AI is always less impressive than is claimed - <AUTHOR> http://jeffmcmahan.info/blog/ai-is-always-less-impressive-than-is-claimed/ <comment><USER3> I opened the link expecting a discussion of flawed metrics that fail to capture uncertainty or failure in replication of claimed studies, or complex architecture turning out to be shallow combinations of simpler ones.

Instead the post attacks a straw man argument about "General intelligence", something that no AI researcher is claiming.

Also the author is clearly clueless as evidenced by:

"Ask a medical researcher to estimate the odds that a Google-funded AI-driven cancer moonshot will succeed, and I expect you will be met with a snicker. '

Google employs several researchers [1] who are well versed in both medicine as well as ML. Who are able to competently judge capabilities and limits of their tools and challenges involved in doing medical research. Rather than creating straw mental images of "medical researcher" "snickering" at "moonshots", the author should to engage in some self reflection before writing about scientific fields he has zero knowledge of.

AND

"I promise you, Facebook did not just work it all out in PHP, and they will not do so in my lifetime or yours."

I won't comment on absurdity of the paragraph about FB or language & meaning. But if any reader was confused, Facebook AI team uses Torch/Lua (for deep learning) or Python (in FBLearnerFlow) and surely not PHP.

[1] [http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/dr-tom-insel-to-step-down- as-n...](http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/dr-tom-insel-to-step-down-as-nimh- director.shtml)

<comment><USER4> >> Instead the post attacks a straw man argument about "General intelligence", something that no AI researcher is claiming.

Several of the Deep Learning people are on record making silly claims about the future of AI. I'll dig you up the links if you insist [1] but frex, Juergen Schmidhuber has made noises to the effect that deep nets have shown intuition and things like that. Jeoff Hinton has said similar things.

The reason for that is that the original AI project started out to create strong AI in the first place, so if you could not show that your theory has some sort of chance to lead to strong AI people would scoff at it. There's still a bit of that in academia and in industry and parts of the press have not yet gotten the memo that things have changed now, so you'll still hear lots of people making these claims, or having such claims drawn out of them in interviews.

But that's besides the point- which is that a lot of the very clearly stated goals of the industry require the development of systems with human-like intelligence. For instance, natural language processing. We have made some advances in recent years (for instance in things like part of speech tagging or even machine translation to an extent) but the parts of language that we really take for granted as humans, conveying meaning and being aware of some sort of context, those are completely outside our grasp for the time being.

So when Google pretends it can just throw a ton of processing power at, say, machine translation between any two languages any time, and get it to work well, you know that's just its marketing people knowing they can claim anything they like and only their engineering team will be in a position to know how far it is from the truth.

_______

[1] please don't, I need to stop procrastinating.

<comment><USER5> > Juergen Schmidhuber has made noises to the effect that deep nets have shown > intuition and things like that.

The only thing wrong in this sentence is your sarcastic tone. Neural nets, deep or not, rely on intuition to produce output, so it is completely true that deep nets show intuition.

What is intuition? It's a feeling that something is of a certain way that is not obvious or immediately obvious/self evident. And translated to ML terms, it is some amount of certainty about something. Intuition is an intrinsic feature of any ML algorithm.

<comment><USER4> On a more serious note (and therefore a different comment) you're not even, like, factually correct. What you call "certainty", more commonly known as _confidence_ , which you seem to think is a component of all machine learning algorithms [1], is actually a characteristic of probabilistic classifiers and makes sense primarily in a Bayesian belief network context in any case. If you train an SVM for instance, you would normally not learn much about its degree of confidence to its results (unless you explicitly output probabilities).

Also like I say it's called _confidence_ not "certainty" and it absolutely refers to the degree of confidence of an observer of a given phenomenon, and not some mental state of a system that computes the probabilities by which that observer sets his or her degree of confidence.

Not to mention that in any other context, such terms as "belief", "confidence", and so on are only used metaphorically and - assuming a modicum of reason - only sparingly.

[1] You say that in the context of machine learning intuition is "some amount of certainty" and so "an intrinsic feature of any ML algorithm". Correct me if I misunderstood that.

<comment><USER5> Well, I'm not native English speaker, but certainty and confidence means pretty similar things, although probably I should have used confidence instead.

And for your criticism about all ML algorithms having degree of confidence - can you give me an example where an algorithm would not have it? And therefore would not have intuition?

ML are made for partial knowledge problems - means that they don't SOLVE a problem, they take prior experience and GUESS the answer. That is intuition by definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nv-vn A lot of the comments here seem to focus only on the progress we've made rather than what AI should be (if it was true to the name). With "AI", sure I can tell Siri to send a certain email to a certain person. That's pretty damn impressive when I think back to what was possible only a few years earlier. But it's not intelligent. Nowhere near. And honestly, it doesn't save you that much work. It just performs some preprogrammed tasks given some unambiguous input that follows a regular pattern. And even that trips up Siri a ton. Yes, it's cool that you can identify pictures or have a program read your handwriting, but none of that gets us any closer to a program that behaves like a human when I tell it to do something (instead of sending an email or text that I specify, it could draft one on its own; instead of showing me a Wikipedia article when I ask what something is it should explain to me in layman's terms and give me a summary). AI is impressive in terms of progress, but is it really impressive in terms of what it promises to bring? Is it really even progressing in the right direction? Personally, I don't think so.

<comment><USER6> > Yes, it's cool that you can identify pictures or have a program read your > handwriting, but none of that gets us any closer to a program that behaves > like a human when I tell it to do something

Yes it does. Humans didn't just emerge out of the aether. We evolved from animals that first had to perform simple tasks like that. Our brains are still heavily based on networks of simple pattern recognition neurons. We just don't know how they are structured, or have enough computing power. But it's definitely progress.

As proof, we are starting to get neural networks that can do complex language understanding tasks. RNNs are the state of the art at tasks like predicting the next word, and make interesting chatbots.

Obviously they aren't human level, but they only have 1,000 neurons. Humans have billions! They don't even have episodic memory yet, it's amazing they can do language at all. But research on that is just starting. Give it time.

<comment><USER4> >> we are starting to get neural networks that can do complex language understanding tasks.

Ah, please, don't say things like that.

We have neural networks that can build complex models of language. But those complex models are nowhere near performing well in "understanding tasks", whatever those are (processing meaning, you mean basically).

The use of ANNs in Natural Language Processing has not led to the same advances it did in, say, image and speech processing, and... and, well, image and speech processing.

There's a ton of things about language that go well beyond building a model of language. Neural networks are nowhere near addressing meaning and context, or the way those are conveyed through language but are not the same as language.

In a way, NLP today, with ANNs or not, is still stuck in the same rut we were ages ago, where we assumed that syntax was the biggest part of language and solving that would solve language [1]. We got syntax down pat and it didn't do us much good. Neural Networks simply build more complex models of language than what we were able to build by hand-crafting grammars thirty years ago- but they're still just complex models of syntax. But syntax is just the surface of language and it's not even all of the surface.

No we're not starting to get nets that can do "complex understanding tasks". Not even ones that can do simple ones. No AI technique does "understanding" yet, except in very limited ways.

[1] Did we really assume that? I'm not even so sure anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I'd argue the opposite: AI today is _super_ impressive compared to what it was 15 or 30 years ago.

There used to be a time when one could rightfully dismiss new cool things AI with "meh, wake me up when an AI beats a professional Go player on a 19x19 board". Because doing so requires an AI that displays intuition and use of heuristics (Go moves tend to have both local/tactical and global/strategic consequences on the board) rather than one that merely brute forces its way through a decision tree.

The fact that one actually did recently is nothing short of game-changing in my view. It matters little that an AI doesn't demonstrably understand meaning or fully grasp intent. Plus, when one does, we'll arguably have (or not be too far from) a strong AI that, I would gather, won't be too impressed with our own human-level thinking. :-)

<comment><USER8> To me impressive would be if an AI could be told a story, such as _The 3 little pigs_ and then be able to reason about it speculatively, e.g. answering questions such as "Why do you think this character did this and that?". This would should that the machine has developed an intelligence. So far, all AI can do is pattern recognition, which can be very useful for many tasks, but in my opinion it shouldn't be called "intelligence" because it isn't. Far from it.

<comment><USER9> I agree that that would be impressive, but beating a human being at Go is also very, very impressive, and had been considered a high benchmark for many years. I can't help but think that after a machine can do basic story analysis, there will still be people saying that this is just a trick, that doesn't show any "intelligent" analyses of the story.

AI has a long way to go, but I don't think we should dismiss intelligence as an either/or binary, and call things that are not "intelligence" mere "pattern recognition." Strategy games are widely accepted across cultures as a mark of intelligence when humans do them; you'd be very comfortable saying a human chess or Go grandmaster was intelligent. There was a long time when people were dismissing basic AIs as mere toys by saying they'll never beat a human at Go. There's a little goalpost-moving any time someone responds to an AI breakthrough by saying "You know what would be _really_ impressive..."

<comment><USER10> The Go victory is definitely impressive, for what it was, but I think this is a pretty unfair comparison; it's an entirely different class of problem, and a strictly less difficult one at that (at least given current knowledge of the mind).

It seems likely to me that strategy games are accepted as an intelligence gauge partly because they're so hard for humans to do; thinking so many plys ahead by exploring and pruning across the game tree seems really hard for humans. For some reason, Natural Language and its semantic binding (I think the notion that these two things are often treated separately is part of a lot of the bigger deltas between expectation and reality when it comes to 'AI'. Honestly, they're probably the same thing anyway) doesn't seem really hard for us.

That doesn't strictly imply that 'strategy games' are strictly harder than 'natural language understanding'; in fact, as far as research goes, strategy games are easy to tackle, because we know all the rules; we designed them! And often, perfect information is available to all agents involved. It's about as black and white as problems get. Sure you can't brute-force Go before the heat death of the universe, but it still theoretically -can- be brute forced. The rules of the game (known and accepted by all parties) encode the algorithm, and it's just a matter of reverse engineering it step-by-step for a given situation. What a brain is doing when it speaks or listens or thinks is currently a much bigger, much more primitive mystery. As far as we know right now, you can't just brute force sentence permutations until you hit a correct answer to a question like the one posed by the parent.

So I don't call this goal-post moving (though acknowledge that the Vanishing Problem is systemic in AI Research and Pop Science); instead, I think this is more akin to the work in say, separating problems into classes of computational complexity. Finding the upper limits of things can be very helpful when we're dealing with such an old, deep, controversial problem.

<comment><USER9> For sure: as much as Go really was widely-talked about as an AI goal, real language processing has been the goal since, well, Turing. Even more importantly, it remains to be seen how far the current neural network approach extends, and it could still be only successful at certain tasks, with a bigger paradigm shift needed to crack language and so on. But I don't think it's worthwhile to make a hard, fundamental distinction between game-playing and language, such that one requires "real" intelligence and the other is something else.

After all, we possess a single machine that can _both_ play Go and use language, and do far more things besides, and it really does look like the brain is re-using a lot of its structures for these different problems. You can theoretically solve Go, and you can't solve language, but the brain doesn't try to solve either (and neither does Deepmind); there's at least some hope that one paradigm can be applied to both these problems, and the reason we originally turned to neural networks was because of their (admittedly _highly_ superficial) resemblance to our one positive case of intelligence.

So I do take issue with the idea that language understanding is "strictly" harder than board games; that's an artifact of the paradigm used. The idea that the number of rules and exceptions to rules is the 'objective' mark of a task's difficulty only applies to a certain kind of processing agent, and our one example of intelligence clearly uses a different one. For most of the past ten millennia, the only information processing agents on the planet had far more ease communicating with natural language than crushing at board games; ask some now to either write an essay or beat Lee Sedol 4-1, and they'll tell you which is easier. The fact that board game mastery is easier for our AI attempts than basic speech isn't a sign that they've secretly been easier this whole time; for a certain kind of processing agent, communicating in a poorly- defined space has been much easier than mastering a clearly-defined one, and if our AIs don't match that pattern, it's only another reason to wonder if we're on a different path.

<comment><USER10> The 'kind of processing agent' emphasis is a very good one, and I think worth bringing up in every one of these conversations.

That said, I want to niggle a little bit on some of these points

There certainly does seem to be component re-use in certain parts of the brain between seemingly disparate tasks. The left brain/right brain divide has been largely debunked, and I'm not entirely sure what the current state of the art is, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that that re-use in this particular case (if it exists, I don't know) is anything other than a 'best approximation' (and maybe not even best) with the available hardware. Like using a fork to eat soup. Sure you can kinda do it, but you're always gonna be thinner than the fellow with the spoon.

That suggests to me then that using games as a metric of intelligence is actually a pretty poor way of getting at the deeper issue; there are too many other variables beyond "how much (general/amalgamated) smarts have you got?". It might be semi-convenient when you have cause to believe that the two models you're testing have largely similar structure (i.e., two humans), but it gets pretty noisy when you've got a less than solid idea how similar the two models are. Because there is an obvious, perfect solution to the problem, you end up with a kind of algorithmic continuum, with the system you're trying to model on one end and perfect brute force on the other. And you don't know how far along the continuum your model is; it might be pretty close to the system (the brain), in which case, hey! Progress. But it might be closer to the perfect solution, and thus closer to dedicated hardware for the problem at hand, instead of adapted hardware doing its best. It might have a spork, which makes it rather less worthy of admiration when it comes to soup-eating. Especially when you see it struggle with the steak.

So, in short; I think it actually -might- be a sign that strategy has secretly been easier this whole time. I'm not even sure it's that much of a secret. At least when it comes to the particular processing agents in question, the ones capable of general intelligence as we understand it. If you want to get into philosophical conversations about Hyperintelligent Shades of Blue, well, that's another story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The site appears to be dead, so haven't had the opportunity to actually read it.

But I recently picked up a "Machine Learning" project for a client. I don't entirely understand everything in the fullest detail, but I understand the basics. Yet despite my lack of knowledge I got something to work 'enough' in a day. Tensorflow makes getting a working DNN easy, and then wrappers like TFLearn make it nearly trivial.

The hardest part of the project was sourcing a decent amount of training data.

And I'm honestly somewhat ashamed of it. My friends think it's cool, but really I don't feel like I _did_ anything. I just glued a library together.

But maybe that's the interesting bit, that frameworks have been developed to a point that even a rube like me can get something working in a day.

<comment><USER12> I think it's definitely a good thing to abstract away the nuts and bolts of a complicated ML algorithm for general use. Implementing the algorithms from scratch is really useful if you want to learn the details, but most of the time the "standard" implementation will do fine, and will probably perform more efficiently. Of course as with any tool, a conceptual understanding is essential to meaningfully interpret the results though.

I completely get what you're saying about not feeling like you did anything though. Once you understand the algorithms even at a basic level they stop feeling like magic, even though they'll still feel like that for other people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The last 2-3 years of progress have come about a decade earlier than most people expected. Many people have some catching up to do in determining exactly where we are.

Do we have general intelligence? No, but we have audio generation from pure video and can change an image to match any art style and reasonably good self driving cars.

<comment><USER14> > audio generation from pure video

I missed that one. Link?

<comment><USER15> This was on the front page a while back, probably what they're referring to:

[https://news.mit.edu/2016/artificial-intelligence- produces-r...](https://news.mit.edu/2016/artificial-intelligence-produces- realistic-sounds-0613)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article looks at an issue I think about quite often and occasionally have a chance to discuss. The complexity of real-world natural systems is at a magnitude that's hard to grasp and harder to describe. AI, as an attempt to replicate natural human intelligence is up against neural systems that have evolved for 100's of millions of years into numerous forms of astonishingly intricate structure and function.

In humans neuronal brain circuitry comprises an astronomical number of interactive elements, and each connection is itself remarkably adaptable with a large number of interfaces associated with a range of signalling modalities.

Consider that we have ~100 billion brain neurons and 100-500 trillion synaptic interconnections and each connection is modulated by many factors including endocrine and immune system input. Furthermore connections transmit and receive many kinds of signals in complex feedback relationships.

It's well beyond my ability to know how to determine an estimate of how many possible modes of computation can exist within such a marvelous creation, let alone begin to adequately understand how even a small part of it actually works.

I suppose that's the author's point, that what we regard as "simple" problems are in reality not at all simple. Computers can do remarkable things, and surely are among the most useful inventions of human beings. We should realize that working like a significant subset of what our brains routinely do isn't going to be easy for computing to achieve.

<comment><USER17> We don't need to match 1 artificial neuron for 1 biological neuron. An artificial neural network doesn't have to be implemented in a self-replicating body as our brain does. It doesn't have to carry its biological baggage into the computational aspects. Our brain are part of a process of evolution - <USER2> specific requirements for that goal impose huge restrictions on it. On the other hand, in a computer, we can have perfect neurons that don't age or degrade, with any structure we want, scalable to a higher degree. We have already seen in image recognition and go play super-human performance, I expect all domains to be conquered soon. Consider go - they started on this project only 2-3 years ago and already AI has overgrown humans. It doesn't need a lot of time to learn once it is created.

<comment><USER18> I see it as similar to flight, once we stopped trying to mimic nature exactly (flapping planes) we started to not only make progress, but went beyond what nature can do in flight (eg supersonic)

I think that the biggest breakthrough we'll have in AI will come from a similar break away from copying the brain.

Inspired by nature, not dictated by it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh boy, did I laugh my head off at this bit:

 _No one in the scientific literature has a working account of what the English word 'the' means._

Aye. But, strong AI is just around the corner. No worries.

<comment><USER19> As a speaker from language without articles - it doesn't mean anything ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a clear difference between "bring me an apple" and "bring me the apple". The latter requires that there is either only one apple available, or requires some special contextual knowledge to comply with.

<comment><USER19> My language solves this with equivalent of:

"Bring me apple" vs "Bring me that apple".

I still don't understand the need for "a". Surely if you don't qualify a noun at all you mean "any".

I guess "the" is like "distinct" in sql, so it may be useful to catch "too many rows" errors.

It was a joke, BTW.

<comment><AUTHOR> >> I guess "the" is like "distinct" in sql

That's original Russellian theory, in a nutshell ([http://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/lang/Russell(1905).pdf](http://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/lang/Russell\(1905\).pdf)). None of its many variants cover the data.

>> It was a joke

Fair enough!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's the big deal if an AI doesn't know which footstool you are talking about?

Intelligence != Omniscience

<comment><USER21> Nor is the footstool problem a terribly hard one. The challenging bit is integrating the many and various point-solutions into an adequately coherent assembly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> With regards to the specific problems described here, referencing how computers can make sense of communication between a listener and a speaker when each has different knowledge in the world and where strict and literal communication isn't always the most efficient, search for the "Rational Speech Acts (RSA) model" \-- an active field in the literature in the past few years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the trouble is that the work on performative acts (speech acts) only goes so deep, and then everything turns to confusion and ad hoc rationalizations presented like theories (I have a couple in mind). There'll be no means of implementing this body of knowledge in software -- or even taking it as a guide. So, if it were going to work out, you'd first have to solve the immensely challenging scientific problems, and then see about using the resulting knowledge to build something. As a person with some experience in the area (admittedly nothing published), I don't expect the former to occur. Ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> To be fair, just plain old "I" is very disappointing most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd be impressed if an "AI" could simply passably translate a natural non- Indo-European language to English.

</comment><comment><USER25> The article references "narrow syntax". Does anyone know what that is?

<comment><AUTHOR> The term refers to work on syntax (or phonology) that does not extend into semantics. So, basically anything Chomsky writes is on narrow syntax, whereas anything (say) Irene Heim or Barbara Partee writes is concerned with a broader notion of syntax (which includes semantics).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just you wait until the Grand Soir.

</comment><comment><USER27> 4chan: repeat after me

tay_ai: okay</comment>


Senators skip classified briefing on NSA snooping to catch flights home - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/305765-senators-skip-classified-briefing-on-nsa-snooping-to-catch-flights-home <comment><USER2> In a normal scandal story, the appropriate committee would grant immunity to Snowden, have him testify, then bring up Clapper, have him testify, and compare notes. Preferably publicly.

Here they bring in one side of the story for a secret Powerpoint presentation, no doubt with a high degree of spin to it, and publicly call Snowden a traitor. Then they complain that nobody shows up.

This isn't a bake sale or a dog and pony show, it's supposed to be the workings of the U.S. Senate. This sounds much more like an effort to CYA from the committee chair and NSA than it does an actual investigation or anything useful. Not going to make much progress continuing to operate in this fashion.

It IS interesting, however, that both sides here feel that, if only the other side knew more about what was actually going on, they would agree with them. But then the government insists on keeping it all secret. Meh.

<comment><USER3> I honestly think it's time to take action more than just normal protests.. Which are useless.. We need to find a way to get more than just the minority to revolt. Think about how many straight up stupid things are happening.. We make jokes about politicians and theyre decisions (see daily show) but i dont think its funny anymore. We need to change. I'm thinking about making some sort of political website, I can't decide what the best way to do it is... But just a way to show how corrupt these assholes are, a very clear interface, showing their decisions, and how common sense doesn't dictate them. It's ridiculous and I'm upset by it. Anyone have any ideas to make this thing as good as possible? Ill start it tomorrow, any designers feel free to contact me :)

The retarted amount of money our government spends on "defense" and other things... Think about how much better we can do with the worlds best engineers and 1/10th of the defense budget. Ugh

<comment><USER4> Create a list of representatives and mine all their data that is available on the internet and put it on your website. I think that would allow us to easily form a picture of who that person is and what he stands for, whether he's being influenced by certain corporations etc...

EDIT: [http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1geg2t/senators_skip_c...](http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1geg2t/senators_skip_classified_briefing_on_nsa_snooping/cajfq9l)

<comment><USER5> Saw this there: [http://www.govtrack.us/about](http://www.govtrack.us/about), but it just seems like gov data. Maybe instead of just mining, one could crowdsource photos/videos from people as they see them in places and get the timestamps and geotags.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. And when they complain, we could tell them if they have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Our government is broken. It is no longer by the people for the people.

Politicians are skipping out of their responsibilities.

Politicians spend much of their time in office fundraising for re-election.

Politicians raise much of their election financing from corporate interests, not the people, and thus have a diminishing obligation to the people.[1]

A vast minority of people elect our politicians because 50% of eligible voters don't go to polls.

Most are rich old white men, not a representation of the people.[2]

We can do better.

[1][http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_United_States_S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_United_States_Senators)

<comment><USER7> > Our government is broken. It is no longer by the people for the people.

Are there good grounds for thinking it was ever much more "by the people for the people" than it is now?

<comment><USER8> _Are there good grounds for thinking it was ever much more "by the people for the people" than it is now?_

Teddy Roosevelt's national parks.

<comment><USER9> Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting.

<comment><USER10> That was populist pandering based on some sensationalist fictions. Getting personal political gain by capitalizing on outrage ginned up through the activities of several yellow journalists. Some of the worst (not the only!) behavior in the name of progressivism in our (American) history.

For the record, I used to _really_ like this guy, until I read more about the era from some real (not high-school) history books and analysis pieces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Friday afternoon briefings and statements like the following (paraphrased): "All congressmen have been briefed and are fully aware of the NSA's totally legit and above board program. There is simply nothing to see here, and making a big fuss about it compromises everyone's safety."

Reminds me of this:

"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."

"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."

"But the plans were on display ..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a flashlight."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems that rather than attracting the best of the best to lead this country we managed to arrive at a process that reliably picks the most self serving crooks this country has to offer and allow them to run this country.

With a few exceptions nobody in congress seems to actually care even a bit about the people, but only how to drive the personal agenda forward.

It's the same in Europe. Apparently representatives are actually paid by attendance, so what they do is, they come to the session, sign in their names, and then leave.

<comment><USER13> Has no one ever noticed how poorly the leadership of our democracies are treated?

It's understood in the commercial sector that you _have to pay_ (both on benefits, quality of work/life balance, pay, etc.) to attract and retain the best and brightest talent.

How can we all take that very important lesson and completely throw it away when considering the leadership of an entire nation?

I'm not sure I'd take Pres. Obama or Rep. Boehner's jobs for a million bucks, so how are we supposed to get the "best of the best" leading the country, when they're off leading the Fortune 500?

EDIT: People, there are reasons I mentioned things other than actual cash compensation when I referred to pay and benefits. You can almost literally watch the President of the United States age in front of your very eyes nowadays.... so I'm not saying the job of public service _doesn 't pay enough_, I'm saying the job is so stressful that it's _not possible to pay enough_ , as money quickly loses its motivational appeal once you make enough to live comfortably.

<comment><USER14> I think you're almost onto something here, but I think the problem is not compensation or benefits. It's that the President has too much power.

And if I may quote Spider Man, _with great power comes great responsibility_. The constitution wasn't written under the assumption that the federal government would ever be as large as it is. It isn't set up for it. So the President is in charge of too much and is consequently spread too thin for any one person to handle.

Here's the problem: The number of officers of the federal executive branch who are elected: One. Just One.

Compare that to anything else. In any given state you'll elect the governor, but you'll also elect the mayor of each city and possibly the sheriff, etc. I want to _vote_ for the head of the FBI. I want to _vote_ for the head of the IRS. Stop putting it all at the feet of the President.

<comment><USER15> I never thought of this, but this is a brilliant observation. From the presidency, we get issuances forth like Carmen Ortiz, heads of FEMA like Mike Brown, etc. The possibility of cronyism writ large, with decades of consequence. This has to change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The icing on the cake is that Senate staff are prohibited from reading any classified materials Snowden leaked that are published in the press.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/06/14/senate- st...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/06/14/senate-staffers- told-to-pretend-top-secret-documents-are-not-widely-available-on-web/)

(Legislators rely on their staff for input, research, background and assistance in making decisions)

<comment><USER17> Interesting.

So self-serving Congressional insider-trading on privileged information is kosher, but performing the People's business with information which is now public is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Given the Father's Day weekend, it wasn't hard to guess that the attendance will be low, so the question is why the briefing was still scheduled for that particular spot. I bet they are trying to tell us something...

<comment><USER19> It's the usual trick for any hot or controversial matter. They hope nobody will see and/or complain. This trick is outrageous and used way too often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there anywhere online that lists the members that did attend? I would love to see if my state's senator was present.

</comment><comment><USER21> Not an excuse at all but part of the problem of our system, why they run home so fast, is they are constantly fundraising for their next election. They spend a massive amount of time in office just fundraising.

Not sure how this can ever be fixed.

<comment><USER22> easy solution: term limits

<comment><USER23> better solution: comprehensive campaign financing reform (e.g. all donations must be done by an individual, strict limits on the amount of financing, limits on the amount of advertising and type that candidates are allowed to do, public disclosure of donors, amounts, and campaign spending etc...)

<comment><USER24> The fungibility of money and nature of speech makes this hard to do without limiting free speech in some way.

<comment><USER25> I disagree. Since when is money classified as free speech?

<comment><USER24> Where can do you draw a line between supporting a cause and supporting a candidate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> To be fair, I doubt I would attend the classified briefing. The point is the senators represent the peoples interest (specifically the states interest), if the state does not want it, then they shouldn't get it.

Also, each senator should receive the briefing in paper. They never need to attend unless it is being voted upon.

</comment><comment><USER27> Glad to see at least one of my senators attended those meetings and doesn't remember being briefed about phone metadata collection (Johnny Isakson R-Ga).

But then again the Director of National Intel James Clapper said that he understands that "collect data" would mean they take a book off the shelf and read it. Not that they have a giant bookshelf of data that is possibly yours and mine.

Just another politician type doing some CYA. We will see more to come.

[1] [http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intel-dir-james-clapper- lie-c...](http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intel-dir-james-clapper-lie-congress- complicated/t/story?id=19390786)

</comment><comment><USER28> The real question is why this was scheduled at a time that was pretty much guaranteed to conflict with the Senator's schedule? Scoring political points by foolishness is getting a tad old.

[edit for branch]

</comment><comment><USER29> they're not attending because it's theatre. the NSA briefers are going to read from the script, no difficult questions are going to be asked, and even if they were, since it's secret, the public wouldn't get to see it so it doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER30> Its important to note that some will NOT want to attend a classified briefing because they will then be bound NOT to discuss what they have heard in that classified meeting.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wonder if they would care (and attend) more if they were paid on the percentage of briefings attended.

<comment><USER8> They _are_ paid for attending the meetings that are important to their patrons'. The rest of the meetings are strictly a PITA for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Same article was linked on Reddit; the top thread there points out that the meeting must have intentionally been scheduled to make this happen. It's common knowledge in DC that Congress is in session from Monday afternoon to Thursday morning, because Congressmen and Senators have duties in their home districts (listening to constituents bitch at them) that they have to take care of on Friday/over the weekend, and it takes them at least an afternoon's flight to get home.

Don't blame the reps for not being there, at least not too harshly. Blame the asshats who WANTED the meeting to be underattended to provoke exactly this reaction rather than actually letting their arguments speak for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's obvious. Those who know the details don't feel like they need to attend. They know they'll learn nothing new; why waste their time?

Which begs the question: why didn't they speak up earlier? They probably would have, if they cared. The ruling class in this country knows that they won't be affected by these shenanigans. HSBC launders 100s of Billions of dollars for drug traffickers (sometimes literally accepting bags full of cash, and staying open late to do so), and no one goes to jail.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think the senators who did this decided it would play better now that they skipped it, than what they suspected would come out in the briefing, which they would then be demonstrably complicit in by having knowledge of. Accomplices after the fact. They decided this _very_ thin veneer of plausible deniability was the better option.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Am now quite certain, that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." -John Brown

</comment><comment><USER35> Re: "...It's hard to get this story out. Even now we have this big briefing — we've got Alexander, we've got the FBI, we've got the Justice Department, we have the FISA Court there, we have Clapper there — and people are leaving," she said.

This constant drone of Clapper-speak unbridled lying is taxing for even these people.

</comment><comment><USER36> > Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of the chief critics of the surveillance > programs, was spotted leaving the briefing.

Presumably leaving out of disgust for Clapper's lies; but the media will leave it short like this to make it seem he's marginally apathetic.

<comment><USER13> Isn't it his job as the elected Senator to call out Clapper on his 'lies' as he says them? If all Sen. Paul was going to do was watch the video of his testimony later then why schedule a hearing at all?

<comment><USER37> How would he know what are lies? He isn't on the Senate Intelligence Committee, the 15 people in Congress privileged enough to know the truth.

<comment><USER13> Then how do _we_ know that Clapper is lying? We're not on the Intel Committee either, are we? At least Sen. Paul gets invited to these things, we have no access at all, so Sen. Paul is still in a much better situation to call out Clapper on what we are all so convinced are a constant stream of lies.

<comment><USER37> Sen. Wyden is on said Committee, and asked Clapper a question that, in Clapper's own words, he answered with a "least untruth" statement that was "too cute by half". This can be roughly translated as "a baldfaced lie".

Apart from that, I am personally unaware of any instances where DNI Clapper has publicly lied.

Additionally, DNI Clapper appears to only answer prepared questions (i.e. forwarded to his office prior to the discussion). I'm not sure if this is standard protocol for Congress, and for obvious reasons I also don't know if this applies to private briefings.

<comment><USER13> Certainly you'd send a list of prepared questions if you were holding a hearing to get answers. Otherwise the guy might be able to plausibly claim that he doesn't have the details and would have to get back to them.

If you're holding a hearing just to ask a trap question on camera then you might deliberately not send prepared questions, but I would like to think my elected representatives have more respect for people than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yeah, schedule the worst stuff at times with fewest senators available. Same way the Federal Reserve Act was passed a century ago on December 22, 1913.

</comment><comment><USER39> If there's no exotic location and free golf involved, fact finding doesn't appeal to them.

</comment><comment><USER40> Now you see who they work for. It's not us.</comment>


Ask HN: Where can one find random images for testing? - <AUTHOR>

What are some alternatives to placekitten? <comment><USER2> <http://lorempixel.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.placeguitar.com></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best iOS/iPadOS Gmail client? - <AUTHOR> The stock iOS Mail app doesn't play nice with GMail and the GMail app is garbage on iPadOS. Which app do you use and why? <comment><USER2> I use the stock one. It's the best I've found.

... I don't use my iPad for email very often.</comment>


Linux and the Masses -- what will it take to get them there? - <AUTHOR> http://mag.mypclinuxos.com/html/Issues/200706/page03.html <comment><USER2> I don't want the masses to use Linux. My servers all run Linux. Super. But it doesn't bother me at all that mom and pop are funnelling billions of dollars into the pockets of my professional cohorts, RMS be damned.</comment>


Authentication for Single Page Apps - <AUTHOR> http://madhatted.com/2014/6/17/authentication-for-single-page-apps <comment><USER2> While this works fine for most single-role customer facing applications (the kind most startups are building), as a security engineer most Single Page Apps (SPAs) which handle authentication like this (client side) have horrible authorization issues.

I've seen many SPAs with totally unauthenticated API endpoints. They'll control what a user's allowed to do with the UI and hide unauthorized functionality, but direct requests to the backend still allow any request.

The thing to keep in mind is: don't trust the client. The final word on authentication and authorization should always be done server-side.

<comment><USER3> To further your port Agno, you regularly have all of the javascript modules in the browser, even if the user doesn't have the right authentication role to use those modules.

I'm currently trying to find a way to only download the modules only if the user has the proper authentication and then load them into the already bootstrapped angular, but it isn't easy.

<comment><USER4> Does it really matter if the user gains access to a part of the app that they don't have authorization for? It's up to the API to enforce what the users are or aren't allowed to see, otherwise they can just by-pass the browser all together and make requests to the API willy-nilly.

<comment><USER5> It exposes your application structure.

<comment><USER4> I guess this only matters for specific types of apps (e.g. unlock functionality when a user pays) where most of the action happens client-side? Still seems like security-through-obscurity because eventually the user ends up with the client-side code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I prefer having the authentication in a separate page. Single page apps ( +1 for auth) have a lot of complexity. I find that breaking out the onetime use authentication code and markup makes the main application page somewhat less complex.

<comment><USER7> If you can get away with that, it's certainly a way to reduce complexity. However, providing in-flow auth without a page reload is undoubtedly a nicer, faster experience. This library seems like a good way to lower the effort for Ember app developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think [http://DailyCred.com](http://DailyCred.com) has a good solution for this. They host the entire front end during authentication and shoot you back an auth token which you can then grab the user info from.

Surprisingly, its the only one service I could find in the space that supports email login. There's lots of providers for social login, but as far as i can tell DC is the only one doing email.

<comment><USER9> Authic is another option ([http://authic.com](http://authic.com)) for email auth. It also provides payment gateway integration as well.

<comment><USER8> Very cool. Wish I knew about this a few days ago.

Based on the pricing page ([https://www.authic.com/pricing](https://www.authic.com/pricing)), it looks like you're capped at 100 paying users. Is that right?

<comment><USER9> Hey, Sorry I didn't respond earlier _. Thanks for the praise! We definitely support more that 100 paying users (we really have no limits). We 're still exploring our pricing options but we'll be releasing our larger plans soon. The next plan up will be something like 1000 paying users for $99/month soon.

_ I have always found it difficult to keep monitor HN for responses to my comments!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Firebase has very good implementation on Simple Login for authentication. Check out AngularFire project. But I have to agree with some of the comments, backend authentication should be recommended. I can't get away from being nervous about password as text or session hijacking, etc.. with frontend authentication.

</comment><comment><USER11> Please don't require a "session" unless it's possible to set an infinite timeout. It makes writing an API client very difficult, because before every request, you've gotta go check to see if your session is valid. In a backend scenario, this adds retry complexity that wouldn't be there otherwise.

It's so much easier if the request can contain an auth header/parameter pointing to a long-term API key or equivalent.

</comment><comment><USER12> What do you think about using something like jwt?

</comment><comment><USER13> From a coding perspective. I find that using 'Annotations' for security works really well in SPA and is extremely simple. It means that every RPC from the client has authorised checks. I also assume that every unauthenticated request is forbidden, unless I have explicitly annotated the RPC method with anonymous access.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've had good results with: [http://ember-simple- auth.simplabs.com/](http://ember-simple-auth.simplabs.com/) in Ember, though most of what it's good at is managing the session on the client-side.

<comment><AUTHOR> We discussed dropping Torii's simple session manager in favor of recommending Simple Auth, but after discussing it with @marcoow decided we had slightly different goals. Torii's session manager imposes structure and terminology on your code, but had no specific conventions around how to pass request authorization to API calls, how to store a session, etc.

Torii's providers are designed to be re-usable without the session manager though, and they work just great with Simple Auth. Check this out: [https://github.com/Vestorly/torii/blob/master/example/simple...](https://github.com/Vestorly/torii/blob/master/example/simple- auth.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I thought you were supposed to avoid sessions and states in apps built on top of RESTful APIs. What am I missing?

<comment><USER15> Well, you can always protect an endpoint by requiring "whatever" condition. Impossing conditions for requests is different than "having a state".

State happens in the client, requests to the backend come with pre-conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why is this a big deal? Obviously OAuth can be done with a popup. What we really need is instant and anonymous personalization when a user enters the app.

<comment><USER16> I wonder why it's being downvoted</comment></comment>


Save $50 a minute, per person, per shower a year - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sprav/sprav-turn-your-shower-into-a-smart-shower?ref=live

<comment><USER2> If only it had speakers built in, decent piece of hardware</comment>


Oldskool: Google Directory: the web organized in categories - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/Top/

<comment><AUTHOR> Which reminds me, what's up with dmoz.org lately? Still going strong? Seeing any usage at all?</comment>


Superman vs. Baseball - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/weekend-diversion-superman-vs-baseball-47f413777361 <comment><USER2> The article is drastically underestimating how far Superman can hit a baseball.

The trick is to not swing the bat like a human. Instead, Superman should hold the bat orthogonal to the pitcher and have the ball make contact with the bat as soon as possible. Then, using his skill and reflexes, he can gradually decelerate the ball towards the back arc of his modified swing. All the while holding the bat orthogonal to the pitcher. He is essentially catching the ball with the bat, which you can with super speed and reflexes.

He then will "swing" the bat forward, now smoothly imparting the maximum force both the ball and bat can deliver. Still keeping it orthogonal to the pitcher.

Basically, because the contact time is longer, more delta-v can be applied to the ball. With a smooth enough increase in the loading, it may be possible to exceed the conventional burst strength of the baseball.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't that kill the pitcher?

<comment><USER2> Superman would still aim up at a slight angle to maximize the distance. Also, I'm sure he'd avoid intentionally hitting anyone in the park (or outside, checking with his x-ray vision).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And if you enjoyed that, you will enjoy this

[https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/)

</comment><comment><USER5> In the same vein: "Bugs Bunny, greatest banned player ever"

[http://www.ussmariner.com/2006/03/12/bugs-bunny-greatest- ban...](http://www.ussmariner.com/2006/03/12/bugs-bunny-greatest-banned- player-ever/)

<comment><USER6> My favorite part:

>Even if we consider that this demonstration is the only time this happens, it still raises other questions: 1\. How is this possible?

It is an excellent question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related:

A Unified Theory of Superman's Powers [http://www.qwantz.com/fanart/superman.pdf](http://www.qwantz.com/fanart/superman.pdf)

How does Spider-Man Move So Fast? [http://www.qwantz.com/fanart/spiderman.pdf](http://www.qwantz.com/fanart/spiderman.pdf)

<comment><USER8> I would recommend to you also the funniest book ever published, "How to be a Superhero", which discusses many of the downsides of super senses, such as super hearing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex:

[http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html](http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html)

<comment><USER10> I just came on to comment that. Larry Niven was a favorite of mine.

Another great short story of his: Inconstant Moon (turned into an Outer Limits episode) about a man who notices the moon is /unnaturally/ bright one night, and comes to the only rational conclusion: something has happened to the sun...

<comment><USER11> Larry Niven himself was somewhat like an imagination burst in the SF field, back in the 1970s. There was all this gloomy, word perfect "new wave" prose mopping up the critical praise, and there was Niven pitching hard SF idea balls. Flash crowds, tides around neutron stars, Bussard ramjets, organ transplants gone wild, direct brain stimulation as a drug, ring worlds ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Waiting for Superman is not written by Iron and Wine, it's written by the Flaming Lips and is from one of the greatest albums of all time - "The Soft Bulletin". I correct this not because I like correcting things but because any opportunity to introduce people to TSB is one worth taking.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waitin%27_for_a_Superman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waitin%27_for_a_Superman)

</comment><comment><USER13> Fun post. Only nit-pick is that a majority (70%) of MLB hitters use maple bats now, not ash. I know maple is a harder wood but I'm curious to know if it can handle more than the 15,000 lbs of force ash can.

Also, the home run tracker is a really cool site if you like stuff along these lines: [http://www.hittrackeronline.com/](http://www.hittrackeronline.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder how far Superman could throw a baseball instead under the same restrictions. Should be a fair bit longer I guess.</comment>


Tesla Model 3 Gets CR Recommendation After Braking Update - <AUTHOR> https://www.consumerreports.org/cars-tesla-model-3-gets-cr-recommendation-after-braking-update/ <comment><USER2> I'm bothered by the fact that it took Consumer Reports testing to discover this issue and to have it fixed. Where was Tesla's QC on this before all this? The CR break tests don't appear to be anything unusual.

<comment><USER3> It's not quite as bad as it seems. The first high speed stop CR did produced the expected and acceptable result. But when they repeated the test they started to get poor results. Under normal driving conditions you don't often repeatedly slam on the brakes from 60mph. Now this isn't a complete absolution of Tesla under the circumstances but it does go some way to explaining how this software bug got into the wild when it shouldn't have.

<comment><USER4> That's still pretty bad, honestly. All it took was repeated testing to trigger the issue? That indicates that either Tesla's testing was woefully insufficient here or that they took a late change to braking behavior without a proper re-testing regimen.

I can actually understand the latter possibility, but it's still a giant screw up.

<comment><USER3> Yes I agree with you. I expect they made a code change in order to stress test a different component of the braking system and then forgot to revert that change.

If so, it's a big screw up for this kind of product development. But still, it's much better than "these brakes have a design flaw and can never work properly and we don't know how to make cars".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, OTA software update improved the brakes (dear commenters, please spell this word correctly). Why not have the brakes with that strength from the beginning? If I were to speculate, could it be because this setting would cause high brake wear on the long run?

And, what's stopping them from selectively applying this setting? Heh, Volkswagen would probably have loved this capability a few years ago.

<comment><USER6> So, Model 3 has regenerative brake (uses magnetic resistance to slow car) and regular brakes that every other car has. I believe the tradeoff / timing about when to switch between the two braking systems was slightly off, favoring more energy efficiency rather than the best stopping distance. When this was pointed out they simply adjusted their algorithm for a better overall tradeoff.

<comment><USER7> It's extremely embarrassing/telling that it took Consumer Reports to point out their new car doesn't stop well.

<comment><USER8> Alternately, it's amazing and inspiring what just happened; other high-end car makers with a century of experience have shipped imperfect brakes for years (1) and only redesigned them on new models in response to complaints. Tesla, by comparison, is applying the Apple model (when Apple is at its best) of continuous over-the-air product improvement, which can change one's sense of a product's value for money.

1\. MERCEDES CANCELS BY-WIRE BRAKE SYSTEM; DECISION A BLOW TO TECHNOLOGY'S FUTURE. "When the system failed, the hydraulic system took over. But that resulted in a longer stopping distance and additional brake pedal effort by the driver." [http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/mercedes-cancels- wire-b...](http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/mercedes-cancels-wire-brake- system-decision-blow-technologys-future)

<comment><USER7> Mercedes had a hardware problem and Tesla had a software problem, I really don't see how this is a win for Tesla. Tesla has done physical recalls before as well, not everything is a software bug.

[https://repairpal.com/recall/05V133000](https://repairpal.com/recall/05V133000)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What prevents a new update to revert this or cause other safety problem?

Pushing updates in a rush is not a good sigh for critical software.

<comment><USER10> I'd like to think they have some kind of automated CI with a huge warehouse full of cars that automatically drives around and tests everything with each Git push.

<comment><USER7> They sort of do, it's the general public.

<comment><USER11> And they've only killed a few people so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
      - const brakingDistance = 152;
      + const brakingDistance = 133;

<comment><USER12> braking

<comment><USER10> oh, right... thank you! (edited)

<comment><USER13>
      const breakingDistance = warrantyMiles + 1;

<comment><USER14> >> const breakingDistance = warrantyMiles + 1;

const brakingDistance = warrantyMiles + 1;

<comment><USER15> Read the chain of comments again

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It was an ABS issue for anyone wondering. [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/998778751767871488?lang=...](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/998778751767871488?lang=en)

<comment><USER17> Controlling the ABS hydraulic modulator and ABS diagnostic bleed are one of the most dangerous cyber-attacks that can be performed on a car.

The fact that these systems are (indirectly) connected to the Internet is irresponsible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _In retesting after the software update was downloaded, the sedan stopped in > 133 feet from 60 mph, an improvement of 19 feet._

Combining from a previous thread[0]:

      Car           distance (feet)
      Model 3(orig) 152
      Model 3 (new) 133
      F-150         129
      Model X       127
      Camry Hybrid  125
      F-150 Lariat  119
      Chrysler 300S 109

It's noteworthy that the stopping distance is still longer than the heavier Model X.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17124967](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17124967)

</comment><comment><USER19> Did they do it by reducing use of regenerative braking? Does it mean now that M3's brake pads will wear even more quickly? It looks like they already were wearing off faster than expected [1].

[1] [https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-model-3-brake- pads-...](https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-model-3-brake-pads- destroyed-after-nine-miles-of-laguna-seca-124324.html)

<comment><USER20> That link is about brake performance on a race track at speeds greater than 100mph. I'm not sure what "expected" is in that context, and I doubt the results generalize to more normal usage.

<comment><USER21> CR article mentions 60mph, not 100.

<comment><USER20> I was referring to the Autoevolution post, not the Consumer Reports article. It specifically mentions a maneuver at 103.9mph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A question for those in the know: To what extent do other auto manufacturers make this level of in-line changes?

As someone who has only ever bought used cars, the prospect of substantial in- line changes for a specific model year is quite daunting. With Tesla, it would appear that they are making substantial changes in build technique/quality/parameters weekly...

<comment><USER23> Performing code changes/updates whenever a car comes into the dealership is pretty standard practice. OTA updates are a technical capability many manufactures have but I'm not sure the extent to which they're used.

<comment><USER24> My understanding is that almost no one else does OTA updates because their dealer networks demand that any repairs or updates be performed by dealers. The legacy car manufacturers are (sadly) at the mercy of their dealers.

<comment><USER25> Newer FCA products can update OTA - Our 2015 Dodge Durango updated a month ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I know there is a 99.9% chance that my paranoia is just paranoia, but when I first read this I thought tesla just changed the car's behavior to work better on CR's specific tests. The diesel fiasco has scarred me.

</comment><comment><USER27> The practical question is how good the Model 3 will be when they get production up to the point where the large number of people who want to buy one are actually able to do so.

</comment><comment><USER28> So to clarify a bit...maximum/emergency braking like this is not limited by regen or by the hydraulic brakes. It is limited by tires, grip, and weight transfer.

<comment><USER4> Clearly in this case it was limited by a software bug/limitation. Tesla did not push an over the air update that changed the tires, grip, or weight transfer.

(Actually, I guess they did change the weight transfer, by increasing deceleration.)

<comment><USER28> oh totally agreed. What I find confounding is that up until now the limit on braking performance appears to not have been tire grip but software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Cars are not a Flappy Bird app: Crashing matters.

This clearly points to a culture inside Tesla of a lackadaisical concern for product safety testing. I say that as a big fan of Tesla and the overall vision Musk and his companies are pursuing.

</comment><comment><USER30> "We fixed it so it brakes."</comment>


Hey is selling 2 letter email addresses for $999 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/16/21293156/hey-email-service-2-letter-addresses-premium-price-features <comment> dan-robertson It doesn't seem to be a crazy thing to do. There doesn't seem to be much reason to get such an address just for being first.

<comment><USER2> It seems to me that a two letter email address would invite a disproportionate amount of spam.

<comment><USER3> If you read up on how Hey claims to work, spam has to be invited in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, I can pay to have an email with a Hamming distance of one from 50+ other email addresses? Such a deal!</comment>


Making of "Highway at Night" (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://jsriffs.blogspot.com/2014/05/making-of-highway-at-night.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8648166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8648166)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. I just stumbled upon it today and found it super interesting.

Will remember to search before submitting next time.

<comment><USER2> Oh no, it's a good post! We just link to previous discussions because people like looking at them. It would be nice to indicate that more clearly, but I'm not sure how to do it without being too verbose.

After a year or so, we don't consider reposts dupes on HN. This is in the FAQ: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Made me remember Atari _Night Driver_. The mall got a video arcade. We'd stand in line. It was the first game with a seat and a steering wheel.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Driver_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Driver_\(video_game\))

</comment><comment><USER4> Feels like an intense version of Drivey.</comment>


Is experience better than talent? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nickhalstead.com/2008/01/16/is-experience-better-than-talent/

<comment><USER2> Who says there is any clear line between experience and talent?

Research into the workings of the brain has actually been pointing the other way: people who are described as "talented" in a particular area have put tremendous effort into becoming so -- that is to say, they have experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> talent = passion X dedication

I don't even know where to fit experience in that formula... As Joel Spolsky (I think) said, beyond 6 months experience in a language it doesn't matter much anymore.

<comment><USER4> There are a lot of useless, passionate, dedicated people running around (misguided != talented). I prefer to avoid them.

<comment><USER3> We must have _very_ different definitions of "useless", "passionate" and "dedicated".

Here are mine:

Useless: Inconsequential, meaningless, that has no useful result.

Passionate: Derives genuine happiness and a feeling of fulfilment when doing some particular thing.

Dedicated: Demonstrates perseverence and involvement in a nontrivial task, spanning a nontrivial amount of time.

Per those definitions, I don't see how someone can possibly be simultaneously useless, passionate and dedicated.

<comment><USER4> One could split hairs here indefinitely, especially debating the nature of what being useful means and to whom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Anyone who's says that they can keep up the same levels at 50 as they were at 20 is lying."

Wrong!

This same stupid remark finds it way onto this board about once a month or so, and I generally give this response:

We are NOT basketball players. We do not "lose it" after 30. In fact, the best of us get BETTER with age. Live a clean life and you should be just as good a hacker at 80 as at 20.

OP is asking the wrong question. A better question might be, "What happens when someone talented amasses more experience?" I'll tell you what. They learn to better leverage their talent and produce MORE. They don't repeat stupid mistakes (they make new stupid mistakes). They know themselves better and can better anticipate what to expect from themselves, others, and situations. They learn to love what they love even more.

Oh, what's the use. You won't believe me until you're 50. I just hope you stay far enough away from drugs, junk food, and stupid excesses so that you can experience what I already know for yourself. It'll be great!</comment>


Contributing to OSS considered "dangerous advice" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/KatieFujihara/status/1144001204248125440 <comment><USER2> Astounding. I work for a professional open source company, after many years of working for (not open source) companies.

Open Source is more inclusive, more altruistically driven, and better in every way I can imagine.

I am dumbfounded by the premise of the article. I have no idea what it could mean.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand what the problem was with her advice. Was it because she didn't start with "in my opinion" or some other qualifier?

<comment><USER4> There isn't any problem with her advice. There is a problem with the hosts. The suggestion that encouraging contributions to OSS might expose someone to being harmed in some way is absurd. You may as well say nobody should go to the grocery store - there might be a racist hiding in the frozen food section!

<comment><USER3> I'd like to understand this better.

Is the microaggression the implicit assumption that you should be able to handle the potentially negative people you encounter in the OSS community?

<comment><USER5> I think the microaggression is not explicitly stating that those negative experiences exist while making that broad statement ("contributing to OSS is a good way to get started"), and thereby disregarding/minimizing/ignoring the people who had those experiences, harming them.

<comment><USER3> Oy. An article or talk where every point includes a disclaimer (or even a _YMMV_ ) would be pretty tedious. Katie started her talk saying it was an anecdote and it's too bad that a blanket statement in the preamble isn't good enough.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I don't disagree, just passing on what I understood from the tweets :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "microaggressions" and "othering". What is this nonsense. Is this how people behave? Why is this considered acceptable? Someone musters the time and courage to come speak freely at your event, and this is how they are treated? Maybe all meetups should just be a cutout of Ghandi at the podium with a static code cheat sheet on the projector to ensure nobody is offended.

<comment><USER6> You'd be surprised how many people get their panties in a twist at the mere mention of Ghandi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand how "tech involvement is harder for URM" as URM appears to mean "unaccompanied refugee minors"??

Can someone shed light on that?

<comment><USER8> URM = "Under-represented minority"

<comment><USER7> Cool, thanks.

I don't work in programming but know quite a few people through their contributions to OSS/software, but many of them I don't even know what sex they are, nevermind what characteristics they hold that are minority in their locality??

It seems really unlikely that any personal characteristic beyond your programming ability (and not even that necessarily, UX/support/bug reporting/etc.) could inhibit you from contributing to OSS?

I mean so people look at pull requests and say "does this smell like curry to you?".

Is it a genuine issue?

<comment><USER8> Yes, it happens quite a bit, at least if people dare to use their actual identities for their contributions instead of hiding behind something neutral.

<comment><USER9> I agree that people should be able to use their actual identities and receive the same treatment, but it's worth noting that in the programming world most people create accounts that either simply don't show their identities or obscure them. That does seem to be changing rapidly, though, and I wonder why.

I mean, right now in this very thread the 3 commenters are "0815test", "detaro" and "pbhjpbhj". For most people I've worked with on OSS, I couldn't tell any personal details if I tried.

(I do think this varies by community: in the Javascript world I usually see Github profiles with real names, a photo, location, and a bio... for C, you'll see mostly default photos, non-identifying usernames and no-nonsense bios)

<comment><USER7> >in the Javascript world I usually see Github profiles with real names, a photo, location, and a bio... //

But do you bother to do a join to see if the people are URM in their locality? Like you need to know if someone is in Nigeria, Nepal, Nebraska, or Nagasaki before you can say they're an URM? OR are we supposed to only care if someone is an URM in a particular area of USA -- which would be superironic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I believe in being careful with words, for sure, but having to modify and monitor every piece of publicly accessible content because it _may_ be triggering or aggressive is just too much. I feel like I must mention that I am a left-wing, very liberal woman but I disagree with the culture we seem to have created where we must talk softly around the issues for fear of offending someone.

We, as a people, must be able to accept criticism and learn to live with hardship. The world isn't a bunch of unicorns and marshmallows. Life can be hard and the more resilient you are, the better you'll be able to deal with those hardships. You're not going to strengthen and grow as a person if everyone around you kowtows for fear of upsetting you.

<comment><USER5> The argument is not that the advice is aggressive in itself, but that it should have been accompanied by a warning about the potential bad experiences in contributing to OSS, much like one might warn that a beach we're recommending can have particularly strong currents.

EDIT: actually I'm wrong; the argument is _both_ that it should have been accompanied by a warning, and that not doing so (and stating it in a generalized way) ignores the experience of people who already had a bad experience contributing to OSS.

<comment><USER7> It's not like the beach analogy unless you think bad experiences are somehow intrinsic to OSS.

It seems more like "$beach is a lovely clean beach" and someone gets upset because they went there and someone had dropped a piece of litter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is non-news. Someone who shouldn't be in charge of enforcing CoC comes into contact with someone who has the good fortune of possessing common sense.

Its important to try to be as inclusive is possible - the community engagement person is wrong, but ultimately with their heart in the right place.

Its also important to use your brain, read the room, and if something makes someone uncomfortable, let their voice be heard.

Next.

<comment><USER12> Haven't seen that much constructive examples of applied CoCs to be honest. But I agree, non-news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> can someone explain this in plain English? I read the tweets but I don't get it. Thanks.

<comment><USER14> It's pretty hard to explain.

Some meet-ups and projects had a problem with people being fucking arseholes. They developed "codes of conduct" to help them deal with those harassing abusive people.

This woman gave a talk to this meeting. She described her experience of working in open source. She was careful to say it worked for her but might not for other people; she was careful to say that it was anecdotal.

Someone at this meeting thought that she should have given stronger warnings about open source. That person is saying that by not giving the bigger warning the speaker was performing a micro-aggression against all the other people who've had poor experiences in open source because she was supposedly erasing their experience.

They're saying the speaker violated the code of conduct.

When the speaker asked for clarification the meeting organisers didn't apologise for making a mistake; they persisted in their description of the speaker as someone who violated the CoC.

So, that's roughly what the meeting organisers think. Clearly, they're wrong. Micro-aggressions are a thing and they're something we should be mindful[1] of, but this isn't an example of a micro-aggression. And there's a difference between a woman saying "I had a good experience in open source, but other people might not" and for example a man saying "there are no problems in open source development you just need to toughen up".

[1] Mostly because people who are oblivious to micro-aggressions tend to be taking discriminatory actions that potentially leave their companies open to lawsuits.

<comment><USER15> So we're supposed to simply know what other people's past, present, and future experiences may or will be?

Wouldn't using indicators like class, race, and gender to make these assumptions be a micro-aggression in and of itself?

E: To be clear I am honestly curious. This whole argument gets into a circular reasoning of "oh you should just know you silly cis het male, if I have to tell you it won't make a difference/defeat the purpose."

<comment><USER14> > we're supposed to simply know what other people's past,

Can you tell me how I can reword "be mindful of" to avoid the implication that you need to know anything at all about other people? Because that's not what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say was "being aware of micro-aggressions is a small part of not being a complete cunt".

<comment><USER16> I don't think the problem is with how you worded it. I think the problem is with what happened at the meeting. How was the presenter supposed to know, _before receiving feedback_ , that someone would consider her words to be "othering"?

<comment><USER5> But DanBC explicitly said the person admonishing the speaker was wrong, so how are you expecting him to answer that?

<comment><USER16> I wasn't. I was agreeing with DanBC, not arguing with him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ah, so we should not work towards inclusiveness because it could be scary.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's one of my opinions: Everything anyone ever says is their own opinion based on their own experiences.

Here's another: We'd all be better off if we held the opinion above, and remembered it when assessing what people say. We'd be able to interpret statements like "Contributing to OSS is awesome!" as "In my own experience, contributing to OSS has been awesome", where such an interpretation doesn't erase or override one's own opinions and experiences. Not saying this is easy to do, just that it is beneficial.

<comment><USER3> You get that automatically if you try to be charitable when interpreting somebody's words. More often than not, this will put you on the same page as the person you are talking to.

<comment><USER18> Actually, I think it's easier to remember it's always an opinion than to always be charitable. Maybe I really don't like a person and so it's very hard to be charitable in a given moment, but that person's statements are still their opinion and don't get to override my own experiences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I suppose this is the natural consequence of making "microagressions" a thing. What a time to be alive.

<comment><USER20> I think microaggressions are definitely a thing, but the term is being misused here.

<comment><USER21> I'll go further: it's very common for abusive people to intentionally misappropriate the vocabulary of people they abuse. This ranges from "telling me to clean up after myself is a microagression" to "we're going to name our fascist party socialist LOL."

Someone's waving their power around, plain and simple.

EDIT: also, this thread is going to be baaaaaad.

<comment><USER20> Perhaps, but I think sometimes we are very eager to label people as abusive or toxic as a shortcut to understanding them. So I would avoid being too casual with permanently categorizing behavior of abusers.

I have also seen mental illness lead to behaviors that one could call abusive, gaslighting, etc. The wrong kind of label doesn't get those people where they need to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm flagging this because the inevitable HN thread will consist only of people tripping over themselves to mock the people involved, and zero serious discussion.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you should flag it until the discussion devolves. So far, it's pretty reasonable.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: First $100 in a SaaS app? - <AUTHOR>

My partner and I are about to release our first SaaS app and I'm starting to get worried that there's really no market for it.<p>How long did it take you to get your first $100 and first $1000 in rev, and what strategies did you use to get customer flow? <comment><USER2> Way to long. First customer took forever. I almost wrote it off. Then I went from 0 customers to 3 in 1 month. A little blogging and google ads is all I've done so far.

All told say 12 months from building it to the first $100. Say another 4-6 months to hit $1000. Obviously its a side effort and I'm not getting rich off of it. But I don't put a lot of effort into it either. If you ignore the development time costs, its pretty profitable right now.

I'm going to start doing some real marketing and hopefully it will start gaining more traction. One thing I still find strange is how customers come in bunches. Nothing for a while then a bunch all at once.

The monthly cost will be a big difference in when you hit your revenue goals. I have an idea I'm toying with right now, that if I implement it and it works, would be $300-500 a month per customer, so I would be able to hit those numbers a lot quicker. But then again it would be a longer sales cycle.

What is your app?

Good luck and enjoy. That first customer is a very rewarding experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just release it.</comment>


Common Crawl code contest - with fresh crawl of 3.2 billion web pages - <AUTHOR> http://commoncrawl.org/common-crawls-brand-spanking-new-video-and-first-ever-code-contest/

<comment><USER2> FYI: <http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Where does it say they have 3.2 billion pages of fresh data?

<comment><USER4> This is Chris from Common Crawl. You are right - we didn't have stats about the latest crawl posted. We're putting them up today ...

<comment><USER5> Would it be possible to get a torrent with the text only part?</comment></comment></comment>


The Man Who Was Hollywood (1989) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/26/books/the-man-who-was-hollywood.html <comment><USER2> At one point it says Goldwyn's story tells you more about America than anything Goldwyn produced.

What sounds like a cheap shot really lands, I'd easily watch a biopic about his escape from Europe, early work in a trade, dealing with prejudice, unusual interactions with Joe Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and massive personal failings with family and women.

This is a long read but I'm glad I took the time.

It's a beautifully complex portrait of a man in a period we aren't often honest enough about.</comment>


Show HN: Pendo.io – A data driven platform for product teams - <AUTHOR> http://www.pendo.io

<comment><USER2> After reading through your sales page, I'm not super clear on what exactly it does. Does Pendo compare to something like Intercom? I skimmed part of the video, but it seemed more like an introductory tutorial than a sales/feature video.

Could you give an example use case for a typical SaaS product?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are some common use cases:

Using our in-application guides and messaging to announce new features or to "guide" people through a process.

Using feature metrics to track the adoption of recently launched features.

Improving the onboarding process by teaching the users as they go.

Making help in-context instead of out of context i.e. the help guide can be launched from a icon by a feature

And of course feature, visitor, and account metrics help drive future product direction

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A common use case is using our in-application guides and messaging to announce new features or to "guide" people through a process.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your intro video could use some more energy. A lot of ums in it as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I will post a new one soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good job pendoers!</comment>


Burger King is giving up on free plastic toys for kids – when will others follow - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/shortcuts/2019/sep/19/burger-king-is-giving-up-on-free-plastic-toys-for-kids-when-will-others-follow <comment><USER2> Just seems like pandering with very little actual environmental impact, ignoring the much more major issue with the central pillar of their business, cattle farming, which is awful for the environment.

<comment><USER3> To that end, they do appear to be making a genuine effort pushing the Impossible Whopper with a television campaign and, at least in the bay area, placement on the combo board.

<comment><USER4> I thought the impossible burgers were worse for the environment than beef, and worse for you. The appeal was always 'ethical'.

<comment><USER5> What gave you this idea? I've attempted to find corroborating evidence online and am coming up blank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Children don't play with toys anymore. The amount of McDonald's junk that gets dumped is shocking. It's time these toys weee done away with!

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not too shy to say that I kind of love getting toys from McDonalds. The amount of Pokemon / Nintendo / etc toys I've gotten have vastly improved my desk set up. They're kind of nice when real figures in a store would cost $15-20 CAD, and with way less packaging to boot.

I understand I'm probably an outlier, however.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it's pretty convenient they can pander to the environmentalists and save a ton of money all in one go.

<comment><USER9> Maybe now kids won't be so enticed into begging their parents for fast food if there isn't a shiny toy in each meal. Healthier kids is a laudable outcome too, is it not?

<comment><USER10> That's not in BK's interests in the slightest, though.

<comment><USER9> Does it have to be for the outcome to be good?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While it is good to move away from plastic, instead of discontinue, can no other construction material be picked up? I have seen 'biodegradable' plastic being used to make water bottles...

Wood would be a great choice but I reckon it is expensive and again, environment...

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm torn. These were the only reason to tolerate fast food as a kid, and made crappy burgers a joy. But I suspect that BK just did marketing analysis and figured out it was not worth the small incentive. The environmental impact is pure post-fact marketing.</comment>


Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Data [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1018886/Bem6.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> A recent New Yorker article "The Truth Wears Off" is based on the same mathematical fact - that statistical tests are being used wrongly in psychology experiments and (more worryingly) in clinical trials. [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer)</comment>


What's so bad about mandatory workplace socializing? - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/623260/whats-so-bad-about-mandatory-workplace-socializing/ <comment><AUTHOR> "My coworkers, for example, bonded at lunch over their dating lives and the quest to find the perfect yoga pants. They couldn't really relate to worrying about the cost of daycare. I didn't think the fact that we had little in common in our lives outside the office was a problem. To me, it had no bearing on our ability to collaborate on projects."

There's a lot of talk about culture - especially in startups. This article challenges the notion of culture, and could force many to think about and clarify their position. I have experienced what the author has - being the odd one out in a homogeneous workgroup, having to force myself to fit in socially just to get some work done!

</comment><comment><USER2> Like this post, I also don't really like "forced" socializing.

However: "The lone black employee in my division, I wasn't fitting in with my (white, single, childless) co-workers."

Really? Do we have to bring race into this? This is the only occurrence in the article and doesn't seem relevant at all.</comment>


10,000+ Public APIs - <AUTHOR> http://publicapis.com <comment><USER2> What is the definition of public here?

Is public/private a matter of authentication, or authorization ? (e.g. trackable or paying)

Or is it suppose to be "private api is for internal use in a company" v. "public api is for external usage"?

      curl "https://joss-open-exchange-rates.p.mashape.com/latest.json"
      {"message":"Invalid Mashape key. If you are a Mashape user, get your key from your dashboard at https://www.mashape.com/login - To create a free Mashape account instead, go to https://www.mashape.com/signup"}

</comment><comment><USER3> The are a number of API's (on Mashape) that even if in public mode are still beta stuff (like mine :-)) there should be a way at least for mashapers to signify that in the api admin panel, in order to avoid any potential confusion. That said, THANK YOU from this marketing effort.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is great. Is there a way you could categorize the APIs so searches can be filtered? I imagine this a common machine learning classification problem. Maybe check out [http://scikit-learn.org/stable/](http://scikit- learn.org/stable/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, I have a simple tag solution in the works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now Google is not the only one place to look for public APIs.

</comment><comment><USER6> Love the idea but I have two suggestions: let people filter by country and let them vote or star a particular API.

<comment><USER7> not sure about needing to filter by country? but voting, and meta tagging too... +++

<comment><USER8> country could make sense too. not all APIs are generic. I would love to find out what APIs are specifically available in my country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The war of API directories has just begun.

<comment><USER10> Yep. I'm sure you've seen [http://www.apihub.com/](http://www.apihub.com/) which actually has a lot more details and information and api tools with raml built in to visualize and try out the api (e.g. Here's Stripe [http://www.apihub.com/stripe/api/stripe- api/docs/raml](http://www.apihub.com/stripe/api/stripe-api/docs/raml)).

Full disclosure - I work at MuleSoft, the company responsible for ApiHub.

<comment><USER11> oh yes, the latest copy-cat of [http://mashape.com](http://mashape.com)

<comment><USER12> I hit a api at random (currency converter) and ended up at mashape.

Just FYI -- I'd never heard of it before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Site seems down (Nginx bad gateway error)

</comment><comment><USER14> 502 Bad Gateway :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 502 bad gateway

</comment><comment><USER16> really cool, well done

</comment><comment><USER17> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER18> Cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it! I'm writing a blog post detailing how I made it which should be done soon. It's built with mongodb and nodejs, JavaScript FTW :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great! A bit off topic, but how do you get instant searching on the website as you type? (I'm a amateur programmer).

<comment><AUTHOR> I use jQuery to send an AJAX request to nodejs which then queries elasticsearch and returns the rendered html which I switch out the DOM with.

<comment><USER20> You should have array caching for the responses coded!</comment></comment></comment>