Image Similarity and Duplicate Detection at Picturelife - <AUTHOR> http://blog.picturelife.com/post/91160886055/image-similarity-duplicate-detection-at-picturelife

<comment><USER2> Really great write up! Did you guys run into any issues with artifacts from image compression?

<comment><USER3> Hey, I'm the author of the paper. Good question! The easy answer is no, the better answer is "yes, unavoidably so." Ultimately it doesn't end up making enough of a difference to work around when we're already tossing out so much information by resizing dramatically.</comment></comment>


Uber's First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-first-self-driving-fleet-arrives-in-pittsburgh-this-month-is06r7on <comment><USER4> Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there's a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. The latter will be an absolute game-changer; the former can yield some marginal gains in safety and congestion, but does not really shatter any paradigms.

This is the former. The latter will certainly happen eventually, but is orders of magnitude more challenging and a number of years away.

<comment><USER5> We don't need to jump to completely driverless right away, there is a convenient intermediate step: The passenger can be the passive driver, and the car would drive to the pickup location empty. As soon as regulation allows, that step already gets you the major benefit of not having to "pay for the other dude in the car".

<comment><USER6> You'd need to verify that users have a valid driver's license. The problem is, how do you verify that the rider's identity is the same as the user who ordered the ride? Facial recognition?

<comment><USER7> No you wouldn't. Car sharing clubs like Zipcar deal with the same issue - <USER2> hire out cars on a completely unattended basis. If a customer chooses to pick up one of their cars and drive drunk or lend it to their cousin with a suspended license, the customer is liable.

<comment><USER6> Good point, don't know why I didn't think of Zipcar when I used a similar service last year.

Looks like the bigger problem might be people suing over accidents where they were distracted and forced to make a split second decision, when they 'reasonably' expected the car to be able to handle the conditions. (Not trying to shift the goal posts, just sharing a separate concern).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how Uber drivers feel about working for a company that is actively trying to make them obsolete.

Not passing judgement or anything, just kind of a strange thing to contemplate..

Uber kept saying they were disrupting the taxi industry by letting more people participate when really in the end they're trying to remove the people from the equation altogether.

<comment><USER9> I always talk to the drivers about their feelings and so on when taking Uber. Maybe my data is skewed but most accept it as inevitable and are not worried much as they have other side jobs. The cab drivers are the ones who must be anxious. It will be really bad if they cannot be retrained for other jobs as it will add to the existing frustration around automation. We simply cannot afford to leave people out as we move on to other things. Outsourcing moved manufacturing jobs to China, our focus on climate and global warming will leading to moving out of coal leaving coal miners behind, Amazon is automating their warehouses, Self driving will leave cab drivers behind...So, how do we create new type of jobs for these people? Humanity cannot progress by leaving people behind.

<comment><USER10> > The cab drivers are the ones who must be anxious. It will be really bad if > they cannot be retrained for other jobs as it will add to the existing > frustration around automation.

I used my "training" \- a very expensive CS degree - to drive a cab. I developed a nerve condition in college, so really I just suffered through the program without becoming competent as a programmer. Also, I dance to the beat of my own drum, and do not take orders well. My kuro5hin.org (RIP) story "Humanity's Second-best Hope" [1] is about the seasonal job I had at Amazon, just before I started taxi driving.

[1] [http://www.taxiwars.org/p/humanitys-second-best- hope.html](http://www.taxiwars.org/p/humanitys-second-best-hope.html)

Cab driving offered me freedom to be my own boss. The cab company's rules were reasonable, and easy enough to comply with. As long as I paid my lease, I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted with my time. No one in the company's administration cared if I took a short break, or a long break, or spent the night in bed.

Something more important came up, and ridesharing ruined the economics of the business (Arizona makes it easy and cheap for anyone to start their own transportation company. The upstarts couldn't be bothered with playing fair), so I don't drive around in a taxi anymore.

I think these money-losing "ride sharing" companies were founded by people with delusions of grandeur and venture capitalists' money to burn. When they run out of their investors' money, the realities of transporting people from place to place will reassert themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I saw one of these a month ago when I was biking around the North Shore (downtown Pittsburgh). Its cameras on top were far more conspicuous than the renders in the article, though.

This article said it would pick people up downtown, but how far would they go to drop off? The golden triangle is mostly grid-based, but go elsewhere in the city and the road topology gets jacked up fast (like Boston), especially in the south and west. Its idiosyncrasies took some getting used to, after living in flatter regions with gridded streets for several years (central Ohio, Salt Lake). In those places, if you want to go somewhere, you start driving in its general direction; in Pittsburgh, it's not uncommon to go in the opposite direction for a while, since the roads don't connect that way.

The article also mentioned bridges being a problem. In Pittsburgh, that's a big problem, since it supposedly has more bridges than any other city in the world.

<comment><USER12> Knowing Pittsburgh, the amount of road and bridge construction that goes on there would also concern me, not to mention the condition of the roads.

There's also a ton of roads that are extremely steep (multiple residential streets with an over 30% grade) which can be extremely dangerous in the winter.

It's an interesting choice of a city for this for sure.

<comment><USER13> I'm sure they chose the city for CMU but I wonder if the driving challenges played a roll. Navigating downtown Pittsburgh is no fun if you aren't familiar with it. I mean it's not really fun if you are familiar either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Definitely not better road markings. I'm a Pittsburgh native, having spent most of my life there, and if anything the immaculate roads here in NorCal are a part of the ongoing skewed optimism regarding self-driving vehicles.

In Pittsburgh, you have potholes, ubiquitous construction (especially on PA-28), bridges (and I'm not talking Bay Bridge esque suspension bridges here), windy single lane dirt roads without markings, to say nothing of winter (snow usually obstructs what little markings there are 6-8 months out of the year), and a completely different driving style than in NorCal. Most people in Pittsburgh drive trucks or four-wheel drive Subarus (indeed, Pittsburgh has been a good niche market for Subaru -- they focus a lot of their advertising there). In Pittsburgh, roads only have two lanes max in each direction (and that's the highways). Even downtown has its fair share of dirt roads (near Allegheny River) and brick roads (roads that are made of bricks). I was shell shocked when I first moved to California and drove on the 101 with its 4 perfectly paved lanes filled with drivers exceeding 50 MPH.

Precipitation is a nightmare for self-driving cars' LADAR sensors, rendering them completely unusable. Drought-afflicted SV has zero precipitation, and Pittsburgh has almost as much as Seattle. Driving in snow is such a drastically different task/skill than driving in perfect weather that most people in California don't even know how to drive in Tahoe on their skiing trips (and the "snow" there is maintained by humans!).

If anything, us Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle researchers are the ones more grounded in reality. Elon hasn't even seen "the Turnpike" \-- it is sad to say that the rather unfortunate fatal Tesla autopilot accident happened here in Pittsburgh.

As aside, Sebastian Thrun was in snow-laden Boston, and he and his lab also have a more realistic time estimate for driverless vehicles hitting the road than TechCrunch.

Anytime anyone in California complains about the roads (and believe it or not, people do complain about them here a lot), I just laugh.

<comment><USER14> [http://pghroads.tumblr.com/post/50986812907/you-knew-this- wo...](http://pghroads.tumblr.com/post/50986812907/you-knew-this-would-be- here)

Infamous Pgh driving scenario: "Left lanes need to exit right, right lanes need to exit left, here's 300 ft, make it happen"

Also, there are a number of short merge on-ramps that have Stop signs instead of Yield signs where you are required to come to a complete stop before merging onto high speed traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It feels like a lot of what Uber does these days is just hyping up the stock price. Of course that is a very short term strategy, if your ever more audacious announcements keep falling flat. We saw a lot of this in the last throes of the dot-com bubble, before the inevitable implosion.

As for this announcement, does Uber have _any_ credibility in this field, which combines the most individually complex AI, robotics and regulatory work that has ever been attempted? Hell, in any non-trivial engineering feats?

Also, Volvo has very active ongoing self-driving research going on. I have to wonder how much of this is Uber's supposed crack team of field experts, and how much is simply a partnership with Volvo delivering the technology.

<comment><USER16> They have acquired their way into credibility. They controversially hired the majority of the CMU robotics laboratory in order to start ATC. They also hired a number of Google self-driving engineers, including the former head of the self-driving effort. Today Uber announced their acquisition of Otto, a self- driving truck company.

The ATC is isolated from the rest of Uber.

Volvo has been working on self-driving cars for years; before the Uber ATC effort.

Regulatory work is one thing that Uber excels at.

To be fair, Google also hired/poached most of its self-driving experts from university robotics laboratories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Lots of hills, and will have plenty of ice and snow in a few months. It seems to me like a logical place to test the resilience of a self-driving system against some predictable corner cases.

<comment><USER18> I'm surprised by their technology:

> The company has been creating extremely detailed maps that include not just > roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked cars, fire > hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's streets.

If one city requires that much work, they're not scalable. Even if we assume the LIDAR on every Uber car collects the new data, the car will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes.

Concerning the bridges, can't they do like the Kinect: Match the image with depth-sensing lasers, so they can detect the boundaries of the bridge, stray away from pedestrians, filter out fire hydrants and trees but slow down when encountering other objects?

<comment><USER19> This is the way Google does it as well, and in my opinion is a fundamental architectural failure. There's a reason after several years Google still has tested in so few locations.

Delphi has a more robust system (in theory), but the accuracy isn't quite as good. To the best of my knowledge Ford is also taking a different approach which doesn't depend on super-detailed maps to operate. The technology to compare the surroundings against a map is far easier than figuring out the surroundings and then navigating within that (not to trivialize this - <USER3> are extraordinarily difficult and nobody has made a fully self-driving car yet).

But hey, like they always say in YC - do things that don't scale. Uber is clearly pushing ahead faster than anyone else, and they have a hell of a team behind this project.

Regarding bridges - to oversimplify the simple answer is they're far noisier for the sensors (all of them, including cameras) and it just wreaks havoc on the sensor fusion system.

<comment><USER20> You could drive down every road in the US for under 10 million dollars. So as long as you can keep them updated I don't think highly detailed maps are a problem. Especially if this is supposed to be a backup for GPS.

<comment><USER21> Considering how often GPS gets confused here in DC, I'm amazed we are suggesting relying on it to drive the car.

<comment><USER20> They are using it for navigation not lane following. You can supplement GPS with dead reckoning for tunnels etc, but high quality maps let's a car be aware of landmarks and then use them to figure out where in the world they are. EX: With enough precision there is plenty of information in the picture to figure out where it's located. [http://socialforest.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/Forest-Gr...](http://socialforest.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/Forest-Green-Wallpaper.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can understand self driving cars eventually being practical on long simple roads.

But I can't even imagine how one could get to my house. My road has cars parked on both sides. Sometimes vans. Sometimes they almost block the road. Sometimes there is a car coming the other way and you have to look for a space to pull into to so they can pass, or maybe back up 1/4 of a mile. Or hope the other car does.

There are cones and roadworks quite often.

I have significant difficulty driving down there, I don't see how an automatic car could any time soon at all.

This might not be an issue if _I_ owned the car. I could turn it off and drive down there myself but an automatic taxi couldnt do that unless there was a driver waiting in the car to do that if required. And if there is, he might as well drive it all and save thousands of [currency]

<comment><USER23> All these challenges are exactly why one would want to collect driving data in Pittsburgh, it seems to me.

I saw a heavily instrumented Uber car driving down Liberty two days ago.

<comment><USER22> I guess that makes sense. And they can solve issues and make improvements one at a time untill it's good enough I guess. But I doubt that will be any time soon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are self-driving cars legal in the United States by law, or just due to the absence of law? Seems like vehicular traffic has always had fairly tight regulations around their operation, but I'm stunned by the speed at which cars that drive themselves are hitting the road. Sure, we've had cruise-control, and cars have been adding things like auto-braking and lane-assist. Have they just taken that feature-creep further to facilitate self-driving under existing laws? Or are they simply able to do-so because they all necessitate a human driver to supposedly be alert, awake and aware? Maybe I missed it, but to me this just seems like something that would warrant some discussion before self-driving vehicles are allowed on the roads, even if the conclusion is the same.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Wikipedia covers the legal aspects reasonably well, with a map of state laws.

"In 2016, 7 states (Nevada, California, Florida, Michigan, Hawaii, Washington, and Tennessee), along with the District of Columbia, have enacted laws for autonomous vehicles."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Legislation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Legislation)

<comment><USER25> Interesting that Pennsylvania is not on this list considering Uber is doing this in Pittsburgh.

<comment><USER26> There's a pending bill: [http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billInfo/BillInfo.cfm?sy...](http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billInfo/BillInfo.cfm?syear=2015&sind=0&body=S&type=B&bn=1268).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What is smart with Uber pushing this tech is they have incentive to test a lot with a human operator, they can earn money driving people during the test, but Google doesn't earn anything when they do, limiting their tests.

<comment><USER28> Google is already driving cars everywhere for Google Maps, so if they want to test it they can put it in Maps cars.

Uber is not going to make anymore money with those than their regular service, since they have to pay the driver anyway.

<comment><USER29> Two safety drivers, according to the article, and the ride is free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As someone that follows lots of tech "trying to see the future" \- to me Uber has the greatest hope of bring driving to the mainstream due to a number of factors.

First, they have a lot of experience with litigation and working with local laws.

They need to replace drivers, but unlike truck drivers - Uber will drive anywhere.

Unlike trucks, there's the potential to allow the passenger to drive the car.

Many more key reasons why Uber's efforts are worth watching, but really do hope they're able to make serious progress in bring autonomous vehicles to the mainstream.

<comment><USER13> > bring driving to the mainstream

Did you mean self-driving ?

<comment><USER30> Yes, that's correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd love to sit in one of those cars and see how well the cars can drive themselves, especially during the winter. It's just a really awesome experience being in a self-driving car - it'd be amazing if you could just hail one with an app.

The acquisition of Otto is interesting. I think Anthony Levandowski is incredible and the trucking industry is perfect for automation given the state of the technology and for logistical reasons. But it seems odd that Uber wants to branch out at this point.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's interesting that they chose Pittsburgh. Having grown up there and they having lived in many different places since, I have learned to appreciate having learned to drive on those roads, especially during winter.

Many roads in Pittsburgh, and western PA in general, can be very curvy and have tight-radius. They're also often steep.

The on-ramps are peculiar because merging traffic must yield, visibility can be poor, and since some on-ramps can have tight radius and be steep, it makes it a little more challenging to merge. However, all of that is not that difficult to learn. It's much more interesting when you add in a foot of snow and ice and blowing snow.

Also, Pittsburgh is an 'older city' so large parts of it were built before cars. Highways have been 'bolted on' in some places, especially the ones that bisect downtown. Many people unfamiliar with Pittsburgh can get lost when coming in from 376 because on entering downtown, there are several quick exits and lots of lane switching.

It makes sense since CMU is there and a lot of robotics people, but interesting nonetheless.

<comment><USER13> I imagine navigating 376 coming into Downtown out the of Fort Pitt tunnel to be insane. I can barely do it as a human. Everyone is entering and trying to cross the 4 lanes to exit on the opposite side with in about 100 yards of roadway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > "Supervised by humans in the drivers seat"

Ah, borrowing from the Musk marketing playbook, just say "self-driving" often enough, and enough uninformed people who have never seen contemporary luxury assisted-driving features will be impressed. Calling out Autopilot as "souped- up cruise control" is a nice touch.

> For now, Uber's test cars travel with safety drivers, as common sense and > the law dictate. These professionally trained engineers sit with their > fingertips on the wheel, ready to take control if the car encounters an > unexpected obstacle. A co-pilot, in the front passenger seat, takes notes on > a laptop.

That doesn't seem very scalable. How many cars are in this so-called "fleet"?

Is there anybody working on autonomous vehicle tech that believes there's any substance here, or is it just adverjournalism?

<comment><USER33> The level of autonomy exhibited by these vehicles are much greater than that of the Model S

<comment><USER32> Can you elaborate? What driving maneuvers do you expect these vehicles to be able to perform? Where is that feature set documented?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Last summer I saw one of these autonomous Uber cars driving on a side road when I was leaving my office in the Lawrenceville neighborhood in Pittsburgh.

Was tempted to motion to jump in front of it to see how the car would react, but didn't...

</comment><comment><USER35> Doesn't this upend Uber's whole model of non-ownership of vehicles and rejection of liability? Unless the driver is just there to be liable for having "allowed" the AI to intentionally hit something or someone!

Also, as a NYC driver, I wonder how aggressively a self-driving car could legally be programmed to defend its lane. I'm picturing Uberbots sitting still in traffic while streams of human drivers gleefully cut them off. City driving is basically a game of chicken every 10 seconds; winning at chicken depends on convincing your opponent that you are willing to have an accident.

<comment><USER36> It does. I wonder if Uber's accounting department really thinks this is a good idea. If Uber has to pay for gas, spare tires, oil changes, cleaning, theft, vandalism, insurance, moving violations, taxes, plus maintenance of what ever gizmos and gadgets it takes to auto drive these XC90s they may find it is cheaper to just underpay regular drivers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is a no-lose situation for Uber.

If it goes well, then Uber has suddenly pushed forward autonomous driving and set itself at the forefront of commercial adoption.

If it is a disaster and many accidents result, Uber will set back driverless cars by a decade, burying it under a wave of pessimism, allowing their current business model to persist well into the future.

</comment><comment><USER38> If the adoption of driverless cars succeeds this translates into less automobiles sold by manufacturers to the general public. Won't the auto manufacturers then need to increase the price of each unit sold? Eventually wouldn't Uber's savings from no longer having pay labor costs be lost due to auto makers increase in price per unit of each(now driverless) car sold?

This seems to be a lot exposure for Uber unless they get into the manufacturing business which seems like a rabbit hole. This type of exposure is the same as say a music streaming business that has to pay for content - i.e your business model is predicated on favorable enough terms from a third party in order to make a profit. And we've seen that the way around this is by being vertically integrated such as what Netflix has done with creating its own content.

</comment><comment><USER36> What happens if someone is in one of these and it needs gas?

What happens if these things get a flat tires?

What if the police want to pull one of these things over?

Can drivers exit this thing at will or are they trapped until some computer in California thinks it is safe?

Uber does know that their drivers do lot more then drive

<comment><USER39> 1) Uber keeps tracks of the fuel ahead of time, and goes to an Uber refuel station automatically before it gets anywhere near low fuel.

2) The computer detects that the flat tire happened, pulls off to the side, and autodials the Uber triple A repair crew.

3) This one is hard actually. Perhaps the cameras could detect the flashing lights and sound of a police car, and automatically pull over? Or maybe there is just an emergency pull over button that the passenger presses?

4) Aforementioned emergency pull over button.

<comment><USER36> These are good solutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder how this will affect crime. With a driverless car, if someone wanted to hold you up, all they have to do is walk in front of the car, which will then obediently stop.

<comment><USER41> As opposed to human-driven cars, which keep going and run you over?

<comment><USER40> If I'm in a shady neighborhood and a drunk or threatening guy or whatever starts meandering towards me, if I'm driving I have the power to turn/drive around him/accelerate or whatever. If I'm sitting in the backseat of a driverless car, I don't have that option.

<comment><USER42> What if the car is already locked and can detect if the drunk guy hits on the car? Would you be safe enough?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Can anyone comment on the connection between Uber a company based in S.F. and Pittsburgh? Does this have to with proximity to CMU? Something else?

<comment><USER43> Maybe more open regulations, smaller city (they seem to be mapping all the streets) or better road-markings. Or a combination of these three.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Forget Self-Driving Cars. Airbus Says a Legit Flying Taxi Is Coming

[http://time.com/money/4456617/flying-cars-taxi-self- driving-...](http://time.com/money/4456617/flying-cars-taxi-self-driving- cars/)

</comment><comment><USER45> Ah, I spotted one of these the other day cruising around Austin. Pretty slick looking vehicle.

</comment><comment><USER46> It is more a test run. It is self-driving but each vehicle will have a pilot and a co-pilot.

</comment><comment><USER47> Uber has to work on self-driving technology, but in a certain way doesn't self-driving technology seem like something that will eliminate Uber's market advantage?

Right now, Uber is the go-to choice in most areas because of network effects. They have the most drivers because they have the most users. They have the most users because they have the most drivers. In a world of self-driving vehicles, anyone with capital can buy a fleet to blanket a city. If you can finance a self-driving vehicle for $400/mo, it's not that hard to launch in a new city. Sidecar operated in my top-10 city with what seemed like 5 drivers. That was too few and it was terrible (given that a lot of the time they might not be on-duty). But if one could get 20 self-driving vehicles for $8,000/mo, it's an easy way to launch. If adding new vehicles is as easy as going to a local dealership and putting down your VC money, you could get more on the road within a day to meet demand. In the early days, you could keep a close eye on demand and over-provision a little.

Self-driving vehicles change the market from being one of network effects (where Uber has a huge advantage) to one of capital spend. Uber does have a lot of capital, but what if GM wants to get into the game? GM gets cars at cost and GM has a brand that people know/trust (they're not some no-name I'm-Uber-Too).

Worse, it's a market of variable capital expenditure. With cable TV/internet, a lot of the costs are fixed costs (actually laying all the cable and such). With wireless service, there's a limited amount of spectrum and a lot of fixed costs creating the network. With self-driving taxis, it seems like the vast majority of the costs are variable costs that go up with the number of riders. There's really nothing stoping a city from having dozens or even a hundred different self-driving taxi companies. I doubt it will be hundreds as it's hard to run a good company, but it does mean there won't be a good opportunity to push high margins onto consumers. An attempt at high margins would mean another company scooping up that business.

I guess I just don't see how Uber maintains high enough margins in what will become an incredibly price-competitive market where it's relatively cheap for new players to join. If Sidecar could have spent $8,000/mo to launch in my city with good coverage, they would have made users happy rather than frustrated that there were no drivers around. They could have been successful. $96,000 isn't a lot of capital needed to start up for your first year. A Dunkin' Donuts franchise costs more than that to start up (from a little Googling). At $5/ride, vehicles would only need to do 3 rides a day to justify a $400/mo price tag. Even at $2/ride (less than public transit), you'd only need to do 7 rides a day for that $400/mo vehicle. That doesn't deal with fuel costs, but you can see how you don't need a lot of usage to cover the cost of the vehicle. If you think about fuel costs on a Prius and a maybe a 5 mile average trip (which seems quite long), you're talking about 1/10th of a gallon or around 20 cents for fuel. A trip that might cost $15 on UberX drops to under $2.50 at-cost for a service that isn't popular (its vehicles only do 7 rides/day) and way lower cost for popular services. So, Uber is going to have to push its margins way down (and keep them down) to prevent someone from wanting to enter a market that requires such little capital.

<comment><USER48> > In a world of self-driving vehicles, anyone with capital can buy a fleet to > blanket a city.

The truth is, that's also possible in a world of driver-driven vehicles. Just pay the drivers more for a year or two, and the network is yours.

Uber is going to be of marginal importance in 10 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Anyone heard when "later this month" is? I'm going to be in Pittsburgh this weekend; I hope it is later enough to try it out.

</comment><comment><USER50> Well, they've got the right people on the project, and the right sensors. This is ahead of Tesla.

</comment><comment><USER51> great decision teaming up with Volvo for self-driving car experiments, Volvo has an excellent reputation for safety.</comment>


Bitcoin thieves threaten real violence for virtual currencies - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/19/bitcoin-thieves-threaten-real-violence-for-virtual-currencies.html <comment><USER2> This is why I've always found the "be your own bank" rallying point crazy.

I don't want to be my own bank. There are many reasons why people stopped keeping their liquid wealth under their mattress.

<comment><USER3> Most banks aren't even their own banks: very few branches keep anything close the $1.8M mentioned in one of the heists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been following these sort of cases and I haven't found one article that actually publishes the alleged transaction hashes of the event.

For better or for worse, there would be tons of vigilantes who would be happy to track down the current location of these funds.

That is, until the robbers figure out they can require the hostage to convert into Monero first.

<comment><USER5> Has anyone done a serious audit on Monero? I have a feeling people are overconfident about it's anonymity.

Picture Tor. Now picture your browsing history is stored forever so if there's ever a bug in the protocol, it all goes clear...

<comment><USER6> That's basically the current state of things with Tor, under the what I think is very real assumption that all traffic is stored.

<comment><USER5> > That's basically the current state of things with Tor, under the what I > think is very real assumption that all traffic is stored.

I mean, systems like Tempora[1] and the NSA's Utah data center[2] are known. Tempora apparently stores data for 3 days and metadata for 30 days.

I'd concede they may store metadata, but I seriously doubt they're storing the full traffic. That doesn't seem doable from a logistical standpoint.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center)

<comment><USER6> > That doesn't seem doable from a logistical standpoint.

Surely you're not going to cite budgetary constraint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Safety deposit boxes are quite cheap, around $20/year. It will probably become a norm to store most of your coins in cold storage in a bank. Physical security is expensive, and banks are good at it.

<comment><USER8> >Safety deposit boxes are quite cheap, around $20/year. It will probably become a norm to store most of your coins in cold storage in a bank. Physical security is expensive, and banks are good at it.

Still doesn't change the fact that I can kidnap your family and hold them ransom until you go to your safety deposit box and get the bitcoin to send to me. The problem is with the non-reversible nature of the payment system, and the fact that it exists outside the realm of a justice system, not with physical security.

<comment><USER9> They could do the same if you store physical gold in your safe deposit, but rich people vault gold without any problems.

<comment><USER10> Well... they're rich. So likely they're going to have cash, investments, real estate, etc. It makes the loss of gold painful, but it's not the end of everything.

<comment><USER9> That can be equally true of crypto.

<comment><USER11> Cryptocurrencies _

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a crypto-outsider I wonder what would happen if the transaction hashes of these robberies we're being flagged as robberies?

Doesn't the blockchain allow for tracking of any sufficient transactions and thus allow for descendants of flagged transactions to be prohibited from ever being converted into real currency again?

I guess, the "leverage" in this case would be that any platform/exchange/etc. that wants to go "official" (eg. IPO, or paying capital gains taxes) will have a problem if there are flagged funds in their books.

(Sorry, if this sounds ridiculously stupid for crypto guys)

<comment><USER13> The problem is that thieves will often quickly mix the stolen coins with untainted coins. So, there will be a large number of descendants of "tainted" transactions, the majority of which are held by completely innocent people. A real-life analogy would be taking stolen gold nuggets to an unknowing goldsmith who melts them together with gold nuggets from other customers and gives back freshly minted gold pieces.

<comment><USER14> That practice would stop immediately if there was some risk to the non- criminals/other criminals, to lose there money by mixing it, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER15> Can you pitch an example of this risk that wouldn't make the currency useless (like too risky to have anyone else hold it or arbitrate it) or ridiculous (KYC-style constraints)?

What is the mechanism of punishing the tainted the money going to be and the mechanism for deciding which money is tainted?

<comment><USER14> Oh, there's like twelve problems with trying to implement colored coins; I'm just saying the existence of mixers isn't one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Last week a lottery winner requested anonymity and has yet to claim the millions as anonymity is not how it works.

I wonder if a PR company helped with this article as there are lots of references to experts with products to sell.

<comment><USER17> That is how it works if done correctly. There was a process for her to get the money through a trust that wouldn't be linked directly to her, but she signed for the winnings in a way that doesn't allow that process anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Relevant comic: [https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

I'd really like to see zero-knowledge transactions as default in the future, just to avoid the sendee seeing your wallet's balance.

</comment><comment><USER19> Surprise - crypto does not solve physical violence. It's meant to solve virtual economic violence by governments.

<comment><USER20> Well it certainly doesn't do that...

<comment><USER21> It certainly does, though not categorically. Nonetheless, I'm sure the people who manage to regain a measure of control in their lives by using Bitcoin welcome the opportunity. [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big- in-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in- venezuela/534177/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Perhaps this classic XKCD should be updated for Bitcoin:

[https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

</comment><comment><USER23> a fairly well defined threat: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber- hose_cryptanalysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis)</comment>


Five Things That Make Kotlin Interesting - <AUTHOR> https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2017/05/24/kotlin/ <comment><USER2> I've been experimenting with Kotlin for a few weeks now and have been deeply impressed by how easy it is to get started with. This stems from three things: The Intellij tooling is excellent, as noted in the article, and the adoption curve is beautifully mild as you can easily integrate as much or as little Kotlin as you like with any Java project.

That of course doesn't say _why_ you would want to use it. The third thing that makes it easy to adopt is that it feels very familiar to most devs who come from a C# or Java background. It is really just a modern Java where nearly every aspect of the language has been upgraded. Writing code in Kotlin feels elegant.</comment>


An Open Letter: Dear Patrick & John Collison (Stripe) - <AUTHOR>

Hi Patrick & John,
I'm excited to see that you are growing Stripe and hiring support engineers. We've exchanged a few emails and chats in the campfire room. Please don't let this personal touch die. It's great to see this position which leads me to believe that support is a core focus (especially developer-centric support). I hope that it is, that you find people that will represent Stripe well, and take ownership of user's concerns like the existing team has done. And I hope you maintain some time to chat with us developers ;)
Thank you for making an awesome product and supporting your users. This is a great example to set for the entire tech community.
Lee <comment><USER2> Don't worry -- we're not going anywhere. We hang out in the chatroom every day, and that's going to continue.

Stripe is growing extremely quickly, and we're trying to craft the Support Engineer role for exactly this reason: we want to keep the same support experience as we add more users.

Please ping us if you ever notice stuff that we should be doing better. (And thanks very much for the kind words.)</comment>


60% of UK population need to become infected so country can build herd immunity - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-herd-immunity-uk-nhs-outbreak-pandemic-government-a9399101.html <comment><AUTHOR> According to other famous virologists, this is a risky strategy to play. This is an RNA virus, this means that you cannot safely assume that the population will be immune after the first infection.

<comment><USER2> I don't like to give the UK government the benefit of the doubt. This seems like an exceptionally poor set of decisions that where made. There is a lot of confusion at workplace's with some companies making the right decision to send staff home that can work remote and others not sure what to do, all the while putting life's at risk.

<comment><USER3> At my company, in the UK, there has been so far no communication on Covid-19 apart from an email more than a week ago to tell us to self-isolate if we recently came back from China and are having symptoms.

That it's it. Not even planning for working for home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> They are calmly announcing that their plan is to let tens of millions of people, if not hundreds of millions across Europe and beyond, be infected with a disease that has a 2% fatality rate.

This is madness plain and simple.</comment>


Google Maps for Mobile 5 unveiled, adds dynamic map drawing and offline mode - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/06/google-maps-for-mobile-5-unveiled-adds-dynamic-map-drawing-and/ <comment><USER2> Google maps/nav was one of the deciding factors for me when moving from the iPhone to a Droid X, and it just keeps getting better.

</comment><comment><USER3> _which brings us to... offline caching. Maps will keep on file the locations that you go to (and search) most often, and it'll be able to reroute while offline in Navigation_

So does that mean data is only cached offline if you're in the area? What happens if the area you want mapped has no cell coverage, is there no caching of that location?

<comment><USER4> The _(and search)_ might solve that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the first app I have heard about where I have Android envy -- maybe it is time to switch from the iPhone

</comment><comment><USER6> _depending on hardware capabilities (3D rendering) and "distinct multitouch" hardware support_

Hrmm, only 8 phones are 100% compatible. Could anyone explain what distinct multitouch is? Why would a touchscreen support two finger pinch but not a two finger push?

<comment><USER7> "Distinct multitouch" is multitouch as you would expect -- multiple simultaneous independent points of contact on the screen. The N1 uses some sort of pseudo-multitouch where it can make a pretty good guess how far apart your fingers are, but doesn't know unambiguously where they were.

Demo: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsSUqkh8pcI>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wouldn't it be feasible to make an iPhone google map app that included a map caching tile server for offline mode?

</comment><comment><USER9> Ooh, the offline mode is going to be handy in Australia.

</comment><comment><USER10> interesting that the Nexus One and HTC Desire aren't fully supported, presumably due to their touchscreens</comment>


React Is a Terrible Idea - <AUTHOR> https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150311-react-bad-idea <comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was a very interesting and thoughtful article. I appreciated that the article linked to Trygve Reenskaug's earliest article about MVC, since the real MVC vision and history is unfortunately not well-known today. But the article also seems to take the idea of separation of concerns a bit farther than Reenskaug himself did: the article "The Model-View-Controller (MVC): Its Past and Present" points out that "in simple cases, the Model, View and Controller roles may be played by the same object. Example: A scroll bar." ([http://folk.uio.no/trygver/2003/javazone- jaoo/MVC_pattern.pd...](http://folk.uio.no/trygver/2003/javazone- jaoo/MVC_pattern.pdf))

However, I definitely agree that a framework that steers programmers toward _always_ combining M,V, and C behaviors in a single component (as React arguably does) is highly problematic.

I highly recommend the link to the MVC pattern article above that explains some of the lost history and greater significance of MVC beyond just "separation of concerns". The core of MVC is much more human-focused: it's about better bridging the gap between the user's mind and the computer, so that the Model feels like an extension of the user's mind as they're using the system.

Note: Somebody posted a link to this article in a comment in an earlier thread ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606482)) but I thought I'd create a new thread about it because although it was written last year, I think it deserves further discussion.

<comment><USER2> The article is fucking crazy.

Web apps and software in general should be about separations of concerns not technologies.

When in React you define the structure + the events your component can receive you are wrapping up that concern nicely in a component.

And BY NO MEANS React is solving any data modeling problem, conversely, they have left that part out of the scope of React and some REALLY NICE options have come out. The most famous is Redux.

And by the way React is not a framework is just a library.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had some other doubts about the article as well, but didn't make any other comments yet because I am still researching React and web components. It appears you may be right that React does not force you into an overly coupled design, but I still think the article makes a good point about how people are writing React components (among many other library-specific component libraries) instead of native web components, which may be contributing to web components lagging behind. But I was just reading that web components can be used quite successfully as building blocks for larger React components or integrated with React in other ways, so I don't see why it has to be one or the other. And yes, sorry to call React a framework - I know it's a library and should not have called it a framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One of the authors here: we've had some internal debate on this since that article was written, summarized here:

[https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20160331-facebook-react- pa...](https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20160331-facebook-react-party-gone- wrong-socratic-dialog)

Technically speaking, with respect to the whole argument that React is "just a library," part of the problem is that it isn't perceived that way by many developers. The first auto-complete option (for me anyway) when I type "Web Components vs…" is React.

That said, the developer experience around Web Components is meh. Part of our frustration is that it would have been cool to see Facebook invest all the effort into Web Components-based technologies instead of going off on their own.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's another article on why web components deserve a second look, even for React programmers: [https://medium.com/@richardanaya/web-components-why-you- shou...](https://medium.com/@richardanaya/web-components-why-you-should-take- a-second-look-548c9966fafa).

The author also wrote a library that simplifies using web components and offers an option for integrating with React: [https://github.com/richardanaya/webblock/](https://github.com/richardanaya/webblock/) (Haven't investigated it in detail yet, but it looks promising.)

<comment><AUTHOR> On the other hand... [https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- webapps/2014JulS...](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- webapps/2014JulSep/0100.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Technology is a meritocracy and I use React because I find it to be a really great way to develop front end apps. It makes sense and it's simple and works really really well. I'm not trading that for some other unproven technology on the basis of ideology. If you want the web to be something else then make it so compelling that I must use it. That's what react did.</comment>


Inter-species mating could doom polar bear - <AUTHOR> http://isittheonion.com/inter-species-mating-could-doom-polar-bear-ex

<comment><USER2> Actual article: [http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/environmentclimatewarmingspecies...](http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/environmentclimatewarmingspeciesarcticbear)

<comment><USER3> They say "pizzlies", but I like the OP's "grolar bear" much better.

They seem scandalized, or maybe robbed, by this. It's a survival tactic. _It's working_. Sheesh. Let them do what they do, the _natural_ thing, instead of trying to preserve a too-small gene pool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Under what conditions is a species considered distinct from species with which it can form reproductively-viable offspring?

<comment><USER5> The species distinction is often made when two populations of otherwise compatible creatures do not reproduce due to time, location, or physiological factors. In this case, geography has historically kept Grizzlies and Polar Bears separate, so their physical features have diverged a great deal despite remaining sexually compatible.

In other cases, different mating seasons or physiological incompatibility might prevent breeding, even though the gametes are compatible. Coyotes and wolves and dogs can breed, for instance, but they usually don't and so they're considered separate species.

The mathematician in me hates this abuse of what should be an absolute and well-defined term, and the cynic wonders about eugenicists making a species distinction between the various human lineages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Shouldn't the article title be just the opposite?

"Polar bears assure survival with inter-species mating"

Wonder why people always want nothing to change? Seems like a strange thing found in folks of all religions and philosophies. This sounds like great news: life carries on. Such a great story and such a sucky title.

</comment><comment><USER7> Two things: Creationists (to which I believe the middle of the Posterous article was referring) shouldn't be upset at all. The Bible says kinds, not species, and that kinds can and do mate.

Two: why try to cull the mixing? If it's working (and isn't the operation of natural selection all about discouraging what doesn't work?) why try to put a human hand in the activity? Are we so desperately trying to retain what we define as species?

<comment><USER8> I assume the reason to stop is due to a feeling of guilt. Instead of considering human influence as a part of nature, many people consider it to be some sort of perversion. So instead of being amazed by the adaptability of life, people feel guilty about causing changes.

Plus there is the whole time scale thing. The fact that evolution took a really long time to differentiate polar and grizzly bears and in a few lifetimes you would see that split undone is concerning.

<comment><USER9> If the two species can mate it was never that big a split to begin with.

Personally I'm far more intrigued by the fact evolution can take action as quickly as a few generations if need be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So what exactly is so worrying or shockingly new about what essentially boils down to evolution?

<comment><USER7> I suspect adaptation might be a better term. Mutations aren't causing this or doing anything (so far as I know) with this, it's merely two creatures breeding and their gene pools intermingling.

<comment><USER9> That's still evolution.

It's just a matter of changing genes to produce something new and then selecting the best outcomes. Whether the change happens randomly or because two organisms combined their DNA, is irrelevant.

<comment><USER7> I stand corrected. A quick glance at Wikipedia showed your correctness. Apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am reminded of a cartoon in one of my environmental studies college texts. (IIRC:) The cartoon depicted a colony of bacteria on pre-historic earth having hissy fits and NIMBY-like protests that their off-gassing of oxygen was destroying the environment and would soon endanger the survival of their species if something wasn't done about it.</comment>


Willpower vs context - effects on habits/decisions - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heidi-grant-halvorson-phd/willpower-bad-habits_b_993968.html

<comment><USER2> To set yourself up for success with minor changes in routine is brilliant. While I'm all for retraining ourselves to be more productive beings, I wonder where the limit lies.

For example, I need a period of brain-less routine for an hour to recharge after a long day at work. Something that breaks the pattern during those times wouldn't provide that mental rest.

So how far can we practically push the balance? Would love to hear personal anecdotes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess we have to break the auto pilot mode only for negative stuff. If we can do positive stuff without troubling our brain, its fantastic! I'd prefer not to change areas in which the environment affects me positively, and change all those in which it affects me negatively.</comment></comment>


ProtonMail founder: Apple uses monopoly to "hold all of us hostage" - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/protonmail-founder-apple-uses-monopoly-to-hold-all-of-us-hostage/ <comment><USER2> Buy an Android then.

<comment><USER3> But then Google

<comment><USER4> A Google Pixel is one of the easiest flashable devices, and one of the few devices you can securely use GrapheneOS with.

<comment><USER3> Regular people won't do that though, protonmail isn't worried about the savvy hacker scenario, but the simple consumer</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Cruises were priced similarly to assisted living centers and more efficacious" - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15507078 <comment><USER2> Cruises are priced such because cruise ship workers are paid incredibly low wages:

"The Cruise Lines International Association says its "crew members are provided wages that are competitive with international pay scales." But a cleaner aboard a Royal Caribbean ship, for example, will work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for as little as $156.25 a week with no tips. U.S. labor laws are not applicable to provide protection to crew members at sea, nor is there any real oversight of the cruise lines' operations."

<http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/13/opinion/walker-cruise-ships>

<comment><USER3> Unlike people who read articles I like to talk with the working folks when I am on a cruise. Yes they work long hours for often 7-9 month contracts. But the pay they get is better than anything they could ever get in their home country. A lot of them get to spend several months at home for every contract but are always eager to go out again. It's isn't an easy life but looking at it from a rich country it seems like slavery. But most of them find the work acceptable for the pay compared to their home. Some cruise lines are much nicer to their employees than others and most of them know who.

I bet that nice piece of fruit you are eating was picked by someone from a poor country who is likely working illegally because the money at that farm is pretty good where they came from. Yes it might seem exploitative to us but their own country is much worse. Something we might not be willing to do for any money other people are happy to do it for any wage.

<comment><USER4> So, your argument is that since the mechanism of globalization works on such a, well, global scale, cruise owners taking advantage by purchasing labour at slave prices in order to sell cruises cheaply to those near the top of the global pyramid (if not on the summit) means it's not exploitation any more?

> Something we might not be willing to do for any money other people are happy > to do it for any wage.

Define "happy". Happy to do it rather than starve, or happy to do it rather than live in the abundance a fair share of the global output would entitle them to (for almost any definition of "fair share" - other than "handed down by previous and current war profiteers").

> ... it seems like slavery ... Some cruise lines are much nicer to their > employees than others

Right. And I'm sure if it _was_ slavery, some slave masters would be nicer to their slaves than others.

(I think I'm coming off more harshly against coldcode than I really intend to here.

I am trying to make the point that precisely because we live in a world that is unfair, defending unfairness when it is obvious will not help improve things. That is, assuming we would like to see things become more fair.

I do agree that too many people will react to obvious unfairness, and then ignore all the not so obvious wrongs we tend to contribute to everyday -- and which is almost impossible to simply "opt out" of (eg: trying to do good by recycling electronics, only to find that circuit boards are melted over open flames by children in China, destroying lives and ground water tables)).

<comment><USER5> _I am trying to make the point that precisely because we live in a world that is unfair, defending unfairness when it is obvious will not help improve things._

Playing Devil's advocate: it wasn't the cruise companies who created the unfairness; they are just performing arbitrage. Eliminating it won't eliminate the unfairness; in fact, it might make it worse.

<comment><USER6> So you regulate it. A good way to do that would be to have labor rights preconditions for docking or doing business.

<comment><USER5> And if you up the regulations enough to make it anywhere near non- exploitative, the cruise companies will just stop hiring foreign workers and leave them unemployed, furthering the inequality between developed and developing countries.

<comment><USER7> There's no evidence for that. Aren't we told repeatedly that companies will simply pass cost increases on to their customers? Can't have it both ways. Is it really the case that a ship full of millionaires can't charge enough to pay people $7.25/hour?

<comment><USER8> Which "millionaire-class" cruise lines are paying such low rates? I thought we were discussing Carnival, Royal Caribbean and such.

Regardless, demand for cruises is not extremely elastic. Make them more expensive and there will be fewer of them as people make alternative vacation plans. Thus fewer opportunities for poor workers. Not to mention, those workers' competitive advantage is their willingness to work for the lower rates. Take that away, and the lines will start hiring closer to home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I met an elderly woman that lived on a cruise ship. She need a walked but was otherwise in good health. She knew everyone on the ship, and made new friends with every cruise. To her it was an awesome life, rather than being stuck in some home. The discounts you get for multiple cruises made it quite affordable for her. Eventually she would need more healthcare but she was going to stay as long as she could.

I wouldn't mind it either if the internet was better...

<comment><USER9> My parents went on a few nice cruises after all their children went off to college, and they had the same experience of meeting such people who were using cruises as retirement homes. When my parents shared this story with me, I had a similar reaction as you did.

I imagine such a life would be much more interesting than life stuck in a single place with no new faces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this because assisted living centers have more regulatory barriers or burdens than cruise ships? Intuitively it does not seem like the costs should be the same.

</comment><comment><USER11> Am I the only person who initially assumed this was a Swiftian proposal intended to highlight the gross over-charging for assisted living?

<comment><USER12> The purpose of assisted living is to adsorb the remaining financial resources out of the residents. Its a battle of giant corporations to prevent any inheritance from reaching the heirs. In the great feast at your financial corpse, will your wealth go to the banks, as mortgage interest, or the hospital, or the assisted living... they're all going to be pretty pissed off if the cruise ships start competing on their turf. So expect some "journalism" aka marketing news releases about horrible cruise ships.

Given that multi-industry business model, how long do you think it would take until cruise ships join that business model? If the residents are not kicked out off the ship until they're utterly destitute, that cruise ship operator is leaving money on the table.

Its like arguing about how a hospital room costs more than a motel 6 room. Well, duh, you're not going to squeeze blood from a rock at a motel.

What sucks about this for everyone, aside from the injustice of it all, jackals at a corpse, etc, is that the new business model is completely incompatible with the old business model. When my wife and I got married, long ago, we went on a fun honeymoon cruise. This option will be removed with the new business model. Technically perhaps possible as newlyweds, but the terms will be something weird like 10% of your remaining net worth per week or whatever instead of just a fixed price "competitive with all inclusive resorts"

<comment><USER13> Before you demagogue the assisted care industry you might want to look at the government as well, Medicade will confiscate estates to pay for care. This was a wonderful feature of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. States are required to recover costs.

My grandmother's stay at a retirement/assisted living home added years to her life. She also got to meet new people and most important, had an active life. Far better than people bound up in their home alone till they pass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a great idea. Instead of settling in a retirement home, which always seemed so depressing to me, abandoned seniors (I know not ALL cases are the same) can at least enjoy travel and a constant change of atmosphere if they so desire.

The sad thing though is that this paper is from 2004. I wonder what action, if any, has been taken since.

As a side note, I also know that some people have family members that need medical care. I just hope I'm never put in a difficult situation where I would consider putting my parents in a retirement home. But if it was a cruise! Not so bad! That's like a permanent vacation!

</comment><comment><USER15> Noro virus outbreaks on cruise ships would put a relatively quick end to that if it were to become popular. Of course you have those in nursing homes as well but a cruise ship is a particularly nice setting. Lots of people in close proximity, and if there is an outbreak you can't really avoid contact with infected others unless you lock yourself in your cabin.

</comment><comment><USER16> Cruise ship retirement communities were a plot element in Albert Brooks' novel, _2030_ , which is definitely worth the quick read.

<comment><USER17> Also the movie Wall-E

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What if serious medical care is required, i.e. surgery?

<comment><USER19> Probably no different than if a younger traveler was injured and needing medical attention: they'd triage it onboard, and provide emergency care at the next port-of-call if needed. Worst case scenario, helicopter ride to a major hospital.

<comment><USER20> Any idea what level of medical care they can provision on-ship? I'd presume they have morgue facilities, given the negatively skewed age distribution, but no operating theatre?

<comment><USER21> They're obviously focused on emergency medicine and cardiac care. Digital radiography, EKGs, external pacemakers, a lab, etc. They can do cricothyrotomy, but certainly aren't set up for major surgery. Basically anything you'd want in an ER but not OR.

Although there are some ships doing cosmetic surgery at sea, and there are proposals for cruise ship medical tourism.

<comment><USER22> And there was a ship moored off Ireland performing abortions at one point.

<comment><USER23> That, in at least one case (and, AFAIK, all cases) wasn't commercial, but ideological: [http://www.womenonwaves.org/en/page/769/in- collection/2582/i...](http://www.womenonwaves.org/en/page/769/in- collection/2582/ireland-2001)

Also, I would not call that surgery.

<comment><USER21> Better example is something like the USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy (or really any big surface combatant in the USN); they can do real surgery.

I'd argue that Comfort and Mercy could do more good for US national security at sea, combined with LPD/LPH for cargo transport and personnel, than any other surface ships in the US fleet -- humanitarian missions probably improve security more than anything but the submarine nuclear deterrent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Having just gotten off my first cruise, I'm amazed at how plausible this suggestion is, at least for a narrow category of folks of limited mobility but otherwise stable health.

Heck, I could see a modest startup taking on handling the logistics of such an arrangement.</comment>


1 in 5 Facebook Employees Worked at Google - <AUTHOR> http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2010/10/one_in_five_facebook_employees_has_no_imagination_whatsoever.html

<comment><USER2> Not everyone wants to be in a startup. People running from Google to FB may be doing it for a different culture, for more money, or for a slight change in what they're doing. There's nothing wrong with that.

</comment><comment><USER3> here's a shocking revelation: facebook is pre-IPO and employees who get stock options stand to make a decent amount of money.

i know it's almost taboo around here to suggest that someone could even consider switching jobs for better pay/more potential stock upside vs. considering only some sort of imaginary "passion" for their job, but that's how it works.

<comment><USER4> Just because you join a company pre-IPO doesn't mean that you automatically get rich. If Google employees are really jumping ship for Facebook IPO riches, then I sincerely hope they've been given truckloads of stock units, because joining as employee 1200-whatever at Facebook means that there isn't much upside left in the share values.

In particular, if you start at Facebook today, the stock units you get are being sold on secondary public exchanges at frothy values. The stock is as close to fully and fairly valued as it's going to get short of an IPO.

<comment><USER3> you don't have to get rich for it to be worthwhile.

i joined a company a year before its IPO, got a modest number of shares, and it amounted to a nice little bonus every month. didn't make me rich but allowed me to build up a lot of savings while paying down my mortgage. it's totally worth trying to get into that situation if the option is available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It isn't about imagination. It is the cycle of the valley. Mature companies have employees go to found their own companies or join other pre-IPO startups. Working for Google you'll have a great career and quality of life but going to Facebook has the potential to make you quite a bit more money through equity.

<comment><USER6> So is that the true motivation for all of these xooglers? Cash in on _something_ before they're completely burned out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article makes the underlying assumption that the single most important factor for deciding where to work , is how exciting the new job is, compared to the old one. I real life, people take a lot of 'other things into consideration when making such decisions. 'Boring' things like money, career advancement and job security usually rank above 'the excitement' of the opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER8> In the modern business world, you often have to jump organizations to get more money or the position suited to you. That's how an efficient market works.

People are jumping back and forth between Google and Facebook _because_ they are so similar, but may offer differences in the exact position and compensation offered.

</comment><comment><USER9> The bottom line is this - if you were to place a bet (as in betting your career) on which company will be dominant 20 years from now and which will become yet another dying Internet fad, I'd bet in favor of Facebook. Absolutely everyone overestimates Google's chances of continuing to dominate forever.

<comment><USER10> Do you really think so? Google handily passes the "actually does something useful" test. Facebook, not so much.

<comment><USER11> One way of looking at it: Facebook has changed the way people communicate and socialize with each other. I think in some ways that is more fundamental than what Google has done - change the way people search. Furthermore, Google has seemed to have trouble innovating in the past couple years, but Facebook has been accelerating the pace of its innovations.

<comment><USER12> FaceBook is 6 years old and has roughly 2000 employees. Google was 6 years old and had roughly 2000 employees in 2004. Does anyone remember what Google introduced in 2004 and early 2005, and how revolutionary they seemed at the time? GMail, Orkut, Local, Books, Scholar, Maps, and Code ring a bell?

There seems to be an inflection point in just about every major tech company's history. First they have to dominate their initial core market. Then they need to figure out how to make money off it. Then they can use the data gathered from their core, and the top-notch employees they hire with the money, to launch lots of innovative side projects. Then everybody starts taking their innovative products for granted, but they make so much money that management can't justify letting people work on further innovative side projects that will fail 90% of the time.

FaceBook is currently in stage 3. Google would be in stage 4, except that the founders still actively push through projects like Wave and Instant and self- driving cars. I predict that ten years from now, both companies will be in stage 4, and the new hotness will be some company that hasn't been started yet.

<comment><USER11> Ok, so does that mean you'd rather work at Google instead of Facebook? Right now, Facebook is doing stuff that is more interesting for programmers I suspect.

<comment><USER12> Considering that I do work for Google and have been contacted in the past by FaceBook recruiters - yes, I'd rather work for Google. FaceBook has some cool technology, but so does Google, and I'm more excited about Google's overall mission.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: API as a Service? - <AUTHOR> Is there any SaaS offering that lets you quickly create a provisioned, usage based API for your existing cloud services?
Let me explain.
Let's say I have some code that transforms widgets.  Right now, I'm the only person who could invoke it.
I would ideally like to sell access to it.  I would integrate with some SaaS API-as-a-service.  They would handle creating user accounts, multi-user access, 2FA, billing, and monitoring usage.
I would set them up with an endpoint to my service along with the expected inputs.  I would be responsible for hosting the API endpoint as well as supplying the containers to execute the services.
Perhaps they would request modifying the function to include an additional parameter for tracking purposes.
Then they would be billed either based on usage or a flat fee..
My guess is that maybe the solution involves serverless somehow. <comment><USER2> Have you heard of Cheddar? It's a usage-based billing API that does almost everything you're talking about, minus the 2FA. That might have to be an external service, but if you're interested, I can double check.

[https://gtchdr.com/2jRxYHx](https://gtchdr.com/2jRxYHx)

Full disclaimer: I work there. (We're doing a massive website update, so until that's done, it might be helpful to chat. Let me know.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't outsource such an important part of your business. It's not that hard to charge people -- just log requests and bill their credit cards monthly. When you're starting out and have < 100 paying customers, you can do it manually in a couple hours a month.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a decent background in this sort of tech and would be willing to help out

</comment><comment><USER5> and detectlanguage, smooch - there's quite a lot of API as a Service companies out there

</comment><comment><USER5> check out ritekit, they do this</comment>


.IO is DOWN at the moment - <AUTHOR> None of the top level dnsX.nic.io servers seems to be responding to requests right now. More and more users are seeing the lights go out on .IO domain hosted websites. <comment><AUTHOR> For Planio ([https://plan.io/](https://plan.io/)), all accounts are available via yourname.planio.net as an alternative while this outage lasts.

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems it's not the first time this happens: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838670](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838670)</comment>


Apocalypse World - <AUTHOR> http://apocalypse-world.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm not 100% sure what this is other than an ad for a book but the image on the site overlaps most of the links / text for me.</comment>


Man 'deletes his whole company' after typing wrong bit of code - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/14/man-deletes-his-whole-company-after-typing-wrong-bit-of-code/ <comment><AUTHOR> Similiar to Java stype NullPointerException, but with a much worse effect in this case.

When will people stop making things nullable by default?</comment>


StateService: Automating recovery of third-party services after a major outage - <AUTHOR> https://code.fb.com/open-source/stateservice/ <comment><USER2> Huh? I feel like this article is missing an example of what kind of operation a Chef run would do that requires coordination between hosts. It's incredibly vague right now, I don't feel like I have enough information to determine whether it's even a good idea for this to happen in Chef.

Like even what the two Curl commands would be in the small example there would be helpful.

<comment><USER3> They mention it's used for 3rd party software, so I can take an educated guess.

It might be, for example, that some 3rd party app doesn't retry database connections. So, you have to start the database server first, and wait until it's accepting connections before you start the 3rd party app.

Just a guess though. You're right...it should have been less vague.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice. A few years ago we've build something along these lines at Technicolor: [https://medium.com/@rad_g/the-ultimate-reactive- infrastructu...](https://medium.com/@rad_g/the-ultimate-reactive- infrastructure-557fe8417caa) I can imagine that our solution wouldn't work at facebook scale but for us, it was a massive timesaver, in 300 lines of ruby code.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it worth the investment to have AI/ML at production level? - <AUTHOR> Lots of AI/ML floating across the world. Is it really worth to invest in AI/ML technologies at the level of production ? Does the ROI and effort worth it ? Any real world examples would help me out. <comment><USER2> I don't understand this question. There's nowhere near eough information to even begin giving any kind of meaningful answer. With a question this vague, all you're going to get are platitudes, random anecdotes, etc.

What kind of problem are you trying to solve? In what kind of organization? What do you mean by "AI" and "ML" respectively? What is "production level" to you? And so on.

For some people, production level machine learning is doing linear regression in OpenOffice Calc. For others it's hand-written C code using MPI on a 1000 node cluster with Infiniband interconnects, and the works. What makes sense for you would depend on the problem, the potential value of solving that problem, and the available resources.</comment>


Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building - <AUTHOR> https://tuvalie.com/fae/?q=Albert%20Einstein <comment><USER2> Regarding the UI, personally, I would shrink things down a notch. It feels a bit "in your face" right now, if that makes sense. Besides that - love it!

Edit: even just changing font-size from 14pt to 11pt is much better imho.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, eric. Thanks for the feedback. If you don't mind me asking, do you think it feels that way because of the color choices, spacing, order of content, or something else? The colors are tied to specific themes, which can be changed by registered users -- but I can still tweak the default theme if it would improve things.

<comment><USER3> (not eric, but had the same thought)

Everything just feels way oversized, in a Fisher-Price kind of way. The font, the colors and "chunky"-ness of the UI.

The full-width content-area doesn't help either. The whole page gets right up in your face and shouts the content at you.

Concrete suggestions:

\- dial down the font size

\- put some blank space in the left-right marigns of the page (responsive if possible).

\- maybe choose a more passive shade of blue for the background.

EDIT: here's an example comparing your page with wikipedia [http://recordit.co/Za7NuT8Hy7](http://recordit.co/Za7NuT8Hy7)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I'm going to work through those suggestions later. Do you mind if I ask for your feedback afterwards?

<comment><USER3> Sure, go for it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I made a couple of small tweaks. If you have a moment and are willing to take a look, I'd love to hear your thoughts! (You may need to perform a hard reload in your browser.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks, I just wanted to apologize. I got an influx of several thousand views because of this post and exceeded some API usage limits, so the web and some of the image results were down for a bit. They're back up now, but if they exceed the limits again, they'll have to remain down for a bit (financial limitations :S).

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't have a comment on the work itself, but like most sites, it has no awareness of line length, and it's therefore painful to parse the information without resizing the window.

Both HN, and the linked website, could benefit greatly in readability by simply limiting line-length to ~32em for textual information. It's strange that a browser, designed for human use, has no notion of humans in that regard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, xjay. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I'll experiment with it later on today. If you don't mind me asking, do you have a reference site I can look at that you think really shines in terms of readability?

<comment><USER4> Sure! Matthew Butterick opened my eyes on the world of typography. He has a site with tips: [http://practicaltypography.com/](http://practicaltypography.com/)

He also has a very good talk called "Typography for Docs": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J6HuvosP0s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J6HuvosP0s)

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are perfect, thanks! After I'm doing fiddling with things later, do you mind if I solicit your feedback?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice work, compliments. I also like the UI, no clutter or heavy JS. But I suggest you add a little noscript message saying this only functions with it enabled.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea, thank you. A little ashamed I overlooked it, actually :/ It'll be thrown in with my other to-do's for the day.

<comment><USER5> No problem, even the no-js users overlook it, including myself...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, gkya. The noscript element has been added. Based on some other feedback I've received here, I also reduced the font size and line width for encyclopedic information display. (It may require a hard reload to notice the difference.) Since you had a positive impression of the original design, it'd be good to hear that it hasn't changed with the update. And thanks again!

<comment><USER5> Checked it, yes, I see the noscript message. I rather like a more plain style for web pages that is based on text rather than icons, but it is personal preference. The font size is better, and it zooms in and out nicely (I zoom out on it for easier reading). If I would change one thing, that'd be to use a serif for some longer text. You're welcome, and kudos again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nicely done! I especially like the timeline. Most of the data for the search results I tried are available via DBPedia and other sources and you did a great job tying it all together.

BTW, re: UI: I found it easy to use, and it looked nice, on the iPad Pro I am using right now. It is kind of people here to offer suggestions for improving the UI, but my suggestion is to leave the UI as is and keep working on the back end stuff

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words! You might have seen the UI after I just pushed a small improvement through (it was right around the time of your comment), so it may have been less offensive for your particular viewing! (If it doesn't change when you do a hard reload, you saw the updated version.) Hopefully that addresses some of the issues, but I agree that focusing on the core service is more important in the long run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great work! The UI is a bit old school -- reminds me of Windows 3.1 crossed with some wireframe creation program, but it is not hard to use. But I especially like the timeline and encyclopedic information. Since I run a search engine myself (solveforall.com), I would like to ask you the sources of the encylopedic information, timeline, and quotes. The result that doesn't seem to add much value is the NELL project one, which lists the type hierarchy. Maybe that could just be summarized to "Albert Einstien is a male scientist" ...

Of course autocomplete would be nice as well as more tolerant input acceptance.

I don't get the finder ... do you plan that people will register, then you can find other users that way? This is not a general search for someone by email, right? That would be cool...

I am looking forward to using your API as well! Do the endpoints on [https://tuvalie.com/?do=developers](https://tuvalie.com/?do=developers) work?

Anyway, cool stuff. If you want to discuss further with me, contact me at jctsay AT aim.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! What's being demonstrated here is one part of one feature of a larger project I've been working on over the last several years. I've built a lot of custom parsers that continuously mine/merge facts from various sources. (I think it's sitting at around 215 million atomic facts, right now, outside of what it can dynamically calculate.) The APIs work (theoretically), but they're very rough. Showing this project off is very new to me!

<comment><USER7> 215 million facts, that's impressive! Anyway, congratulations on shipping. If you ever want to collaborate on search, please let me know.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to find ways to collaborate with anyone who's interested :) I also forgot to mention that you can download an export of (most) of the timeline events from [http://endlessorigins.com/](http://endlessorigins.com/) \-- I update it from time to time with new events, too. To my knowledge, it's the largest freely available structured data set of historic human events. Could that be useful to you?

<comment><USER7> That looks great, I am going to look into this at some point. Thanks a lot for the link and all your hard work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Man, this is almost exactly a project I had envisioned years ago. I was going over a list of terms I needed to know for a midterm in school, and thought it would be neat if I could just plunk in a list of comma-separated terms and have it fetch definitions, wiki blurbs, images, and whatever else it could find in to cards for each term.

<comment><AUTHOR> Funny you should mention that! For registered users, comparisons across concepts are an actual feature. The service tries to summarize on a per attribute, cross-entity basis what makes each item different or similar. It's pretty computationally-expensive, though, so I didn't want to slow down this demo by showing that off. I can post a couple of screenshots of it in action if there's any interest?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is so cool, it shows you're a real developer's developer, if you get what I mean!

One thing that confused me a little at first, UI wise, is the scroll bars on the page Web Results and Image Results panels. I was just scanning pages and thought the page was hanging for some reason while using my mouse wheel.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I can honestly say that comment put a smile on my face. As far as the scroll bars go, I just didn't want to take up too much screen real estate for those individual sections. (So that people who want to spend time with them can, but those who don't can skip over them a bit quicker.) Do you think there's a better way to handle that? I'm very open to suggestions for just about anything!

<comment><USER9> Sorry this is a little bit delayed! It's hard to see when you get replies here :)

My feeling is to either make liberal use of "Click to expand" or to just let users scroll the whole page vertically. I think we've become used to long, vertical content elements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for anyone who checks this out. I'd like to release a free API soon with most of the data the portal contains. That's one of my big objectives since hearing about Freebase shutting down. At any rate, all thoughts and feedback are greatly appreciated!

<comment><USER10> What would be really awesome (and probably insanely difficult to make) is an API which does something similar to what Google does when you define: stuff. It usually comes from a dictionary, but sometimes it has more interesting sources. I'd love to put something like that in an IRC bot.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is even more experimental than the main service, itself, but does something like this meet your needs (genuinely curious)? [https://tuvalie.com/fae/?q=Albert%20Einstein&api](https://tuvalie.com/fae/?q=Albert%20Einstein&api)

<comment><USER10> While that is useful, it wouldn't meet these particular needs. What I'd want is a single piece of text, with maybe a link, giving a best-effort description/explanation of the subject.

So when specifying "Albert Einstein" Google gives:

> Albert Einstein. BrE. (1879-1955) a physicist, born in Germany, who was > possibly the greatest scientist of the 20th century. In 1905 he published > his theory of relativity. This led to the equation giving the relationship > between mass and energy, E=mc2, which is the basis of atomic energy.

But when specifying "hubbub" Google gives:

> a chaotic din caused by a crowd of people. "a hubbub of laughter and > shouting"

Stuff like that, where it (somehow) automatically determines which piece of information is most relevant. Again, I don't think this is really doable without having as much search data as Google does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Completely subjective, but I'm very drawn to the timeline. I would be interested in a site that was organized entirely around that, with the videos and pictures displayed chronologically and by importance.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a big fan of the timeline, myself! I actually regularly export some of the timeline data to a TSV file for others to be able to use in their own projects. [http://endlessorigins.com/](http://endlessorigins.com/) \-- I'd love to know what kind of uses you can find for it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Information looks good. Design looks a bit old doesnt affect anyway but I would recommend updating it. SEO of the site is worse.

What is the plan for revenue? contextual advertisement? Donation? Or something else?

I would love to collaborate and help in UI/UX and SEO. Ping me if you wish to connect: firstname.lastname@example.com

Recent work: oizom.com, metavideos.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. Thanks for the feedback. If I can help it, I don't want any advertising to touch the knowledge functions of the site. It's part of a larger project that offers subscription services and sponsorships for interest communities, so all of this is just one piece to that puzzle. Donations would be wonderful, but I don't really see getting a lot of them. If nothing else, I still love building this stuff. I've been at it for several years and my interest level hasn't diminished at all, so I have that going for me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Registration rejects email addresses with certain characters ("+" at least)

Also, I think it's a bad idea to offer common financial codes as recovery codes for your site (SSN, mother's maiden name, etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, DrScump. Both of these have been fixed. Users will be warned to change their security question if they're using an old, insecure question type, and no one will be able to select those questions beginning immediately. I was using a standard list of security questions, but I absolutely see the value of avoiding such info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Invitation code? Not liking my email address for some reason.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, if you're willing, could you shoot me an e-mail from the address it doesn't like? You can reach me at hello @ the domain of the site. That's the first I've heard of the issue, and I'd like to make sure it gets fixed. (And thanks!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Invitation code?</comment>


Show HN: ProSportsBot, Live scores for the NBA, NHL, MLB and 100's of soccer teams - <AUTHOR> https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@ProSportsBot <comment><USER2> Nice. You should add it to botpages.com if you haven't.</comment>