Daniel Kahneman on when to trust intuitive judgment - <AUTHOR> https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2018/11/16/daniel-kahneman-do-not-trust-your-intuition-even-f/?slreturn=20181030094020 <comment><USER3> Maybe it's just me, but I find Kahneman frustrating to read and this article really demonstrates the problem: he defines a concept and then gives examples which don't meet the definition.

He defines intuition as thinking you know without knowing how you know. OK, great. Now the example: guessing someone's GPA based on the fact that they started reading early. Like most people, I guessed it would be on the high side. Kahneman calls this "intuition that is generated automatically with high confidence." And that's… just wrong.

I have very little confidence in my guess, and it certainly isn't generated automatically. It's based on a belief—which turns out to be wrong—that early reading has some relationship with college GPA.

So maybe in this example, he is using the dictionary definition of "intuition", which is basically non-conscious reasoning. He thinks this shows the problem with intuition, but again, that's just wrong.

I didn't get the answer wrong because I failed to reason consciously. It's because my belief about the relationship between early reading and GPA was wrong. If I take his advice and don't trust my intuition, and carefully and logically reason my way to the answer, guess what? I'm still wrong because my information is wrong.

His explanation of when to trust your intuition is similarly flawed. He basically says you can trust your intuition when you have good information. Well yeah. That's a generic statement that goes for almost any method of drawing conclusions about the world, and doesn't help us understand when intuition is useful or not useful.

<comment><USER4> I think at least some of it comes from the fact that Kahneman didn't write the article. The article is composed from both his speech that was referenced and from the book that he wrote, and kind of marries them together in a weird way. I find articles like this extremely thin because they usually synthesize points with very thin lines. Original authors will have hundreds of repeated examples and data sets, of which Kahneman is one of them. He certainly didn't win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for nothing -- he has serious data to back up his research.

If I had to summarize Thinking, Fast & Slow up in one sentence: human intuition shouldn't be trusted when it comes to statistics problems, because humans aren't naturally statistical thinkers.

All of the research in the behavioral economics category shows this pattern very well. GPA distribution among populations is statistically quantifiable. Due to human cognitive biases, however, it appears to be a problem that has an obvious answer by intuition, and that answer is wrong.

The specific three qualities that are outlined as giving way to intuition boil down to having a large body of evidence and a very tight feedback loop, which statistics does not have but things like emotion reading do have. If you get the emotions of your significant other wrong you'll immediately see the repercussions. Casually misjudging someone on the street because of statistics will never see you being corrected.

But really, I think you should just read the book. This article doesn't even come close to doing behavioral economics justice.

<comment><USER3> I have read the book, and found it frustrating for the same reasons I mentioned. For example, the core concept of System 1 vs System 2. He says somewhere in the book early on that they aren't actually "systems", i.e. a physical brain structure. But then he uses language like "System 1 does X and System 2 does Y," implying there's some grounding in neuroscience, when there is in fact none. They are just a grab bag of functions that don't have much in common, but we're led to believe he's describing something fundamental about the brain.

The other thing that annoys me is his pessimism and nihilism of seeing human beings as fatally irrational. One response that I found interesting was the book The Enigma of Reason by two evolutionary psychologists who argue that reason evolved in humans specifically because we are social animals, and the purpose of reason is to persuade others. It's why we are so much better at catching other people's poor reasoning than our own. The implication is that reason is designed for group settings. Showing that isolated individuals reason badly is like riding a bike on an ice skating rink and saying the bike sucks. We test human reasoning in conditions its not designed for and then come away with an overly pessimistic view of humanity.

<comment><USER5> I've not read "Thinking Fast and Slow" but long ago I read "Heuristics and Biases"[0] and attended one of Kahneman's talks during his tour promoting his newest book.

I couldn't help but think that TFaS was the product not so much of a desire to share some new insights he'd recently discovered but rather that he saw (or some publisher pointed out to him) how authors such as Pinker, Greene, Tyson, et al were garnering considerable attention and revenue translating sophisticated scientific topics developed by others for a lay audience. As if someone said to him: "Hey, you were involved in discovering some sophisticated and important topics, why don't _you_ translate those to a lay audience?!"

I have great respect for Kahneman and H&B is a wonderful collection. However I find it peculiar that the entirety of TFaS seems, on the surface (again I've not read it) strikingly similar to essay #22 in H&B by Steven A. Sloman titled "Two Systems of Reasoning". In it he uses Kahneman's and Tversky's work to argue for two competing strategies for arriving at the truth: associative vs rule-based.

It's as if Kahneman is borrowing from Sloman who borrowed from Kahneman.

[0][https://www.amazon.com/Heuristics-Biases-Psychology- Intuitiv...](https://www.amazon.com/Heuristics-Biases-Psychology-Intuitive- Judgment/dp/0521796792)

<comment><USER6> I found thinking fast and slow unreadable. Bored me too death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This makes total sense. What's he's basically saying is if you've collected a lot of evidence, you can quickly classify a new data point. (And if feedback is not immediate or very noisy, you're not collecting as much evidence as you think.)

If that sounds like a lesson for machine learning, it's because it is.

For the same reason, as a quantitative trader, I look at stuff that has a lot of repetitions historically. And over short time periods, because that both gives you faster feedback and more non-overlapping reps. Which addresses the point he makes about the financial markets.

The other takeaway is that you don't have nearly as much evidence as you think. I mean who wouldn't think that kids who learn to speak early have high GPAs?

Often I get into a discussion with people who pull out something similar, with no specific source. Everyone else is convinced that not only is the hypothesis true, but that there's so much evidence that I'm just being difficult when I ask for it.

There's a lot of traps like this in the social sciences. I'm not saying these are all wrong, just that your intuition is seductive if you don't ask for the evidence:

\- "People descended from the cold regions are smarter, because they had to be smart to survive"

\- "CEOs who have share options perform better, because they have better incentives"

\- "Without patents nobody would bother to invent anything"

\- "Reading to your kids is good for them"

Lastly, some things are unlearnable for one person. If you're going to learn, you'd need to aggregate somehow:

\- How many times has someone sold their company? Probably not more than a handful. Even people who have n>0 are quite rare. So what does this say about how highly you should weight this person's experience?

\- How should I coach the team for the big final? Again, how many finals are there in a year in any given sport? Can you learn any lesson at all that's separate from just increasing the n of the number of games coached (which probably is meaningful)?

<comment><USER8> "How should I coach the team for the big final?"

why is the "big final" any different from any other game?

<comment><USER9> Because it is the last game. In any other game you need to pace your players to ensure that they are rested enough by the next game to play well, but in this game you can throw that all away as they will be rested. In the final minutes having a player do something that will break their leg might win and there is no downside to future games (there are of course ethical concerns).

<comment><USER8> just give everyone amphetamines, problem solved

(there are of course ethical concerns)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > in order to develop expert intuition (1) some regularity in the world that > someone can pick up and learn (2) a lot of practice, and (3) you have to > know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong

> "So, chess players certainly have it. Married people certainly have it > [about each other]. People who pick stocks in the stock market do not have > it. Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support > developing that kind of expert intuition," he explained

<comment><USER11> This I believe is also hammered on in Thinking fast and slow which is an excellent book.

It condenses the major findings on behavioral psychology from 21st century into an accessible paperback.

<comment><USER12> Adding this to my reading list, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Based on his three conditions, intuition looks like machine learning

<comment><USER14> Well, intuition is an output of a neural network, it's just that the neural net is implemented in meat instead of silicon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My intuition tells me that these three conditions are correct. Should I trust it?

While these conditions intuitively make sense, the example that he used to support his conclusions feels very weak. If the only information I know about this person is she read fluently at a young age, I don't think I can make a good guess of her GPA in college at all. There's no "right intuition" in this case, because so many other variables are in play.

<comment><USER16> I think what you are missing is "base rate neglect."

Let's say the overall average GPA is 3 (or 3.1 for women):

[https://blog.prepscholar.com/whats-the-average-high- school-g...](https://blog.prepscholar.com/whats-the-average-high-school-gpa)

Then you would expect that to swamp the information that this person was an early reader. You might let the early reader have a slight effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think it's important to establish different kinds of intuition. Intuition =/ stastistics. While I like Khaneman and his books are interesting, his arguments around intuition show a fundamental misunderstanding of intuition as I understand it and apply it.

If you try to use intuition for things which are better suited to statistical analysis, then yes he is correct. But what about all the other kinds of intuion? The intuition of an author knowing how to put together a sentence. A painter intuiting colors. A businessperson intuiting a good hire.

So many times in business, we have to rely on intuition because we simply do not have the time or resources to make decisions mathematically.

For example, I work in an industry (marketing) that is increasingly dominated by a school of thought of A/B testing.

The typical approach is create hundreds of combinations of different ads, copy, and creative and then see which one converts the best. I take an entirely different approach that I find much more successful and efficient that relys almost completely on intuition.

I simply create the ad that I "know" will do the best and run that one. Of course if it doesn't work, I make changes, I look at data and results as part of it, but the majority of the time I run my business on intuition. Could I squeeze out a few percent here or there? Probably. But the time and money it would cost to come up with statistically significant data-driven decisions is far higher than having an ad up and running for an extra 2 weeks.

I created a campaign this week with one offer, one landing page, one version of an ad. The landing page converts on day one at 77%. No testing. No looking at data. Getting it right the first time is a culmination of all my experience, all my knowledge. That's what people pay me for. I could spend weeks A/B testing data, but intuition of what allows me to run my business successfully, and is the reason people hire me.

<comment><USER18> So, what you're saying is that K's three conditions are met in your specific case.

<comment><USER17> Re-reading the article, yes you are correct. Although I still feel it's important to distinguish different types of intuion. The intuition he is referring to here, and the 3 conditions, doesn't apply well when we are talking about my other examples, like a painter intuiting colors or an author picking one word/sentence over another. There's no immediate feedback on those. With a book you have to make all the decisions, publish the book, and then people either like it or not. In the case of art it seems to me, there is a different kind of intuion at work. Ideas and creativity are subject to intuiton, but not the kind that the author is taking about here.

<comment><USER19> _> doesn't apply well when we are talking about my other examples, like a painter intuiting colors or an author picking one word/sentence over another. There's no immediate feedback on those._

This is most definitely false. Painters constantly look at how the colors they pick work in the larger composition. Very very few painters could produce anything tolerable with the lights off.

Likewise, good authors are constantly re-reading and editing their own work. It's a truism in writing that "first drafts are shit". The experience of reading a sentence you read is very different from what you experienced while selecting the words, and you do get immediate feedback when you do it.

<comment><USER17> Right, I suppose I was thinking of the fact that a painting success or lack of success is not an opinion of the artist, but rather the critical reception of the work. I'm sure everyone who writes a book or does a painting (for the purposes of public consumption anyway) thinks that on some level it is "good". But an artist creating a painting that is new or innovative is by definition doing something someone has never done before. Good art must be both original in some way AND "good" (subjectively). What drives an artist to create something new, and combine elements in a novel way is a form of intuition, and my argument is that form of intuition is as seperate from the type of intuion the author is referring to.

Where do an artists ideas come from? No one knows, really. But forming them into a concrete work is a type of intuition, which I think is quite different from what the author is taking about. Hence, how you define "intuition" is important. I believe there are several ways to interpret the concept, and it's important to distinguish between the types.

<comment><USER19> There are a couple levels to this.

1) How a painter learns to get the image onto the canvas that they have in their mind. This requires a ton of intuition. You're literally using your hand muscles, so it's not like you can get out pen and paper and calculate how many Newtons of force to apply to the brush. This intuition very much lines up with the three rules of the article.

2) How a painter learns how the audience will respond to their work. This definitely has a slower feedback loop, since they have to complete a work and show it to people. But otherwise, all three components are there. Almost every successful artist has a long history of making work and showing them to people. Art school is _all_ about critiquing each other's work to train exactly this intuition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how those three conditions apply to intuition in software development. The only condition that seems to regularly be unmet is "immediate feedback."

<comment><USER21> I think intuition goes downhill as your system increases in complexity. It's harder to develop deep experience or regularity in distributed systems than it is in your monolith that you know inside and out. Feedback can get less immediate, too.

<comment><USER18> So true. I spent the bulk of my early SW development career in distributed systems that were complex enough that they felt like they had a mind of their own. What I learned back then is that my intuition was worthless. Maybe that's just me but the key to success was always to set aside your expectation of what your code does and instead spend more time instrumenting and collecting data on what was actually going on. This is especially true for completely asynchronous systems like networks or systems that integrate multiple independent subsystems. Things just don't happen in the order you expected when timeouts, aborted operations and retries bubble up and down your OS and application stack.

After 30 years I consider myself pretty capable in debugging such systems but one thing I never use is "intuition" as defined in the beginning of the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Those are very reasonable points to explain the way correct subconscious prediction of success works. I wonder though whether this definition doesn't run the risk of creating a closed system of thought, i.e one where you can always refute opposing evidence from within the system without being aware that the system is making you incapable of seeing something else. Specifically, any genuine cases of intuition not due to Kahneman's reasoning (if such exist), would never be seen and always attributed to survivor bias (as long as they don't become a statistical anomaly).

It's probably difficult to build a case against this reasoning, as it seems quite logical - my first thought as a candidate for a counterexample was claims of "love at first sight". Sure, many of those might end in divorce but does that mean that all the successes are just due to being on the right side of statistics or is there something more going on?

</comment><comment><USER23> The third criteria of immediate feedback seems too stringent. In chess, feedback is often not immediate. If one were to run a reinforcement learning algorithm on chess with no human coded rewards, the only objective feedback would come at the end of the game (win, loss, draw).

Certainly the more immediate the feedback the better though.

<comment><USER24> I think it's more important that the input produces an immediate and readily observable change to the state of the world, not necessarily that you must have perfect information in the feedback as well that shows the exact utility of your previous action.

For example, in the stock market it's not even clear to me what the total scope of effects is, immediate or not, that any single action I take as a private investor will have on the market. Before I even can start to learn about the effectiveness of the changes that my actions produce, I am hamstrung by an inability to see an immediate, comprehensive effect to each action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can't figure out how to actually read the article. There is a button to continue that does nothing when I tap it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sounds much like conditions to a successful solving of a problem when modeled with machine learning. Have enough data, immediate (as opposed to delayed) feedback, and enough structure in the data. That neural networks in our brains might be learning an embedding or two :)

</comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of one of my little sayings... "Common sense is just a first approximation of reality". So yeah, common sense is more likely right than not, but it is not reliable. If you need a reliable answer, you need to go deeper than common sense.

Of course, intuition is somewhat different, in that intuition can be wrong more often than right. See Hans Rosling's findings in _Factfulness_ to grok that, and start to understand just how dumb you actually are.

</comment><comment><USER27> those three conditions are needed to learn _anything_.

</comment><comment><USER24> Elizer Yudkowski extrapolates quite a bit on these ideas in his book Inadequate Equilibria[0].

[0][https://equilibriabook.com/toc/](https://equilibriabook.com/toc/)

</comment><comment><USER28> [http://www.presentlove.com/using-intuition-for-trading- stock...](http://www.presentlove.com/using-intuition-for-trading-stock- options-markets/)

</comment><comment><USER29> What does regularity mean, more formally? The phenomenon needs to have a probability distribution that looks something other than (uniform?) random?

</comment><comment><USER30> "intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do."

That is not a precise definition at all, in fact it is an orthogonal concept. "Thinking that you know" may be happening during intuition, but to claim that that is what intuition actually IS is just wrong.

Intuition is the thought, not the thought about the thought.

A more precise definition might be something like "knowing -- rightly or wrongly -- without knowing how you know."

</comment><comment><USER31> how many are peeved they didn't get Julie's GPA? How can I accept its a terrible answer with 0 data provided. How much merit can I give to someone giving advice about investing when they gave me no data to indicate they are good at it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Daniel Kahneman claims that (1) regularity, (2) practice and (3) immediate feedback are the keys to trusting intuition.

If this is true, I should be able to intuit when I get a lot of upvotes on Hacker news.

This comment will do okay, I predict. (1-5 votes) But if I had added a joke, it would have done very well. (10+ votes)

Now that I added that last insight, it will do even better than okay. (3-7 votes).

I'll report back in a day.

<comment><USER32> So, what's the joke? I want to see you succeed.

<comment><USER16> Sorry to mislead you. I hadn't thought of a joke, but if I had thought of a joke and put it in, my posts get a lot more upvotes.

It might be my natural humor, or it might be people reading HN like a laugh however corny. I don't get feedback on why people vote, and am not allowed to ask.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I believe he is confusing intuition woth deductive logic.

My intuituion tells me that the gpa is lower then what the group would accept or he wouldn't use it as an example. Is that intuition, no.

<comment><USER34>
        Is that intuition, no.

Correct, that does not meet the definition of intuition he has proposed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> _However, he added, people who pick stocks in the stock market do not have it.

"Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support developing that kind of expert intuition," he explained._

In the short term, definitely. In the long term, however, I disagree. Stock markets follow highly-regular multi-year cycles. The problem seems to be that people forget this during the peak or trough of the moment.

Interestingly, this intersects with the third requirement:

 _And the third condition is immediate feedback. Kahneman said that "you have to know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong."_

Given the long intervals over which stock market cycles operate, there's little chance to get immediate feedback.

So according to this analysis, most stock pickers can't gain intuition - <USER2> not for the reason stated in the article.

It takes someone with: (a) a really good memory; and (b) a very long time to play.

<comment><USER36> In one his other books DK discussed being hired by a major investment bank to research decision making processes used by their leading investment managers so they could train incoming bankers.

DK discovered that the successful outcomes of the senior bankers were random rather than based on skill or experience. His report was not well received.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This gross oversimplification and attempt to quantify intuition is kind of laughable.

Intuition is the effect of all the different types of knowledge you have coming together in one converging lighting up of your nervous system.

This is basically ancient genetic knowledge, combined with all the previously recognized experience traits that are connected to the current experience, combined with whatever other information that you are receiving.

Trying to estimate a student's GPA is not a good example of how intuition works.

<comment><USER38> It was so laughable he got a Nobel prize for it. That's not to say Kahneman is always right, but he is always worth listening to.

<comment><USER39> Citing someone's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is probably the worst kind of an appeal to authority.

<comment><USER12> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Most of us trust the Nobel Prize to be a mostly-neutral arbiter of excellence in various fields. That means it is not the worst kind of appeal to authority, but rather the best - referencing a well-known and widely trusted source.

Can you give us a reason we shouldn't trust it _in the general case_ , since your claim extends to the general, not the specific?

<comment><USER40> > Most of us trust the Nobel Prize to be a mostly-neutral arbiter of > excellence in various fields.

Even if that were true, there is no Nobel Prize in Economics.

It's a completely different prize, given by a different institution, that was associated much later with the Noble prizes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How would the night sky look if we could turn off all the lights? - <AUTHOR> http://audiovision.scpr.org/168/darkened-cities

<comment><USER2> This has already been discussed here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5463888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5463888) from [http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/artscience/2013/03/darkened-...](http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/artscience/2013/03/darkened- cities)

I wish we could go lighter on nighttime light pollution.

</comment><comment><USER3> You would never see something like that over a major metropolis without also removing "regular" particulate pollution and heat haze. And it would _still_ not look like that to the bare eye. To a camera with a long enough exposure, sure.

<comment><USER4> In areas with low light pollution and a clear sky it really does look like that. Even without the moon there is plenty of light to walk around without a flashlight and the sky is really breathtaking. Granted, while you do get some color perception things look a little more black and white than those photos and you get a little low light static.

Edit: Though I have noticed some people have really poor night vision so your mileage may vary.

<comment><USER5> I'm so glad to hear that. I had sort of assumed those breathtaking photos you see of the Milky Way were the result of long exposure tricks.

It sounds kind of silly, but I live in a really terribly light-polluted area where you're lucky to see a dozen or so stars at night if it isn't cloudy, and my dream vacation is just to go out to Arizona or maybe the middle of the ocean, just to see the stars properly for once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Astronaut Michael Collins, on looking back at Earth from a great distance: "I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified façade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied." ([http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/jul/HQ_09-164_Collins_s...](http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/jul/HQ_09-164_Collins_statement.html))

These photos show the opposite.

It's a vast universe out there; more humans need to see it...

</comment><comment><USER7> Breathtaking! Although I only got to see the milky way in the sky because of a power outage, it was worth it.

<comment><USER8> Milky Way is never visible so clearly to the naked eye, its just the high exposure shot that makes it visible.

<comment><USER9> They key words are _so clearly_. It is definitely visible but without that many details. Also, these photos show way to many details near the horizont, even without the light pollution the thicknes of the atmosphere would have effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ever since I saw the first post on this here, I've wondered about automating this to some degree of accuracy. Contrast recognition on the skyline/cityscape image to delete the light-polluted sky I can't imagine would be too hard, a bit of math could tell you where in the world this sky would be in the next few hours to filter an image database search (provided the images had location and time data), and combining the two would be relatively simple. The biggest part I can't get around is maintaining the shot angle so it's EXACTLY the same sky. The image database, too, would have to be pretty extensive.

</comment><comment><USER11> The way it looks in Himalayas, why?

 _Much_ cleaner air and a few kilometers less of it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Beautiful but creepy

</comment><comment><USER13> Obviously, light pollution is the best kind because it goes away within minutes of turning off the source. Who the fuck cares about this.

<comment><USER14> Who cares about this? Anyone with an interest in astronomy, obviously.

<comment><USER2> I strongly believe (but have not much to back it up) that turning nights into days as we do has consequences on our psyche and biological cycles. It blurs the distinction between night and day.

I wish my local councilmen would try to experiment no light at nights and see what comes out.

<comment><USER15> _no light at nights and see what comes out_

Jack the ripper?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: MP3 to Text - <AUTHOR> https://www.veed.io/tools/mp3-to-text <comment><USER2> "MP3 to Text" seems very inaccurate since you can only upload video files. In fact uploading an .mp3 file shows "File type not supported".

edit: I get it, OP just keeps submitting his service with different descriptions until one gets some upvotes. Only took 25 tries to get 30 points. Shameful.

<comment><USER3> Just goes to show that people upvote anything if it sounds cool, and don't bother checking it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> MP3 to text? Why does it ask me to upload a video?

<comment><AUTHOR> Opps, thats a UX problem. Will get this fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool but how do I know what languages supported? It says "VEED is able to recognise and transcribe languages from all over the world - English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and many more".

From my experience with NLP/AST the tricky part is models for some less common languages.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true, we support over 55 languages. The more popular the language the better the results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the pricing? What speech-to-text engine is being used?

Clicking on the Sign Up button on iOS Safari does nothing.

Clicking on the Get Started button takes me to an Upload Video form - not what I expected from a mp3-to-text service.

<comment><USER2> Apparently you're limited to 50 MB for free, which is pretty short if you can't send audio files but only videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This would have been genius in the napster days of yore; why seek out and download mp3s yourself? Just sit back and have people send stuff __to you __! I kid, i kid! ;-)

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there even a good offline version of this? There are some opensource tools for speed-to-text but what about batch processing of audio files?

<comment><USER8> You may be interested in voice2json for offline batch processing: [https://voice2json.org](https://voice2json.org)

Here's an example using GNU parallel: [http://voice2json.org/recipes.html#parallel-wav- recognition](http://voice2json.org/recipes.html#parallel-wav-recognition)

<comment><USER9> > voice2json is optimized for:

> Sets of voice commands that are described well by a grammar

> Commands with uncommon words or pronunciations

> Commands or intents that can vary at runtime

Doesn't sound like what you'd want for a generic transcription service.

<comment><USER8> It supports open-ended transcription too: [https://voice2json.org/commands.html#open- transcription](https://voice2json.org/commands.html#open-transcription)

Users have reported good accuracy with the English Deepspeech profile: [https://github.com/synesthesiam/voice2json- profiles](https://github.com/synesthesiam/voice2json-profiles)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does this work? And is it more accurate than YouTube's automatic captions?

</comment><comment><USER11> Multi speaker?

</comment><comment><USER12> reminds me of descript</comment>


Android App Reads data from Contactless Credit Cards - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thomasskora/android-nfc-paycardreader#readme <comment><AUTHOR> Article with more details here: [http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/06/android...](http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/06/android- app-lets-you-swipe-con.html)</comment>


Pilot posts detailed MS Flight Sim video of how to land Boeing 737 - J-dawg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/18/boeing_737_instructional_video/ <comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't he be directed to attempt a CAT IIIA (or B) ILS autolanding?

Edit: see sample video of the procedure here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIaMALJjOEc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIaMALJjOEc)

Edit II: see the same guy "remotely" guiding a random person to land using the autoland: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7WMQUDGDD4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7WMQUDGDD4)

<comment><USER2> Autoland would definitely be preferable, a CAT III ILS would be ideal although you can still autoland off a CAT I beam. CAT IIIs tend to be limited to big airports due to cost and restrictions on the surrounding terrain and obstacles.

With autoland though, it's not just a simple button push. The aircraft needs to be descended around any terrain, navigated through any weather, and put into the landing configuration. If it'll be landing somewhere other than the planned destination, there's also a fair amount of reprogramming of the FMS.

<comment><AUTHOR> > there's also a fair amount of reprogramming of the FMS

That was something I was missing. Probably complicated when you are scared to death. But still a CAT I glideslope descent/touchdown would be preferably to landing with the PAPI I think. (Funny detail, papi means daddy in Spanish!)

<comment><USER3> same for german, PAPI means daddy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tom Scott did an amusing if brief "How to land a plane in an emergency" video a little while ago that people might enjoy: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3R1ajg8dTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3R1ajg8dTY)

</comment><comment><USER5> Pretty cool.

What's the likelihood of this every happening to a member of the public these days? I presume that, in the eventuality of all pilots being out, there's a hierarchy of people who would then take over? I.e. if there are no pilots on board, the head of the cabin crew would perform this?

<comment><USER6> Would they even be able to enter the cockpit? IIRC since 9/11 the door to a cockpit is kept locked under almost[0] all circumstances[1]. I am not sure if this holds for all airlines though.

[0]: [http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/08/how- to-h...](http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/08/how-to-hijack-an- airplane-in-3-seconds/243631/)

[1]: [http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-german-jet-crash- door-201...](http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-german-jet-crash- door-20150325-story.html)

<comment><USER7> The cabin crew can unlock the door if the pilots do not intentionally keep the door looked as the Germanwings suicide pilot did.

<comment><USER6> But that was exactly my point. That:

a) It appears to be standard procedure in the aftermath of 9/11 to keep the cabin doors locked _at all times_.

b) Many of the cases mentioned where this is useful are cases where the cabin crew are incapacitated due to, say, hypoxia or some other malady.

Given both of these I fail to see how this skill is as useful as others appear to be claiming it to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's lots of youtube videos of actual landings from the cockpit view even. I like to watch them and when flying I like listening to the radio chatter also if available.

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought modern airliners could pretty much fly themselves, or is takeoff and landing outside the scope of the automation?

<comment><USER10> A pilot licensed to fly smaller aircraft wasn't able to save this plane:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522)

<comment><USER11> Non-pilots think all the pilot training is learning to fly.

Pilots know flying is very easy, all the training is learning how to survive uncountable emergencies and failures. And economics and judgment and experience and doing it smoothly and a few other things.

Landing a large jet is very easy in a simulator. A random untrained person saving a plane that's out of fuel is impossible.

<comment><USER7> It depends, professional pilots often botch landings and swear in the cockpit although these landings are still safe (enough) …

A landing attempt by a passenger as shown in the YouTube video would probably end with a crash since some manual flying is involved in the end. It is very unlikely that a passenger would getting the controls right at the first time and he (or she) would certainly not be able to perform a go-around.

Autoland would be more helpful. In the worst cased, an aircraft can land without flaps and without 'three greens' if the runway is long enough with a high probability of survival for the passengers. Speed control is of course important but the correct speeds for a zero-flap landing could be given from the ground via radio.

<comment><USER12> "They say a good landing is one where no one gets hurt, and a great landing is one where they can re-use the plane."

Hat-tip: Cabin Pressure, BBC R4</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Want: The airbag scarf that replaces a bulky bicycle helmet, inflates in 100ms - <AUTHOR> http://sub.garrytan.com/want-the-airbag-scarf-that-replaces-a-bulky-bicycle-helmet-inflates-in-100ms-to-save-your-noggin <comment><USER3> With safety equipment I tend to prefer simpler designs. A lump of polystyrene in a shell is pretty good, and doesn't have loose wires or flat batteries to worry about. It's a lot cheaper too.

But the problem with traditional helmets is that they tend to be built to pass a safety standard. Some people want the helmet that is much better than that standard.

So it's nice to see someone experimenting with new techniques.

<comment><USER4> Helmets do not do as much as you think. They are not really very good for the types of accidents that bicycles have. For example, see: [http://www.bicycling.com/senseless/index.html](http://www.bicycling.com/senseless/index.html)

<comment><USER5> I don't know, I have personally fallen off a bike travelling at around 25km/h and hit the side of my head on the pavement. If I wasn't wearing my helmet(and that was a regular, $40 helmet) I don't know if I would be still here - <USER2> helmet cracked,but my head was still completely intact,so I guess they have to work to some extent.

<comment><USER6> Argh, this kind of anecdotal evidence makes me crazy. Helmets aren't skulls. You have no idea whether the forces that caused the helmet to crack would have caused similar injury to your head had you not been wearing the helmet, nor do you have any idea whether the forces the helmet managed to absorb before failing are a significant fraction of the forces your head experienced during the accident. Nothing about your experience is sufficient grounds for the conclusion you draw at the end of your comment (that "they have to work to some extent"), nor can any single accident experience provide such grounds.

<comment><USER7> I personally know people who object to helmets, and refuse to wear them even though we have a helmet law in my city.

I'm not entirely in agreement, but there is logic to this line of reasoning:

1\. Helmets, and helmet laws give the impression that cycling is a dangerous activity, and discourage people to cycle.

2\. the biggest thing you can do to increase the safety of cycling, is create cycling infrastructure and put more cyclists on the road (I believe this is backed up by hard data, but I have no citations).

3\. It follows from 1 & 2 that helmet laws make cycling less safe for all of us by decreasing the number of cyclists on the road.

There is more to their argument than that, but that's the one I personally find most convincing. I still wear a helmet though, so clearly I'm not entirely convinced.

<comment><USER8> As a side note, research has shown it may be safer in the sense that drivers give more birth to helmet-less cylclists. They see those with helmets as more professional and better equipped, and apparently pass them at higher speeds and closer clearances.

[http://www.drianwalker.com/overtaking/overtakingprobrief.pdf](http://www.drianwalker.com/overtaking/overtakingprobrief.pdf)

As for a more broad discussion on the topic, outlining both sides of the debate:

[http://www.cycle-helmets.com/helmets-uk-dec-2012.pdf](http://www.cycle- helmets.com/helmets-uk-dec-2012.pdf)

<comment><USER9> I don't give 2 shits about the drivers that pay enough attention to see what I'm wearing. I care about the drivers not even looking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Working at a local hackerspace in Malmö (Sweden) a few weeks back a girl came in with one of these and complained that it was annoying that it kept poking her in the neck all the time. When she pointed to where it was itching it accidentaly exploded around her head. Sounded like a gunshot. No one was hurt, many where shocked. Better safe than sorry I guess.

</comment><comment><USER11> Articles about this helmet have made it to the front page a few times. Here are a couple submissions with comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828134)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388056)

And apropos, "Bicycle helmets haven't changed since their introduction" \- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5901164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5901164)

</comment><comment><USER12> As a cyclist, I could point out that relative to a normal helmet this thing is hugely expensive and very prone to user error (must be charged, must be turned on). But I could live with both of those things. The real deal-breaker is that it doesn't look any more _comfortable_ than a regular helmet.

Cycling on a hot day, my scalp gets all sweaty and uncomfortable, but at least the helmet has big air vents to minimize overheating. You want me to replace that with a thick, bulky _scarf_? No. In July, I'd be miserable after 10 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://hovding.com/en/](http://hovding.com/en/)

This is the official site. They seem to have tested the safety rigorously. And, best of all, it's Swedish design!

<comment><USER14> As someone in the cycling community, this isn't actually a new thing. It's been for sale for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> That doesn't seem all that less bulky than a regular helmet. Plus, you have to keep it charged. Sometimes low-tech is better.

<comment><USER16> Not to mention that if I were riding in the summer there is no way I would want something wrapped around my neck as it would decrease my ability to cool myself down. Sure, having something on your head is not much better but helmets these days have quite good ventilation.

<comment><USER17> There is a social problem with helmets in that people who don't want to mess up their hair or makeup don't like wearing them. I don't particularly like the idea of relying on a battery-powered barrier device, but for someone who won't wear a helmet, this product is better than not wearing anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Bicycle helmets are just bizarre. No one wants to admit that the problem is with 5 ton liquid fuel propelled potential wrecks and their woefully inadequate (both in what nature has granted them for the task and their attitude) drivers.

Give me proper streets, not pyrotechnic strapped to my neck.

<comment><USER19> Helmets have saved my life not once, but twice. Both times were off road, at slow speeds, doing things that shouldn't have been a big deal. Neither involved any cars, but one resulted in a concussion and the other a severely sprained neck and a root canal. Both helmets were shattered.

Cars are _a_ problem, not _the_ problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What if you land on a pointy surface ... gravel, sand or sharp stones? Sure it's good protection, but let's think this through first.

(I am convinced that regular bicycle helmets are crap, as there are no decent standards or crash tests being done with them. The least I would call an improvement is a downhill helmet, a motorcycle helmet would be preferred as speeds for severe crashes are quite similar.)

<comment><USER3> What is wrong with all the various standards? Are they just not rigorous enough? Or is there some other problem?

Here's a quick list of different information I found [http://www.bhsi.org/index.htm#standards](http://www.bhsi.org/index.htm#standards)

<comment><USER4> See my link above. Normal helmets do nothing to prevent concussions, which is one of the major outcomes of a bike crash.

Stop broken skulls, great. But concussions are still very possible, and current helmets do not do much for it.

<comment><USER21> No helmet can stop concussions. If they could, the NFL would redesign football helmets and save themselves a lot of trouble. G-forces are G-forces, whether you're in a helmet or not.

EDIT: There are a lot of very smart people working on this problem. But it's a hard problem.

From the Associated Press:

In a series of interviews with The Associated Press, representatives of the NFL, its players' union and the four equipment companies that make every helmet worn in the league all agreed there's no football helmet -- in production or on drawing boards -- that can eliminate concussions. And there might never be one.

[http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=5797046](http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=5797046)

<comment><USER22> Helmets could spread the impulse over a longer period of time, reducing G-forces.

<comment><USER23> Doesn't a [more] deforming helmet like that in the OP do just that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very very cool. Although it seems it wouldn't help if something runs into your head before impacting your bike or body. Like a truck with a high bumper. Or entering a free-fall and landing on your head. But I suppose those are relatively few of bike incidents.

<comment><USER25> Yeah I thought about hitting a tree branch across your forehead, the collar would not be aware of the impending impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> And that's why we have regulations. So people can only purchase an innovation that not only looks great, but is actually more effective, in like 2 to 5 years which it will take to approve it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd be really curious to see video of how this works with some common "updo" hairstyles. My girlfriend wears her helmet most of the time. But if we're going out for a nice dinner, she'll wear her hair up in a bun on top of her head. If we're on bikes ( a common event ) she generally skips the helmet to accommodate her hairstyle. I wonder if this inflatable helmet would get hung up on this wad of hair and prevent full deployment.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is neat but some potential problems with it.

\- Will not protect from things falling on the head

\- May not protect in a direct impact (head-on) collision where the head may hit something before the person falls because it may not deploy in time.

</comment><comment><USER29> The website raises a few red-flags about Hovding for me.

1\. It must be charged to operate.

2\. It has an on/off button even when charged to ensure it doesn't accidentally inflate when you're putting it on, suggesting this is a problem.

3\. Once inflated, it's done. You have to buy a new one. The website suggests your insurance may pay for this, which implies they definitely won't even if it did not inflate in an accident.

This is certainly an interesting concept, but it's expensive, has two additional points of failure vs a helmet (must be both charged and switched on to work), has a high probability of inflating when it shouldn't, and isn't reusable. Technically, most bike and snowsports helmets aren't reusable after an impact either, but you can certainly wipe-out in a way that would trigger the Hovding but wouldn't cause a head-impact, thus wasting the Hovding in an accident a helmet could come through unscathed. I can certainly see why this isn't catching on.

This kind of helmet, with modifications, _would_ be good for back-country skiing, more for avalanche protection than for impact protection. Suffocation is a major cause of death in avalanches. When you are pulled under, snow generally gets everywhere and, once you stop, freezes fairly solid. Even wearing very warm gear you don't have much longer than 15 minutes before hypothermia will kill you (being packed in snow crushes your insulation and greatly increases the rate of thermal conduction to the ice surrounding you), but you can easily suffocate before that. This is why things like avalungs are fairly popular. However, avalungs are basically useless if you aren't very careful about keeping them in mouth-range (if not actually in your mouth) at all times, because you will _not_ think to move it over from its convenient spot on your shoulder when an avalanche is bearing down on you, and you will _not_ be able to grab it from your shoulder once you're immobilized by snow!

An inflatable hood that covers the face during impact and then deflates could automatically produce a bubble of air large enough to keep an avalanche victim from suffocating for 15 minutes, which is hopefully long enough for his AST trained buddies to find and dig him out! There are currently avalanche air- bags on the market which can be user-triggered. These air-bags supposedly help one float on top of an avalanche in addition to providing protection, which is obviously a good thing! However, they _must_ be triggered, and generally don't come over the head. Something that would trigger automatically would be invaluable, although the difficulty of only triggering when appropriate is immense! If hovding's triggering system could work reliably in avalanche conditions it might be worth adding to avalanche air-bag units. I'd love to see radio controlled airbags in addition to automatic and manual controls though. This way, if your buddy is being swept away by an avalanche you might actually be able to trigger his bag even if he doesn't think to. This would be fantastic for heli/cat-ski operators as well.

Avalanche safety is a _much_ higher price-point market than bicycle safety. It's a better target market for bleeding edge tech like hovding. If you could deliver a system that is reliable, even at a price-point in the thousands of dollars, cat/heli-ski operators would go for it immediately.

<comment><USER30> (1) Yeah, like a headlight, like a phone, ... keeping widgets charged is a routine part of modern life.

(2) Remembering to turn it on after putting it on doesn't sound difficult to me.

(3) I've done a fair bit of bike commuting, and though I always wear a helmet, I've never been in an accident in which I needed it. Statistically, I would expect this would never go off while I owned it; maybe once. The fact that I would have to replace it if it did is not a barrier at all.

I think you're dismissing it unreasonably.

<comment><USER31> Regarding #1, how many items do you have to keep charged where their charge state does not affect their normal operation, but can be life and death in certain cases? Both this and #2 are recipes for screwing up, because there's not much indication when you've done so most of the time. Even if we dismiss operator error, what are the odds you'll fail to notice it if the charger or the power switch break?

<comment><USER30> > Regarding #1, how many items do you have to keep charged where their charge > state does not affect their normal operation, but can be life and death in > certain cases?

I have something that is not at all life-and-death, and only needs to be charged once a month. I've been pretty good about keeping it charged. In the case of something more consequential, I have no doubt I would keep it charged. The device has a charge state indicator that looks like it would be a pretty good reminder.

Did you see the part where it makes a sound when you turn it on? Looks to me like Hövding have thought this through pretty well.

<comment><USER31> All that, and you're not going to even say what the device is? Don't make me guess....

<comment><USER30> It really doesn't matter what it is. I hardly ever use it. The only reason to charge it every month is to keep the battery from going bad.

All that, and you're not even going to say whether you looked at the Hövding website?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Testing by the Swedish insurance company Folksam that compared Hövding to 12 conventional helmets found it performed at least three times better than the other helmets in a drop/hit test for shock absorbance" [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2013/04/04/meet-t...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2013/04/04/meet- the-girls-who-want-to-sell-you-an-invisible-bicycle-helmet/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Given that the general idea looks fine, and I'm all in for anything that improves safety, I'll nitpick.

In the last test, the dummy' face (if it had one) ends up all over the floor, as the helmet only protects the forehead and, furthermore, slides a little. Given that regular bike helmets are longer on the front and rigid, in theory only the chin would hit the floor. Thus, a regular helmet would be better in that case.

Can anyone confirm or deny if that would be the case?

</comment><comment><USER33> Funny, I've just finished Neal Stephenson's "Snow crash" and that's what the skaters are using instead of helmets in the book.

</comment><comment><USER34> Watch the video again.

Go to 00:38, and assume that the dummy was hit by a lorry with flat face. The lorry would make a direct impact on the back of the head, before the helmet inflates.

Go to 03:55, and assume that the cyclist had hit a wall. This time too, the cyclist's head would hit the wall.

I wouldn't buy this helmet.

</comment><comment><USER35> This would be awesome if it had a detector of coughing patterns indicative of water entering lungs (quite distinctive if you think of it): it would be selling like hotcakes to parents of young children learning to swim or going to camp.

<comment><USER36> An accelerometer would be able to detect the unique thrashing signature of a body trying to stay above water; it differs greatly from swimming or kicking to stay afloat.

<comment><USER21> If you're putting it on a toddler, why not simply have it activate when it detects water?

<comment><USER37> this exists. [http://www.safetyturtle.com/](http://www.safetyturtle.com/)

<comment><USER23> If they want to actually sell any they should put a video demonstrating the product on the front page and not limited by being Apple Quicktime only nor hidden behind a "super nanny" logo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Interesting. I can see how it may work for deep powder skiing.

As to biking, there is a pretty nice alternative available based on plastic/gel materials that harden on the impact! Lookup 3DO beanie.

</comment><comment><USER39> Here is a user test from an early adopter: [http://alfabravo.com/2011/11/hovding/](http://alfabravo.com/2011/11/hovding/)

</comment><comment><USER40> OK, did anyone else think that crash test dummy was cool? There are now bicycle crash test dummies!

And they fitted it out with Portlandesque hip bicycle clothing too....

</comment><comment><USER41> Innteresting concept, but I'm even more interested in what sort of valve technology can contain a gas under pressure, and release it electrically.

</comment><comment><USER42> Are Swedes actually that concerned with their cycling appearance?

A nice helmet (I use the Giro Aeon) and cycling glasses looks good enough.

<comment><USER43> Part of it's practicality. In NYC we now have a bike share - grab a bike from any station, ride around, return to any other station. Frequently I'm out and about and feel the need to grab a bike and do something - but I don't because I don't have my helmet with me.

At the same time, I really don't want to have to lug my helmet around everywhere just in case I want to take a short ride.

Having a compact "helmet" all the time that takes up next to no space (and is inconspicuous to boot) would be very nice.

When cycling is a sport/deliberate activity, rather than a transportation method/incidental activity, the dynamic changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The only purpose I can think of for this is to keep your hair all pretty. No serious cyclist would use this. Specifically, I ride downhill bikes and can guarantee I'd be dead already if I were to wear this for protection. With a real (full face) helmet, I have already endured multiple concussions, a broken neck and countless other injuries to the head/neck area so consider me a qualified test dummy.

<comment><USER45> Obviously you are not the target market. Impacts are expected in downhill riding, unlike most forms of cycling. You don't see off-road car racers relying on airbags either--they aren't fit for the purpose.

<comment><USER44> It's just not safe. To use this would be trading safety for looks. If you ride a bike at all, you should plan on going down.

<comment><USER30> I commuted by bike for years (though not so much in recent years) and have never had an accident at speed.

I do wear a helmet, but not a full-face helmet, and it looks like this thing would actually be more effective in protecting against concussions.

<comment><USER44> From this comment, it is obvious you do not do a real commute. I have worked at various bike shops throughout my life and most recently I own one. Almost every commuter or road cyclist I have ever spoken too has been hit by a car, hit a car or been in a serious wreck at least once. If they had been wearing this silly contraption then many of them would not still be riding today. It is just absolutely ridiculous unless your priority is looks.

<comment><USER30> > If they had been wearing this silly contraption then many of them would not > still be riding today.

What are you basing that on? Did you actually look at the product's website? Do you have some reason for thinking the product doesn't work as claimed?

<comment><USER44> I checked it out pretty thoroughly. All the wrecks they test are best case scenarios. Put some obstacles in the way of the fall and results will dramatically change. Anything remotely sharp would end this holiday.

<comment><USER30> > All the wrecks they test are best case scenarios.

I didn't see a comprehensive list of scenarios. Are you referring to the 3-minute video? I don't think that was intended to show "all" the cases they tested.

I guess the thrust of your criticism is that it doesn't protect against all possible accidents. Surely you're aware that a helmet doesn't either. (A friend of mine died in a bike accident -- his helmet was insufficient. I don't know enough of the details of the accident to hazard a guess as to whether this device would have worked better.) Probably, there are some accidents where a helmet would work better, but I have no problem believing there are many where this device would perform better. (It's much larger, when inflated, giving it much better cushioning ability. Helmets, as noted elsewhere in this thread, aren't very good at preventing concussions -- I expect this device would be much better.)

<comment><USER44> Precisely my point. Not even a real helmet is 100% and there is no way this is as good as a real helmet. Just no way. Also there is a chance of failure if your power source or gyroscope malfunctions. Why would you take that chance? For nice hair? Not a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Anyone knows if it is legal in Europe? I've searched extensively to no result.

</comment><comment><USER47> Should be placed in the steer. Would forget to wear it after 5 times...

</comment><comment><USER48> Why not have this cover more of the body? E.g. a vest or something?

</comment><comment><USER49> Only thing I can't figure out is if it's reusable?

<comment><USER50> real helmets aren't reusable after a real accident, so probably not; that said, I have no idea

<comment><USER49> Sure a bad accident they get destroyed. But what happens if you fall off your bike over something simple and not even get a scratch. Helmet will still work fine. Will this get set off for minor things? And if there's no damage can it be reset? Seems like an expensive $500 helmet that would only be useable once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Just don't forget to keep the batteries fresh, I guess.</comment>


Copy-Pasting URLs from Google Search Can Leak Previous Searches - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jeremyrubin/caution-copy-pasting-urls-from-google-search-can-leak-previous-searches-11940508e79 <comment><USER2> I've noticed this before as everytime I copy-paste a search URL, I manually delete the parameters as even the non-readable ones probably contain some metadata about me.

Yeah, it'd be nice if Google search pages came with a handy "Link to this" button as Google Maps and Google Books do...but in reality, that would raise even more issues. If I understand Google's search mechanism...the results are tailored to each user...my search for "burger place" is going to be much different than someone doing it in New York. Yet if I see a "Link to this" button -- _especially_ if it's a link shortener -- then I would expect it to direct all users to results that I've seen. OK, _I_ don't expect that...but I bet 99% of other users do.

So it's not a clearcut decision about whether such a feature should exist, given the ephemeralness and personalization of SERP. So given that it's not an intended common use case to pass around URLs to results...what is it that Google should do to fix this? Re-engineer their system so that every URL is a non-human-readable URL that obfuscates all possible metadata? Remove the ability to tailor search results based on past results of that same session? I can see why they might choose: "If a user wants to send around a URL by manually copying and pasting it, we should trust them to read it before they send it out as the relevant parameters are human readable"

<comment><USER3> I suspect it's someone being clever.

I _think_ doing subsequent searches as a "#q=x" change to the URL lets them avoid reloading the page and use clever javascript to replace the results.

<comment><USER4> A friend of mine says that the only part of the URL you can change on older browsers and _not_ refresh the page is the anchor-tag part.

OTOH, if you _only_ put search params in the anchor-tag part, the initial search is much slower on slow connections.

Still, infoleaks are BAD. Page load and update speed shouldn't come before safety of a user's private information.

<comment><USER5> Strange to cite a "friend" when stating a basic fact about how web browsing works.

<comment><USER6> Fact-checking is good, but it takes time and it's not always worth the trouble. I'd rather see someone use an honest qualifier than either claim certainty they don't have, or not post at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Weird...when I was at Google, very significant engineering effort was expended (we're talking man-years) to prevent exactly this case, and it was a major design constraint on the features we could launch. Something must've changed in the thinking of the higher-ups.

I also wonder why they don't just use pushState, which was proposed as a solution way back in 2010 but didn't have the browser support necessary. Now it's got the browser support:

[http://caniuse.com/#search=pushState](http://caniuse.com/#search=pushState)

<comment><USER8> There was a thread a few weeks back about something Google-related and an ex- Googler was saying how many hours they spent making the home page and search results pages as light as possible, but that recently they stopped caring about that.

<comment><USER7> You mean this one?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395008)

That ex-Googler was me. :-)

I'm not actually sure whether they don't care about it, BTW - the SRP is about 1/3 as heavy as it was when I left, so it looks like someone's been cleaning it up. These things tend to move in cycles - I was hired at the very end of a "latency & performance" cycle, then spent most of my career there during a "moar featurez!" cycle, and it wouldn't surprise me if the focus is again latency and performance.

<comment><USER9> Doesn't that bring in to question all the research that says the faster your page loads the more money you make?

If Google can swing between adding a load to the page load and then whittling it down making it faster, the money difference involved must be fairly trivial.

<comment><USER7> Not exactly. It's more that making the page faster is fairly predictably going to get you $X in additional revenue. Adding a new feature is going to get you anywhere from $0 to $Y in revenue, but _you can 't know what $Y is until you've launched it and given users some time to learn about it_. So the only way to avoid getting stuck in a local maxima - your current feature set, as optimized as possible - is to periodically try to shake up the page, add some new features, and measure their effects. After a couple years or so, the features for which $Y < their cost in latency & developer maintenance are killed, and a new round of optimization & code cleanup starts based on the current feature set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Similar behavior when you search for something in Amazon, then click on something. The original search is in the URL of the page that you're on. Be careful sharing that last link.

Not Safe for Work:

Here I searched for "blow up doll" (yup, they sell them), then clicked on a cute alien inflatable doll. The original search is at the end of the martian doll URL, that I so thoughtfully shared with my kid, or grandkid, or spouse, or employer's decorating committe ...

[http://www.amazon.com/Green-Inflatable-Martian-Alien- Decorat...](http://www.amazon.com/Green-Inflatable-Martian-Alien- Decoration/dp/B003KXWHPK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1446073301&sr=8-1&keywords=blow+up+doll)

</comment><comment><USER11> In another time and place, and if Google wasn't involved, I doubt this would even hit the front page of HN. People have been embedding tons of state into URLs for years without obfuscating/encrypting them. Web apps should be idempotent with respect to URLs, and bookmarking any screen you're looking at should allow you, the user, to return to that state.

Maybe there should be a fix for this, at least to encrypt the old query, but realistically, this behavior is widespread in web apps, and it's only newsworthy because Google.

<comment><USER12> Unnecessary state should not be present in the URL. Yeah, people do it all the time, but it's sloppy coding and bad for many reasons, including those described in the article.

<comment><USER13> What about allowing people to bookmark parts of a single page app?

<comment><USER14> How does this contradict not keeping state unnecessary to return to a place in the app? (as in this case, past state). I'd think most users expect that a URL leads them to the same view again, but not that it preserves their history to get there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I understand why people are irked (to say the least) by this, I can understand the technical reasoning behind it.

The hash part of the URL, (#andmorestuff) is not sent to the server by the browser, however the query string is. (?var=stuff&another=otherstuff)

Using this to send the search to the server is smart, since the server can respond with data without an additional round-trip AJAX request. However, everything in the URL, other than the hash is read-only by client-side scripts. So, if you want the URL to reflect the search, you can either a) reload the page using the query string, or b) follow the single page app methodology, and manipulate the query string with the data, and change it using an AJAX request.

Google's interactivity, with the smoother feel of not seeing an entire page refresh (plus potentially less data being sent over the wire after the initial load) could be simply stored in an internal state. However, should the user refresh, the search would be lost. If you try going to a Google search with a search query hash, you'll notice a brief delay before the search results are displayed.

For example, in this link: [https://www.google.com/search?q=original#q=newsearch](https://www.google.com/search?q=original#q=newsearch)

The page loads, but there's an AJAX request to the /search route with the hash-specified query, with query string parameters to specify how the data should be served. Still, the client-side script cannot strip the query string of the previous search without a full page reload.

While the info leakage is annoying, it's unavoidable in this strategy.

Note: The browser history, and subsequently the URL can be manipulated through the History API's pushState, which could be a direction Google could go in, but IMHO, the hash approach is viable as well.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/History_API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/History_API)

<comment><USER16> Why can't typing search in chrome bar directly go to -> google.com#search-term

<comment><USER17> Because that would make the search results load slower, since it would first have to load google.com and then do a second request for the actual search.

<comment><USER18> But isn't that how it's meant to work ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Clean Links [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clean- links/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clean-links/)

Mozilla Addons to the rescue once again. I am always surprised at how under appreciated plugins like these are. If I ever stumbled into money, I would pay it forward to all the developers who feverishly code these plugins for the betterment of humanity and the web.

</comment><comment><USER20> Author here -- curious to hear HN's thoughts on if this should be fixed or is acceptable.

<comment><USER21> I don't recall needing to copy and paste a search URL to someone in a long time, but maybe other people use it in their workflow. (maybe in jest I'll use [http://lmgtfy.com](http://lmgtfy.com))

Interestingly enough in Safari on 10.11, the URL I see in the address bar when searching for "$x" is just "$x" but when I copy and paste "$x" into a text box I see my previous search in the url. I've noticed safari shortening to just the base recently but this feels a bit off.

<comment><USER4> > ...when I copy and paste "$x" into a text box...

What do you mean by this? The following things fail to repro the issue for me on Firefox 41:

 __

* Open google.com

* Type a search in the search box, press return. (get a #q=$SEARCH anchor)

* Type another search in the search box, press return. (get a #q=SEARCH2 anchor)

 __*

* Go to google.com

* Type in the search box, press return. (Same result as above.)

* Paste text into the search box, press return. (Same result as above.)

<comment><USER20> It's a very safari specific thing.

address bar reads [$x], where $x is search term, on copy you get a url.

<comment><USER4> > address bar reads [$x], where $x is search term, on copy you get a url.

Yikes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For me, it's mainly an issue when trying to copy and paste a link to a file like a Word document that downloads instead of being viewable in the browser.

</comment><comment><USER23> >Note: This information has been disclosed to >Google appropriately, they have chosen to not >fix this behavior.

>The other day, my friend sent me a link

So did Google respond with a "No" or is 2-3 days with no fix considered too long?

I'm not diminishing the seriousness of this problem but it just got a whole lot worse being on HN after only 2-3 days head start on a fix to a major part of the Google product line.

<comment><USER20> They responded with a no, even after further prompting that they should fix it.

<comment><USER23> Can you post this dialog? I have trouble understanding how they gave a solid "No" on something which warrants much consideration.

Most companies won't even respond if they don't intend to fix something, that way they can claim they're working on a fix when it all blows up in their face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A safe(r) way to search Google is using startpage.com, which searches Google anonymously on your behalf. I just confirmed this bug doesn't translate over to Startpage; this is the URL you get when you follow the same procedure as the author:

[https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl](https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl)

<comment><USER25> Then how will the author share the results page? That was the task they wanted to accomplish.

<comment><USER26> Looks like there's a "Bookmark this search" link. It can be right-clicked to copy the URL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Slight OT, but it took me 4 hours to realize that it's Google who's crawling the URL of pages (mostly cron jobs, or admin sites) that nobody should have never stumble upon.

I'm not sure how this works (the URL I paste and use in Chrome is sent to Google?), but it came back few hours later from an agent called "Google favicon". The IPs in 66.249. range strongly suggest it's a legitimate Google bot.

Why they do it - no idea, but just to be save I blocked all 66.249. and 66.102. traffic across my systems.

EDIT: yes there is robot txt that dissalows all traffic. Google ignores.

This is very internal site - no need to have everyone from 66.249 acessing it.

<comment><USER28> Using robots.txt to block them should've worked as well.

<comment><USER29> s/as well/better

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Are you sure this isn't by design? I mean if you send a link of

        https://www.google.com/search?q=computer+language&....&q=python

it _should_ return different results than

        https://www.google.com/search?q=snakes&....&q=python

So if people send urls with queries (they should just send actual target urls) then it's quite relevant that the search results are the same for the both links sent.

<comment><USER31> The problem is that the first search terms are included for no reason. [https://www.google.com/search?q=psychiatric+doctor+in+palo+a...](https://www.google.com/search?q=psychiatric+doctor+in+palo+alto&....#q=python)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> >Google's automatic inclusion of prior search terms is a similar violation of a user's privacy expectations, and they should fix it.

How? That's information you are voluntarily sharing. Besides you can easily see what you are sharing since it's not obfuscated nor encrypted in any way.

</comment><comment><USER33> The lack of ability to share search results is a conscious decision by Google to make their search engine feel private and personal.

You have your own Google that knows a great deal about you. It's is tailored to you, your location, your life. Google has become an extension of self.

Making search more social by adding simple sharing capability means that you would be less likely to use Google for personal and private search queries.

Google is the most successful advertising company on the planet.</comment>


Scalable, Lie-Detecting Timeserving with Roughtime - <AUTHOR> https://int08h.com/post/to-catch-a-lying-timeserver/ <comment><USER2> Aren't all the goals already met by e.g. [http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20151212.html](http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20151212.html) ?

<comment><USER3> httpstime is interesting, but roughtime seems to have a few additional features:

* stateless operation (via UDP)

* no reliance on SSL/TLS or PKI

* ability to catch incorrect servers (assuming no collusion)

I think it's a very interesting take on time services, without being something quite as heavy as PTP/IEEE1588. The stated goals of fixing wildly incorrect clocks over ultraprecise timing [0], preventing clock-source tampering, and keeping largely in-line with the original design concepts of ntp (while solving a number of security shortcomings) seems to be targeted squarely at user devices, and much less so at service providers or operators that require precision timing for log stamping and the like.

Additionally, if you need a roughly-correct clock for validating HTTPS certificates, and you have to connect to an HTTPS server to update your time to be roughly correct, how do you trust the server? Sure, you can simply connect to something with a self-signed cert, but then you're putting the trust squarely back in the hands of that single server, without any method of verifiability. Turtles all the way down.

[0]: "The Roughtime creators state that 25% of Chrome's certificate errors are caused by incorrect local clocks (off by days or more). A local clock within a few seconds of reference time is good enough."

<comment><AUTHOR> I was typing up a response, but yours is great. You nailed it.

The only thing to add is that a tlsdate-like approach will not work consistently with TLS 1.3 as the standard makes time in the handshake OPTIONAL.

<comment><USER3> It's been a couple of years since I was really immersed in the operational aspects of NTP/PTP - glad to know I can still mostly follow along.

Nice theme on the blog.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What would the magnitude of effort to actually replace ntp with another solution be? Even in low-level programming, I mostly take for granted that it occurs, but it's regular enough that there's an ntpd on any machine I connect to.

</comment><comment><USER5> What does someone stand to gain by lying about the time?

<comment><USER6> Say you've gotten your hands on an old, expired TLS certificate (or cracked one using old crypto). Then, if you can convince a client it's in the past, you can use that to mount an attack.

<comment><USER7> Tor has a related problem where the Tor consensus is only valid for a specific time window - if you use the consensus outside that time window you may end up using a completely different set of nodes than what everyone else is using, potentially greatly reducing your anonymity.

For most crypto applications like certificate expiry, you don't need a particularly accurate clock - +- a day or two is fine - but with Tor the devs have to balance being able to frequently update the consensus with clock accuracy; IIRC the maximum allowable clock skew in Tor is about six hours.

Of course, note how even in that case, if user-experience wasn't an issue you'd be better off telling the user to just look out the window to set their clock than using Roughtime. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will Covid-19 be the end of Bullshit Jobs? - <AUTHOR> Do you think that confinement, social distancing and work-from-home will result in the reduction of the number of "Bullshit Jobs"[0]?<p>[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs <comment><USER2> The opposite. In work-from-home situations, BS jobholders (which I generally define as managers with few actual skills other than managing) continually need to justify their existence, which they love to do via constant and excessive videochats with anyone and everyone. Meanwhile productive workers are more invisible than ever, lacking the random hallway, coffee machine, bathroom run-ins with top execs/mgmt.

People think this stuff doesn't matter, that they treat everyone fairly, but when the hard decisions about who to cut need to be made, that frequent visual reminder (along with all the tasks they insist they are managing, but which other people are actually doing) is a huge advantage in remaining employed.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, because people are irrational creatures and BS jobs exist for irrational reasons. A pandemic doesn't fundamentally change the qualities of an organization that permit BS jobs to exist.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Wikipedia page says the author of the concept is a proponent of UBI and proposes it as a solution to this supposed problem. So you have to wonder at his motive for writing the book.

People who are looking to support a pre-exising conclusion are generally engaging in political manipulation, not science.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nah, maybe will create a new category of "remote" BS jobs like "Remote culture coach, Remote Manger, Distributed communications Director"

</comment><comment><USER6> Going through the wiki link, some of the jobs might end (or already be at the end of it) but it would be less due to Covid-19 and more due to some automation (and hence cost saving to the business). That said,the following jobs seem fine for the time, maybe the way (or the workplace) might change, but definitely won't end soon:

* Receptionist

* Administrative Assistants

* Lobbyists

* Corporate lawyers

* Telemarketers

* Public relations specialists

* Programmers repairing shoddy code

* Middle management

* Leadership professionals

</comment><comment><USER7> No, because the concept of BS jobs is largely BS.

<comment><USER8> Yes I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The US is heading form record low unemployment to depression era 20% unemployment. Nobody knows just how bad it will (can) get just yet, but it keeps getting worse. This will result in a major economic contraction. A recession is all but guaranteed and possibly a depression.

One area that will be hard hit is corporate software development. It is extremely unproductive and inefficient. Inefficiency is allowed when the economy is strong because there was a perceived shortage of talent and it is easier to hire talent than train talent. Without any kind of standing licensing or certification standard in place there is no uniform definition of competence and so the hiring market was largely candidate driven.

That is done. Almost no business will be profitable this year and many will fail through the process of market correction. Business can no longer afford to hire ineffective software developers.

As a long time web developer I have been astonished at the level of allowed ineffectiveness of web development practices. Essentially, almost nobody knows what they are doing or how the technology works without extensive help, typically through developer friendly software tools.

As the economy contracts, business fail, and hiring all but stops employers will be forced to make tough decisions in order to keep the lights on. Before established employers simply had to exercise competitive market pressure to be successful. Internal software development was just an internal cost of doing business and expenses are easy to justify if the business is cash flow positive. When the economy suddenly fails like never before and nobody is cash flow positive everything is open to critical review. Now businesses will be forced to consider how essential this internal software development is to their bottom line. If they absolutely cannot afford to live without it they will have to justify it as an essential operating expense. That line of thinking will roll down to each individual employee.

The days of hiring 10 developers to monkey patch a giant application around a giant framework that does most of your job for you is over. Instead employers will be forced to justify spending any money on writing software, budgets will shrink, and developers will be forced to justify their continued employment in competition with their peers. This will result in many unemployed software developers competing for employment in a market of a very few openings. Each open position will be under greater market pressure to perform more efficiently to the business, to justify its existence financially.

Before, when the economy was strong, talented and highly productive developers were rare and hiring top talent was expensive. Many employers would settle on the average developer in the middle of the bell curve because that would be perceived as lower risk and lower expense. You get what you pay for in that talent was sacrificed to lower financial risks of hiring and so you are now staffed by less productive people with less productive business practices. When there are suddenly very few software developer positions left and each developer is more directly connected to the financial health of their employers the nature and definition of performance will change.</comment>


Guerrilla guide to CNC machining, mold making, and resin casting - <AUTHOR> http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/ <comment><USER2> This guide (or book?) couldn't be upvoted enough. With his comprehensive work I believe Michal has done more for home manufacturing and high quality hobbyist robotics than all 3d printing "revolutionary" and "disruptive" companies _combined_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a co-operative movement in the maker movement - one where the mysterious "Well equipped machine shop" is a co-op or subscription approach - it strikes me as very similar to airplane ownership - very few pilots own a whole aeroplane, and why should every maker own all they need

As an aside I have often felt this would be a fantastic Mythbusters franchise

<comment><USER4> There's at least one US company I know of called TechShop[1] who have 5 or 6 places around the US with pretty well equipped workshops, along with instruction/safety classes etc.

On the more DIY front, Hackerspaces[2] are a sort of community/timeshare approach to various equipment, and are much more widely spread,[3] but since they're largely community-driven, the range of stuff available varies widely.

[1] <http://www.techshop.ws/>

[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackerspace>

[3] <http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces>

<comment><USER5> I was a member of TechShop in the Bay area for a while. Unfortunately all their locations are just too far from my home and they have no plans to open a shop in the East Bay, but if you are a member of one, you are a member of all the locations. Two thumbs up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some people make you wonder if they're not like Shakespeare is rumored to have been; so phenomenally productive that they might be a myth, an amalgamation of the work of several brilliant people, piled up behind one convenient name.

Michal Zalewski is that kind of guy.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is -something- very appealing to engineers about fixing or making physical stuff as a hobby after spending your work life in a virtual world where words create things.

I always thought it was my working class roots showing through but I've managed to collect a fairly complete set of metalworking, woodworking, automotive, electrical and HVAC tools over the years. The excuse at the time? I could learn it and do it myself and keep the tools forever for what it costs to pay someone hourly once. (note: if you're in the midst of a one-in-a- lifetime cash cow, just hire out this stuff and kick the hobby down the road.)

I have however run across certain trades that require developed skill not just a knack for learning quickly - among them: drywall floating, window tinting, body and paint. Others are highly scalable big jobs that just aren't suited to a one-man attack.

There is an element of burnout in that most of this physical work is a lot harder than what we all do for work!

</comment><comment><USER8> Great article, I am glad MSDS was touched on before machining cast parts. The only thing I would add is that users should check MSDS before machining ANY material. There are a few exotic metal alloys whose dust can cause severe respiratory trauma.

<comment><USER9> As the son of an engineer who built milling machines and died from lung disease caused by inhaling beryllium dust, I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I bought a used CNC mill off e-bay a while back and this is exactly the kind of resource I have been looking for to really get some use out of it. Still what we need is a really good open source CAM program. Most of them are proprietary, slow, or just useless on complex projects.

</comment><comment><USER11> CNC machining is exactly the hobby I've wanted to develop. A well-timed post indeed. My eternal gratitude for your efforts to provide this information.

<comment><USER12> Patience is important. I bought a Sherline mill and converted it to a 4 axis CNC setup. The challenge with these small mills is rigidity vs material. So if you're making something in Aluminum for example you still need to make a lot of really fine cuts rather than just plowing in and throwing chips like you can on a 'real' mill. That said if you are willing to wait for it (and with a CNC setup its really a time tradeoff) you can get good results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great guide! I've often thought about trying some DIY resin castings and this is by clearer and more thorough than anything else I've found online.

</comment><comment><USER14> Dang. This is an amazing guide. This could have saved me so much time and money if I read it before buying a crappy mill and having to rebuild most of it from scratch.

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, I had a great time and learned lots by buying one of those cheap chinese "mini-mills" and slowly replacing all of the awful sand-cast pot metal parts with self-made machined steel parts.

It was kind of a rite of passage like assembling my own light sabre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This link is awesome!, you need to browse forums and pages for weeks or months to get all that info on your own!. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER16> I became a mechanical engineer because I was fascinated by machine tools, but ended up writing software and devising printing algorithms for a living. This article is a treasure. Just the kind of field guide that people like me need to go back to the world of atoms and build stuff.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, this is really great. I never knew about Creo Elements/Express going to give it a try.

If you use SolidWorks then check out HSMXpress, it's a great free CAM package.

[1] <http://www.hsmworks.com/hsmxpress/>

</comment><comment><USER18> Very impressive compilation of information for the robot hobbyist (among other stuff) !

</comment><comment><USER19> As a general rule, I never browse to any links from Michal Zalewski. If he's gonna pwn me, I'd like him to have to work for it a bit more. ;)

</comment><comment><USER20> About this guide - wow and wow. Incredible work; good read for beginners and beyond. Very complete bit of writing here!</comment>


GoPro Spherical: The Future of Virtual Reality - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO-m3exi27M&feature=youtu.be

<comment><USER2> Some pretty bad stitching artifacting during the bicycle section. Looks like dynamic range is going to be a problem too: when biking under the overpass, the whites were blown out and overexposed, while the darks were muddy and underexposed.

Can it produce 3D footage, I wonder? Intuitively, it feels like 360-degree 3D video would require a heck of a lot of cameras.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, 3D video is "easy". 360 video is "easy". But 3D, 360 video is hard. So far the only traditional solutions I've seen (without using several depth cameras set up around a room) involve a ball of cameras and custom software that can be used to both stitch together video and also interpolate depth based on the different angles.

Very interested in this stuff though. None of the current solutions in development fall within my video and VR hobbyist/enthusiast budget but that never lasts too long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't realize Chrome supported panoramic video like that. Pretty cool.</comment>