got obsolete. Cameras now, lidar and radar later for night and bad weather flights.

<comment><USER69> Do you mean the same systems driving Tesla cars to immobile objects on the road ?</comment></comment>


Build Your Next Web Application with Erlang - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.miceda.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/build_web_app_erlang.pdf

<comment><USER2> I tried. No, really, I tried. Back when the whole etherpad is dead thing happened, I spent about a weekend trying to write a clone in Erlang. Erlang seemed a perfect fit for a comety backend server.

First off, I found info saying that yaws wouldn't work because it has hard coded timeouts. Then I found erlycomet. But none of the samples worked.

Moving on, I found nitrogen. This was the one true diamond in the rough. It works, it has real documentation, and it's pretty well designed, at least according to my one day experience in erlang land.

Side note here that both these projects use mochiweb, which is like the new hotness apparently. But documentation for mochiweb? Ha, forget about it.

Once I got the basic page up, I decided to go with couchDB for a backend. You'd think that with couchdb also being written in erlang, there'd be some good client libraries, but the situation is pretty much a clusterfuck. erlang_couchdb was the best I found, except none of the examples in the README actually worked. And there's not much in the way of documentation. The main problems stemmed from there being different ideas of what should represent a document. Some functions used a pattern like {json, { wawawa }} others used a pattern more like [{json, [wawawa]}] and so on and so forth. The document get and put operations used different forms! put(get) crashed!

Primary conclusions I drew:

1\. erlang web development is just too immature yet. Half the libraries you need are just random code dumps in github or google code. There's piles and piles of blogs and articles like this that tell you all the choices, but don't do much to explain why you'd want one or the other. Piecing it all together is very frustrating.

2\. erlang as a language has the lethal combination of dynamic pattern matching. Pattern matching in a static language like ocaml? Awesome. Dynamic types in language like python/lua? Qualified awesome. Those features together? MOST ANNOYING THING EVER. Everytime my app (and by my app, I mean the example code I was running) crashed with a "oops, I didn't find the right pattern" error, it was unfuckingpossible to determine who/what/why was at fault.

It's not the syntax or the functionalness or the strangeness of erlang that killed me. It was dynamic pattern matching and the difficulty of figuring out what went wrong. I'm avoiding it like the plague from now on.

<comment><USER3> while mochiweb isnt documented officially, it has an incredibly concise api, and pretty much everything is a short google away.

        mochiweb_http:start(Options)

and

        Socket = Req:get(socket),
        inet:setopts(Socket, [{active, once}]),
        % Send message to comet handler here
        receive
            {tcp_closed, Socket} -> ok;
            {error, timeout}     -> send_timeout(Req);
            {msg, Data}          -> send_data(Req, Data)
        end.

are pretty much all you need to get a working comet server going.

your 2 complaints are valid, for web development erlang certainly doesnt have nicely documented easy to use libraries, but they are coming along.

and as for the "dynamic" pattern matching, I think this is more down to experience, erlangs pattern matching is very simplistic and although when something doesnt match when you expect it to, its incredibly annoying to find out why (by incredibly annoying you just print it out before it attempts the match, then look to see why it doesnt match)

but this happens very rarely, at least in my experience.</comment></comment>


The Never Ending Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.perell.com/blog/never-ending-now <comment><USER2> I wrote something[1] in a similar vein recently. My take is that we as a species are just not ready for this. We weren't ready for near-free sugar and we are not ready for instantaneous, global communication. As individuals we are very capable but as a whole we need more time to grow.

I like the idea of atemporal media consumption. I ended up doing that unintentionally in college years ago, catching up on 1950-70s classics and browsing through the corresponding Wiki pages. I did the same thing re: Israel/Palestinine conflicts a few years ago, trying to grok the issues in depth and context. From my personal experience it works amazingly well, giving me a look into a world that is no longer the same. Only problem is that the effects are short-lived, like a Habitat for Humanity mission. Once you are back in your own world, that other world is a distant memory.

This is in contrast to my one very short experience using a VR headset just once. I have had more flashbacks to swimming along side a massive alien ship than recollections of Hitchcock or Woody Allen movies. Maybe VR history worlds would be a good remedy to his "now" problem.

1\. [http://chir.ag/201810301545](http://chir.ag/201810301545)

</comment><comment><USER3> Netflix and other streaming services seem to do a good job of resurfacing TV shows and movies from the past. Much more effectively than syndication or cable channels did since they're all available all the time.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is a very good book which talks about "The long now". About expanding now from just the present to longer periods of decades, centuries and millenia.

Really helps in setting things into perspective - [https://www.amazon.com/Clock-Long-Now-Time- Responsibility/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Clock-Long-Now-Time- Responsibility/dp/0465007805/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542478662&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=the+long+now&dpPl=1&dpID=5100znCSNDL&ref=plSrch)

</comment><comment><USER5> Flagged as low content blog spam

<comment><USER6> Why low content when it may lead someone to reconsider their consumption and move them into more historically substantial documents or writing?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What chance is there of a TLD raising prices significantly? - <AUTHOR> I am looking to purchase some .yoga tld domains, and I am nervous about building a business on a domain tld that has dynamic pricing.
Most every .yoga domain on namesilo costs $23.99 USD/year... but some of them like natural.yoga cost $5,000+/year
Is there anything in the ICANN contract preventing whoever owns the .yoga tld from saying "hey I think I want to increase flyGuyOnTheSly.yoga from $23.99/year to $10,000/year renewal fee because that is a popular domain"???
Essentially rent seeking on my hard work that made a "worthless domain" in their eyes "now popular"?
Thank you <comment><USER2> I asked donuts (gTLD owner of .family) whether my domain renewal could be reduced (from $385 per year to something more reasonable for a genealogy hobby). This was their response.

Maybe it's not worth reading too much into the "we can't change the renewal cost" line.

—-

Hi Nick,

Unfortunately, we can't change the renewal cost for santamaria.family

If we ever start to change renewals, I will be sure to reach out to help.

Sorry about that.

[redacted]

Domain Consultant, Donuts Inc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well that is definitely something.

I reached out to namesilo as well, and while they could not confirm whether or not it was possible, they admit that it would be extremely unorthodox and unprecedented.

And just thinking game theory here...

Raising prices significantly like that would be signing their own death sentence.

Nobody would buy a .yoga domain if they knew the owners were self dealing like that.</comment></comment>


The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/ <comment><USER2> It's a very interesting long-form article about disinformation warfare. Not just in the US but also around the whole world. I wish things like these weren't so divisive. I'm sure most who decided to flag this article did so without even having read it.

<comment><USER3> I'd agree it is an interesting topic, but I suspect an article about misinformation originating from the left would be flagged quickly, also.

In the end, 'no politics' is a _great_ rule for HN.

<comment><USER2> If you have such an article please post it. I'll gladly read it and I promise I won't flag it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a software developer, are you sure that what you're developing doesn't have third-order effects that enable things like this article points out?

<comment><USER5> The case of Li Wenliang is really sad. He knew about the Corona virus epidemic at an early stage and tried to raise the alarm. He posted about it on social media. Police showed up and arrested him for spreading "false" rumors.

After a while he was released but it was too late. The situation was out of control. He got the virus himself and died.

It really scares me that increasing numbers of developers write software enabling tyranny and abuse like this.

We must not censor the rumors, but give people the tools to evaluate for themselves what the truth really is.

<comment><USER6> See also Jiang Yanyong:

> _The Chinese military surgeon who exposed the government's cover-up of the > the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic in 2003 has been under > de facto house arrest since last year, according to his friends and family._

* [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/09/sars-whistlebl...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/09/sars-whistleblower-doctor-under-house-arrest-in-china-family-confirms-jiang-yangyong)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Circumstantial facts based writing from a left wing publication like Atlantic, against conservative president. What is new ?

</comment><comment><USER8> This article complains about conspiracy theories, yet it's a non-stop conspiracy theory itself.

<comment><USER9> How so?</comment></comment>


The AI box experiment - <AUTHOR> http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox

<comment><USER2> What annoys me is that the transcripts have never been revealed.

To the OP: you must have reached that article through the same sequence of links I followed when I (re-)discovered it this morning!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, kinda annoying, but at the same time challenging to come up with an idea of how to break out of the box. I'd go the humanitarian route being the AI.

I've reached it following links from the Alien Message submission on lesswrong.com

<comment><USER2> Same for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are two good old threads on HN about this:

Ask Eliezer Yudkowsky: How did you convince the Gatekeeper to release the potentially genocidal AI?: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195959>

My theory on Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI-Box Experiment <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327427>

</comment><comment><USER4> This repeatedly comes up, as if Eliezer Yudkowsky convincing someone to say "Ok you can go free" is somehow indicative of how difficult or easy it would be for a real AI to get let out.

Let me put it this way: If it were that easy, out in the real world, I'm fairly certain prisons would be impossible.

Keep in mind that the gatekeeper is not obliged to sit and listen to the AI- in-a-box. The gatekeeper is not even obliged to pretend it's a real AI-in-a- box scenario and make the decisions he would make in that situation; you can sit there thinking, nay, SAYING "man this is gonna be the easiest $10 i ever made" for the whole two hours and tough shit for the would-be-AI.

I continue to refuse to accept the possibility of Eliezer having won those two rounds without being paired with a completely retarded gatekeeper.

</comment><comment><USER5> Fascinating idea, and quite a bit more interesting, and with obviously higher stakes than the Turing Test.</comment>


Show HN: IceCream – A little library to sweeten debugging in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gruns/icecream <comment><USER2> I like this. For more complicated scripts, I use Visual Studio which has a full debugger with breakpoints and watch capabilities. For small scripts I do use print and this would be useful.

I'd like to be able to easily remove all calls to ic from my code though, since I share my scripts with my team and try not to use non-standard packages so it works on a default python install.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'd like to be able to easily remove all calls to ic from my code though, > since I share my scripts with my team and try not to use non-standard > packages so it works on a default python install.

That's a wonderful idea. I'll investigate the best way to accomplish this. Thank you.

Don't hesitate to let me know if you have any other ideas; feedback is how good products become great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is EXACTLY what I need. Thank you sir (or madam).</comment>


IPv6: It's time to get on board - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/1192894270727351/ipv6-it-s-time-to-get-on-board/ <comment><USER2> The big bottleneck is this: the vast majority of top-tier cloud providers (AWS, Azure, etc.) do _not_ support IPv6 and seem completely uninterested in doing so. Until this changes I don't foresee a tipping point.

I really don't understand why this is. None of these are old systems. IPv6 existed when AWS was built. Were they really designed from the ground up without IPv6 support?

Of course I kind of know the answer. While most of hackerdom is pretty open to trying new things, most networking engineers are (in my experience) ultra ultra conservative and terrified of change. The majority of the network engineering community has dug in its heels like a stubborn mule at IPv6 and must be dragged grumbling into it.

<comment><USER3> >Were they really designed from the ground up without IPv6 support?

Yup. It is simply amazing how many things I see devs push out that hard code badness (such as php ip2long, as an example). Intrusion detection that only will correctly resolve and send IPv4 to automatic firewall rules. Interfaces that truncate IPv6 addresses so information is lost. Who knows how many security problems are potentially added by this code that expects one thing and can get something else.

<comment><USER2> A lot of it's just laziness. Perhaps we'd see more support if C included a built-in 128-bit type so IPv6 addresses could be shoved into a variable.

<comment><USER4> You've actually hit upon (part of) the answer right there. While IPv4 was designed around the (then) new 32 bit processors of the day, the committee that came up with v6 decided to ignore the underlying hardware reality. There's no corresponding type in C (or the underlying hardware, without going into SSE) that can store a v6 address natively. It just acts as a handbrake and makes it that much harder to implement. The question should be turned around, why didn't they design a protocol that could fit into a built-in type in C? After all, we've only just "run out" of v4 addresses about 20 years after it was first predicted to happen. Going to 64 bit would have kicked the can another few decades down the road, and could have led to a much faster implementation. You can't blame the "designers" of C (since there aren't any really, it's just the CPU manufacturers), it's the IETF that ignored the reality of hardware and programming languages.

<comment><USER2> IP64 would have worked, and would have kicked the can much further than another few decades. If I were asked to invent IP 2.0 I'd have suggested just extending the V4 address space by another 32 bits and calling it a day.

But I do see the advantage of big addresses. They give you room for meaningful cryptographic semantic information and stateless auto configuration, both of which are very valuable in big distributed systems and for security.

So yeah, could have been simpler but not a big deal. Things like struct sockaddr_storage make programming it pretty easy too, but most older devs aren't familiar with them.

<comment><USER5> _IP64 would have worked, and would have kicked the can much further than another few decades. If I were asked to invent IP 2.0 I 'd have suggested just extending the V4 address space by another 32 bits and calling it a day._

And you'd still have to rewrite all software to take advantage of it.

Everyone who thinks they could've come up with a better solution seems to conveniently forget that _no solution_ would've both extended the address space while providing free backward compatibility with v4. Those are, quite literally, incompatible goals.

Any hacky solution you do come up with (like, say, NAT64) applies to IPv6, as well.

Meanwhile, IPv6 goes on to address a whole host of other issues, like the mess that is CIDR, simplified autoconfiguration, built in address randomization/privacy extensions, etc.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's true - there were proposals that extended the address space in a backwards-compatible way but they were rejected in favour of a clean-slate approach that required rewriting everything and breaking existing networks.

<comment><USER5> Specifics, please.

How do you extend the address space such that old devices in legacy addresses can communicate with new devices in an extended address space without NAT64-like hacks.

<comment><USER4> This is probably the best historical document looking at the original discussions around IPng (which eventually became v6). Interestingly these debates were happening right around the time of the invention of the www so there isn't a lot online today.

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1454](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1454)

Section 6 (Transition Plans) talks about plans to use new headers or IP Options to carry the extra information for the new protocol in an IPv4 packet. In the end they went for the alternative which was not to have a transition plan, they went for the dual stack approach instead.

The SIP proposal is interesting, it's basically the same as v4 but with 64 bit addresses. They were worried that it might not be enough, of course their predictions about exhausting the 32 bit address space were off by decades.

<comment><USER5> That section makes my point for me. From the text:

(a) That IPng hosts can also use IPv4 or (b) There is translation by an intermediate system

And that "The transition plans espoused by the various proposals are simply different combinations of the above."

Those options are precisely equivalent to dual stack and NAT64 respectively. No method of extending the address space van avoid doing one of the two.

Amusingly, it even predicts the situation today, noting that "Experience would tend to show that all these things will in fact happen, regardless of which protocol is chosen."

The mistake the committee made was dismissing NAT immediately instead of standardizing and approach alongside dual stack, to provide operators with options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > knowledge of where IPv4 would fall short and its 2.0 version, IPv6

This is a comical example of the now common use of "2.0" to mean "new".

<comment><USER7> It's a bit ironic since the "v6" literally stands for version 6. IPv4's 2.0 version would be IPv2, a step in the opposite direction.

<comment><USER8> No, IPv4 + 2.0 = IPv6.

Easy math.

<comment><USER7> But if IPv4 was the first version then wouldn't the 2.0 be double that?

IPv4 * 2.0 = IPv8

Why are we bothering with IPv6 when clearly IPv8 is the future?

<comment><USER9> Google released V8 years ago, now it's all about VP9

<comment><USER10> We are skipping v9 and going straight to v10 in an effort to show that this is a new product

<comment><USER11> I thought it was because legacy software detected the much older versions, VP95 and VP98, by doing a prefix search for "VP9.*" and they didn't want to break them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there any fundamental reason why IPv6 is faster than IPv4? My intuition is that the only reason things appear faster is because IPv6 communication is likely to occur using newer network devices (with newer strongly correlating with faster).

Edit: The only technical difference I can see is that clients are expected to do MTU discovery which would probably result in better link utilization.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's the fundamental reason but the checksum doesn't need to be recomputed at every stem, which used to be touted as a major advantage. (I imagine processing power at the router level is cheap enough now that this is no longer a concern, even for ten-gigabit links.)

[http://ipv6.com/articles/general/Top-10-Features-that- make-I...](http://ipv6.com/articles/general/Top-10-Features-that-make- IPv6-greater-than-IPv4-Part4.htm)

<comment><USER13> With IPv6, you also don't have to compute the checksum twice at each end of the connection, with IPv4 you have one in the IP header as well as one for UDP or TCP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author, Paul Saab, also presented on IPv6 at @Scale conf: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7rcAIbvzVY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7rcAIbvzVY)

</comment><comment><USER15> Not looking forward to having to support geolocation under IPv6.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure why it would be that different.

<comment><USER15> Size of the database is my concern.

<comment><USER16> The database will get bigger but I'm sure it will accommodate ranges rather than individual IPS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey Suddenlink, Facebook is talking to you. Your neglected beta time is up, time for results.

</comment><comment><USER17> Funny, the companies screaming the loudest about IPV6 are the ones that want to track users the most.

I will be dragging my feat as much as possible on this.

<comment><USER18> Explain how these companies will be able to track you better with IPv6. I would think it's the other way around since each device has (normally) a /64 possible addresses to use and routinely moves to a new address/holds multiple addresses

<comment><USER8> With the default IPv6 addressing scheme the last 64-bit are the MAC address of your Ethernet card, which makes tracking trivial.

Also, there is usually no NAT, meaning IP addresses are more likely to uniquely identify the user even without the MAC-based addressing.

But of course setting a cookie allows better tracking, and Tor defeats tracking anyway for those wishing to intentionally defeat it, so in practice it probably doesn't make much of a difference.

<comment><USER19> For the billionth time, NAT does not provide any security as it only does address conversion. The other fields in the IP and TCP headers (such as the connect(2) side's port number, the TCP timestamp[1], badly implemented initial sequence numbers[2], and anything else that is useful for OS fingerprinting) can be used to distinguish between users[3] that share a single NATed IP address.

As you say, HTTP cookies and other higher-level protocol techniques are usually more than enough to enable tracking. Worrying about your MAC or IP address is like worrying about your street address. If you are going to be on the net and ask people to send you data, they need to know where to send it. It will always be possible for the person sending the data to log the return addresses. Use Tor (or similar) for privacy, as your IP is by definition public.

The most powerful feature of the internet was how it allowed anybody to publish on their own, unrestricted by any central authority, so please stop trying to create the _digital imprimatur_ [4] with NAT.

[1] [http://phrack.org/issues/63/3.html#article](http://phrack.org/issues/63/3.html#article) (section 0x03-2, "TCP Timestamp To count Hosts behind NAT")

[2] [http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/oldtcp/tcpseq.html](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/oldtcp/tcpseq.html)

[3] [http://memeover.arkem.org/2012/02/identifying-computers- behi...](http://memeover.arkem.org/2012/02/identifying-computers-behind-nat- with.html)

[4] [https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital- imprimatur/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/)

<comment><USER20> > For the billionth time, NAT does not provide any security as it only does > address conversion. The other fields in the IP and TCP headers (such as the > connect(2) side's port number, the TCP timestamp[1], badly implemented > initial sequence numbers[2], and anything else that is useful for OS > fingerprinting) can be used to distinguish between users[3] that share a > single NATed IP address.

The above are all good points. However, using IPv6 for tracking is trivial. Getting behind the NAT is not. It should not be trivial to track. From a behavioral economics framework, the more steps a bad actor has to take to be "bad", the less less he's to do so. Conversely, the easier it easier for people to behave good, the more likely they will do so.

<comment><USER21> You don't have to "get behind the NAT" to track these things. Also browser plugin versions are worth a bunch of entropy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tensorflow and deep leanrning, without a PhD – part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRouwj_3cYsmLrNNI3Uq5gv5-hYp_QFdeoan2GlxKgIZRSejozruAbVV0IMXBoPsINB7Jw92vJo2EAM/pub#slide=id.p <comment><USER2> I've been wanting to dive into this subject for quite a while now. I've been playing with large data sets for a few years now. I learned only the basics of data mining. I re-took courses in linear algebra and inferential stats. How much time do you think I would need (per week) and for how long to achieve a knowledgeable status in Tensorflow and deep learning (assuming I know the kind of models i aim to build and improve) ?</comment>


Android vs iOS Apps : Basic Development Differences - <AUTHOR> http://digitizor.com/2011/05/30/android-ios-apps-development-differences/

<comment><USER2> Ugh. Don't bother reading, here's an example of the quality of the article: "Android offers an easier application development experience. Writing apps for iOS is far more painful and laborious than writing for Android. Supporting HTML, JavaScript, and SQL makes things easier. Since it's easier to start writing Android apps and the entry barrier is lower, there are a lot more "amateur" apps on the Android Market"

OK, sure, and now of course, the author is going to get in there and offer up some evidence to back the assertions in the above sentence, isn't he? Errr, no, infact there is nothing to back up the assertions - you just have to take him at his word... Waste of time.

<comment><USER3> I wish I had read your comment before reading the article.</comment></comment>


Why Did Yishan Wong Resign as Reddit CEO? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-CEO/answer/Yishan-Wong?srid=X&share=1 <comment><USER2> Call me naive but I completely believe sama and yishan. Everyone's trying to find the "real" reason because we're all so used to companies lying or trying to save face in every non-positive situation. Too many times the boy has cried wolf and nobody's willing to believe that this time it's the truth. CEOs stepping down for major screwups citing "spending time with family" has made us question if anyone ever voluntarily resigns from a high profile job.

Voluntarily quitting is treated as an act of cowardice instead of strength. We espouse failing fast in projects but not in our own personal choices. People are questioning the real reason because they can't accept that a CEO of a hugely popular site has chosen to resign on good terms instead of being involuntarily ousted. Long ago I wrote something about quitting that many of my friends and family loved and hated ( [http://chir.ag/200804242130](http://chir.ag/200804242130) ) but I still stick by it. I wish more people would resign, breakup, divorce, and leave when they are in a miserable, non-salvageable situation than stick around and make everyone including themselves miserable.

Good luck to yishan and the new reddit crew!

<comment><USER3> "Call me naive but I completely believe sama and yishan."

I believe them as well, the big question for me (still) isn't why yishan left but why reddit needs to be 100% in San Francisco -- not in the sense of SF vs Daly City, but the Bay Area (only) vs. having offices in SLC, New York, etc. I'm sure there are hand-wavy reasons for it like synergy-collaboration-focus- blahdeblah but nobody has yet convinced me that it wasn't just a poor decision (one that seems to clearly have had a large impact in this departure even if yishan and the board agreed on the Bay Area centralization).

<comment><USER4> My bet is on YC culture via their presence on the board. My signal as evidence is the requirement that teams relocate to San Francisco as part of being funded. _If_ I'm right -- and I'm not sure I am -- I would hope that's something that gradually changes over time.

Twitter's choice to stay in the city was a big bummer for me, but I understand why it happened. Once Caltrain electrifies and gets a bit more optimized, though, I really want to see more of this industry spread out to the peninsula so we can have a bit of a breather. East bay too. There's an ember of startup love taking root in Oakland and it'd be awesome if YC would blow on it.

San Francisco is complicated and this industry isn't helping as much as it could, is my point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can see people who haven't hit that level of burnout might think Yishan is being crazy or an idiot. The truth is that startups can be insanely difficult and stressful, especially if it's your first time.

Once you've hit the wall the smallest thing can crack you up. I've seen people break down in a boardroom over seemingly trivial issues, but through the lens of years of insane stress it made sense.

<comment><USER6> Stress is a result of expectations. Expectations lie in the future, which pulls us away from being present. Life sucks if you aren't present, so it necessitates reminding yourself of intent and not of unmet expectations.

<comment><USER7> Someone else has been reading Ekhart Tolle lately.

<comment><USER8> Or any of the large number of Eastern philosophies that Tolle has taken most of his stuff from, many of which manage to present it in far less pseudo- mystical packaging than Tolle.

<comment><USER6> Or massive amounts of therapy after having a mid-life crisis. :)

<comment><USER7> Of course, that was a half-joking nudge. I'm in the same position myself: having a quarter-life crisis and trying to read my way through it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is DHH's take on Yishan's resignation via Twitter. He seems to be heavily implying that this was not a voluntary resignation.

DHH: Reddit CEO's forced uprooting of employees outside SF got full board support, but moving one BART stop? YOU'RE FIRED

DHH: @andrewstepner No CEO is ever fired. Everyone always "voluntarily" resigns, whether that's actually the case or not.

DHH: "Yeah, just force those families to uproot their whole life. Give them a week. Ok, two.", then, "want US to travel 20 mins longer? NO, NO".

[https://twitter.com/dhh](https://twitter.com/dhh)

<comment><USER10> It's 6-7 further BART stops to Daly City. The continuing leadership also seems committed to geographically-centralizing the team for improved collaboration. I don't think DHH is showing any insight into the situation or players; he's just projecting his pet issues.

<comment><USER11> > The continuing leadership also seems committed to geographically- > centralizing the team for improved collaboration.

Centralizing a dispersed team for improved collaboration would put them somewhere in Nebraska, maybe Colorado. Just say that the investors want them close by.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reddit has grown so much under Yishan's stewardship: [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit)

According to the graph, Reddit has tripled in size since SOPA. People could say that Reddit would have grown with or without Yishan, and while that may be true, it ignores how completely easy it is to mess up growth, especially for a site like Reddit.

<comment><USER13> Is google trends really indicative of growth? Not that I'm contesting that reddit has grown, it most definitely has.

<comment><USER12> I've always wondered. Alexa has become unusable, and Trends was the only free thing I could find. One datapoint that it works: When I used Google Trends to claim "Reddit seems to have doubled since 2013," no one contradicted that: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8567833](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8567833)

It seems like all tools are indicating that Reddit is growing like a weed, though. Actually, Reddit is in a pretty unique position. Subreddits mean that pretty much every person on the planet is going to find _something_ interesting, so everyone from 13 year olds to grandmas are participating.

I wonder how long Reddit will continue to grow before people start comparing it to Facebook.

<comment><USER14> Interesting comparison between reddit and facebook: [https://i.imgur.com/NUkB96v.png](https://i.imgur.com/NUkB96v.png)

Notice facebooks decline.

<comment><USER13> Anyone have an idea what's the FB bump in 2013?

<comment><USER15> Probably mobile traffic gradually was taking over and users on mobile searched less for "facebook"?

<comment><USER13> I mean the increase in 2013.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I imagine that one thing CEOs hold dear is the ability to set direction. While the issue at hand (where do we put our office?) might not seem significant, it was clearly the straw that broke the camel's back. Tough situation. I believe (and hope) he'll bounce back and start something awesome.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm a little critical of Yishan on here, but I think this sounds fair and reasonable. I won't discount the stress of the job at all, it probably explains some of the things I've been critical of.

Being stressed out is the worst, being stressed out for months on end is like living in a personal hell. You're constantly fighting your animal fight or flight instincts, and you behave in ways that will seem (in retrospect) bizarre). I hope he can find some calm and peace. My experience is that it takes a terribly long time to come down off of a continuous stress high.

Good luck to Yishan in the future and to the new Reddit executive team.

</comment><comment><USER18> The investors forced Yishan to do the relocation thing which was a backhanded layoff in order to keep more.money for the investors. And then he recommended not trying to make everyone go to San Francisco because at this point it is clusterfuck and a bad value.

From what I can tell, Yishan is a good guy, the investors are scum who make poor decisions, and Yishan couldn't fit in with that culture.

</comment><comment><USER19> I truly do not see why people are so worked up over this.

It is a big site, yes. But it isn't publicly held, so its internal politics don't really have an impact on anyone who is not an employee or an investor. Its internal business operations, profitability, and ROI to its previous owners or current investors really have no impact on my life as a general user of the site. Its continued success or failure really doesn't either, if we are being honest. Maybe they will bring a grand vision to fruition in the future that will make it more important, but right now, it is just a site I go to when taking a coding break.

So I have no reason not to simply take the public statements at face value. Certainly, there is a PR spin on things. But so what? What does it gain anybody to dig deeper and push for more details?

Let it go, Let yishan move on, and let reddit's new team get to work.

</comment><comment><USER20> A lot of startups would love to see the kind of growth (5x) Reddit achieved under Yishan's stewardship from around 30m to now 175m. That's some achievement imo!

I hope Yishan takes some time off before starting a new professional adventure.

</comment><comment><USER21> >> i.e. how stressful is too stressful, until multiple outside people and coaches I was working with remarked to me that I looked incredibly worn down for months on end and it wasn't supposed to be this hard.

@sama did just tweet about saying you look tired[1].

[1] [https://twitter.com/sama/status/532684505081864192](https://twitter.com/sama/status/532684505081864192)

</comment><comment><USER22> I've spoken to Yishan a few times over the last year about the stress of running Reddit - I can confirm the story as told by Sam and Yishan is true. Sometimes there is more to the story than what you see on the surface, but sometimes there isn't. In this case, there isn't.

</comment><comment><USER23> I love his career philosophy: [http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/the-secret-to- career-success.h...](http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/the-secret-to-career- success.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> When I see questions like this I ask myself what real impact it'll have on my life as an user of $x. Usually the answer is none or "I don't care".

</comment><comment><USER25> I have quit jobs due to burnout and said it was something else, too.

</comment><comment><USER26> No mention of this, though?

[https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...](https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_reddit_employee_ama/cl1ygat?context=3)

I would not want to work for any company whose CEO takes the low road on personnel issues. That was truly cringeworthy.

<comment><USER27> But the California defamation laws still needs to be fixed. Read [http://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/2igkke/reddit_ceo_ca...](http://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/2igkke/reddit_ceo_calls_out_former_reddit_employee_as_to/cl2ditf?context=3) (particularly those words highlighted in bold) and weep.

<comment><USER28> I see nothing wrong with that law.

If a company wants to say something negative about someone they better be able to prove it.

<comment><USER27> I am talking about the automatic damages and the requirement that it must be fact not opinion for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "[Reporters: if you want to share this URL, append "?share=1" to the end of the URL so that viewers can view this answer without the regwall]"

Or maybe do that be default instead of forcing people to register?

<comment><USER12> Personally, I'm less inclined to put up a fight about that than I once was. I argued pretty passionately that it was terrible and etc, but I've since spent some time on Quora. It has fascinating content. We should probably accept that their growth strategy is either brilliant and succeeding even without our Expert Input, or their growth strategy is dumb yet Quora is successful in spite of it. Either way, bringing it up every time Quora pops up is probably more harmful than helpful at this point.

<comment><USER30> Quora is successful? Their userbase is still below 5 million and most of their traffic comes from a third world country(India), and they still have exactly zero ads 5 years on after raising 161 million in capital.

Quora is an unmitigated failure at this point.

<comment><USER31> You might want to let their investors (who include Y Combinator) know - because they keep pouring money into Quora at ever higher valuations.

<comment><USER32> Pouring money into a company more or less requires ever higher valuations otherwise it would be much harder to find future investors.

The question then becomes what kind of assumptions underly their businessplan that they use to justify these higher valuations. These can make for very interesting reading, usually they translate into a loose form of: for every 'x' dollars of investment we can generate 'y' dollars (usually a multiple of 'x' ;) ) of turnover keeping the ship afloat long enough to pull in the next round of funding. As long as the funding keeps coming it will look really good to the untrained eye. The real issue of course is what the expected lifetime value is of the customers when taking into account the amount of overhead. If the balance here is close to zero it can become quite hard to distinguish the ultimate losers from the winners. 'At scale' then becomes the key, if you can't make it fly at a small size the theory is that the company will do just fine if you just scale it up drastically while keeping the overhead steady. This is a hard problem.

Since Quora's investors presumably did financial due diligence before they invested it is safe to assume that the story is a complex one and any variation on the theme mentioned above will be hard to dig up. The degree of desperation with which they try to monetize their traffic is a good indicator about what's going on behind the scenes.

Barometer: slowly dropping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I totally believe Yishan. Jokes aside, just look at his twitter profile picture! [https://twitter.com/yishan](https://twitter.com/yishan) This man is definitely burnout.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I look at that picture and I see myself a few years back. It is far better to prevent burnout that try recover from it, as it's a pit that's really hard to climb out of.</comment></comment>


The Shallowness of Google Translate - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/551570/?__twitter_impression=true&single_page=true <comment><USER2> For those who might be interested to see the discussion by the HN on this article, it's been submitted and discussed before:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16287171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16287171) (23 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267363) (12 comments)

There are other submissions without comments, showing that the article is of interest:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16285196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16285196)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279656)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16265302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16265302)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16294491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16294491)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16296738](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16296738)</comment>


Show HN: Free API service for crypto and foreign exchange rates - <AUTHOR> https://www.exchangerate.host/ <comment><USER2> Is it possible to retrieve results over HTTP?

I'm probably a unique use case, but I'd like to use this to "fix" the exchange rates portion of Apple's currency converter dashboard widget, and I want it to work even on very old OS's. That means I can't use TLS 1.2, and the root certs are often out of date anyway.

I'm currently using exchangeratesapi.io, which doesn't support HTTP either, but does support TLS 1.0, so it kind of works. However, outdated root certs mean I need to instruct users to manually install exchangeratesapi's certificate, which I'd rather not do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, you can use api via [http://api-v1.exchangerate.host](http://api-v1.exchangerate.host)

<comment><USER2> Very cool, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was looking for this exact thing a few weeks ago, and couldn't believe how difficult it was to find a decent, free API for crypto exchange rates (I just wanted to write a little script that tracked my investments, nothing huge.)

(Also, I'm the founder of ReadMe; we do API docs... if you want to use us, my emails in my bio :) )

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, what would such an API look like? Would you provide xpubs for various coins and get back current balances and transaction history?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing, that's really useful. I realized you did the javascript example using XHR Any reason why you didn't use fetch?

``` fetch(url) .then((resp) => resp.json()) .then((data) => { console.log(data) }) ```

instead of

``` var requestURL = '[https://api.exchangerate.host/latest';](https://api.exchangerate.host/latest';) var request = new XMLHttpRequest(); request.open('GET', requestURL); request.responseType = 'json';

request.send(); request.onload = function() { var response = request.response; console.log(response); } ```

<comment><USER6> fetch isn't universally supported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Your website looks good. The examples in several languages is also a nice touch (expected from API documentation).

I do have plenty of questions though.

Does this service get historical rates from its sources in real time or does it store those in its own local database?

How long will this service be free for? What's the business model that's being thought about?

What kind of rate limiting, if any, is used so that a developer who uses these APIs doesn't have their app go down because someone else is hammering the server with a lot of requests?

<comment><AUTHOR> hi, thanks for question,

> Does this service get historical rates from its sources in real time or does > it store those in its own local database?

Historical data are stored and synchronized at regular intervals in the local db.

> How long will this service be free for? What's the business model that's > being thought about?

I was looking for stable service and i did not find any, that would have satisfied my needs, so i decidide create myself. Current features will be as free in the future as they are now.

> What kind of rate limiting, if any, is used so that a developer who uses > these APIs doesn't have their app go down because someone else is hammering > the server with a lot of requests?

Yes, there are rate limit, currently 300 per minute, you can see it in the response header.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very slick site! In a previous life I worked in the crypto transaction tracing space, I ended up building my own tool to do what your API does, but this is much more polished than my tool haha.

Very curious about the front-end! I'd get many more side-projects out the door if I understood the path to get a polished landing page / front-end like yours!

<comment><USER9> Came here to say the same thing. The frontend looks super slick. Is it a purchased theme or did you build it yourself?

All my personal projects fall over with my poor design and frontend skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does this compare to [https://www.sendwyre.com/](https://www.sendwyre.com/)? Seems like you have multiple features including some conversion so interested in hearing about the differences.

<comment><USER11> It looks like this is just an api for exchange rates vs sendwyre, which has exchange services.

<comment><USER10> I see, when I read: >API also comes with separate endpoints for single currency conversion and Time-Series data.

I thought it meant literally converting, not calculating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the illustration of the people building the application a lot. Is there a name for this type of image? Say I'd like to hire someone to make one of these images, what would I be searching for?

<comment><USER13> Perhaps search through [https://dribbble.com/](https://dribbble.com/) \- this style is currently very popular. Perhaps search for "isometric".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great, I am look for stuff like this. Can you connect to oracle to make it easy to integrate with Solidity contract ?

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been wanting something like this for so long...

</comment><comment><USER15> Where do you get your cryptocurrency prices from?

What's the daily run rate like, sustainable? I see you have GitHub donations, is that covering costs currently?

</comment><comment><USER16> How frequently you update rates for intra day foreign exchanges? let's say USD -> EUR

</comment><comment><USER17> self plug: an easy to use go library built on this with smart optional caching [https://github.com/asvvvad/exchange](https://github.com/asvvvad/exchange)

</comment><comment><USER18> How do you plan to make money?</comment>


Inside One of the World's Most Secretive iPhone Factories - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-04-24/inside-one-of-the-world-s-most-secretive-iphone-factories <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11562294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11562294)</comment>


Ask HN: Financial advice for a graduate student - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
I am 23 and about to start graduate school this Fall (Master's program). Since graduating last December with my B.S., I have been working full-time at a software company. It's allowed me to save a little extra money; money that I do not plan on spending during grad school that I can use to invest (~$5,000).
The problem is, I don't know the first thing about investing. I'm pretty open to all options, but I don't know if I should buy stocks, a CD, mutual funds, or if I should go ahead and start a retirement account, based on my age and the amount of money I currently have to invest.
I've noticed a few Ask HN threads about financial advice, and was wondering if anyone had any opinions on the matter based on previous experience, expertise, etc.
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> The real choice isn't between stocks, cds, mutual funds, etc. It's between conventional and unconventional investing.

The conventional route is easy and standard. Emergency funds in a bank, set up a schedule to buy index funds automatically, put the rest into CDs.

The unconventional route is real estate or business. 30%, 50%, or more is possible, and even easy, once you discover the way. But you have to find the way yourself, overcoming obstacles, inertia, and common wisdom.

For example, I learned how to buy foreclosures at courthouse auctions and resell them. 30-50% in 6 months. People doing real estate transactions regularly pay out over 15% for hard money loans secured by real estate.

Hacker News is great for learning how to create a business. Go to biggerpockets.com for real estate ideas.

</comment><comment><USER3> is the $5k the only money you have in total, including savings? if it is, put it into a good online high yield savings account and keep that $5k for emergencies. having a supply of liquid cash on hand can literally be a life saver.

do you already have some emergency savings and you just have that $5k to throw around? then i would stick that $5k into a Roth IRA with someplace like vanguard. get it started now, and if you need that money back further in the future, you can pull out the original $5k after a few years. put it into a reasonably diverse set of investments, but heavier on the risk/reward side of things. look for funds with lower expense ratios.

<comment><AUTHOR> I already have emergency savings, the $5k is for me to throw around. I'll check out both Roth IRAs and the savings. And do you have a recommendation for a good online high yield savings account?

<comment><USER3> right now, ally bank and ing direct are probably the best all-around options (higher rates plus good reputation/services).

starting a Roth IRA early is a good idea for long-term investing. it won't get you rich quick, but there's not much you can do with $5k to get you rich quick. putting it away and crossing your fingers for 7-ish% average yearly return will take that $5k and turn it into $100k or so when you're able to withdraw. and as i mentioned, if you want the $5k back later, you can get it back, penalty free (though you can't touch anything more than the original $5k).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not research a few stocks you like and divide the money up into a few companies? Might be a fun learning experience.</comment>


Twitter will kick themselves for missing this - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/08/03/twitterWillKickThemselvesF.html

<comment><USER2> Hmm I think what hes trying to say is this:

I blog, I use twitter. I update twitter through my blog, the twitter plug in for wordpress. Before I had it, I only updated twitter...once a month.

If twitter connects with other platforms, it will expand its influence widely. Thats all that the article says, as far as I understand. Blogging is one way of telling people what I do, but I connect it with the twitter platform and that means more for twitter.

<comment><USER3> He meant that Twitter should have tried to be the platform for all similar services no?

That's what I thought as I quickly skimmed through it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lost me with the business plan. What if Twitter would charge 5$/month for the privilege to participate? In no time free alternatives would spring up.</comment>


I Drove 4 Hours a Day to Attend a Mainframe Conference and It Changed My Life - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@LaticiaC/i-drove-4-hours-a-day-to-attend-a-mainframe-conference-and-it-changed-my-life-184381bfc78b <comment><USER2> This sounds interesting. Is there a place that I can rent Mainframe time cheaply to get an entry into mainframe programming?

<comment><USER3> I take it you didn't follow up on this six months ago?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20873531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20873531)

<comment><USER2> Ah you are right, I didn't follow it up, thanks man!

<comment><USER3> Heh. No problem :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>