Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ <comment><USER2> Being a relatively new community, Stack Overflow has been wrestling with these issues for some time. Most recently, Michael Pryor [1] posted a topic [2] questioning the need for closing questions, which, ironically, has been closed 7 times [3], and generated a lengthy (but otherwise well-mannered) discussion with some people on both sides of the isle and many others in between, culminating in a blog post [4] about what constitutes an acceptable question.

Historically, my position has been similar to the unofficial policy here at Hacker News, in that topics/questions should be allowed if they interest/concern hackers/programmers, even though they may not specifically be about hacking/programming. However, recently I've come to see that, if left unchecked, generic discussion questions will overrun Stack Overflow simply because they appeal to the greatest common denominator of the audience, and therefore garner the most attention.

The closing system on Stack Overflow works quite well as that limited check. By providing guidelines for acceptable questions and a mechanism for closing those that aren't, Stack Overflow provides the means to keep it's garden (to borrow a metaphor from the article). However, by having the community, as opposed to appointed moderators, keep the garden, it means that fun, insightful, or otherwise constructive yet off-topic questions can remain in a limited capacity, so long as those that want to keep them outnumber those that want to remove them.

1: Cofounder of Fog Creek. Partner of Joel Spolsky, cofounder of Stack Overflow.

2: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/756650/why-do-people- clos...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/756650/why-do-people-close- questions-on-stackoverflow-closed)

3: On Stack Overflow, users with a certain reputation score can vote to close a question. A question is closed when it reaches 5 close votes. The one exception is that starred moderators can immediately close or open a question. Once closed, the same mechanism is used to open a question back up.

4: [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/the-stack-overflow- que...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/the-stack-overflow-question- lifecycle)

<comment><USER3> I question the wisdom of pure democracy and majority vote for such decisions as opening and closing articles. As you say, fluff topics appeal to the GCD of the population, and should have plenty of votes to stay open.

One of the things that I liked most about StackOverflow when I started using it was how hard it was to get karma. To get it, you either had to ask good programming questions or give good programming answers. That's not easy to do.

Then I saw a question about office chairs with 50 points on the front page.

<comment><USER2> True. However, while there is an extremely low reputation threshold for being able to vote, there is a significantly higher threshold for closing and opening. The term "reputation" is sort of a misnomer in that it doesn't particularly signify technical skill, but rather an investment in the community. With a daily cap of 200[1] and a minimum of 3000 required for closing, an extremely active user would need to spend at least 15 days asking great questions and giving great answers. I think that after such an investment of time and effort, most users would want to maintain the level of quality on the site.

Also, one thing that I didn't mention before is that Stack Overflow has a setting called "Community Wiki" that, among other things, is customary to use when posting subjective or off-topic material to prevent reputation gain. Whether or not a question is marked as Wiki can mean the difference between staying open and getting closed, and a question that gets over 30 answers is also deemed subjective and rolls over to Wiki. This means that not only does a closer have to earn 3000 rep, but it's also granted primarily through on-topic posts. The question you mention, I assume, is this one [2], which has been Wiki since it was posted.

1: It's possible to exceed the cap by hitting it then having an answer or bounty accepted, but this is very hard to do regularly for normal users.

2: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/306708/must-haves-for- dev...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/306708/must-haves-for-developers- office)

<comment><USER3> Good points.

StackOverflow is my favorite site that I discovered this year. Its community is incredible. I hope you guys make enough money off of it to stay open for a long time.

<comment><USER2> I should clarify myself - I'm not affiliated with Stack Overflow, I'm just an engaged user that saw parallels between the article and the recent discourse about how the community should be moderate itself.

That aside, I agree with your sentiment - SO is my newest favorite site, and I, too, hope that Jeff & company are able to keep the site open for a long time. Once you go Stack you never go back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the most interesting part of this is the sentiment of _trust_ that is claimed to be essential for a community to thrive. You have to trust your moderators and they have to trust themselves to act accordingly, or your community is at risk.

I see this exact same pattern in every startup I've been in. Everyone has to trust one another to do the Right Thing (at least to the limits of their ability), to Work Hard and Preserve The Culture. You hear these phrases a lot, but it is very obvious when a startup _gets_ the ideas and has a staff that can still be productive when not hounded and driven back to their desks. Even the moderation aspect is reflected in the way startups tend to do recruiting. In small groups, if even _one_ person objects to a new hire, then they should be out. And if you ever question that objection, you're creating a huge potential problem in the future.

Someone should go grab an anthropologist and ask them if this has any relation to humanity's tribal cultures in history. I bet the answer would be really fascinating and informative. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Dealing with mass migrations is also interesting in this context. I'm one of what appears to be many reddit refugees, and I mainly left because of what appeared to be a medium size exodus from digg to reddit.

I assume that the people were moving from digg to reddit because they saw that there were generally "better" elsewhere - why would you move to somewhere if you didn't think it was better? - and then some proportion of those people didn't take the time to get to know the prevailing culture, and so they brought parts of the culture they were fleeing with them.

Seeing that has made me stop and think and then think again before posting here. I'll probably start to consider myself part of the community after a year or 500 comment karma, whichever comes last. Unless reddit implodes and they all come here.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think that the thesis here is true, but the statement "communities that X cease to have X when any old person is allowed in" applies not just for values of X == "intelligent discourse", but also for X == "group-think leftism", "group-think rightism", etc.

Shirky nailed it here:

<http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

 _The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying "You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way."

Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: "This is for discussing the works of Tolkein." Go in and try and have that discussion.

Now, in some places people say "Yes, but it needed to, because it had to convey the sense of lassitude," or whatever. But in most places you'll simply be flamed to high heaven, because you're interfering with the religious text._

Sometime the religious texts are opinions, sometimes they're people, sometime they're both.

I was a semi-frequent commentor on a popular blog. I'd spoken to one or two of the founders of the blog on the phone a few times, had done some business with them, and all-in-all had a cordial relationship, even though we differed on major-party-politics.

Then the popular blog hired a well known blogger to do their moderation. This well known blogger had a VERY strong political stance ... and brought with her to the group blog a bunch of her alcolytes.

A few times someone would post "politician X did Y and is the worst person ever". And I responded calmly "ummm...didn't politician Z do the exact same thing? Are they both the worst person ever, or might the situation be a bit more nuanced?".

...and for that, the moderator censored my comments.

I appealed to the founders of the blog, they agreed that I had said nothing untoward, the moderator was talked to ... and then the same thing happened two more times.

At that point I gave up on the group blog.

If they were willing to tolerate a bit of intelligent dissent from the orthodoxy, I was happy to be there ... but if the purpose of the group blog was veneration of the religious texts ... well, I've got better things to do with my time.

So... it is true that moderating can increase the IQ of a conversation. ...but it can also increase all sorts of other things: insularity, group-think, distrust of dissenting voices, etc.

<comment><USER7> What the article argues is sometimes true, but sometimes it happens that a community dies because of insane moderators, as the above commenter observes.

It happened on the MaxPC forums a few years ago, where I and a few other long- time posters were banned for reasons that were trivial, because one of the mods -- a very hotheaded and patriotic Canadian -- was threatened by the respect others accorded us.

BoingBoing is doing the same thing, from what I can tell, with its idiotic disemvowelling.

<comment><USER6> > BoingBoing is doing the same thing, from what I can tell, with its idiotic > disemvowelling.

Apparently I didn't do a good enough job obscuring the identity of the group blog and moderator I was referencing... ;-)

<comment><USER8> I would love to make a subreddit that auto-posted bb links and allowed unmoderated discussion of them. bb links are pretty good, but I agree that their human moderation is dumb and heavy-handed. I've always gotten stuck on how to programatically submit reddit posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a good summary of one of the points Plato made in The Republic. Great article, even with the post-LSD writing style.</comment>


Steve Jobs' first dream for an Apple headquarters: Coyote Valley, San Jose - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_18255200

<comment><USER2> Very interesting. although I can't help but wonder, other than possibly starting silicon valley sooner, what would have changed if apple had been located in San Jose?

</comment><comment><USER3> Another thing to be added to the long list of things that John Sculley screwed up.</comment>


Apple Should Buy TV Networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.iateyourblog.com/post/31064809985/apple-should-by-tv-networks

<comment><USER2> Fox News would be a perfect addition to their reality distortion field.</comment>


Uber Neglected Simulation Testing on Self-Driving Cars, Insiders Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/articles/uber-neglected-simulation-testing-on-self-driving-cars-insiders-say <comment><USER2> For comparison, here is a look at Waymo's simulation operations: [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside- waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/)

<comment><USER3> > Being in the car a lot, I can feel what the car is doing—it sounds weird, > but—with my butt

He's describing, incidentally, how professional drivers drive.

<comment><USER4> Can you expand on that a bit more?

<comment><USER5> As you become "good" at driving in harder conditions, you'll use your butt (which is really how you're physically connected to the vehicle) to figure out the traction state of the car, to know if the car is sliding, if it's close to losing the rear end or the front end, if it's pitching down or up, and so on. This is how you know which corrections to make to the vehicle to keep it going fast without losing control.

Pilots of small planes do the same thing. After a while you can just feel small accelerations and change of directions without needing to check some of the instruments.

<comment><USER6> Huh, fascinating. I remember reading a Star Wars novel ages ago in which they said that one of the things that made Luke Skywalker a good pilot was that he slightly detuned his craft's inertial compensators (or whatever the Star Wars version is) so he could feel how the craft responded. Didn't realize that was actually based on real life driving/flying!

<comment><USER7> The common complaint against "new" vehicles and their drive-by-wire systems is that they functionally act as inertial compensators, dampening road feel.

If the roads were perfect, you wouldn't necessarily want them (day to day), because it diminishes the minute vibrations that make their way up to the pedals, into the steering wheel, etc., and those things give you feedback into what the car is doing that are invaluable.

Of course, the roads aren't perfect, and most of us aren't doing high- performance driving on them, and we don't need anywhere near that degree of feel, so the benefits of driving by wire far outweigh the cons of analog driving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Qasar here (x-YC founder and partner). So im building a simulation company. Not commenting on Uber specifically but the reason lots of companies don't have great efforts is simulation is actually really hard. It's not building a web application (tested methodologies, established best practices, lots of experienced engineers in the space...etc).

You can get a lot done (and get wonderful demos) through research vehicles. The issue with sim is similar to the issues with AVs as a whole - getting to 90% is much easier than getting to 99.9999%.

Also, there is this weird thing in AV (and specifically in-house sim) where pointy-haired managers think "if we put 30 SWEs on the problem - we'll make progress!". While raw eng horsepower matters in some software problems, when you are on the line between research and engineering, more SWEs might actually make getting a robust product up harder.

Another thing we've seen is in-house efforts overfit solutions. They don't really have a wide viewpoint (nature of how secretive the space is), and therefore go down paths which are just plain wrong but no one is there to challenge them.

<comment><USER9> Is this really so surprising?

Nobody (well, theoretically someone, I'd like to be proven wrong) has a self- driving algorithm which is formally proven. If we can't get, to use your example, web engineers to formally prove their web applications, when they have all these structural advantages, then how can we expect something unproven (har, har) to be formally proven? So there needs to be an extensive QA test suite.

And for all of these other relatively-mature engineering sectors like web engineering, how many of these companies are really investing in QA? In strong and comprehensive test suites, in security reviews, in performance testing and UX scoring before release? Almost nobody, right? I mean, the only reason why society can get civil and biomedical engineers to submit to strict quality control is through regulation, but no regulatory body has any real idea of how to apply that to software. And autonomous driving systems are supposed to be different?

Mythical Man-Month came out _38 years ago_. The Pareto Principle, not so much as being explicitly a 80/20 split but about how the vast majority of the effort is needed to achieve actual completion rather than just a proof of concept, was originally coined _in 1896_. Suddenly it doesn't apply to Uber?

Is it really so surprising that it's so difficult to find senior practioners in these areas when few companies are committed to that level of quality, and the companies which are tend to be so successful that they can afford to pay compensation at rates so far above the rest of the market so as to ensure that few of their senior engineers ever leave?

<comment><USER10> The reason why there isn't perfect QA for things like webapps is a cost reason, not a knowledge reason.

Society usually doesn't need a formally proven cat pics sharing app, and most web apps, including facebook, are that level of application. They would rather pay a cheaper price than to have a perfect expensive thing.

You'll also notice that as organizations get bigger, they do invest more in testing, QA and regression detection.

<comment><USER11> A counter example is in the aerospace industry. Most software has to be d-179b certified, which requires not only testing with complete code coverage, but also complete branch coverage. Every possible outcome in every "if" statement must be tested.

Needless to say, this is expensive. I've heard estimates that it costs roughly $1000/line of code.

The point is that there are methods to increase reliability, but there isn't the financial incentive to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given time to market constraints and the potential value of having widely adopted autonomous vehicle software, it's not all surprising that vendors will take experimental shortcuts. And it's not at all surprising that sometimes, those shortcuts will result in fatalities.

That being said, I still want this tech on the road ASAP, not because it's perfect, but because human drivers are So. Fucking. Awful. They kill thousands of people a year due to negligence, incompetence, and occasional malice. Plus, the additional sensors available and the software response time mean autonomous drivers can outperform even sober, attentive, skilled human drivers in most situations.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw someone talking scary stuff about what someone here called "semi-autonomous murderbots" in a FB post that appeared on my feed immediately after several posts about a local accident, where a bicyclist was killed by a road-raging driver, who then hid/destroyed his car (the murder weapon still has not been found, even though his trial is now over). If that jackass had a self-driving vehicle, the bicyclist would still be alive today.

So are big corporations going to do kind of a careless job testing live vehicles in a rush to market? Yes. Will people get hurt? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes.

<comment><USER13> >So are big corporations going to do kind of a careless job testing live vehicles in a rush to market? Yes. Will people get hurt? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes.

Hey, another human driver on the freeway here. Sorry, but I don't want to be killed because you want to play with some toys. It is completely unethical and immoral to ship unproven tech that has the potential to kill people.

I'd suggest running an experiment with OPT-IN volunteers in a neighborhood or small city for a year or however long it takes and then coming back with data.

<comment><USER12> It's not about "play with some toys". It's about _saving lives_. Tens of thousands of people are killed by cars every year in the US alone. And the primary causes of those fatalities are the kinds of things most easily addressed by automation - lane drift. Running red lights and stop signs. Speeding. Driving too fast for conditions. Aggressive maneuvering leading to loss of control.

Drunken or distracted driving, by itself, doesn't kill. It leads to the behaviors that kill, like lane drift and speeding and running lights. These are all things that autonomous cars handle really well.

<comment><USER14> When a human-driven car kills someone, the driver is held responsible and faces some sort of punishment. When a self-driving car kills someone, it's not clear that there are consequences, meaningful or otherwise, for anyone besides the person killed. Until this changes, I am fine with having a hardline stance against autonomous vehicles on the same road I'm on.

<comment><USER15> Volvo has the right approach. If the fault is on their car when it is in autonomous mode they will take full responsibility. They have said so multiple times publicly. Then again they don't trust their system enough to give it to actual customers yet.

<comment><USER16> My experience with Volvo was very positive. They were very keen on building a Simulink model for the entire vehicle, which IMHO is a good way to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It should be mandatory for all self-driving car (system/software) vendors to publish their test plans and all test logs for public to review before the car/software are allowed to be on the public road.

It likely allows everyone to learn from all the mistakes and improve the process for the whole industry - similar to the passenger airplane safety record improvements learned from every single accidents/crashes.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps we will end up with a standardized validation simulation model that autonomous vehicles must pass for licensing. The test suite could grow as more anomalous scenarios are analyzed (ex: acceleration into gore point; white- painted trailer truck turning across divided highway; debris on highway), and it would ensure that any new vehicle on the market or OTA update would meet a minimum of safety. Manufacturers could compete on test suite coverage and acceleration curve stats, and market using rendered video of simulation results showing superhuman skill.

<comment><USER16> I hope there is some level of cooperation.

At the very least we should have a standard set of crash or near-miss scenarios so that we can collectively learn lessons when things go wrong.

Particularly when people have already paid the price with their lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't understand why Google/Uber are live testing with lethal SUVs instead of polystyrene golf-carts that could only hurt someone if they tried to eat it. We could be getting acclimatised to near disposable pizza delivery carts earning the algorithm enough trust for 2 tons of metal and a passenger.

<comment><USER20> Heck I don't understand why most people drive lethal SUVs for short trips that could be much more efficiently accomplished with a golf cart aka NEV. Especially in dense urban areas where your average speed ends up being only 10-20 mph anyway.

<comment><USER21> \- People want big cars and big cars are cheap enough for them to get.

\- For the perceived feeling of safety in larger cars.

\- For the off chance that once a year they might need to take some extra large load (e.g. help a friend with moving).

AKA. emotional needs, not practical ones.

<comment><USER22> It snows where I live. My street floods. I have a family. I frequently want to carry a large number of items.

I get that SUV's aren't for everyone. Acting like they are for no one is silly though.

<comment><USER23> _It snows where I live._

I grew up where it snowed a lot. I've never owned anything that sat particularly high nor with 4WD, and I've never missed a day of work due to snow.

 _My street floods._

If the water is above the air intake of a Honda Civic, your SUV isn't going to do you any good.

 _I frequently want to carry a large number of items._

I'm continually shocked at how few SUVs exceed the cargo volume of our 35mpg Scion xB. I've moved furniture for a friend because his Equinox wouldn't carry it. I rented a Nissan Xterra to carry a bicycle box that fit less snugly in the Scion than it did in the Nissan. SUVs might have a use, but carrying things is not one of them.

Until you threw in the ol' "I have a family" (because the children can _not_ be seen in a Volvo wagon), I thought you were doing a parody of "Excuses SUV Owners Use to Justify Their Big-Ass Vehicle". I'm pretty sure I was wrong.

<comment><USER24> >I'm continually shocked at how few SUVs exceed the cargo volume of our 35mpg Scion xB. I've moved furniture for a friend because his Equinox wouldn't carry it. I rented a Nissan Xterra to carry a bicycle box that fit less snugly in the Scion than it did in the Nissan. SUVs might have a use, but carrying things is not one of them.

That's like saying you don't need a fullsize truck because the methheads seem to do just find hauling scrap metal in their Dodge Caravan.

For a load with a constant amount of space usage (e.g. kids + sports stuff) having more space will make hauling that load less of a chore. If you do it regularly then the luxury of a bigger vehicle is often considered worth the cost.

I can and have hauled fridges, office desks, etc on the roof of my wagon. I always prefer to use my truck for those things unless the item can't stand getting dirty from the truck or I'm going so far that the extra fuel economy and better driving experience of the car makes it worth it. Strapping a desk to the roof of a car and not doing a crap job is a chore. Just tossing it in a truck and strapping it down takes like 30sec.

A vehicle with more space can haul more crap or haul the same crap more easily.

As an aside, I wouldn't let my kids be seen in a Volvo Wagon. I'm white trash, not some hipster. A rusted out Subaru is more my style.

<comment><USER23> _That 's like saying you don't need a fullsize truck because the methheads seem to do just find hauling scrap metal in their Dodge Caravan._

That's like saying that one kinda, umm, perhaps didn't completely comprehend my point. Unless you're arguing that a Dodge Caravan has more space than a Ford F-150 (and maybe it does, dunno).

 _having more space will make hauling that load less of a chore._

Yes, I completely agree, that's why I like the Scion over an SUV.

 _As an aside, I wouldn 't let my kids be seen in a Volvo Wagon._

So you're worried about the image you project as well. Fair enough, I think that might apply to many vehicle owners including, to a degree larger than I care to admit, myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not sure if this is possible, but couldn't they capture all the LIDAR inputs from a car being driven by a person, then feed that into the software to see if it actually recognizing objects correctly?

Or even do it on a closed track. That way you could throw all sorts of things at it like kids, bikes, garbage cans, whatever.

Should be able to see what works and what doesn't work pretty quickly.

EDIT: Never mind! That's what Waymo does in the article another person posted.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside- waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/)

<comment><USER26> When it comes to "closed track" and other "simulation" style things, you need to be very careful when ML is involved.

I don't know if Uber/Waymo/Others have "solved" this problem, but ML systems have a tendency to "learn" the wrong thing. You could run millions of simulations (both virtual or on a closed course) with "test obstacles", but the second the car encounters one a child with red balloons in the early morning on a foggy day it might not know what to do with it because that exact scenario wasn't in any simulations.

<comment><USER27> They'd be using the simulator for validation, not training.

<comment><USER25> Exactly. Throw something at it the system should stop for (e.g. a child). If it doesn't, go back to the drawing board and figure out why.

Agreed the test track is not ideal, that's why I was wondering if they could throw real recorded data at it. No risk to the public, but puts the system through real-world trials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Testing in Production. It still boggles my mind that that's the norm in software engineering these days. Interesting how in this case it seems "inappropriate" in real life, and the article fails to make the connection how normal this is in the software world nowadays unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER29> The Uber crash was not a failure of the AI, it was a failure of the UX.

The car saw the obstacle and detected a collision, but there was no warning system to alert the driver about it.

Meanwhile, the driver was looking at a laptop and taking notes on the system logs (which they were told to do), not watching the road.

<comment><USER30> The car saw the obstacle and detected a collision, but did nothing, presumably due to the high false positive rate of such things.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, I feel like your parent poster is ignoring the implications of the high false positive rate.

Like, let's say I had a grammar check. But the grammar check was _bad_. It flags every other sentence as needing a grammar change, anything other than a very simple "subject-verb-object" sentence structure looks wrong to it. For every correct grammar problem it identifies, it finds 20 incorrect grammar problems.

As a result, I turn off the UI for the grammar check.

Then I write a document that has a grammar problem.

It seems stupid to say that this is either a failure of my use of the software, or a UI failure of the software. The problem is that the _fucking software doesn 't work_, specifically that it fails in a way that makes it too "noisy" to use.

And sure, if my job is to catch grammar errors, then it's also my fault. I'm supposed to be backing up the system. But we also know that I won't be perfect and will have failures of attention sometimes. But regardless of that, the grammar checker just didn't work.

And, in this analogy, bad grammar kills people.

<comment><USER32> In this case, as I understand it, they also disabled the emergency braking feature built into the Volvo. Which wouldn't be obviously crazy if they had better, adequately tested emergency braking integrated with the "autonomy" system. But to disable the existing safety feature in favor of their own system, and _also_ disable their own system due to a high false positive rate, seems negligent on the face of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Of all the things that managers neglect to ensure rigorous testing of, self- driving cars should be the worst possible offender

<comment><USER16> I would have hoped that ISO 26262 would help to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Maybe it is an audit quality issue?

<comment><USER33> There is also likely difficulty in testing an ML black-box. When I took the ML class (Stanford's, online), they actually recommended setting aside some percentage of the training data as test data, but this is (IMHO) sub-par because it doesn't eliminate the possibility of things like overfitting

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The right question is not "why did Uber do this?", but rather, "what was it you thought would stop them from doing this?" Current answer: nothing. But hopefully, the attitude of governments towards letting a company like Uber test fast-moving heavy machinery on their citizenry, is changing. Different industries have different attitudes towards innovation and risk, and there are good reasons for that difference.

<comment><USER16> I think that the automotive industry could take a leaf from the aerospace industry.

A lot of aerospace money has been spent learning how to do things safely.

It would be a shame to spend the same money all over again, re-learning the exact same lessons in automotive.

<comment><USER35> Most of the automotive industry already knows how to do things safely. It's really just companies like Uber and Tesla that either don't know or don't care.

<comment><USER16> Aerospace and defence seem to have a much stronger notion of systems engineering than I experienced in Automotive -- but it is entirely possible that what I experienced was an outlier, not representative of the whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> crooked-v "Move fast and kill people" is the new motto to use, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER36> I never understood why the starting point for these projects was not simply to drive a car in GTA V (or some other game) around the city. It would test pedestrian detection, street signs, traffic lights, merging, emergency vehicles, etc... While certainly not perfect, it would seems like a good starting point in a controlled environment that is already modeled on the real world.

<comment><USER37> Isn't it? I was under the impression that this was the first step was simulators like CARLA ([http://carla.org/](http://carla.org/)) before real- world testing.

<comment><USER36> Thanks for the link! That is a fascinating project.

I was not considering the different sensor inputs that would not work on an existing game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I guess this is both astonishing and completely unsurprising at the same time. How can one hope to gather decent statistics in exceptional situations without a simulation?

<comment><USER16> A big problem is that the software engineers and algorithms engineers are pressed to deliver demonstrations in very short timescales.

This precludes the necessary conversations about test interfaces, for example, making the task of the simulation team closer to one of reverse-engineering than of simulator integration.

<comment><USER38> And people getting run over is the result of those software decisions by management, software engineers, and alg. engineers. Don't just be a cog in the machine, doing what one is told to do. Write software in the ways that are known to be correct and responsible.

<comment><USER39> This is important. I hope engineers working autonomous cars think long and hard about whether they want to be on a team that, it looks to me like, negligently killed someone by choice.

The only difference between disabling the emergency braking mechanism and, say, intentionally disabling safeties on industrial machinery is the novelty. I think it was pretty obvious that something like this would happen, and that's why so many people have been making noise about it. Now that we know for a fact that Uber is willing to make this choice, there's (a) no excuse for not coming down on them for it, (b) no excuse for Uber not completely overhauling their safety protocols with the help of an external ethics and legal advisors, and (c) no excuse for engineers working on this for not at least seriously thinking about their own ethics and possible moral culpability.

Some people want to focus on the future. Self driving cars will be great! Gotta break some eggs to make omelets! Fine. But those who are killed before that bright future deserve some accountability, those who don't want to be killed deserve some respect, and the makers of said omelets can bloody well be expected to be held responsible for their actions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Move fast and break people.

</comment><comment><USER41> In my opinion, this is criminal behavior and Uber's senior leadership should go to jail.

<comment><USER42> 100% agreed. Somehow large corporations get away with a diffusion of responsibility. Enough people are involved that it's hard to blame one person. But certainly for issues resulting in death, I don't think responsibility should be diluted.

If 10 different executives knew or should have known that their decision had life-critical implications, then I think all of them should face the appropriate penalty. (Here, I presume it's for involuntary manslaughter due to criminal negligence.) And I think the same penalty should apply to developers who knew or should have known that their actions put lives at risk.</comment></comment>


Bing is blank? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bing.com/ <comment><USER2> Upside: renders quickly and identically in all browsers.

<comment><USER3> Actually, it doesn't 'render'. Looking in dev tools, it's a 404.

<comment><USER4> You can still return any page data you'd like with a 404 status. They are returning with a Content-Length of 0, so no page is sent. So it is rendering properly, it's rendering nothing.

<comment><USER5> Don't most browsers present a default 404 page?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> HTTPS gets me a blank page. The no-S version works fine:

[http://www.bing.com/](http://www.bing.com/)

<comment><USER7> Same here, [http://www.bing.com](http://www.bing.com) works fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The bigger question here is: Why were you looking at Bing to begin with? It has probably been like this for months.

<comment><USER9> 5 people couldn't do their searches today.

<comment><USER10> Interestingly enough, according to Alexa bing.com is #10 ranked site in the US, #22 worldwide.

[http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com)

<comment><USER11> #10 in the search engine world might as well not exist.

<comment><USER12> It's #10 of all sites, not just search engines.

<comment><USER11> OOPS! That's not a bad number at all then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's the latest redesign. Microsoft are going for an increasingly minimalistic trend.

<comment><USER14> Yep, expect 100% blank iPhone's coming in IOS 8.

<comment><USER15> 90% blank iPhones 100% blank Zunes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really like the new design, very good example of the new minimalist trend and "flat" look. It is really able to convey all the value I see in Bing in such a simple and minimalistic design.

Best move Microsoft has made since Windows XP.

<comment><USER17> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6937698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6937698)

<comment><USER16> My comment was sarcastic, I know that it's just a bug.

<comment><USER17> So was mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://bing.com/](https://bing.com/) works fine, but [https://www.bing.com/](https://www.bing.com/) doesn't work.

<comment><USER19> [https://bing.com](https://bing.com) redirects to [http://www.bing.com](http://www.bing.com). [https://www.bing.com](https://www.bing.com) doesn't redirect. It's just sloppy.

<comment><USER20> Ugh, an SSL-stripping redirect? Poor form!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

</comment><comment><USER17> How does a story like this with all of the comment circle-jerking make it to the top of hacker news? I really wish I could down vote stories.

<comment><USER22> There's been a LOT of uninteresting shit on the front page the past couple days. I consider them off-topic and flag them. Stories such as:

* How to defend yourself when your photo is ridiculed on Reddit (this has what to do with startups or technology?)

* Protesters charged with 'Terrorism Hoax' for too much glitter on their banner (same here)

* Amazon issues "Choking Hazard" warning for Testable JavaScript (the Daily WTF is that way →)

* this one (oh noes a 404 somewhere on teh interwebs, let's crack jokes)

all deserve flagging for being off-topic.

<comment><USER17> But what really bugs me is that all of the top level comments should be nested under one single comment labelled "silly one liners".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/)

Problem solved.

<comment><USER24> Doesn't ddg use bing underneath?

<comment><USER25> DDG is a meta engine, it uses a multitude of search providers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 404 apparently

      curl -I https://www.bing.com
      HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

</comment><comment><USER27> It's not much of a challenge to beat Google at UI design but I am happy Bing team is constantly widening the gap.

First the reason I started using it: Google introducing ridiculously frequent captchas for VPN users.

Now there is an option to choose local/international search with one click instead of diving into constantly changing settings menu when using Google.

Also disabling adult filter without logging in is kinda handy and one would think basic privacy feature. Google is becoming more and more user hostile with every change and I like Bing more and more.

<comment><USER28> I like Google atm because it works ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> We found him: timthelion is the one person that actually uses Bing.

<comment><USER30> Psst .. DDG uses Bing. As does Facebook.

<comment><USER31> as do Yahoo and Siri

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> MS should reward you for noticing, rarely anyone actually goes onto bing.com

<comment><USER33> I know your post was said in jest, but bing is ranked #22 on Alexa and #10 in the US. ([http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com)) and gets over 17% of search marketshare.

The top sites, if people are curious: [http://www.alexa.com/topsites](http://www.alexa.com/topsites)

<comment><USER34> I think it ranks highly for the same reason that MSN.com used to rank highly (I think MSN was even the number 1 site for a time); I.E., It has nothing to do with actual hard-earned popularity, and everything to do with default settings in IE.

<comment><USER33> Bing is also the search engine for popular sites such as Yahoo and Facebook and the default search engine for Siri.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The flattest UI.

<comment><USER11> It's modern hyper-minimalism. GENIUS!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> best it's ever looked

</comment><comment><USER37> [https://ssl.bing.com](https://ssl.bing.com) is where they host "secure" content at, apparently. [1]

[1] [https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Assl.bing.com](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Assl.bing.com)

</comment><comment><USER38> For posterity: [http://i.imgur.com/mb3bpwJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/mb3bpwJ.png)

</comment><comment><USER39> Less is more? [http://d.pr/i/FhLN](http://d.pr/i/FhLN)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems to be an SSL problem.

<comment><USER34> Technically, SSL is still working fine. The 404 page-not-found result is delivered over the secure channel :)

I know nothing about the Microsoft Bing servers, but my stab-in-the-dark guess would be that somebody changed something on the load-balancers that handle SSL termination, and now they're proxying to the wrong pool of back-end servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Link to previous discussion on subject: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041)

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm only getting the problem on https... [http://www.bing.com/](http://www.bing.com/) works for me.

</comment><comment><USER42> bing doesn't do SSL. Possible reasons:

1\. Microsoft is cheap. SSL/TLS encryption of content requires a little more processing power. 2\. The Bing API doesn't support HTTP/S. Could be a JSONP limitation. 3\. Conspiracy Theory: Microsoft wants to fill up NSA's snooping storage archive, so they can sell them more Windose and SQL servers.

</comment><comment><USER43> Microsoft's CEO is not going to be happy.

<comment><USER44> Good thing that they fired their CEO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I noticed this a while ago that it doesn't load with https. Can't believe they still haven't fixed that.

</comment><comment><USER46> Preparing for a white Christmas.

</comment><comment><USER47> Wow, these companies are really overdoing their minimalist design nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER48> Someone wrote the index controller in php and deployed a syntax error

<comment><USER49> I would be rather surprised if MS used PHP and not ASP

<comment><USER50> They actually use a LAMP stack. /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Brought to you by the NSA

</comment><comment> j-rom They're taking their flat UI a little too seriously.

</comment><comment><USER52> At least it'll be Internet Explorer compatible.

</comment><comment><USER53> As it should be.

</comment><comment><USER54> HTTPS?

</comment><comment><USER55> It's back now.

<comment><USER56> Not here. I like the new minimalistic design

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> kiko: Its a cow eating grass</comment>


Google's Sensorvault Is a Boon for Law Enforcement - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/technology/google-sensorvault-location-tracking.html <comment><USER2> Location history was both surprisingly good and surprisingly bad in the past, but the last few times I looked it was less impressive.

On the good side it used to be remarkably accurate at identifying and tracking stops along with routes I had driven. At the same time it would have occasional astonishing jumps such as the 15 minutes I once spent in South Korea during the middle of the day.

At some point they appeared to dumb it down pretty radically and it would no longer even recognize that I had been at a location even when I had been there for hours.

These days I use a separate unfortunately discontinued app for tracking location and uploading to my own cloud storage a few times a day.

I've given up on Google not being evil, but it might be nice if they could avoid being so freaking creepy.

<comment><USER3> Can I ask why you keep your own location history?

<comment><USER4> I've used it in the past when travelling abroad so family members can keep track of where I am. Like the OP, I don't use google, because of the creepiness of it all, but hosted my own as uploaded kml files. I set up a GPS logger to save my pos every 1/2 hour or so to keep battery usage light.

<comment><USER5> Which GPS logger do you use? I tried a few, but they were all a pain. I'm primarily interested in tagging photos of my cameras that don't have their own GPS.

<comment><USER2> If you can find an apk I'm using Backitude (gaugler.backitude), notable for using location 'steals' when some other app gets location rather than directly querying on its own. I just have it write to a kml file locally, and another program syncs that folder to cloud storage 2x daily.

It's also capable of pinging a url with location data if you prefer.

Edit: this may be interesting from someone else actively using it for their own tracking and reporting (includes parsing scripts) [https://petermolnar.net/location-tracking-without- server/](https://petermolnar.net/location-tracking-without-server/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's active discussion on another NYT piece; this seems to be a dupe in spirit if not in fact.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19653647](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19653647)

</comment><comment><USER7> Under Pichai, Google is doing everything it can to.

A. make money because that's the most important thing (e.g. China population surveillance projects).

B. Keep the trust busters at bay by making itself useful to the government any way it can (e.g. this).

<comment><USER8> He's an MBA, and not a techie. All he knows is how to strip-mine a company to make Wall Street happy. These people all play from the same playbook: maximize profits and minimize expenses per quarter.

Google shows so many more ads today than 3 years ago. It's all Pichai's doing.

<comment><USER9> Please, lets not blame the business people. Both of the worlds largest surveillance and ad companies were founded and built by "techies".

Your chosen education has nothing to do with how big of a douche bag you chose to be.

<comment><USER10> Is isn't that what you do when you choose your education? I chose engineering because it is a nice compromise between wealth and douchiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Google%E2%80%99s%20Sensorvault...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Google%E2%80%99s%20Sensorvault%20Is%20a%20Boon%20for%20Law%20Enforcement.%20This%20Is%20How%20It%20Works&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER12> I have had Android devices for many years and this issue makes me want to seriously consider an is device. If apple really has nothing like this bank of locations stored and centrally searchable, why would anyone who cares be okay with Android? I feel like I need more info about Apple's security reliability.

<comment><USER13> Most of this can be disabled simply by disabling Location History. Apple is definitely better for not keeping this kind of thing - however even with an Apple or Librem device, your carrier will store your location and hand it off to law enforcement more readily than even Google would, so keep that in mind.

Being concerned about your location privacy and having a connected cell phone in your possession at all times are mutually exclusive ideas with the current state of things. Short of major legal changes it will not be possible.

<comment><USER14> This is false.

This is from congressional testimony in the past month that hasn't gotten virtually any coverage from the traditional media outlets:

>Hawley pointed out on Tuesday that a user's location is sent to Google hundreds of times a day, even when the phone is not in use. In fact, Hawley said, a user's location is tracked "every four minutes, or 14 times an hour, roughly 340 times during a 24-hour period," even when the phone is not in use.

>DeVries confessed that "location information is absolutely core to making a mobile phone work the way that you want it to work." He said that Google has an "optional service" called Location History that is opt-in and "can collect location over time when people turn that on."

>"But Google collects geolocation data even if Location History is turned off, correct?" Hawley pressed.

>"Yes, senator, it can in order to operate other services—"

Google's privacy head was passing off the location data harvesting as something that is necessary for the phone to function, which is untrue. They are using the devices to surveil on people, which, among other things, allows intelligence agencies to outsource an important task.

[https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-tracks-you-even-when- loc...](https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-tracks-you-even-when-loc..).

The actual hearing itself: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwyuCtbK3qw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwyuCtbK3qw)

<comment><USER15> Also your phone connects to up to 7+ cell towers at once giving good location history to AT&T who then sells your location history as a product to law enforcement. We are tracked multiple ways. Logging into Gmail gives your ip and a less precise but overall description of where you are, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The headquarters of Google in Manhattan.

More quality New York-centrism from The New York Times :P

<comment><USER17> I think that's an accurate (enough) caption for the photo, which is a picture of a thing that says "Google" \-- ie it's the headquarters in Manhattan; which is not the world headquarters.

> Google, which already employs about 7,000 in the city, has its New York > headquarters at 111 Eighth Avenue, one of the city's largest buildings that > it bought in 2010.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-new- york/...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-new-york/google- plans-to-expand-office-space-in-new-york-city-wsj-idUSKCN1ND083)

> Google's current New York Headquarters is in the former Port Authority of > New York building. It occupies an entire long city block between 8th and 9th > Avenues and between 15th and 16th Streets.

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/google- announces...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/google-announces- major-expansion-in-new-york-city/)

<comment><USER11> From the Reuters story: "Google also plans to expand its existing property at Chelsea Market by about 300,000 square feet, WSJ said citing people briefed with the matter." Off-topic: The Chelsea Market location is where I had to go to pick up my Google Glass in June 2013. Early adopters ("Explorers":[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass)) had to go to Google offices in LA, SF, or NYC to get them and have them fitted and calibrated. Later, when Google expanded their availability to the general public, they simply shipped them to your home or office like any other electronic device. "... either a benefit or a hazard":[https://youtu.be/o_AXOjlPF0Y](https://youtu.be/o_AXOjlPF0Y)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One trope on this site that seems to always come up in this discussion is the presumption that if it's good for law enforcement it's a bad thing. But IMO that's not really how it works. Things are often good or bad depending on how they are used. If this is being used to target dissidents, that's bad. If this is being used to catch rapists and murderers, that's good, provided that their rights aren't being violated.

<comment><USER19> I don't want to be under constant surveillance. I don't want to be monitored all day, every day. I don't want to be tagged, tracked, and catalogued like an animal.

It doesn't suit me.

<comment><USER20> Then don't turn it on. It's completely optional.

<comment><USER21> It's not like it's a button you can press to "turn it off". Google's smartphone which dominates the market and has billions of users is funded by a company whose whole business model is tracking + targeting users using the data they provide.

Rooting and install another Android OS is no easy task for a normie and comes with it's own maintenance baggage. And even then you have to install Google's proprietary software to even use the App Store.

A phone without the app store is a no-go for 99% of people.

The solution is allow the customers the option to "turn it on" (especially after they pay $300-900 for a phone) rather than being omnipresent.

<comment><USER22> The article seems to contradict your statement:

"Location History is not on by default. Google prompts users to enable it when they are setting up certain services — traffic alerts in Google Maps, for example, or group images tied to location in Google Photos.'

<comment><USER23> Google is tracking your location regardless of what settings you toggle how. They have been forced to admit that much.

[https://thehill.com/policy/technology/433742-google-takes- he...](https://thehill.com/policy/technology/433742-google-takes-heat-over- location-tracking-in-privacy-debate)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqw81WF_eqw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqw81WF_eqw)

<comment><USER13> What they're referring to in that article is that when you use Google Maps and as you're following driving directions, their servers get your location so they can compute your route and offer you better routes and notifications about accidents and such along the way. That part I feel I signed up for and is perfectly fine.

It's been stretched by media to make it sound nefarious, but no one has shown that they're actually sending location data when history is disabled and you're not using maps.

<comment><USER23> No, what they're referring to is that if you use an android phone, either with a sim card or with google services authenticated, they are are recording the location of the phone to provide 'services' such as phone calling and play store access.

The only thing location history toggles is whether your location data is branched off to the location history product line. It does not toggle the existence of that data or the fact that it's archived at several other points.

Take the time to watch the congress hearing and note the very carefully worded answers and why they are worded that way.

<comment><USER13> It was based on his wording that I drew my conclusions, they provide many services outside of location history which do mandate on demand location data, you know? Do you have any evidence that they're still doing periodic location after location history is disabled? I had heard concerns but it seemed they were exaggerated last I checked. Should be pretty obvious in RE if that's true.

Ultimately though, you're still not getting around being tracked, your cell provider collects that location data even if Google doesn't. Just having a cell phone and a SIM puts you in a pretty awful state privacy wise.

<comment><USER23> LMGFY

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/13/google- lo...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/13/google-location- tracking-android-iphone-mobile)

<comment><USER13> From your linked article:

> For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open > its Maps app

Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. In order to download map tiles around you, show nearby stuff, traffic, etc they need to know where you are. So yes, that means they get your location.

But that has nothing to do with the sort of periodic background location reporting used in Location History that people are concerned about. Disabling Location History and not using Maps or other Google location based apps or APIs means they won't get your location.

Also note that there's no mention of play store access, phone calls or any other sorts of usages which seem like they shouldn't ask for location in that article.

They make a bit of a big deal about searching for "chocolate chip cookies" not requiring localized results, but from a technical perspective I think it's obvious that they just send it with the request regardless, they don't know . Trivial to disable if you don't want that though. In fact, both this an the Maps example will happen even on iOS devices as the article points out.

When I said I found those claims exaggerated last time I looked into it, this is exactly what I meant. They must get a lot of clicks by making this stuff out to be more nefarious.

<comment><USER23> > Disabling Location History and not using Maps or other Google location based > apps or APIs means they won't get your location.

Which is impossible unless you don't use the phone at all, hence the 3 hour long congressional hearing[1]. Turn off location history, turn off location services, it doesn't matter, your location tracks are being logged.

I'm not sure what you're trying to argue about since you seem agree with the premise. You think the news outlets exaggerated the fact that Google grossly underplayed the language around their always-on tracking and mislead hundreds of millions of users into thinking they're not being tracked when they in fact were? Okay then.

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

<comment><USER13> What you seem to be saying is that they're sending location data periodically even after disabling location history. That I believe is false. Any location sending after that is by user or app demand.

Achieving this on an Android device isn't impossible by any means: deny location to all apps and those apps won't be able to call the Google Fused Location API. If you want location without using Google's API, allow only select apps which use direct on-device GPS access, it's readily available in the Android API without the need to pull in the Google Play Location Services package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is one of the reasons I've switched to Apple, turned off all my location services, use various VPNs, and often leave my phone at home (or use my secondary work device).

Its astonishing what companies and law enforcement can do. For instance, people are concerned with some of Trump's laws/actions already. Why would we want to give him or anyone in such a position the ability to sweep up whole populations based on being near an event. It goes beyond that obviously, Google can predict movement and predict interests, even what you'll say at this point.

Eventually, law enforcement will be issuing a warrant on the model which predicts/represents you as well.

<comment><USER25> Since someone is probably going to mention it:

Yes, iOS has a superficially similar feature called Significant Locations [1].

No, it doesn't work anything like Sensorvault. Significant Locations are collected and stored locally on the device. They are only used to provide relevant suggestions to the user of the device (e.g, to suggest Maps destinations based on where the user frequently travels), not for advertising or analytics.

[1]: [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207056](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT207056)

<comment><USER26> I got a kick out of Significant Locations when someone told me about it. It says I go to a liquor store every night at 7pm. Of course, this is the corner store on my block, but without context it looks like I drink a lot of beer. It didn't really bother me enough to turn it off.</comment></comment></comment>


IOS 6 vs Android 4.1(+Google Apps) feature comparison - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/google-android-jellybean-versus-apple-ios-6-2012-9?op=1

<comment><AUTHOR> "Round 3: Android Beam vs. Shared Photo Stream" That point is a little bit odd. I would say Photo Stream is more similar to (privately) sharing your Google+ Albums or sharing from the Android Gallery through the share intent.

Android Beam is a very different beast.</comment>


Are Headers in C++ the Problem? - <AUTHOR> https://buckaroo.pm/posts/are-headers-really-the-problem/ <comment><USER2> C++'s refusal to maintain compatibility with C while scrupulously maintaining compatibility with some C _practices_ is the problem.

They modified the type system so good, idiomatic C code won't compile, but they refuse to make writing unsafe code any safer in any meaningful way.

They added new syntax and reserved words, again breaking C compatibility, but they refuse to clean up C syntax even to the extent of removing the bizarre octal notation which makes 0100 do something deeply, deeply unexpected to anyone who doesn't know some obscure bits of lore.

Finally, they moved a bunch of real complexity to the compile phase, something C largely doesn't do, but they refuse to replace the file-based system they inherited from C with anything which would make C++ compiles even a little bit faster.

<comment><USER3> Your stance reminds me of this post:

C++ Modules - a chance to clean up the language? [https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/agcw7d/c_modules_a_cha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/agcw7d/c_modules_a_chance_to_clean_up_the_language/)

In short, C++ is a company-driven language instead of a community-driven one like Python and Rust. Some C practices are maintained because voters from the committee agree that _these_ practices are necessary (for their code) and it's impossible to make a completely backward-incompatible change when they have >1M LOC code base.

<comment><USER2> I think there's an underlying concept here.

C is three things:

1\. A mid-level language, by which I mean a language where you do all of the mechanics but you abstract most of the machine-specific details. Memory management is manual, but you don't know or care about how malloc() works behind the scenes, and you can't even ask. You get integers with defined semantics up to things like overflow/wraparound, but you don't know or care if they're implemented in terms of multiple machine words or even if there's such a thing as a carry flag. It's midway between a macro assembler and, say, Python, which does nontrivial magic behind the scenes.

2\. An unsafe language, with nontrivial undefined behavior (the overflow/wraparound stuff I mentioned above) with no guide rails like the ones Java provides, where if you overflow the language specifies an error will occur. In C, very little checking code of that type is emitted or specified.

3\. A systems programming language, where programmers do unsafe things, like writing values to DMA registers, things the language can't abstract away because... well... you have to write an OS kernel in _something_ , after all. This is unsafe by design, as opposed to the above, where things are unsafe because of a safety/speed trade-off.

Rust proponents want to separate 2 from 1 and 3, and make a language where you can do things by hand and do unsafe things on purpose, but the language has more guide rails to prevent you from doing unsafe crap by accident.

C++ apparently wants to separate 1 from 2 and 3, to move more high-level and get more "language magic" (templates, iteration stuff... ) without making the language any safer in _any_ respect. That's just an uncomfortable position for a language to be in.

My point is, it could move Rust-ward _and_ high-level-ward if it ditched some C-isms from the language... but you gave a good explanation of why it won't.

<comment><USER4> The interest in making _languages_ safer, rather than in making _code written in them_ safer, seems to have developed into a bigger factor recently than it was in the 90s. I can't personally think of any not-Rust languages that prioritize operating safety over ease of coding (compared to Rust). Perl lets you rewrite the global interpreter at runtime, PHP enables decades-old code to continue running, Apple Basic offered PEEK and POKE for writing arbitrary bytes to anywhere addressable by the memory controller. I'm sure some exist, but my point is that we have been favoring expanded _capabilities_ for decades and only now are we starting to favor expanded _safeties_. When taken in that light, it makes perfect sense that C++ has always wanted to expand the capabilities of C without caring about safeties. What else could have resulted from that history?

<comment><USER5> In some sense. I'm not sure when "langsec" started, but it's certainly older than rust.

<comment><USER4> While it is certainly true that Langsec has been around since we invented programming, Rust is the only viable language I've encountered in practical use anywhere that prioritizes langsec over ease-of-delivery. The focus of C++ on features rather than safeties is echoed by almost every language invented prior to Rust.

(I don't know why Rust was the agent of change in that priority, but I'm very glad for it!)

EDIT: COBOL is good at this, or tries to be. Lots of loopholes but it's clear from this article anyways that they _tried_ to make it a safe language. But they prioritized features like "call arbitrary C functions" over safety, and you can just write unsafe code without even a hint that you're doomed. That's perhaps the essence of what I see as the difference: Rust forces you to declare your unsafe intentions to do unsafe things.

[https://www.kiuwan.com/blog/security-business-oriented- langu...](https://www.kiuwan.com/blog/security-business-oriented-languages- cobol-rpg/)

<comment><USER6> Strange claim, have you ever heard about Ada?

<comment><USER4> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem may be not headers itself, but that there are so many ways to split the compilation and build artefacts in a project.

Java and (Turbo/Free) Pascal try to have few ways of dividing the materials: Java has class files (and Jar files, and modules), Turbo Pascal has Units. Both involve having a certain namespace correspond to some file the compiler can find and compile, and where you then use the definition from the compiled file.

Python and JavaScript/TypeScript have modules as namespaces that correspond to one source file - if you import a symbol from a module "bar/foo", the compiler will look in "bar/foo.js" (or a dozen places in node_modules, or in a dozen eggs), and if foo.js doesn't have that symbol you know something is wrong instead of wondering if there are other files that contribute to that namespace.

Lisp and C/C++ have a tradition that goes back far enough that compilation units and namespaces (packages in Common Lisp) are disjoint things. C++ is on the path to making this _more_ complicated with the addition of modules that create another portioning of the compiled stuffs without forcing the others (headers, namespaces, source files) to agree with it.

So, headers are not the problem - it's that for a given entity in the source code (namespace, class, function, whatever) it's not automatically clear to the compiler where to look for it. Which effectively leads to the funky ball of dependencies between source files being variously manually specified in (auto-, C-)make files as well as extracted automatically and still being error-prone.

<comment><USER8> I think you hit on what I've felt about learning Python then trying to learn c++.

In python, all code paths are "statically discoverable". Meaning if a symbol exists in a file, I can find where that symbol comes from in that file. And if it's an import, the import tells me where to look for it in another library or relative path.

In c++ when I was trying to learn it was a lot of, "okay so why is 'foo' available here?" "Because it's imported by the 'bar' library that you're importing at the top of the header."

<comment><USER9> > In python, all code paths are "statically discoverable".

That's not exactly true. modules can monkey-patch themselves and other modules; they can override the import mechanism to do all sorts of things. It's usually considered bad form, but .. it's possible, and some people like it that way.

<comment><USER8> Yes you're right. But in the first five years of learning I've never run into that conventionally. Where I have, it was made painfully obvious by comments.

Practically speaking, when it comes to learning by reading code, it's invaluable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem with headers (in C++) isn't #include. It's the bleed-through of macros (and pragmas, I guess) from headers into subsequent headers. Without that, precompiled headers would be an obvious win always and every time.

Macros are side effects and there's really no sane way to constrain them (currently), but C++ modules are an attempt to do so.

<comment><USER11> In my experience, precompiled headers (as implemented by g++ at least) don't help as much as one might hope. I suspect that they only cache the parsed AST, as opposed to generated code. I wouldn't be surprised to find that generating optimized code is a lot more computationally intensive than parsing.

<comment><USER12> For complex projects, precompiled headers are massive, and sometimes slow you down!

In several big C++ source bases that I've worked with, we reversed the process - at compile time, concatenate all the source files together, include everything you need just once. It's massively faster than precompiled headers, at the cost of sometimes running out of compiler heap, and inability to parallelize builds. The loss of parallelism was offset by the much faster compilation, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fixing this is one of the killer features of the "Blaze" family of build- systems (Buck, Bazel, Pants, Please), since they do not defer the actual build execution to another program (such as Make or Ninja).

Response from a CMake dev:

> Well, by the time CMake could discover -MM flags, the build has already been > written and CMake (the program) is out of the picture. Linking to a CMake > target is also not just "add this library to your link line" either, so a > simple response file written somewhere during the build for the linker to > use is not sufficient (nevermind that this file may be updated by any TU > compilation rule in a library target, something build tools tend not to like > too much). I guess combination configure/generate build tools can do this, > but CMake is a build generator and does not execute the build at all.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/auyl07/are_headers_rea...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/auyl07/are_headers_really_the_problem/ehdm36y/)

<comment><USER14> ...Is it? Maybe blaze/bazel changed a lot in the past several years, but I remember it didn't even auto-import headers. You have to manually specify _every header file_ in your dependency list. (To be precise, for every header you include, your dependency must include some BUILD target that contains that header.)

So you don't ever get "undefined symbol"... you instead get "cannot include header"! Not sure if that's an improvement. :/

<comment><USER13> The header lists are specified either as a list of directories (Bazel) or using globs (Buck). You must have been using quite an old version!

Yes, it is a big improvement. The error message tells you exactly what you failed to do. If a target does not export all of its headers correctly, then fixing that fixes it for everyone consuming that target, which scales well to large code-bases.

It is not a coincidence that so many companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Thought Machine) have converged on this design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > If you include header X then you must also link to the library target that X > belongs to

Visual Studio's solution: #pragma lib(foo). That's that problem solved. This is not the big problem.

The big problems are a mix of 3 entangled problems:

\- textual substitution by macros with cross-file scope: the behaviour of an included file depends entirely on previous files.

\- object memory layout and API are unnecessarily bound together, so you can't change so much as a single function argument without completely recompiling all dependent code.

\- a number of things (mostly templates but some strings) are duplicated hugely beacause they're defined in the headers, and then de-duplicated at link time. So compilation ends up disk-bound while the compiler writes out lots of data that will be thrown away.

So, you can change one byte in a header high up the dependency chain and recompile most of your code. Slowly.

<comment><USER16> > Visual Studio's solution: #pragma lib(foo). That's that problem solved.

Not even close to that easy; platform differences make it a pain to find libraries consistently. (Windows tends to make it most difficult, with Apple close behind for a few libraries.)

<comment><USER15> Yeah, that gets specified "outside the language" in the compiler arguments for link path and include path.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Patient: "Doctor Doctor, it hurts when I do this" Doctor: "Don't do that"

This is arguing that there is a solution to manage a problem, and that because there are (caveated, external, third party) ways to manage it, there isn't a problem. Yes, there are ways to mitigate some of the problems of headers, but all the bookkeeping is part of the criticism.

And there's still duplicate definitions in separate places to keep in sync, you end up having to move all your code into headers if you want to make things generic (with compile time repercussions), and it's easy to mismatch header versions with the libraries for the same file.

Linking to the libX library for X.h is the least problematic of the header problems/criticisms.

</comment><comment><USER18> IMO what is needed is a preprocessor with reference semantics that are conformable to the modern notion of modules. I.e. a preprocessor that thinks that a reference is defined when it's defined in a module included by this one, instead of "before this point in a translation unit." This way it's adequate to include a list of defined symbols in a pre-compiled header, and reuse them when including that module to some other module.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think headers aren't "the" problem, I kind of want to say they are "a" problem, but they aren't really even that. I think I'll go with that they can be really annoying. They are quite a powerful mechanisim, but can be difficult to understand when you have complex header hierarchies (as often found in embedded systems) and introduce a bit more friction when coding.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think they are a good fit for C and C++. Headers allow more fine-grained control of module inter-dependency and are great for targeting different processor architectures. Java, C#, etc. don't have to deal with that to the same degree so there's no direct comparison.

<comment><USER21> Java has the Foo/IFoo pattern. It's not a direct equivalence, but if you want to separate interface from implementation, you have that option.

<comment><USER22> > Java has the Foo/IFoo pattern.

Are you thinking of C#?

<comment><USER10> What? There's no real difference except spelling (aka syntax and convention).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well there are plenty of header-only libraries that put their entire code in headers and you do not need to link to anything. You can do this in C too but it's much more popular in C++ with templates. I'm surprised the author doesn't mention this.

<comment><USER13> This blows up compilation times, so not really an option for larger projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > _Headers are not necessarily evil._

Haven't demonstrated that headers are not bad. Just that there's a involved, error-prone, half-manual, workaround to "automate" their discovery and use.

</comment><comment><USER25> Idk if you inline some functions in the header and then rely on the compiler to automatically pull the right version in then you could be in for some hard to find bugs.

</comment><comment><USER26> Aren't modules supposed to improve the situation?

</comment><comment><USER27> > In summary: Headers are not necessarily evil.

The headline by OP seems like a clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER28> Going to invoke Betteridges Law here and say No.

<comment><USER29> I don't know if they're _the_ problem, but they're _a_ problem.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Strimpack – roll your own livestreaming portal, chat, subs, and forum - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/j4p3/strimpack <comment><USER2> > And because the livestreaming platforms [obviously referring to Twitch] take > an egregious chunk of the money people tip streamers, even after they've > ground their way to "partnered" status.

> The application has lots of external dependencies. In particular, you need: > > Twitch - a Twitch account with an application registered on their > developer console.

I'd be really interested to see what happened if a popular streamer used a platform like this to completely bypass how Twitch supports itself, while still using Twitch's bandwidth / services / etc. Presumably Twitch would ignore it until it became a problem, and then change their TOS to disallow it.

<comment><USER3> Back when Twitch was Justin.tv, we put in a lot of effort to make sure we only sent video to a copy of our player that was successfully showing our ad placements. I imagine that similar protections are still in place, but it's been almost a decade since I worked there.

<comment><USER4> There exist open source clients which can play Twitch livestreams, so I'm not sure how much effort is being concentrated there anymore: [https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink](https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How convenient - I just finished a rough mockup for a site that matches this perfectly. (Livestream / live podcasts for color commentary / announcing during live sports)

[https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/1sSM6zloqJ4eGOywLD4n...](https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/1sSM6zloqJ4eGOywLD4nrj_thM50Rv2rp/page/I2FR)

</comment><comment><USER6> Setting up a live streaming site is easy, we did whitelabel sites for Camarades.com a long time ago. The hard part is - just like with chatroulette clones - to keep it clean (if that's your objective). If you don't keep a very good eye out you'll be running a fetish porn site in an eyeblink, and possibly an illegal one at that.

<comment><USER7> I understood the objective to be for each streamer to run their own site where only one person or group does the streaming and people just watch and interact. I think keeping the text chat clean is pretty much the same as keeping a forum (like based on discourse) clean. Thoughtful defaults and good tools for moderators should be enough for many cases.

From what I've heard it is bandwidth that costs the most? Like $20 a month gets me a droplet on digital ocean with 4TB transfer, 4GB memory, and 80GB of storage. If you have 25 concurrent viewers each watching 100 hours of Livestream every month and each hour of 1080p60 is 1GB, how much ___ will you need?

25 * 100 * 1GB = about 2.5TB? Does that sound about right?

<comment><USER8> If you're streaming through twitch, isn't it essentially 1 viewer, since you're just uploading it to their servers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love the narrative style!

      setup instructions

      1. Get a server. Not a tiny one.
      ...

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes, interviewing does suck. Cool project and I hope that it gets you noticed. I love seeing these cool one-off, hyper focused things on github.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ohh haha. I thought this was a replacement for twitch or similar, but it's just the chat/subs/forum, the most important part, the live streaming, is not part of this project.

<comment><USER12> If folks would like to serve their own live streaming video, I worked on this Docker image for my church which provides a few HLS streams from an incoming RTMP stream:

[https://github.com/awakening-church/awakening-nginx- rtmp/tre...](https://github.com/awakening-church/awakening-nginx- rtmp/tree/experimental)

You can hack on this foundation to create your own solution.

Also, you can use Terraform to easily run this on Azure:

[https://github.com/awakening-church/live- infrastructure](https://github.com/awakening-church/live-infrastructure)

Or DigitalOcean:

[https://github.com/awakening-church/live- infrastructure/tree...](https://github.com/awakening-church/live- infrastructure/tree/digitalocean)

It's fairly cheap, costs about 25 cents an hour on DigitalOcean. Compare to hundreds of dollars for some other live streaming services.

<comment><USER13> I feel like that with a geographically broad area you're not going to want to host this yourself and MUCH rather use someone's services for VOD/live streaming. Doing CDN and stuff for video seems like a pain. Additionally for live video.

<comment><USER14> Huge price difference fixed bandwidth cost vs. CDN.

<comment><USER15> Nah. $.04/GB is practical.

[https://www.keycdn.com/pricing](https://www.keycdn.com/pricing)

<comment><USER16> That's still pretty high if we're just considering raw transit costs. The highest rate I would be comfortable paying for a CDN would be $0.015/GB ($0.03/GB in Asia), that's still way above market rates for most IP transit right now.

Much better deal (and probably way better CDN) than AWS provides, but AWS egress rates are suicidally bad, especially for high bandwidth stuff like video. If you're doing any serious streaming, avoid AWS like the plague unless you like livestreaming yourself filing for bankruptcy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks awesome.

At my company [1], we work with organizations who do livestreaming to enable live Q&A, moderated chats and polls. If anyone's interested in hooking up such interactivity to your own livestreams, drop me a message!

[1] [https://www.pigeonholelive.com](https://www.pigeonholelive.com)

</comment><comment><USER18> I would say if you really wanted to make this easier for streamers to use you could use helm to package up a kubernetes configuration (a bit of work) and then put it into something like google cloud launcher so you could just point and click to set this up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, one-click deploy would be the next step. Hadn't seen helm, I was debating between k8s and rancher.

If possible I'd like to avoid an opinionated hosting service like Google Cloud Launcher or AWS ECS, but I recognize that it's probably necessary. The only open source one-click deploy I've seen is a church service[1], but the author of that project accomplished it by with a separate app that provisions the necessary DO droplets via API and presenting the credentials to the user.

1: [https://github.com/churchio/onebody](https://github.com/churchio/onebody)

<comment><USER19> Rancher 2.0 is a Certified Kubernetes implementation:

[https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=landscape&landscape=certi...](https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=landscape&landscape=certified- kubernetes-distribution,certified-kubernetes-hosted,certified-kubernetes- installer&selected=rancher)

[Disclosure: I run the Certified Kubernetes program.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Really cool but I have a question: Does the site ask users to connect to any third-party domains or run javascript from third parties? If so, what information do they get about users?

</comment><comment><USER21> This is effectively what I have seen a couple of somewhat popular YouTube shows do to combat the toxicity of the platform. Embed the live video in their page, and provide their own realtime chat to the stream on their own site, complete with merch store/other content/etc.

I think with Twitch it's not really necessary. The community itself is generally, with exceptions, not toxic (being curated by streamers).

The 'who made this and why' seems to indicate some minor antagonism for the platform financials. Their take on bits transactions is definitely abhorrent, but they haven't blocked 3rd party transactions yet. People know they are getting screwed when they buy bits, but they have other options.

I hated bits when they came out, but they fill a bit of a niche role that a streamlabs/paypal donation doesn't. If the end goal is to shift money from viewer to streamer, bits smooths a few obstacles.

Once a bits purchase is made, they can be spent on any streamer instead of repeating the transaction for every person. The actual tip itself is an almost frictionless transaction, just a few keystrokes in the chatbox. This avoids the bounce rates seen when a user has to open a separate browser window, possibly log into paypal, or providing information to a third party site, etc. Most streamers I've discussed this with privately have said that they agree on the rates, but that it's still been a net benefit (sorry, this is just anecdotal). The worry of course is that it's a precursor to complete control of transactions (eg, banning paypal/streamlabs/etc) despite claims this won't occur.

But all of that aside.. I think the project would get a lot more traction if you at least appeared to try to work WITH the platform instead of against it.

There's a lot of value you can add here just to augment the system instead of combating it. Help the streamer build their online profile. Some thoughts:

* Keep the in-line stream, embedded with the Twitch chat if possible.

* Build a CMS system for the streamer to showcase custom content while he or she is offline.

* Add a merch store or integration.

* Embed the streamer's twitter feed.

* Show off their Discord.

* Keep the forum.

* Add a tool to sync up community permissions across various tools (twitch permission, discord, steam groups, etc).

* Show off their YouTube content.

* Add a calendar

* Show when the streamer's friends are online and streaming.

* Make all of this modular so streamers can pick-and-choose

* Optional WYSIWYG style edits (I know, but.. it makes this more accessible to users)

There's a lot more. Some of the above may be bad ideas, and I'm certain some are not for every streamer (and I don't think should just turn on all-of-the- things if they did exist).

I love the idea of giving streamers a way to build further upon their Twitch audience. It could increase engagement and help Twitch. It could also help reduce a streamer's dependency on a single platform, eventually, without outright confronting that platform.

</comment><comment><USER22> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER23> Taking on twitch? I dig it

<comment><USER24> Taking on twitch by using twitch.. bold move.</comment></comment>


How the BBC lost the plot on Brexit - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/07/12/how-the-bbc-lost-the-plot-on-brexit/ <comment><USER2> The gist of the article seems to be that the beeb knew stuff and refused to tell people cos it was frightened of the mob like, populist attack dogs. Now the attack dogs are real - just like in a proper dictatorship- for example the front page headlines calling our entire supreme court traitors and publishing their addresses (that should have been jail time for the editors and shows what a scary time it was two years ago.)

But the beeb made its usual failure of trying to be even handed (you know here are 20,000 scientists warning of climate change, here is one old fool we dug up - let's give them equal screen time)

But the main failure was that _no one_ knew anything. No one popped up with a list of the 750 euro agencies we would leave - no one had the impact statements on every industrial sector (we still famously don't).

There just was no information on the downside. And this was apparently by design on the orders of the PM Cameron tomstop it looking like the government was being used to scare people into his side

So recent Danny Dyer hilariously blamed Cameron for all this mess - and yes it is his fault. But it is also Boris Johnson's faukt for making it mainstream to vote leave (we could all see what shits Farage and the millionaire bloke who is in the picture were - and they would have stayed at 15% were it not for johnson

Finally parliament let a referendum go through to an Act with the awful wording and consequences (it's no good to say no one believed leave might win - parliament is for those kind of what ifs)

so - no it's not the beebs fault - not fully. and their sins are minor

\- The intellectual arguments against brexit were either mostly unknown (the sheer depth to which we are joined to Europe (cf the litany of things that will go sideways if we become a third country - not just the obvious stuff like queues at Dover port which was well discussed, but transporting nuclear material necessary for medicine or access to military grade GPS satellites.)

<comment><USER2> that needs a fair bit of polishing ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To save others time, this article is about how the BC should have gone even further to support the "Remain" campaign and how it should have fought against "Leave" and their alleged dishonesty, nothing more.

</comment><comment><USER4> The BBC has slipped. They are reliable about presenting only one side to a story, the left side.

</comment><comment><USER5> The establishment in the UK which the BBC is very much a part of is heavily remain. Teresa May is also very much a Remainer and is trying to sell a deal to the public that would exit the UK from the EU in name only. Cameron stood down from the Prime Ministership because he didn't believe Brexit was the correct decision. If May wasn't interested in carrying out Brexit she should have followed Cameron's example and not taken the leadership.

As someone living in the UK I think the EU holding trade with the EU as a hostage is disgraceful. I understand the EU has real concerns about rule harmonisation it wants to protect and the UK leaving the Union is going to put pressure on that. However, let us say the UK exited the EU tomorrow. What effect would this have on the rules the UK operates under and would this negatively effect the EU enough that it would make sense for them to end trade with the UK? My guess is there would be very little initial change in the law in the UK. Initially I'm guessing the UK would end the jurisdiction of the ECJ, end free labour movement of EU citizens to the UK and stop taking new legislation from the EU. However, note that on day 1 probably all of the laws effecting trade and harmonisation of rules would still most likely be in place. It would make more sense in the no-deal situation for the EU to keep the current free trade in place and introduce exceptions as the UK begins to drift from the common market rules or negotiates free-er trade agreements with other countries that would undermine the harmonisation rules.</comment>


Merlin Mann "The Philosopher" on Hypocrisy - <AUTHOR> http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/526558637/merlin-mann-the-philosopher-on-hypocrisy

<comment><USER2> I've always liked Neal Stephenson's take, from "The Diamond Age": [http://steveedney.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/hypocrisy- relativ...](http://steveedney.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/hypocrisy-relativism- and-the-diamond-age/)

(Note: that was just the first link I found, I'm not trying to start a debate about the rest of the blog post)

<comment><USER3> I like Stephenson's distinction as well, but have often found it difficult to get other people to understand it. Regardless, thanks for posting the link. It prompted me to buy a first edition of The Diamond Age to replace my exceedingly battered paperback. The Kindle edition would probably be more practical, but it's a book that belongs on a bookshelf!</comment></comment>


The internet doesn't suck - <AUTHOR> https://marksurman.commons.ca/2018/01/09/internet-doesnt-suck/ <comment><USER2> So the problem is the signal-vs-noise ratio. There exists good stuff out there, you just need to know where to look. But maybe we're underestimating the impact of a low SNR. After all, life 500 years ago was also great, you just needed to know where to look, you just needed to move to the right city.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Who would have thought, 20 years ago, kids would be live streaming their concert to a working dad with a handheld device?</comment>


Despite the downturn, entrepreneurs are enjoying a renaissance the world over - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13216025

<comment><USER3> An excellent article on the whole - as is often the case with Economist articles.

It kind of lacks a point, though. It's a shame that we only have the introductory article. I'm sure the "special report" (which usually consists of several articles) will have a lot more meaty recommendations.

Fortunately, I'm subscribed (it's the only magazine to which I subscribe) and so I'll read it when it comes in the post tomorrow :-)

</comment><comment><USER4> When I voiced a positive opinion of the bad stock market, the people in my office became outraged and I was ostracized and ridiculed for being Un- American.

The bad stock market and bad economy in general are perfect for people in my position who are just starting out and are looking for an opportunity.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but it really sucks for a whole lot more people who are not just starting out and have lost their retirement. I would be more sensitive about that.

<comment><USER6> _have lost their retirement_

I would encourage people to not repeat things like this because they might convince a fiscally illiterate person (i.e. most of the population) that it is true.

If you had a million dollars in your IRA last year, you are highly likely to have about $600,000 now. (This is if you had a portfolio 100% concentrated in equities -- and if you did this close to retirement, well, there is no helping you now is there.) If you were planning on a 4% withdraw rate ($40k) last year, it is likely to remain safe currently: even with the 40% drawdown the market has seen, historically at a 4% withdraw rate you are overwhelmingly likely to die before your money runs out.

The worst case scenario for the typical investor is that they push back retirement for a year or two, which has large effects on longevity.

The big threat to retirements isn't transient financial difficulties, however disruptive they may be. The big threat is underfunding. This goes for pensions and individual investors. Your IRA/401k is NOT an emergency fund or excuse to go on a vacation between jobs, people.

<comment><USER5> A million dollars? Over 50% of Americans have less than $25k in retirement funds. Even 40% of ages 55+ have less than $25k... Obviously no one literally _lost_ their retirement (as long as there's a penny in there, right?), but all I was trying to say was that we should be sensitive about these things.

As young people with nothing to lose, we shouldn't be surprised to offend someone with optimism in this environment.

<comment><USER6> _Even 40% of ages 55+ have less than $25k..._

I know. These folks have no more lost their retirement due to the financial downturn than I have lost an aircraft carrier full of Swedish supermodels and propelled by unicorns.

An inspection of my back pocket will not reveal that aircraft carrier, but that doesn't mean I lost it.

Clearly if you've got $25k in your retirement account close to retirement, whether it declines to $15k or explodes to $100k is immaterial to your prospects of retiring: you're going to be almost wholly dependent on other sources of income either way. (Social security, pensions, income from working, familial support, etc.)

<comment><USER5> > These folks have no more lost their retirement due to the financial downturn > than I have lost an aircraft carrier full of Swedish supermodels and > propelled by unicorns.

I LOL'ed. I think you are just taking what I said too literally. I get what you mean, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The world's greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to be America."

It will be interesting to watch how/if this changes over time, specifically in regard to the seemingly new attitude exhibited by the world community (i.e. the indian example discussed in the article).

<comment><USER8> Yes. Taking into account that Indian founders have less opportunity costs in traditional companies and almost equal earnings potential in a startup, this should be interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If america doesn't come around to the fact that our success is due to creating a positive environment for entrepreneurs we will quickly (by historical standards) go down the tubes.

</comment><comment><USER10> "entrepreneurship ... "the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control"" - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER11> Had never heard of Joseph Schumpeter. Here is a paper <http://swopec.hhs.se/iuiwop/papers/iuiwop0533.pdf> on how he was nearly right. It explores the Swedish economy.</comment>