Paul Allen's yacht destroyed 14,000 sq.ft of reef in the West Bay Caymans - <AUTHOR> https://caymannewsservice.com/2016/01/billionaire-boater-destroys-wb-reef/?utm_source=CNS+Newsflash&utm_campaign=ff59f693b6-26_1_16_early_poll&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e5aea46d5d-ff59f693b6-59643737 <comment><USER2> I'll take this opportunity to point out that Paul Allen is a strong supporter of research to save the ocean's coral reefs.

Last June he funded [1] a nearly $4 MM USD 5 yr project for researchers at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (HIMB) [2] and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) to study assisted evolution to increase the resilience of coral species.

[1] [http://www.vulcan.com/news/articles/2015/coral-reef- research...](http://www.vulcan.com/news/articles/2015/coral-reef-research- support)

[2] [http://www.hawaii.edu/news/2015/08/04/ruth-gates-research- to...](http://www.hawaii.edu/news/2015/08/04/ruth-gates-research-to-reverse- rapid-coral-reef-decline-supported-by-paul-g-allen/)

(disclaimer: my wife works at HIMB)

edit: It looks as this comment is viewed by some as excusing the incident -- that's not the intent. I just wanted to point out that Mr. Allen was already helping to _save_ reefs, not destroy them.

<comment><USER3> Donating to MADD doesn't get one out of obeying traffic laws. If anything, this shows that Allen was well aware of how sensitive reefs are and so should have made sure his boat wasn't part of the problem.

<comment><USER4> You do understand that while this is a nice head line it's not his "fault" in any other means than owning a yacht.

The yacht has a captain and a crew they are responsible for managing the ship and unless Paul Allen was yelling at them threatening to fire them if they do not plow into the coral reef it's just an unfortunate event that the media likes to blow up because hey it's another rich guy with a yacht.

<comment><USER3> Fault no, responsibility yes. Owners of vessels like these are responsible for the damage they do, just like any other employer.

<comment><USER5> Most of these yachts are rented out by their owners. I don't see anything in the article stating he was even on the ship. I'm not sure how you can hold him responsible if he wasn't even on the ship at the time this occurred.

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior)

>> ... a legal doctrine which states that, in many circumstances, an employer is responsible for the actions of employees performed within the course of their employment.

<comment><USER4> "When applied to physical torts, an employer-employee relationship must be established (meaning that no vicarious liability is established for work performed as an independent contractor) and the act must be committed within the scope of employment (i.e., substantially within time and geographical limits, job description and at least with partial intent to further employer's business)."

Don't think that it really falls under this legal doctrine. I'm pretty sure he'll feel responsible non the less but doesn't it mean he's liable and it sure doesn't mean that it needs to be overblown in this manner. Cargo ships do much more damage to the environment on a daily basis. That said he most definitely owns the Yacht he owns several his biggest Yacht is often loaned to researchers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_\(yacht\))

The cause for the incident is probably more interesting as if the damage was done while mooring it begs a question why is there a mooring spot so close to a coral reserve in the first place.

<comment><USER3> The issue isn't who rented the boat. It's who paid the captain/crew. That is most likely some holding/management company in turn owned by Allen. Insurance is also at play. It's no different than if a bus driver crashes. The passengers on the bus aren't responsible, nor is the person who hired the bus. It is the bus owner.

If the owner is not held, then the only people left are the employees. They don't earn enough to ever pay fines associated with this sort of accident. So it's either the owners or nobody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> >>> Allen's communication team shows the billionaire is not taking responsibility and implicated the Port Authority, saying the crew followed officials' instructions on where to place the vessel.

Don't care. Captains are always 100% responsible for the movement of their ship. Though rare in practice, captains are expected to override anyone, including pilots, to ensure safe and lawful operation of their vessels. The captain works for the owner. The owner is financially responsible for mistakes of his employee. Allen should pay up.

<comment><USER6> The official who gave these instructions should also be fired. I find it interesting that the discussion centers around Allen. I'd argue that the official who supposedly gave the instructions is the person most responsible and yet I see less pitchforks for him/her than for Allen.

Doesn't mean Allen/the captain is innocent but it's odd how the focus of the debate is centered around them. Guess the "evil rich dude" narrative is more fun than the "incompetent official" one. I guess the headline "Incompetent official instructs ship to destroy reef." gets less clicks.

<comment><USER3> Because Allen, not the captain, is the on refusing responsibility for the damage done by his boat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't see how the airings of Paul Allen's yacht news is particularly relevant to Hacker News. It's gossip, at best. Even in the guise of having conversation around environmental responsibility.

<comment><USER8> I agree that it doesn't add much to HN when stories like this are voted up on to the front page, but the implied alternative where stories like this are purposefully blocked from being on the front page by some mechanism is _so much worse_. It's far better to accept a little irrelevant gossip at the cost of the community than to start censoring what we can vote on and destroy the integrity on HN altogether.

<comment><USER7> Right, I agree with that completely - I'm more suggesting we should be a bit ashamed of ourselves as a community for pushing the equivalent of tech tabloid news to the front page.

There are more appropriate mediums to argue in if we feel Paul Allen isn't responding well enough to "the incident".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Any vessel that causes damage to local reefs can be fined. However, despite a number of incidents of reef damage over the last few years by both cruise ships and luxury yachts, the government has failed to collect on sanctions."

What the fuck?

<comment><USER10> I'd guess that they're balancing levying fines against these entities and the tourism/money that they're bringing to the islands.

<comment><USER11> Can anybody demonstrate the "balance"? I always had an impression that yachts don't pay much to the average place where they anchor but only to the marinas?

<comment><USER12> If this had happened in the so called "marine park" then it usually means that the yacht paid the "mooring fee" for just the right to drop an anchor in the designated space. Designated by the "local authority", btw. And for megayachts these fees are quite high (hundreds or thousands of dollars).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That yacht hosts one of the SeaKeeper oceanographic monitoring systems for the SeaKeeper society, so for it to destroy a reef while (automatically) measuring sea health is a bit ironic

<comment><USER14> Link for the curious: [http://www.seakeepers.org/](http://www.seakeepers.org/)

For me this doesn't seem to show up on the first page of Google results for "SeaKeeper". Instead there's a gyro roll-stabilizing device for yachts that goes by the same name. This made me question whether you had confused two devices on the yacht. But a more precise Googling did in fact find the society you mention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is terrifying and sad to see the world I grew up with slowly ground away through negligence. As an eleven year old I went snorkeling for the first time in the pristine Caymans. In my short life-time (I'm only mid-thirties) I have seen the great reefs I once explored demolished.

I can't even... I am just floored at how quickly we destroy things that took ages to grow.

<comment><USER3> While a shame, this sort of damage is not totally unnatural. Hurricanes have been decimating reefs for millions of years. A drifting tree trunk, at low tide in moderate surf, can do this much damage in a few minutes. The real manmade reef killers are chemical, not physical.

<comment><USER16> True! Global warming/climate change is destroying vast quantities of reefs, yet people latch on to events like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fer goodness sakes, it's not like he was insensitive to the delicate ecosystem - I mean the guy just brought his small yacht - the Tatoosh (303ft) - not the big one (the 400+ ft Octopus)!

The way you people are carrying on youd think we were dealing with a megalomaniac here.

(1) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_\(yacht\))

</comment><comment><USER18> This has been a recurring issue in the Caymans. Just a few months ago the reef was damaged by a cruise ship. There has been a long debate between the Cayman government and environmental groups over building a large pier to better handle cruise ships and yachts. Environmental groups have been fighting it because some of the reef would have to be relocated to build it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Pedantic point of clarification: there's no such thing as "the West Bay Caymans". The damage happened off the coast of the West Bay district of Grand Cayman.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's OK, guys, he's rich. Let's go back to telling developing countries that they should respect the environment more.

</comment><comment><USER21> Good thing our loose regulations help those responsible individuals amass immense fortunes to be used to the benefit of mankind. Exactly like Paul Graham explained in his "thoughtful" essay.

Oh, wait...

<comment><USER22> Paul Allen has pledged to give the majority of his fortune away[1][2], and has already founded the Allen Institutes for Brain Science and Cell Science, among other charitable endeavours (not that he's under any obligation to do either). So he spent a tiny fraction of his wealth on a yacht (which also employs people for what it's worth). Should he be putting 100% of his savings toward the benefit of mankind instead of only 99%?

[1] [http://givingpledge.org/](http://givingpledge.org/) [2] [http://givingpledge.org/pdf/pledge- letters/Allen_Letter.pdf](http://givingpledge.org/pdf/pledge- letters/Allen_Letter.pdf)

<comment><USER23> The percentage you give away is a less relevant measure than how much you keep. To me it seems obscene for an individual to own a 300ft yacht.

<comment><USER24> _To me it seems obscene for an individual to own a 300ft yacht._

Well, OK, you're obviously entitled to your own opinion and principles. But where then do you draw the line between what is obscene and what is not?

If you've ever travelled to a foreign country on holiday, you've enjoyed more luxury in those few days than many people in the world ever will, and you might have spent more money on your holiday than it would take to build a well in Africa and save a whole village from multiple hours of walking every day just to access potable water.

If you've ever had major medical support paid for by some form of insurance or national healthcare provider, you've probably enjoyed better treatment than is accessible to most people in developing economies today.

If you've ever had a $5 drink in a coffee shop, the money you spent on that could have bought an entire meal for a homeless person in your own city who is going hungry instead.

There is always someone richer and always someone poorer. What we regard as obscene, in either direction, often seems to be more a subjective product of our own background and position on the scale than any objective measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Let's see him get reservations at Dorsia now!</comment>


Ask HN: Middle of project, side project raised money, what do I do? - <AUTHOR> Hey HackerNews,
I could really use some advice. I was hired by a major California company 6 months ago to work on a project that is now about 3/4 finished. Deadlines are fast approaching and I have an important role on the team and project. In short they are relying on me and not finishing this project would not be good for the team or company. In my free time I've been working on a side project with a single other person who recently closed a quite large seed round. Enough to work on it for a couple years, hire a number . The side project has no product overlap, I used my own machines and never used company time to work on this.
My cofounder, while ok with it, thinks that me staying with the big company is a risk to the startup because the company could make a claim despite us playing it by the book (again no product overlap, no company hardware, etc) and they think I should probably leave immediately.  I will eventually do this but I feel bad leaving my company in a bind. I do care about these people. I could use some advice. Would be happy to add some more details if it would help but trying to leave it vague. <comment><USER2> Quit if your side projects seems like a better future for you.

While it's admirable that you feel for "a major California company", I can assure you that this company has no feelings for you. Just recently we've heard of major layoffs at Yahoo, IBM, Zenefits. Your company will have no regrets about firing you, mostly because a company is a legal fiction, not a person.

I would also disregard the advice of talking to the company. There's a huge discrepancy of power between you and a company so they can make your life miserable (a lawsuit) even if you didn't do anything wrong or do what you think is good for the company.

Also, the larger the company, the more risk averse they are, so forget negotiating some one-off deals with them (so that you can keep working for them at the same time as working on your project). You're probably over- estimating your importance to the company. They became "a major California company" before you ever joined and they'll remain such company after you leave.

Quit and don't look back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I think it's sound advice. Appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If your side project raised money, it's not a side project anymore. At this point you are working for two businesses. Be honest with yourself about your priorities, pick one of the businesses, and stick with it 100%.

If you go full time on the side project, your company won't miss you too much. On the other hand, if you continue to go full time on your company, you will have minimal time to devote to your side project, and your cofounder will miss your efforts. He will likely try to hire someone else who believes in the company enough to go full time. Clearly if the investors believe in it enough to give money, you should believe in it too. If you don't, then you're not cut out to be a cofounder.

Honestly, you need to move fast, because your side project is now a business. And if you're on the outside, you're position of "cofounder" will become increasingly harder to defend, the longer you spend not working there.

Edit: and I agree with those saying DO NOT TELL YOUR COMPANY ABOUT THE SIDE PROJECT. You gain nothing from that and have a lot to lose. If they discover that's why you're leaving before you actually submit your resignation, they can make the departure process much more difficult for you. They can threaten lawsuits against you and your new company -- even if totally unjustified -- in an effort to keep you working for them. You don't want to drag your cofounder into a messy situation. My advice: just submit your two weeks notice, keep your mouth shut, and have a clean departure. By the time they realize what your next move was, they won't care anymore.

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems like the best thing for you and the company you work for is for you to let them know and give them the option of letting you split time at both companies or lose you completely.

You will definitely want to talk to a lawyer who can make sure you have your rear end covered in case your employer wants to get a lawsuit going against you, and get the employer to sign an agreement that you are free to your side venture without fear of getting sued as long as you keep your work separate from theirs.

If they think they need you, it would give them the opportunity to keep you around for a while. If they don't, you don't have to feel like you left them high and dry.

But DEFINITELY make sure that you have your ass covered legally if they decide to have you keep working with them!!!

</comment><comment><USER5> Can you just get in honest communication with the company and discuss the problem? Perhaps arrange an official agreement that absolves you from this risk in exchange for the completion of your present project.

</comment><comment><USER6> You're not that important, they'll survive. Give ample notice, maybe offer limited consultation for some period after. Talk to a lawyer.</comment>


18 Years - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/paulusmack/ppp/blame/8d7970b8f3db727fe798b65f3377fe6787575426/pppd/eap.c#L1423 <comment><AUTHOR> Not a C developer, but doesn't this look like a backdoor present for 18 years?</comment>


What David Cameron just proposed would endanger every Briton - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2015/01/13/what-david-cameron-just-propos.html

<comment><USER2> Is there a possibility that this will have a positive effect of a) pushing the issue to the forefront (because it affects everyone) where it can be easily disputed in its current form; b) making services like Tor / VPNs a necessity for regular people and thus moving everyone towards a safer internet not governed by states? This has already happened with the block of thepiratebay: regular people have been pushed into a position of regularly using VPNs.

Say Cameron get this passed. Technically it is unfeasible because they can't realistically ban foreign companies from using encryption, and because some of the protocols are (for the sake of argument) unbreakable. So if you want to stay anonymous, you still can, and more people will. Furthermore, the privacy argument goes mainstream when it is WhatsApp / Google vs. the UK government, with regular people suffering immediate consequences, vs. a bunch of programmers / cypherpunks. I can't see how this would be a positive for the government in any way.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you think open source social networking can take off? - <AUTHOR> I just signed up for Diaspora* again, after seeing the article about Mastodon on the front page, but I suspect I'll just use it to cross post to Facebook. There are many reasons a centralized business (eg Facebook) that everyone is already on will squash stuff like Diaspora from ever taking off (latter is more complicated to start with, inherently less capable of attracting users in first place, etc.). Do you think there is any strategy/way a decentralized and open social media platform can ever take off? It just seems like the way things should be... but most likely will never be. <comment><USER2> In 1986 I would connect to BBS systems over a 300 baud modem and communicate with other enthusiasts, teenagers, systems programmers, game programmers, mainframe jocks and former ham radio operators.

If you want to join some other network and talk to your friends, do it. Then you have some choice if your grandmother joins or not!</comment>


Tips for your first tech conference - <AUTHOR> http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2019/03/18/tips-for-your-first-tech-conference/ <comment><USER2> I completely agree that breakfast at conferences has been a fantastic opportunity to meet fellow attendees. Conversation is quite easy to strike up by asking which talks the table is planning to attend.</comment>


Memory Management for Rubyists (with Jim Weirich) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/48297255

<comment><AUTHOR> This is video from our last Cincinnati Ruby Brigade. The topic was memory management including background, strategies and how it applies to Ruby development with the MRI.</comment>


Song of GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> Author here. Thanks for the wonderful comments! I also fixed the https issues.

This was really taken to the next level thanks to a couple of pull requests from some really talented developers; rpflorence, phuu, and everyone else with issues and pull requests. This is what makes open source so cool. <https://github.com/ajacksified/song-of-github/contributors>

Also, Midi.js is really fun to play with. <http://mudcu.be/midi-js/>

Obligatory song link: <http://song-of- github.herokuapp.com/?username=ajacksified>

</comment><comment><USER3> A lament: <https://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=aaronsw>

How fitting that it ends on a discordant note.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't seem to work anymore, I guess the autor removed it?

<comment><USER5> It works if you use http instead of https. I don't know why RyanMcGreal linked it that way. jQuery isn't getting loaded over https so that's why it's not working.

Here's the correct link: <http://song-of- github.herokuapp.com/?username=aaronsw>

<comment><USER6> Pull request is in: <https://github.com/ajacksified/song-of-github/pull/8>

<comment><USER5> This is only my second post so I don't know if this goes against the community guidelines but...

Hell yeah!, I love open source!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great, I love small hacks like these!

I would love to be able to authorize it with my Github account so it can read my contributions to my private repository. All around great work.

<comment><USER2> Great idea; I've heard it a few times. I actually built this against an undocumented API call; if you watch the network tab when you open up GitHub, it makes an ajax request for JSON. I replicated that request with https.get on the server, then dump that json out on the page (to get around CORS problems.)

I think they're using sessions to determine if you're logged in / authenticated; so I'd need to either see if I can just pass in an oauth token and see what happens, wait for them to build an API around it, or just do the work of combing the repositories and build the data manually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The song of linux. <http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=torvalds>

</comment><comment><USER9> The song of bootstrap: <http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=mdo>

Very nice :)

<comment><USER10> <http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=michaelklishin> another good one

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Melancholy; melodic but listless; in turns sporadic and frenetic; all too brief, and all too incomplete.

<http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=charonn0>

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=antirez> <\- best one I heard so far :-) this thing is fun.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also, it's just me or does MIDI.js have the potential to lead the renaissance of midi music on the internet? I had almost forgotten midi files existed if it weren't for this lib.

<comment><USER12> It's going to lead to someone writing a MIDIBlock extension for Chrome, which I will happily install alongside FlashBlock and AdBlock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> TJ's song <http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=visionmedia>

<comment><USER14> LOL!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like how mind sounds. Sounds like a lone explorer searching for programming nirvana for a year, got disappointed for a little bit, and then eventually rediscovered the joy of programming again.

<http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=wyuenho>

This is really really nicely done. Thanks for this. This made my day.

</comment><comment><USER16> Woah , the music generated is beautiful looks like some sort of computational creativity. Trovalds's song is depressing , <http://song-of- github.herokuapp.com/?username=torvalds>

</comment><comment><USER17> My public github is pretty sad, so I wired this up for GitHub Enterprise (<https://github.com/burkemw3/song-of-github>) and like my song much better now.

</comment><comment><USER18> Mine was disappointing, but here's a pretty one:

<http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=jashkenas>

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome stuff man! mine is very boring: <http://song-of- github.herokuapp.com/?username=chinchang> :P

</comment><comment><USER20> Best one yet by far... <http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=sferik>

</comment><comment><USER21> This is pretty good: <http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=radar>

</comment><comment><USER22> Congratulations, Just a musician can think that :)

</comment><comment><USER23> LOL, my song is the saddest song I've ever heard. It sounds like the score to a point a play where the protagonist loses everything.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is absolutely brilliant, well done.

</comment><comment><USER25> Great idea, great thing to have fun with. And a great motivation, to contribute more in the future... ;-)

</comment><comment><USER26> I love it. So simple. So creative!

</comment><comment><USER27> Great idea! Try using a pentatonic scale, or sharp the 4th (F) to avoid some dissonance.

<comment><USER2> Oh, good idea. I may add in the ability to select scale (or select it based on frequency of contributions / username checksum or something).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is the best thing I've seen on the web in 2013 so far. Amazing amazing job

</comment><comment><USER9> I would suggest that for those people who don't contribute quite as often as big contributors, to change the pace inbetween large gaps so the song isn't just a note followed by 30s of nothing. But this is great!

<comment><USER10> This is not a bug! Contribute more! :)

<comment><USER29> At least the gap at the beginning should be shortened. As that's not something you have any control over now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It doesn't seem to work on chrome canary in OSX Lion.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice, some MIDI.js magic! I like.

</comment><comment><USER14> What a cool idea, awesome!

</comment><comment><USER32> Cool idea!</comment>


Contentful, a Stripe for content management, raises $28M led by General Catalyst - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/04/contentful-a-stripe-for-content-management-raises-28m-led-by-general-catalyst/ <comment><USER2> Contentful was born several years ago (back then as StorageRoom) through Show HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041)

</comment><comment><USER3> We almost went with contentful when we chose a headless cms. But their pricing for large multilingual sites was through the roof.

Directus is an open source alternative that has the same features for free. So we wet with this. Very happy with this CMS.

<comment><USER4> yeah, pricing did not make sense for us. We went with Kentico Cloud (hosted, but it is also open source that you can deploy).

<comment><USER5> > but it is also open source that you can deploy

Do you have a link for that? I couldn't find anything about self hosting.

(But I did check it out, and it definitely is quite capable!)

<comment><USER5> I asked Kentico Cloud support, this was their reply.

> Kentico Cloud is a SaaS model, so you need to host the application that > consumes data from it. I'm not aware of an option where you would host the > content management application.

So no self hosted option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What does "a Stripe for content management" mean?

<comment><USER7> Seriously. From the article:

> When many people today think of cloud-based content management systems > (CMS), the names that likely come to mind are WordPress (which we use), or > Medium (which people leaving their companies like to use), or Tumblr (which > is owned by the same company that owns TC).

So it's a blog hosting service?

> Contentful can provide some of the same functionalities as these but it's > aimed at a different end: CEO and co-founder Sascha Konietzke describes it > as a "headless" CMS, not unlike Stripe's relationship to payments: there is > no front end for ingesting and formatting content, or design end for > producing the final look of that content for the reader. Instead, there are > a set of APIs that developers of the media product in question can use to > control both of those aspects more flexibly.

So it's a specialized database?

> "Existing CMSs are like the MS-DOS of the internet," Konietzke said. "No one > really likes to use them, similar to older payment systems before Stripe."

…wat wow

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess I thought of all this way later than everyone else. I only just recently wanted to start building a headless CMS and now it seems a ton of really well done ones are coming out. Good to know I can focus on what I actually wanted the CMS for!

Another one that came out recently was sanity.io.

</comment><comment><USER9> What a terribly confusing analogy.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can someone provide a pros/cons of Contentful? I don't get what's so hard about building an API around content. The frontend I get, but the backend seems relatively simple, and the complexities are usually brand-specific

<comment><USER11> It's not the API. It's that too many applications have Admin UI boilerplate interfaces for managing a lot of their content. And too much time is wasted in building those UIs. I know, I've done it.

The way I see this is, it allows you to completely skip building the content management portion of Admin UIs, and present you with pure content as data, so you have full flexibility over how your website layout looks.

<comment><USER5> Contentful (and similar services) also _can_ invest lots of time to get a good looking and super usable admin interface that can tackle difficult problems well.

Examples: Sorting of ordered many to many relations, WYSIWYG or markdown editors, workflows, versioning, concurrent editing of items - all the stuff that you don't need for an MVP but if you have hundreds of editors and non dev people working on the actual content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So it's a REST API with a webapp I can whitelabel? Why would I pay for this - what is the problem it solves?

If it's anywhere near as brilliant in implementation as Stripe is I really want to know, since it will probably make my life easier.

I often find "Uber for X" or "Stripe for Y" confusing. If Stripe were doing Y they wouldn't be Stripe now, would they?

</comment><comment><USER5> Awesome product. And a free developer plan you can actually use for live projects, too!

</comment><comment><USER13> > "Existing CMSs are like the MS-DOS of the internet," Konietzke said. "No one > really likes to use them, similar to older payment systems before Stripe."

What a ridiculous statement. Wordpress is so much more popular than Contentful. The vast majority of publications don't need a headless CMS. It's literally half the value proposition of Wordpress (since they have a REST API).

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I can't see them being worth that much money. Between WP and Drupal's Contenta distribution ([http://www.contentacms.org/](http://www.contentacms.org/)), you can deploy a free open source system that's way more extendable than a proprietary system ever will.

<comment><USER13> Yep, with commodity developers. Never heard of Contenta before, sure wish it was around at my job where we rolled our own headless Drupal v5.</comment></comment></comment>


Humans are wired for negativity - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/humans-are-wired-for-negativity-for-good-or-ill/ <comment><USER2> Negativity was interpreted negatively in this article. It shouldn't be. Negativity can be positive.

Cultivating dissatisfaction is key to doing good work. If you can't bring yourself to say "Man, this sucks, I could do better than that" how will you try to do better?

In fact, research shows people who are motivated more by the fear of loss rather than the hope of gain, in other words, defensive pessimists, are better prepared to handle the obstacles that get thrown in their path. Being negative is the strongest motivation for these people.

The irony of it is humans being wired for negativity sounds like bad news for the optimists. But there's a way to model optimists in terms of negativity too. Optimists have what Keats referred to as high negative capability: they are capable of "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".

As a practical matter, I think it helps to honor both the negative and the positive. Be negative when you are figuring out what you want to fix that's broken, and be positive about bringing yourself to actually do it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some humans... Others, not so much.

A related study from last year: "Fear as a Disposition and an Emotional State: A Genetic and Environmental Approach to Out-Group Political Preferences" [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12016/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12016/full)

"Fear is a pervasive aspect of political life and is often explored as a transient emotional state manipulated by events or exploited by elites for political purposes. The psychological and psychiatric literatures, however, have also established fear as a genetically informed trait, and people differ in their underlying fear dispositions. Here we propose these differences hold important implications for political preferences, particularly toward out- groups. Using a large sample of related individuals, we find that individuals with a higher degree of social fear have more negative out-group opinions, which, in this study, manifest as anti-immigration and prosegregation attitudes. We decompose the covariation between social fear and attitudes and find the principal pathway by which the two are related is through a shared genetic foundation. Our findings present a novel mechanism explicating how fear manifests as out-group attitudes and accounts for some portion of the genetic influences on political attitudes."

</comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps it's more a _physical_ thing than a metaphysical or psychological thing. We live in a universe of increasing entropy and by definition, for any expected outcome the possible disorderly states vastly outnumber the orderly ones. So when we contemplate a set of outcomes for a single future event, it is likely that we always end up contemplating more negative ones than positive ones?

<comment><USER5> This was my conclusion as well. Also, planning for negative outcomes ensures survival much better than planning for positive ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Or, rephrasing it a little "we put much more energy and resources into what is not working well and can be improved or could be dangerous then into what is already good", which sounds a lot less surprising.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting article that buried the lede.

The part about the criticism of the positivity ratio was particularly interesting because a co-author wrote the brilliant parody of post-modernism published in one of its seminal journals, Social Text ([http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)).

A critique by Sokal is prima facie intriguing.

I need to go read the original article but the Wikipedia summary is fascinating ([http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio)) in specific, Fredrickson and Losada appear to have chosen functional parameters that yield good results, not ones based on evidence.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes, people do it here a lot. The Wall Street Journal comments section, for example, is unbearable because it's simply full of negative comments. I don't mind people being critical because sometimes negative people are actually well informed. Unfortunately, there's too much fire and forget without any accountability. Anyway, we just need to figure a way to raise the bar in such a way that real information is passed on rather than unadulterated opinion.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Aside from Dutch, all other languages lean toward the bleak."

This is rather interesting. I wonder if this contributes to their low rate of aggressive dreams and positivity. Furthermore, it would be interesting to study if this might somehow be connected with their very "liberal" policies towards sex and drugs, sources of pleasure.

</comment><comment><USER10> We are good at processing negative information. That doesn't mean we are a race of 'depressive realists' or that significant positive emotional events are not the _defining_ building blocks of our character.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is what causes the 'fight or flight' reflex – a survival instinct based on our ability to use memory to quickly assess threats.

</comment><comment><USER12> This along with all the other articles about how it's OK to be sad, depressed, burnt out, unable to focus, disinterested and demotivated are complete bullshit. We're living in a society where we no longer have any real battles to fight and our culture is starting to conjure imaginary problems out of thin air and then come up with creative ways to solve them.

"...even a random snide comment take up most of our psychic space, leaving little room for compliments or pleasant experiences to help us along life's challenging path."

Here, have a strong cup of toughen-the-fuck-up.

PS: The fact that you're finding this at the bottom of the page and greyed out is a case in point on how HN has fallen in love with self pity. (Not an edit)

<comment><USER13> What if I told you that "toughen-the-fuck-up" does little to address positively actual depression and burn out?

<comment><USER12> I've watched a perfectly healthy young man of 15 get a diagnosis of depression from a doctor and was given a prescription of Prozac. We tore up the script and told him it was exam stress and he was fine. Still is 8 years later and kicking ass.

Life is tough and many people, possibly most, want to be told that it's not really tough, it's just that you're special which makes it harder for you and this pill and less work/hardship will solve your problem.

It's why the USA is filled with people addicted to and completely anesthetized by various prescription drugs.

Sure, real depression actually exists. But it's rare and I suspect the over- diagnosis we're seeing is more damaging by removing people from active and productive lives than lack of diagnosis.

When last did you hear a doctor tell someone to get regular sleep, eat well, get some exercise and face up the the challenges they're presented?

<comment><USER5> There is some truth in what you're saying but you're overly dismissive of the very real and not-actually-rare issues of depression, which have physical causes and treatments just like any other human ailment.

Telling someone who actually has depression--that is, a brain chemistry imbalance that causes negative feelings--to toughen up is about as helpful as telling someone with a broken leg to walk it off.

<comment><USER14> It is nothing like a broken leg. A broken leg has a clear understandable cause and a clear efficacious solution. Depression has neither.

If "toughen up" means eating well and exercising, it may very well be just as effective as SSRIs: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2291072/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2291072/)

In my anecdotal experience the link between lack of exercise, poor diet, and depression is very strong. Hopefully there is more research into this area, but the main issue with it is that depression and SB is methodologically weak. What counts as "depressed" and "sedentary behavior" are extremely open-ended. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20174982](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20174982)

<comment><USER15> The thing is, "toughen up" is not taken to mean that, particularly by someone who is depressed. It's taken to mean "stop complaining, there's nothing wrong with you", which can be very damaging for someone in an already unstable mental state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> First, it makes sense. A teaspoon of wine in a barrel of sewage makes a barrel of sewage. A teaspoon of sewage in a barrel of wine makes a barrel of sewage. This isn't just a snide saying. It applies directly to, say, the safety of drinking water. That obsessive search for what might be wrong has held an evolutionary benefit for millions of years.

There's also a social power in it. We claim that we want to lead via inspiration and charisma, and that carrot-driven approach works at the big- picture level, but most people who succeed in business, day to day, get their way by exaggerating the negative consequences of whatever they don't want. "I want X" is to put yourself out there and risk being called a bike-shedder. "The company is fucked if not-X" makes it sound like you're looking out for the group... unless you do it too often. So much of the tension and negativity in corporate life comes from the accumulations of these phony existential risks (and the bad decisions resulting from people, especially at the top, buying into them).

(This is not to say that one should directly apply the stick, i.e. be a bully. You don't want that. You want to convince people that there is objective harm to the group, out of your control, that will befall it, if not-X is chosen. If you're the one holding the stick, then you'll be seen as an extortionist dickhead, but invocation of _external_ sticks is quite powerful; see: religion.)

Then there's the art of the complain-brag. The best way to diffuse envy of an elevated position is to make it seem like it actually entails a lot of suffering. "I envy you guys on the floor; I just sit in meetings all day." From CEOs to middle managers, people pretend their jobs are unenviable, because it makes the organization more stable that way. But the picture that people end up with is that things are unpleasant from any direction and unlikely to get better. Plenty of people _do_ like their jobs, but they're not allowed to say as much to the plebs. People will tolerate much more inequality if the people above them in the ranks appear not to be enjoying the position.

<comment><USER17> Nitpicking:

>> _A teaspoon of sewage in a barrel of wine makes a barrel of sewage._

To be realistic, it makes a barrel of (maybe a bit cheaper) wine; alcohol kills bacteria.

(As someone that eats lunch at restaurants most of my life, I avoid reading about kitchen hygiene. Laws and sausages, etc.)

Edit: I didn't realize it, but I guess I am a typical example of cynical negativity. That alcoholic drinks are safe to drink is a feature, not a bug. And while not much of an oenophile, I do enjoy a glass of dry Spanish red. Just don't tell me about the sewage spoon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> bullshit

</comment><comment><USER18> "Wired" is essentially referring to genetics. ~ 8% of our genomic lineage is that of a virus. Negativity is just the manifestation of an innate human pathogenic desire to cause harm. It's just nature working its magic.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I learn to be funny? - <AUTHOR> Hi all, I'm looking for resources on how to learn to become funny at conversation.
Any books, thoughts, blog posts, ideas, videos, etc, are welcome.
Hopefully language agnostic since I'm a native spanish speaker.
What has worked for you? <comment><USER2> "Dying is easy. Comedy is difficult."

"If you don't have a sense of humor, don't try to be funny."

If you just want to be good at conversation and social stuff, get a copy of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People)

It's cheesy but it works.

That said, if you are really after being funny, then know that _the essense of comedy is timing_. Being funny is more like dancing than acting, say. Good news is it's a skill and unless you're hopeless you can practice and learn it. Get yourself a copy of Ol' Asimov's "Treasury of Humor" and just tell people jokes and practice your timing and delivery. Good luck! It's wonderful to make people laugh!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov%27s_Treasury_of_H...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov%27s_Treasury_of_Humor)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reading suggestions. I had Asimov's sci-fi stuff in my reading list, and learning he's got comedy writing will definitely make me get acquainted with his work now even more quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 0\. Have more conversations with more groups of people.

1\. Notice the things that make you laugh or you find witty in conversations. Keep a journal if necessary.

2\. Steal liberally.* If the comments are highly situational, think of ways to generalize, or imagine similar situations where you could use similar material.*

3\. Focus on people's reactions when you tell those stolen jokes.

4\. Once you can get a reaction with tested material, branch out to variations and introduce your own material. (Don't stick with joke theft forever, just use it as a transition, so you can isolate other things to work on.)

* (2) probably requires multiple distinct social groups. Even in the same group, you can get away with this with a little hat tip, like, "It's like that time when John said X..." Or if you build from that into storytelling--everyone likes hearing stories about times they said or did interesting things--so you'll have a sympathetic audience while you practice some timing and rhythm.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestions. I find the journal idea pretty awesome. I'm very methodic when setting my mind to learn something new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hang out with people that are funnier than you... If you don't know any people that are funnier than you, then go to comedy clubs on amateur nights. If you go on a night when a professional comedian is performing, while he might be funny, chances are you won't be able to meet him or hang out with him afterwards. On amateur nights, you should be able to meet everyone afterwards. Find the funny amateurs, meet them, ask to hang out with them, and their humor will eventually rub off on you... You could try Improv classes too, as suggested by another poster.

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems like a good plan too. It has helped me to become a better musician just by playing music with good musicians. I would call it learning by osmosis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did a course in script writing for film and TV. There was a considerable amount of work on how to structure for comedy. The best part of the course was that homework was to watch TV, comedy shows in particular and de-construct them.

The key to being funny is to be aware, notice things and see the unexpected, etc. The funniest material is adapted from real-life events with a sprinkling of whimsy added. Telling jokes is very much about engagement and timing.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The best part of the course was that homework was to watch TV, comedy shows > in particular and de-construct them.

This sound very intersting. Could you share an example of such work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> are there improv classes in your city?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty sure there are. I hadn't considered that option. Have you tried it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Serious question: Were you ever funny?

<comment><AUTHOR> I do make people laugh sometimes, though I tend to be more literal and stick to meaning than absurdness in conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You could try and enrol into clown college. It worked well for Steveo the star of Jackass.</comment>


Ask HN: What resources to give a Comp Sci student that only knows C++/Java? - <AUTHOR>

Am looking to help "enable" computer science developers that only know C++/Java to learn more modern languages Rails/Node.js/etc and work in a Git/Github environment. Any good resources/methods that help make this transition easier? <comment><USER2> "Can your language do this?" by Joel Spolsky is an excellent introduction to functional programming for people coming from a C++/Java background.

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html>

Reading it was the first time I realized what I had be missing by not knowing anything about functional programming.

I think it would motivate people to want to learn more.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you thinking about resources for learning web frameworks like Rails, Django, etc.? Or do you want them to start working through some of the newer multi-purpose languages (Clojure, Scala, etc.)?</comment>


Closure conversion: How to compile lambda - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/closure-conversion/ <comment><USER2> Just once I'd like to be able to guess correctly as to whether articles like this are referring to the AWS offering before I click.

In this case it is not.</comment>


Shrinking deep learning's carbon footprint - <AUTHOR> https://news.mit.edu/2020/shrinking-deep-learning-carbon-footprint-0807 <comment><USER2> "Unlearning" is one algorithmic approach that may yield substantial energy consumption gains.

With many deep learning models, it's not possible to determine when or from what source something was learned: it's not possible to "back out" a change to the network and so the whole model has to be re-trained from scratch; which is O(n) instead of O(1.x).

</comment><comment><USER2> The article covers software approaches (more energy-efficient algorithms) and mentions GPUs but not TPUs or ASICs.

Specialized chips (built with dynamic fabrication capacities) are far more energy efficient for specific types of workloads. We see this with mining ASICs, SSL accelerators, and also with Tensor Processing Units (for deep learning).

The externalities of energy production are the ultimate concern. If you're using cheap, clean energy with minimized external costs ("sustainable energy"), the energy-efficiency of the algorithm and the chips is of much less concern.

Could we recognize products, services, and data centers that were produced with and/or run on _directly sourced_ clean energy as "200% Green"; with a logo on the box and/or the footer? 100% offset by PPAs is certainly progress.</comment>


Ask HN: How to sell eBooks etc without the hassle? - <AUTHOR>

I have some ideas for some side businesses selling ebooks, clip art collections, that sort of things. I'm a web developer, but I don't want to write all the payments handling, sending files stuff myself. Can the HN community recommend any site that current does that? I'd like to be able to send them a file of my finished product and have some way to redirect the users to that site to buy stuff. <comment><USER2> I think you would find Scribd really useful:

[http://support.scribd.com/entries/96701-selling-documents- on...](http://support.scribd.com/entries/96701-selling-documents-on-scribd)

Also, Amazon makes it easy for publishers to sell e-books through their Kindle store:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_n...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_navbox_lnpub_bks?nodeId=14061761)

(Once you publish on Kindle, you automatically get onto Stanza, Mobipocket and some other distribution channels too).

For clip art, I highly recommend IStock:

<http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php>

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickbank does exactly that, but their fees are pretty high.

A few years ago, I wrote a custom script for ebooks that takes a PDF and watermarks every page with the buyer's Paypal email address after purchase, and offers email and download delivery options.

</comment><comment><USER4> e-junkie.com is pretty much made for this use case. Back when my #1 problem was taking Paypal and immediately delivering license keys, they made my day.

</comment><comment><USER5> Lulu.com and CreateSpace.com are both good for this.

</comment><comment><USER6> could just set up a simple front end w/ shopfiy or something similar. i think they have support for digital goods.

<comment><USER7> Shopify + Fetch (<http://fetchapp.com/>) seems like a decent combination for selling digital goods. Fetch provides file hosting and download services and integrates with Shopify as well as other services. I believe it helps manage updates to your files too, eg. with an option to send out re-download notices to existing customers when you update a file.</comment></comment>


Asynchrony in C# 5, Part One - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2010/10/28/asynchrony-in-c-5-part-one.aspx <comment><USER2> I cannot express how thrilled I am to see Microsoft address this problem in their language, and to see them do it in such a well thought-out way.

In particular, I was kind of underwhelmed by the Task stuff they added in 4.0, because what I was expecting was something like this new await/async syntax - so now, seeing that they used the (comparatively primitive) Task infrastructure in order to build await/async, I feel bad for doubting them. So far on a cursory examination, these new features solve almost all my concurrency problems (at least, from the perspective of a compiler), and should let me throw out a ton of existing code that I've been maintaining. I basically wrote my own cooperative scheduler and infrastructure to do exactly this on top of the iterator features from C#2/3, and it's been a godsend, so it's going to be nice to have it in the compiler :)

In particular I'm pleased that instead of dictating that everyone use only cooperative threading or preemptive threading for concurrency, they're exposing both scheduling techniques with easy-to-use APIs that integrate well with each other. To me, this seems like a much better approach than picking a One True Concurrency Mechanism (like, for example, node did).

<comment><USER3> If you want to write async code in .NET, use F#.

You can compose and BeginOp EndOp functions into a function that returns an Async<T>

I've probably screwed up the exact function name but here's the psuedo code.

Example: Imagine a C# class as follows

      public class Foo {
         public AsnycResult BeginGetBar(int bar_id) { // something }
         public Bar EndGetBar(AsnycResult result) {
            // something
            return bar;
         }
      }

Now to consume in F# create an extension method

      type Foo with
       member x.AsyncGetBar = Async.FromAsyncResult(x.BeginGetBar, x.EndGetBar)

Now to use it

      let somefunc = async {
                      let x = new Foo();
                      let! bar =  x.AsyncGetBar(10);
                      // do something with bar
                   }

What F# does is create a call back that is the rest of the function after the let!/do! statement, basically your code is split into a call back everytime you use a let!/do! binding.

For a more interesting example lets say you want an async file copy.

      let copy s1:Stream s2:Stream =
       let buffer:byte[] = Array.init 8192
       let rec copy = async {
         let! read = s1.AsyncRead(0,buffer.Length,buffer)
         match read with
         | 0 -> ()
         | x -> do! s2.AsyncWrite
                return! copy()
       }

The nice part about this is that copy is a fully reusable piece of code async code. So anytime you're in an async block and need to copy a file, so...

      let move s1 s2 = async {
        do! copy s1 s2
        do! delete s1
      }

<comment><USER4> With this new extension to the C# language you can do the same in C#, it's the whole point of this extension. Actually the C# way of doing it seems to be a bit nicer than F# even.

<comment><USER5> "async" in F# is based on monad comprehensions, making it a feature you could've come up yourself.

Personally I don't like magic keywords baked in the compiler.

<comment><USER6> Even though I never fully got the hang of F#, I must agree on this one. I like C# as a language, but too many magic keywords just starts smelling wrong.

Having a compiler do work for you and simplify your code is nice and you wont see me complain about this feature in particular.

On the other hand, I've made enough monadic extension classes (NullSafety, Object-transactions, etc) and extension methods to cover up for short-comings as I've seen them in my projects, and it always bugs me how this effectively forces me to clutter up my syntax.

Consider the following code

       var x = GetSomeObject()  // can be null
               .SubProperty     // can also be null
               .Indexer[index]; // can also be null

This code can cause NullReferenceExceptions all over, so to do it safely, you need to add a bunch of if (object == null) checks.

With my NullSafe-extensions, the expression looks like this:

       var x = GetSomeObject().AsNullSafe()
               .Do((x) => x.SubProperty)
               .Do((x) => x.Indexer[index])
               .Value; // can be null or default

Within the C# type-system, there is no way to get around this clutter and massive use of lambdas. Granted, it looks better than the corresponding code with manual null-checks for every step, but with lambda expression comes the cost of not being able to debug & correct code at runtime.

<comment><USER7> Magic keywords, as you put them, on the other hand increase the ability of the language to be tooled. You get better debugging, code completion, diagnostics etc. when what could be a library feature is implemented as a first-class language feature.

The other side of the coin is that many larger businesses use coding standards to restrict the idioms in use across the enterprise. When the language is flexible enough to freely create new idioms (like Lisp and Smalltalk in extremis - the notion of DSLs came from these for good reasons), many folks fear that every codebase in the company will become its own silo of idioms, increasing the ramp-up time of new developers coming in. When an idiom comes packaged up from the tool vendor, "in the box" as it were, however, they can (hopefully) rely on new devs coming in to be up to speed already; as well as fairly confident it's been thought through properly.

Furthermore, third-party libraries and software component vendors in general benefit by being able to assume that everyone knows and can support the idioms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If people doubt that Microsoft still has smart hackers working there, you just need to follow Eric Lippert's blog. Even if you have no interest in C#, he has a lot of genuinely interesting thoughts on programming and related topics.

</comment><comment><USER9> Visual Studio "Async" CTP freely downloadable:

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx>

</comment><comment><USER10> This is probably the best language feature I've seen since generics in C#. Actually, I think it may just simply be the best language feature in C#, period. I wish I could use it in shipping code right now.

<comment><USER8> Seriously. I've wanted something like this in javascript for ages. Given the complete async nature of modern javascript, it would be a huge win. On the other hand, async code in javascript (as it is now) does look cleaner than the equivalent on C#.

<comment><USER11> Maybe you'll find stratified js -- <http://stratifiedjs.org/> \-- interesting. I haven't tried it myself, but it seems to fit the bill. As a side note: IMHO C#'s use of only 2 keywords and method combinators is cleaner than stratified js' approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not that thrilled with yet more specific syntax for one feature. F#'s approach of having a simple core that can be extended in-language (versus only via the compiler with new syntax) seems like a much more elegant approach.

But it's nice that async code in C# won't be as painful as it is today.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really like that Eric Lippert dropped this little nugget on us as the end of a long and nerdy blog series :-)

I would love to shadow that compiler team for a week or two, and get to sit in on some of those discussions.

</comment><comment><USER14> wow, this looks very much inspired by F#'s async expressions. I'm really looking forward to being able to use this.

</comment><comment><USER15> The designers of C# 100.0 realized that writing code is painful, so they added super AI to solve the problem for you.</comment>


Ask HN: Advice if mobile platform I built can be used for other verticals? - <AUTHOR> I recently built a mobile app for my church (API and admin back end is Rails, front end is Ionic 3, push notifications are powered by Amazon SNS).
https://www.sdabulletin.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_f8CQqEdnU
Basically a member can select a church, view events, and get push notifications.  The custom admin content platform is based off weeks, so you author the content of the week, and the app automatically views the correct content based on the date.
I was just wondering, would there be other type of business verticals this type of platform might be useful for?  I was thinking maybe California farmer's markets, but am not sure if there was enough new content weekly. <comment><USER2> I think to expand, you'll want to consider the use case where someone would want to be subscribes to multiple groups at once (most folks don't belong to multiple churches).

With that enhancement, I would envision it for Farmer's Markets, Trivia Nights, Bowling Leagues, D&D Groups, etc - just about anything that meets on a weekly basis.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the scenario about things that meet on a weekly basis, in your opinion would you download an app per business or prefer to have one app power it all? For example, a farmer's market app, a trivia nights app, a board game app, etc.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I would have one app per segment. If I'm a trivia fan (spoiler: I am), then I am interested in going to trivia nights 2-3+ times per week, and this would be a good central location without being locked into a single trivia group (ex. Geeks Who Drink). This would also allow the app to be a source of trivia nights while on vacation or visiting family.

For the farmers market example, I might be interested in learning what's in season across multiple markets, and what farms/vendors will be where.</comment></comment></comment>


Remembering When Driverless Elevators Drew Skepticism - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2015/07/31/427990392/remembering-when-driverless-elevators-drew-skepticism <comment><USER2> There's a false analogy here. Driverless elevators raised a concern in regard to the safety of the elevator cab's occupants in what was primarily a matter of private policy on private property. Essentially any public policy decision was about regulating the use of private property within private spaces and any citizen could opt out by taking the stairs.

On the other hand there are primary concerns with driverless cars in regard to the safety of non-occupants in the public commons and therefore it is primarily a matter of public policy regulating the use of private property in public spaces. The notion that opting out of public spaces is healthy for citizenship in general seems antithetical to a meaningful concept of citizenship in a liberal polity.

There are luddite concerns over self-driving cars. But there's an auto- industry counter tale of "Remembering when Tetra-Ethyl Lead in Gasoline was Considered a Good Thing."

<comment><USER3> Or the counter tale of "Remember when having all of the vehicles be driven 80+mph by drunk and/or sleep-deprived, distracted people filled with road-rage while trying to eat, put on makeup, text on their cellphone, and interact with passengers at the same time was considered a good thing?"

People were outraged over the Vietnam War, in which, 20 years of war, the U.S. lost 58,209 dead. Since 1930, we've lost about 30,000-54,000 _each and every year_ to vehicular deaths. Even now that cars are a bit safer and deaths are down a bit, they're still quite high compared to an event where you expect death, and unlike a war, it doesn't end. If we lost 100+ people per day to plane crashes or a few thousand people a month to terrorism, (or to elevators for that matter), it would be a huge deal.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a push to get humans out from behind the wheel.

<comment><USER4> This so hard, I mentioned this in a post just last week. There's a 9/11 every month on US roads, yet we leave the number 1 safety improvement (computerized traffic) we could make to probably eradicate 90% to private business: pushing driverless cars. Now of course at the end of the day this change has to be driven by businesses, but government can and should help: R&D and prototyping (like a ton of big inventions, e.g. the internet) could and should be funded to a very large extent by the government. Commercialization should be entirely left to businesses, but even here governments can use regulation to introduce new safety standards to inform drivers of the safest options for driving at the very least. And you could even go so far as to employ a model akin to that of many governments which increase taxes on fuel inefficient cars (e.g. SUVs) and decrease them on fuel efficient cars as an environmental measure, but then apply the same on the basis of safety (driverless cars, if they score well on safety which they should over time, being cheaper). You can argue that such a move is big government, you can also argue that's simply the government forcing the market to price in externalities (purely from a financial perspective, road death and injury increasing costs of healthcare on society, decreasing productivity, but also things like congestion and fuel efficiency can be priced in, which driverless cars should do better in) that currently are ignored. It'd still be entirely market driven, but the market reflects reality better. Once it picks up individual states could choose to make certain sections of roads (e.g. one lane) or sections of their city, entirely driverless car only at certain hours of the day, to accelerate the process. And once you go driverless you'll essentially open up what 'public transportation' really means. In a sharing economy of vehicles which need no driver, anyone's car essentially becomes a tiny bus-service. I'd expect the cost of transportation to drop quite significantly.

<comment><USER5> _R &D and prototyping (like a ton of big inventions, e.g. the internet) could and should be funded to a very large extent by the government._

Wasn't the DARPA challenge a big driver for autonomous car technology?

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. I think they can do more. The Challenge was relatively (mostly because there wasn't much else) significant 10 years ago and had relatively small ($1m for the winner, per year) attached to them. Not quite the effort we'd expect in relation to the size of the automotive industry, or the damage of externalities of driving that could largely be solved or improved (loss of life, injury, congestion, fuel efficiency, cost of transportation etc). I'm also not aware they continued after 2007.

Of course I wouldn't be surprised in the least if all those university teams (e.g. Carnegie Mellon who came in first, or MIT who came in 4th) are either employed at e.g. Google or Apple working on these things right now, or provided or are providing the research to those who are.

edit: yeah Google's driverless car project is headed by the Stanford director whose team won the 2005 DARPA challenge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I personally am just missing one thing to give me confidence in self-driving cars - transparency into their algorithms. I don't need to get deep into them, but some general information on how they "think" for accident avoidance would help me.

Just as an example, lets assume some debris on the highway. I am sure the self-driving car can avoid it, or stop until there is a clear space to go around it. But what if a human is tailgating? Does the car ignore that? Or does it (facetiously anthropomorphically) think to itself, "Hey, that is a human behind me, tailgating, at 75 mph. Swerving left to avoid this debris would put the human-driven vehicle on a path to collide with it, because the poor sap doesn't have my reaction time. I'd better hit the brakes instead, to communicate the danger."

I know that is an edge case, but edge cases are where accidents happen anyway, so I'd like to know what to expect from self-driven cars.

<comment><USER7> Edge cases are where accidents happen because humans suck at them, whereas you can specifically train on them with a computer.

The bigger problem, that you allude to, is that the algorithms that actually work are mostly machine learned and therefore very opaque to human inspection.

<comment><USER4> One of the big issues with this is how consumers/government will require algorithms to prioritize.

i.e. one can imagine that there are accidents with a certain context wherein a driverless car could prevent x amount of people from dying, by killing its own passenger. For example an axle breaks, you can't turn right anymore, only left, and you're coming up on a right turn. You're supposed to turn right and stick to your lane, you can't, you either go straight onto the other lane, or go left. You happen to be driving an SUV and there's two small cars in the lane. If you go straight you hit both of them, and the camera registers 2 young children in each and an adult driving. Given the difference in car sizes, you're likely to survive but also likely to kill at least two kids, perhaps up to 6 people, you'll definitely destroy 2 cars and injure all 6. Or you take a sharp left and drive infront of them straight off the road, you drop down in a cliff and die. In both cases the computer calculates to a large degree of certainty that if either choice is made that it'd go down pretty much like this.

Now this is a silly edge case but it's the best I could come up with right away, more plausible ones exists. Anyway the question now becomes, is it okay for cars to be sold that are programmed to prioritize the passenger's life, i.e. killing the maximum amount of innocent people who are not you, estimated between 2 and 6, injuring at least all 6, creating the biggest economic damage and loss of life or livelihood to innocent people (particularly 'innocent' as their car's axle was just fine, yours wasn't).

Or would a government require the algorithm to take a different priority, one in which the car's software is programmed to sacrifice the car's owner/passenger, for the sake of a utilitarian calculation?

I think the answer is pretty clear what's fair, and that if a computer wasn't part of the equation that an ordinary human would likely not have had the mental fortitude to identify the axle steering issue and all options and choose the best one and that the outcome would be worse than a driverless car. But I also think it's pretty clear that the 'fair' decision would still be highly controversial and scary to imagine and something that'll see quite a lot of debate and pockets of resistance the next few decades.

<comment><USER8> It somewhat annoys me that we could eliminate 99.9% of accidents, yet people still would object to a self-driving car because of contrived fictional situations like the one described above.

A freak situation like the one described above would surely make the news - "Hero driver saves family by giving his life" and/or "Our mom would still be alive if that asshole wasn't so selfish". Yet I don't remember seeing a single story like this, ever. From comment threads on self-driving vehicles, you'd think these moral dilemmas are a daily, if not an hourly, thing in traffic.

<comment><USER4> Don't take discussion as objection. If it was up to me we'd go driverless asap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Elevators are enclosed and move on rails. The "driver" of an elevator does not even consider obstacles, and couldn't see them if he or she wanted to because the floor and ceiling aren't transparent.

Driverless trains operate in many cities around the world. They hardly raise an eyebrow. They are on rails, of course, and those rails are on dedicated, closed tracks out of the way of traffic. The trains just have to coordinate to stay out of each other's way, stop if there is an alarm condition (object or person in track area), and correctly stop at the proper spots at the stations.

Not comparable to driving a car.

<comment><USER4> Of course it's not comparable in the sense that driving a car is different from operating an elevator, that's not a point the article aims to address. The point is that at one point we thought we needed to manually operate something out of safety or convenience concerns, that we could actually automate more safely and conveniently. Similarly, the point is, that most people had similar notions a few years ago about cars, and we're now seeing they're similarly untrue.

<comment><USER9> Convenience is the main point of automation; the only thing convenient about manual operation is that it provides a convenient job for someone, who finds it inconvenient to be replaced.

I don't think there was ever any genuine concern about automation bringing inconvenience (other than maybe some ineffective forms of automation: "strawman automation").

"I mostly like the idea of a machine that lets you just throw in your dirty clothes and punch some buttons, but won't that do away with the sheer convenience of washing clothes by hand?"

Doesn't compute.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Automatic elevators at least have their own distinct movement areas.

Automatic cars have to share their space with (human-driven) cars, crazy nuthead bikers and drunk-as-fuck pedestrians, not to mention cops ignoring all the traffic rules to get a fucking burger from McD and other emergency services.

Quite a difference I'd say, even with today's technology.

<comment><USER11> Normal drivers, Nuthead bikers, drunk pedestrians and cops can all be reacted to much swifter by a computer using radar than any driver behind the wheel. It's just pride to think you could.

<comment><USER12> I don't think anyone doubts it can react more quickly. The real question is whether it can react more correctly. I think the answer is "soon", for what that's worth, but I also think that until the answer is an unmitigated "yes" it's a valid criticism.

(edited for tone)

<comment><USER13> The key is that a human can _anticipate_ a dangerous situation and take mitigating action before a quick reaction is necessary. AI still has far to go before that sort of nuanced behavior can be replicated. Until then self driving cars will be like teenagers learning to drive. Sure they can get themselves from point A to B but I don't want to be near them while they do it.

<comment><USER14> Disagree entirely. Anticipation is just a function of memory - of having enough training data that you can glean potential outcomes and their probabilities through the attributes that surround them.

That's used in AI all the time already.

<comment><USER15> You're drivng down a crowded highway and you see an obstacle. You're likely to get rear ended if you hit your brakes and you can't change lanes. However you recognize it's just an empty card oard box. You drive through it with no issues.

Can you train a computer to do that?

<comment><USER16> ...and it turns out the "empty" cardboard box is half filled with metal pipes, which your human eye had no way of knowing in the split-second before your car collides into it in 65 mph. Your car screeches, loses control, and swerves into the neighboring lane.

But luckily a following self-driving car already detected the presence of an obstacle using radar. It detects your car maintaining speed. Within several milliseconds it evaluates chance of collision as VERY HIGH, starts evasive maneuver, scratching your car at a speed which is still uncomfortably high but not likely to cause a fatal accident.

Several weeks later a team of automobile experts review everything recorded in the accident, improve the algorithm to reduce the chance of accident even further in Edge Case 783645: the preceding human-driving car plowing into a small road obstacle at 65 mph. Firmwares are automatically upgraded during the following months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cool bit of history and I kind of see the analogy, but there's a difference between pulling up and down by cables in a single shaft indoors, and powered rolling on roads outdoors anywhere. Even if the first self-driving cars are on fixed paths too, there are a lot more variables.

<comment><USER18> But technology in general is a lot more capable now too. Self-driving cars are safer than manual elevators were, and they're a lot more useful to boot, as they get you to anywhere you want to go rather than just to a different floor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The story a few days ago about a bicyclist doing a track stand confusing a google car, which in turn reverted to performing a sequence of seemingly excessively safe manoeuvres, generated some fascinating responses.

Most particularly an observation that we seem to be stuck in a 'perfect or nothing' mentality - whereas new technologies, even in their own niche, really don't need to solve all problems for all people.

I guess because it feels like that attitude directly contradicts the sarcastic adage 'there's never time to do it right, but lots of time to do it over' (and myriad permutations) that generally encourage us to get it right on the first go so we do not have to waste time revisiting.

Complaining about the 100% applicability of an otherwise fine analogy seems to, again, be missing the point here. Plus, HN readers are not the target audience for this kind of story.

Aside: on a very recent trip to India, spending some time working in a very large, very new office (not retail) building, replete with fully functional lifts, it was fascinating to see each lift had a uniformed attendant that pressed buttons on request.

<comment><USER20> Actually perfect or nothing is a nice standard. Did you know that the elevator was quickly adopted because its inventor[1] went to shows and cut the cable holding up the cab he was standing on? It was because he had a foolproof locking mechanism to stop free-fall, in use ever since.

And it really is foolproof: a quick internet search reveals there has not been a single case of an elevator falling death in the history of elevators (EDIT: see replies[2]). (There is one exception I found, which was due to massive structural damage to a building, like a giant explosion, which also damaged the elevator. Check for yourself if you don't believe me.) [Almost] no elevator has ever fallen due to a snapped cable, in the history of elevators. (So even if you're afraid of heights you have no reason to be afraid of elevators, but maybe stop reading this comment here in this case.)

This is why even highly sqeamish people or people afraid of heights don't mind standing in a locked elevator cab, being held up by a cable, and with ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred stories of empty space under them while the cable lifts them up and down. It's just a non-issue (due to height, I guess claustrophobia is a separate issue.)

And this happens because the safety mechanism to keep elevators from falling is, well, perfect. The inventor of the elevator showed it, again and again, using his life.

If it weren't the case, at least some people would feel very differently about elevators! As this case shows, a standard of "perfect or nothing" absolutely impacts public perception and fast adoption, and may even mold people's opinion for centuries to come.

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

[2] I had done a quick Internet search, see replies for a few cases.

<comment><USER21> The difference is that no one (or nearly no one) dies taking the stairs. If you're going to replace one perfectly safe means of travel with another, the new one should also be perfectly safe.

But cars are anything but perfectly safe. In many parts of the world automobile accidents are a leading cause of death. Even in parts of the world where seatbelt laws and stringent safety requirements have reduced automobile deaths, they're still significant. What's worse, unlike other "preventable" causes of death such as smoking and obesity, automobile deaths disproportionately affect the young.

For all these reasons, I think the standard for driverless cars should be somewhat relaxed. Unfortunately, I'm guessing the "robots killing humans" mentality may still dominate...but if we can get past that I think driverless cars will have a larger impact on the demographics of death than almost anything else in the last 50 years.

<comment><USER22> According to this[0] nearly a thousand people in the US died from falling down stairs in 2000. I've injured myself on stairs, albeit not badly, but never in an elevator.

[http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm](http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In tipical geek fashion, this discussion is stuck around matters of safety in driverless cars and how can people be made to trust them. How much better they are, how fascinating the tech is. How driverless cars can replace cars entirely.

But do people actually _want_ driverless cars? Will they _ever_ do?

A driverless car is not a driverless elevator or train. People never drove their own elevators or trains, they were driven by other people. A car is another matter entirely. People enjoy driving their own cars, some because of the control it gives them, others because of the act of driving itself. If this weren't so, people wouldn't choose to drive their own cars in situations where taxis or other forms of public transportation are clearly superior.

I want a self-driving car as much as I want self-drinking beer.

I'm not saying self-driving cars are useless. I can certainly see a future with self-driving buses and taxis. However, for that to happen there are a few human obstacles that must be overcome even if the technology becomes perfect. The same obstacles that currently prevent self-driving trains from becoming more widespread: if you need a human to stand watch against vandalism and to react in emergency situations, he might as well be driving the thing, it's cheaper.

<comment><USER24> Indeed, there's still a case for car ownership even if one doesn't enjoy driving.

One reason for preferring a car over a bus or taxi is the ability to transport luggage. I frequently find that I have to undertake round trips of 200-300 miles with a car full of bulky and valuable equipment; the destination is often somewhere that is not easily accessible by public transport, or requires changes between bus, train and taxi, even if I could take the luggage via that means.

It might be rather convenient to have the car conduct at least the motorway portion of the driving itself, but access to my own car is pretty much essential in order to do this sort of thing. I suspect that for anyone in business where they must transport goods or tools it will be even more vital.

<comment><USER25> You would just get a van or truck on demand. That's a huge benefit of on demand, self-driving cars - instead of having one car you try to fit into your every need, you get what you need and when you need it. So, something tiny if it's just you and your partner going to dinner. Or a van if you're taking kids and friends to an event. Or a truck if you have to move a sofa.

I have a sedan. 90% of the time it's just me in the car. Insane.

<comment><USER26> I am in similar situation to OP - I need a larger car during the weekends because I drive 200 miles away for certain events where I need to take loads of stuff with me. But during the week it's mostly me alone in the car driving to work.

I could rent a truck during weekends - but that would be ungodly expensive, especially since I'm under 25 so every rental company charges literally 2x or 3x for car/van rental to drivers under 25. Then I have to worry about returning it on time, and it has to be in perfect condition or again, I have to pay for anything that's damaged. If I scratch my own car - no biggie. If I want to stay overnight - it won't cost me another $100 per day of rental. And then the question is - is it really "better" for the environment/society/traffic to make two cars rather than one?

<comment><USER25> Why would they make two cars rather than one? Most people would be sharing cars in x years. There would be fewer on the road over all. You'll use the truck for a couple of hours and then until you need it again, it'll return to the pool of available cars unless you want to hold it for the day.

In the future, you won't be driving the car so I don't think U25 will be such an issue.

<comment><USER26> Well, even if I don't drive a car personally, I would still like to own one, to keep it personal. Sure, you could order one and it would pick you up, but then you are sitting in a seat that thousands of other people sat in. You can't leave any of your things in the storage spaces, because tomorrow you might get a different car. There's also the factor of hygiene that puts me off buses and taxis.

And they would make two cars because I would need one vehicle to go to work,and another to take my stuff over the weekend - rather than one vehicle which does both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Oh man, this reminds me of the time I met an elevator with an operator. It was in one of the Smithsonian museums - perhaps appropriately the museum of american history? It was only 22 years ago, and I rode the elevator several times just to watch the operator work the strange controls. I wish I'd photographed it.

<comment><USER28> I saw one in the Air and Space Museum just this summer. Your tax dollars at work, America.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> this reminds me of a truly excellent HOPE X presentation about elevator hacking[0]. one of the most entertaining con panels i've seen, and interesting information on an esoteric topic.

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

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm pretty sure driverless elevators never operated on open roads. I'm also pretty sure driverless elevators don't travel at highway speeds.

I dunno, maybe I'm wrong, and this elevator here in my office building goes burning up asphalt and rubber when I'm not around to notice.

<comment><USER25> You've completely missed the point. See IkmoIkmo's post in this thread.

<comment><USER30> Even after seeing IkmoIkmo's post, I'm standing by my own. It does nothing to prove that the drivered->driverless car transition would be anything _close_ to the drivered-driverless elevator transition. Even historical elevators rarely (if ever) had multiple elevators per shaft or a shaft that travelled in more than one dimension; that's a non-starter for the analogy this article tries (and in my opinion fails) to present as if it proves anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> People still do not accept driverless trains or tubes yet. I remember talking with an AI expert a few years ago. The London's underground had a fully automated driverless prototype in the 70's. And here we are, in 2015 and only a toy driverless system in London (DLR).

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure how much that's the case. For many years now, Paris' lines 1 and 14 have been fully automated. I've been to Toulouse last year and their whole subway system – albeit small – is automated. I'm also pretty sure that the train one takes from Copenhagen's airport to the main train station is fully automated, but I'm not sure about the other lines.

All in all, I think the public acceptance issue can be mitigated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Planes need 3D steering and trains 1D... yet we have driverless planes and not driverless trains.

<comment><USER34> We do have driverless trains.

<comment><USER6> And we do not have driverless planes - we have driver-supervised autopilots.

EDIT: I guess we have drones, with programmed routes. But again, regulations require supervision in those cases.

<comment><USER35> We sure don't have any drones carrying passengers, so I think your argument stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The change in elevators was from having a professional operator to allowing passengers to push the buttons themselves. Elevators are still "driven" by humans, not robots. The self-driving cars are a whole different ball of wax.

<comment><USER36> Interestingly, this exists: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is this here to sort of suggest that "we got used to driverless elevators so we'll get used to driverless cars".

It's perhaps true but a really bad analogy. There's minimal risk of my child being hit and killed by an elevator as a result of a bug in the elevator software.

<comment><USER4> It's not a technological argument, it's one of human perception. The article talks about how ordinary people like you and me simply didn't view an elevator as something that's safe or convenient without a manual operator, quite like cars today. And that this perception didn't change automatically, it took time and new ideas which didn't have much to do with technology really.

As for safety perceptions back then, it's hard to say exactly what they were like. The article alludes they were pretty bad, when elevator operators went on strike the city was badly affected apparently. I can tell you in the US like 20-30 people die each year in elevators, it's pretty minor given the billions of trips but I think we can easily imagine elevators were not quite as reliable 100 years ago when the automatic elevator existed, and that the accident rate was quite a lot higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Strange comparison, I've never heard of an elevator, driven or otherwise, run over kids....

Unfortunately I can't come up with a better analogy myself but comparing this to an elevator seems weird.

<comment><USER39> [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and- order/1180240...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and- order/11802401/Girl5-dies-after-trapping-head-in-lift.html)

Fatal lift accidents are not unheard of.

</comment></comment><comment> anti-shill doctors were also under a great deal of suspicion 200 hundred years ago or so...the idea of the story of Frankenstein was taken from the fabric of the society of that day...most people did not trust doctors...anything new is under suspicion.

<comment><USER40> While I don't really disagree with the general point, 200 years ago there was minimal understanding of medical sterilization methods and no anesthetics so it's certainly understandable that surgery at least was viewed with, shall we say, suspicion. Given that you would probably die or be seriously incapacitated in some way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> My biggest issue with driverless cars is how they'll handle extremes.

You as a driver might choose to hit some one rather than risk hitting a barrier with your wife and baby on in the car.

In other cases you might rather drive your car into a barrier or even off a cliff rather than hit a child.

Now this isn't about morality or legality you might be morally and legally "wrong" for swaying out of a more dangerous obstacle for your self and the passengers of your car while increasing the likelihood of harming some one else, you might go to jail for that, be found liable in a civil law suit or just feel like shit for the rest of your life but it's still your decision to make.

With dirverless cars that's gone the car really has a choice to make and that's in an extreme case in which it cannot avoid an accident some where there will be a algorithm dictating should it prefer to risk the passengers of the car or the 3rd party it might collide with.

Even if the car can do a risk calculation and choose the lowest results that still isn't good enough since well it shouldn't be upto the car to make that decision because it cannot count for other factors such as who is in the car and who you might hit.

Heck if you as a driver have a choice of swaying left or right to avoid a kid on the road and there's a 200,000 to your right and a 20,000 car to your left you are going to go left every time.

<comment><USER42> It takes too long for the deliberative mind to make a decision, because thinking through the situation would take ten seconds or more. The way you describe it is not what happens. In actuality the animal brain will make an intuitive decision, and the rational brain will then invent an explanation for that decision and pretend it was going to make that decision all along. By contrast a driverless car will always make deliberative decisions, so if anything the only morally right decision is to let the algorithm decide, because whatever its process it will still reach the right conclusion more often than a monkey brain evolved to avoid lions trying to decide whether to turn the wheel of a car or not.

<comment><USER41> I would disagree if there's enough time to react there's enough time for a choice now it doesn't mean you can have a lengthy internal deliberation but your mind will take the current biases into a fact.

There's allot of stuff you are doing without realizing it people for example drive 10-20% slower with a child in their car without doing that intentionally, while men tend to speed up while having an attractive woman as a passenger you will behave differently and make different choices based on the situation you are in.

I've been involved in several accidents / near accidents in my life and in all of them i have enough time to react and make a decision, if you can't react and it's not some one really jumping infront of you which means you hit them before you even notice them it means you are driving too fast or otherwise distracted in the 1st place.

I don't care about morality i care about the best outcome for me as it see it i don't want my car to sway into incoming traffic because it calculated that it's a lower risk of serious injury than hitting an idiot on a motorbike that decided to do an illegal uturn,

That situation is from experience i couldn't way left because i might hit incoming traffic if i would say right i would hit the cars to my right if I would emergency break i would still hit him and most likely cause a chain accident with the car/s behind me so i went on knowing that i would most likely hit him, I've manage to get enough speed and stick close enough to the right to not him but even if i would've in my opinion that would've been the best situation even if it was the 1st or 2nd highest chance for some one to be seriously injured use case.

Now I don't remember slowing and thinking hmm can't do left, can't do right, can't break, I remember my eyes running from left to right for a couple of milliseconds and then speeding up instinctively but it was still a decision i made. Now if it was a kid on a side walk I would've swayed right without a doubt even tho i could've gotten hit by a passing car or driving some one else of the road, and if i had my kid in the car? well if mowing down and entire puppy orphanage was the least risky scenario for me i would've done that in a heartbeat.</comment></comment></comment>


0x5f3759df — Fast inverse square root explained in detail - <AUTHOR> http://blog.quenta.org/2012/09/0x5f3759df.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The appendix of this article has a slightly more intuitive explanation: [http://blog.quenta.org/2012/09/0x5f3759df- appendix.html](http://blog.quenta.org/2012/09/0x5f3759df-appendix.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> Previously submitted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4526609](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4526609)

Also from another source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115168)</comment>


Ask HN: What SaaS do you promote to your friends? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Any in this list (no affiliation):

[https://prism-break.org/en/all/](https://prism-break.org/en/all/)</comment>