Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530232/self-driving-ai-winter-full-autonomy-waymo-tesla-uber <comment><USER2> Waymo seems to be the only question mark in my mind making me doubt my bet that we're a decade or more away from usable self-driving cars.

If Waymo has truly solved the problem while everybody else is just trying to catch up and/or bluffing, I guess I wouldn't be that surprised.

Edited to add: The reason is that they've apparently ordered 10's of thousands of these cars. Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads? It seems unlikely that they are just that stupid to spend that much money without being confident that their plan will work. One last option would be that they intend to put 10's of thousands of them on the road just to exponentially speed up the data collection that they've decided is necessary to truly get the system up to par.

<comment><USER3> I tend to agree. Waymo ordered 62,000 Chrysler Pacificas with delivery slated for late 2018. Base retail on the hybrid model is $40,000USD. Even if they got an unbelievably generous 50% discount, that means they're $1.24B USD serious, excluding the cost of the additional autonomous driving equipment. So this will either be one of the biggest debacles in Google/Alphabet's history, or they really are ready to go.

<comment><USER4> Waymo has also ordered 20k Jaguar I-paces. Rumour is they have invested about 11 billion in R&d so far, and I'm crudely estimating the cost of their 80k upcoming robotaxis to be around 12 billion. Alphabet is committed.

Waymo estimates about 50 trips per day will be served per vehicle. At that rate, 80k robotaxis is enough to displace most of the taxi/rideshare services in the southwestern United States, though I'm not expecting to see all of them on the roads until 2022 or so. Waymo has a ton of work ahead of them. Mapping and validating in the ~100 square mile area of Chandler has taken them about 18 months so far, and supposedly they are on the verge of a commercial launch. Every city they hope to deploy in has differing signage, differing driving habits, and many funky intersections and road anomalies that need specific attention.

<comment><USER3> In this scenario there's no moat for Lyft/Uber either. If Waymo can meet demand, they'll be able to undercut ride sharing prices so deeply that most consumers will switch overnight. Banks will be falling over themselves to provide the massive credit they'll need to bankroll the expansion.

<comment><USER5> > they'll be able to undercut ride sharing prices

Why?

I see comments like this constantly. But does anyone ever do even a basic spreadsheet to explain the unit economics of this argument?

Low skilled people who can drive are pretty cheap and plentiful. Even if self- driving tech is flawless (spoiler: it's not and won't be soon) it still only replaces part of their responsibilities. Someone will still have to clean the cars for example. Presumably there will be some required level of human monitoring, etc.

Conversely, capital and highly reliable technology isn't free. You can calculate pretty easily the rate at which it's profitable to substitute technology for labor, this is a trade-off we've literally been making for centuries.

One one side you have plentiful cheap low skilled labor. On the other you have lasers, fast computers, graphics cards, cameras, and the associated programming inspection and maintenance costs.

Why do we think the latter side is going to be cheaper in anything remotely like the near term?

<comment><USER6> I don't disagree that some may be over-estimating how much cost can pragmatically be cut, but I also think you may be glossing over some of the costs and inefficiencies that come with operating a large heterogenous operation comprised of individuals and personal or rented vehicles.

A company deploying large mostly-homogenous autonomous fleets may be able to benefit from:

      - we probably don't need to tip AVs
      - economies of scale on obtaining vehicles, fuel, maintenance, and cleaning
      - tuning maintenance/cleaning schedules across a fleet towards keeping vehicles in service for longer
      - may be able to perform cleaning/maintenance during off-hours, vs owners who'll often have to trade
        working hours to do these tasks
      - autonomous systems may drive (and be tuned towards) in ways that also help preserve long-term vehicle
        value and minimize costs
      - lower insurance, legal, and PR costs if they outperform human drivers, don't molest/murder
        passengers, etc.
      - minimizing costs around acquiring and managing a human workforce
      - there are probably many small ways to optimize the positioning and functioning of an AV fleet that
        just won't work with a large contractor fleet

That said, the potential for a lot of these savings depends on current prices actually reflecting these components. It may very well be more expensive to perform some of these activities, no matter how efficiently, than to exploitively externalize their costs on drivers and riders.

<comment><USER6> I haven't looked for work on the price/demand relationship here, but it's also worth noting that price reductions may not just purely be a matter of cutting costs and passing those on at a static ridership and profit level. There are likely to be some price points that profoundly change user behavior

To give an example, my favorite coffee shop is about 7 minutes (+wait) from my apartment by car either way, and around 18-26 minutes (+wait) by bus (shorter there, longer back). Without a ride pass and with tip, it's probably around $7-8 to Uber this one way, vs. $1.25 for the bus.

At this price, I'll usually only Uber if heat or rain make getting to and from the bus miserable. I have a ride pass atm that knocks this down to around $6-7 with tip, which makes me marginally more likely to take Uber, but it isn't my default. I took the bus this past Sunday morning, planning to get some open source work done, but I'd forgotten my laptop wasn't in my bag. The time/sweat cost of the bus round trip and the money cost of the Uber round trip were high enough that I just sat and read a book instead.

I'm not sure exactly where, but somewhere between ~$2-5 total, I'd probably default to taking Uber both ways. Down at the low end of that range, I even would've gone back for the forgotten laptop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another bad article.

As I keep pointing out, the way you start to do automatic driving is by first profiling the terrain to see where you can go. If it's not flat road, you don't go there. Doesn't matter why it's not flat. Then try to classify other road objects and predict their behavior. This only matters for moving objects.

Waymo gets this, as we know from Urmson's talk at SXSW a few years back. Most of the DARPA Grand Challege vehicles got this, because they had to drive off- road, where you have to profile terrain or else.

Tesla does not get this. Cruise may or may not get this. Uber - well, Uber's system detected the pedestrian and ran into her anyway, which should end with someone in jail.

There's this mindset that you just throw deep learning at camera images and automatic driving comes out. Musk claimed that. It didn't work. We don't hear much from Tesla about self-driving any more. Udacity's self-driving course is also deep learning based.

As for how much testing is required, read the California DMV accident reports.[1] This gives you a sense of what the real-world problems are. 25 minor accidents so far this year. Mostly Cruise. The most common problem, especially with Waymo, is being rear-ended while cautiously entering an intersection with limited visibility. Their system will start forward to get a better view, then detect cross traffic and stop. What may help there is some convention such as rapidly flashing the brake lights when a sudden stop is likely and there's a vehicle close behind.

On the LIDAR front, Continental's flash LIDAR is already working well enough that drone makers are buying it. Continental is ready to produce that thing in volume, but they need volume orders from automakers before the price comes down.

[1] [https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/autonomousveh_ol316+)

<comment><USER8> > The most common problem, especially with Waymo, is being rear-ended while > cautiously entering an intersection with limited visibility. Their system > will start forward to get a better view, then detect cross traffic and stop

This actually highlights a really hard problem that (perfect) self driving will need to solve: theory of mind.

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

Not only does the AI need to empathize and predict how typical humans react, they also need to be easy for humans to empathize with. Humans typically use themselves as a template for a reasonable range of reactions. So when the capabilities don't match up (like needing to scoot up to process how to cross where a typical human wouldn't need to), it will violate their expectation of you. So in this case being cautious is considered a crazy and erratic behavior to a human. (e.g., "what were you thinking?! why did you stop!? shouldn't you've seen that the road was empty?!")

<comment><USER9> The only time I've ever been rear-ended was that way — pulling out of a parking lot where the street was at a slightly higher level, so I couldn't see around the parked cars on either side of the exit. I started to pull out rather quickly, but then was forced to hit the brakes, and the person behind me — well, I don't know where they were looking.

I guess that's not quite the same scenario, though, since the person behind me couldn't see the cross traffic either; they were just cueing off my own behavior to conclude that it must be clear.

Anyway, you're right: good driving isn't just predicting what other people are going to do; it's also making sure your own behavior gives _them_ the correct idea about _your_ intentions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner > with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate," he said. > "Safety isn't just about the quality of the AI technology."

Wow. What a goal post move. I don't think this is how successful technology spreads. Governments usually accomodate tech because it proves itself in the market, not vice versa.

<comment><USER11> Also, good luck marketing a product which only works when everyone is lawful and considerate, and otherwise has a considerable chance of killing occupants or pedestrians.

<comment><USER12> Cars that you can buy today are such a product. As are kitchen knives.

<comment><USER10> Not in the same way, there is accountability when a driver or knife wielder uses them dangerously. He's arguing for putting the accountability on pedestrians, which would be the equivalent of putting accountability on a murder victim. "Hey, it's not the murderers fault, the victim shouldnt walk around in bad neighborhoods."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The crashes that the article claims came from edge-cases that the engineers didn't account for weren't, in fact, edge-cases. The Tesla crashes are due to the way Tesla's system works, it doesn't recognize stationary hazards. Similarly Uber's system failed to brake for a hazard that it could clearly see. That's not an edge-case, it doesn't have to know that the object is a woman pushing a bicycle. It's a solid object moving steadily into the car's trajectory.

<comment><USER13> Edges cases are what really matters in this case!

Isn't there a saying that 80% of the code is written to handle 20% of the cases?

<comment><USER14> I think you have that flipped. 20% of code covers 80%. As you try to get to 100% coverage of all possible scenarios the complexity gets in some cases exponentially harder as all the low hanging fruit is picked

<comment> the-dude So he is exactly right : 80% of the code handles edges cases. You are the one who is flipped.

<comment><USER15> 20% of code covers 80%. 80% of code covers 19%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As someone who worked at a ridesharing co, I'm also really curious about the ops side of things, like how will passengers behave when there's no driver in the car? Will people try to have sex, do drugs, make a mess? What happens when someone vomits in the car or is very drunk (actually a very common problem in ridesharing)?

<comment><USER17> They change the interiors of the car to accommodate. There is a reason the public transportation doesn't feel like my Ford Fusion. It is made for lots of different butts to be in and if a mess is caused they come in and spray it out. A bus for example can be cleaned with a pressure washer (sometimes inside and out.) Seats, headboards, etc. etc. can all be put on by snaps or simple screws. Anything stolen can easily be monitored and the last occupant can be charged for it. There are a lot of ways to get this done and make it extremely cheap and durable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm continually astounded by the Tesla hasbara:

"Tesla and a host of other imitators already sell a limited form of Autopilot"

Imitators? You mean GM, Mercedes and VAG that have had these systems for longer than Tesla are just bad copies of the glorious Tesla autopilot?

Unreal.

<comment><USER19> All due respect, have you used any of the Autopilot clones? There are endless debates about what's better on paper, but everybody I know who's actually used them says Autopilot is much more mature. Comma.ai seems to be right on their tail, but it's an aftermarket system requiring a fair bit of DIY (so it's not very accessible yet for most end users). Tesla was first to market with auto steering, and seems to have the most mature offering, so framing them as the market leader seems pretty accurate to me.

<comment><USER20> As someone who has used Autopilot and many of its "clones" as well as worked with several OEMs on these features, Tesla's offering is not more mature, it's more irresponsible. Autopilot is a combination of ADAS features that many other OEMs have had for a while and deliberately chosen not to tie together due to safety concerns. These concerns have been validated multiple times now by Autopilot errors. The "clones" are deliberately less good because the manufacturers offering them care more about safety and reliability than about marketing beta products.

<comment><USER19> How mature a system is and whether it's morally responsible (or imperative) to release it are different questions.

> The "clones" are deliberately less good because the manufacturers offering > them care more about safety and reliability than about marketing beta > products.

When I say "maturity," I'm not talking about holding back features. I'm saying that Tesla's system works better in situations where other manufacturers offer similar features. For example, how many other manufacturer's TACC will slow down (below the set limit) when a turn is coming up and then accelerate through the turn as a human is taught to do? How many autosteering systems will sense an adjacent car drifting from its lane and "creep" away from it to avoid a possible collision? These are the sorts of mature behaviors that put Autopilot ahead of the pack and make it much more real-world useful than its competitors.

On irresponsibility, I passionately disagree. But rather than rehash a bunch of old discussions I'll just link to prior comments explaining why I feel the way I do, and we can debate it further in those comments if you're interested.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302164)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17233845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17233845)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773903](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773903)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17236608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17236608)

<comment><USER20> Ok, we have different definitions of maturity. To me, it means your system's core functionality works reliably in the use cases it is designed for. Nice- to-haves like speed smoothing are secondary.

Thanks for the links to your other comments. I don't think there's fruitful debate to be had here - we're just of different opinions. I think autopilot encourages bad driving behavior in drivers who would otherwise be more alert, and if I've read your comments correctly you think the responsibility is nevertheless still on the drivers and autopilot probably helps more people than it harms. I'd love to revisit this if we ever get apples to apples accident data showing comparisons between autopilot-enabled vehicles and comparable vehicles from other manufacturers in the same price and age range (thus with corresponding modern and expensive ADAS systems).

<comment><USER19> > Ok, we have different definitions of maturity. To me, it means your system's > core functionality works reliably in the use cases it is designed for. Nice- > to-haves like speed smoothing are secondary.

I agree with this definition, but I see it more as a sliding scale than a checkbox. I think it comes down to whether you look at each system in isolation or whether you put them all on a single spectrum. I'm imagining human driving at one end of a spectrum and fully automated driving at the other, and looking at what percent of driving conditions each system provides a safety or utility improvement in (so you can see why features like speed smoothing and reacting to nearby cars quickly become relevant to my thinking). But I can see why, judging each system on its own, one would say that Autosteer is less mature at what it aims to do than simpler and more constrained systems are at what they aim to do.

You summarized my take on Autopilot as accurately as one can in a single sentence (thank you for that btw). Like you, I look forward to the day when data is available to resolve competing hypotheses like these. Elon pledged on the last earnings call to release quarterly Autopilot data reports; I'm hoping those will include Autopilot vs non-Autopilot driving usage and their respective highway accident rates, broken down by feature (TACC, Autosteer, TACC + Autosteer, etc). I think that'd be the best way to assess Autopilot safety, as it would control for all other factors. It'd be great to have apples-to-apples numbers from all manufacturers, but I think that will take longer and probably some coordination from NHTSA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I work on self-driving cars. Imho, companies need to collaborate on certain aspects like perception instead of competing. The vehicle is basically blind beyond the range of the sensors or if you miss a detection. Collaboration on these issues will lead to faster progress instead of competing.

<comment><USER22> > Imho, companies need to collaborate on certain aspects like perception > instead of competing.

I also work on self-driving cars. Why would I share technological innovations with another company?

<comment><USER23> So people don't die.

This is an example where companies could put people over profits and share what they've learned to keep things safe. I don't see a lot of research papers (I see none) coming out of Waymo, Tesla, Uber, or Cruise.

<comment><USER21> This is another form of collaboration. You could publish your innovations in some technical forum w/o code and it'll automatically drive the industry forward since SOTA results will be available.

Right now, no one really knows the performance of the Waymo system. Millions of miles doesn't mean a lot. I can do billions of miles in a parking lot with no cars or pedestrians. Even millions of miles on road doesn't say anything about the performance of the components.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The story of computation in general — "The Rise of the Machines" — has been more about humans becoming more like machines than the other way around. The question is not "will computers ever be able to drive as well as a human?". It's "Will humans remake their driving systems to fit a sufficiently intelligent computer-driven model?" I believe the answer, as the US ages and falls below replacement rate, is yes. We are already fully invested in the age of benevolent machines, and there is no turning back.

</comment><comment><USER25> Rodney Brooks gave an interview that was recently reposted on ArsTechnica. He has so much real world experience productizing AI and robotics that no one else really compares. He is not pessimistic just realistic about self driving cars. And he has great reasons why true autonomy is going to take a long time.

<comment><USER26> Rodney Brooks has a history of skepticism about AI (said in 2009 that he doesn't think AI is even possible), as does Gary Marcus (who's been anti-deep learning since 2011). "AI is hype" hit pieces always quote them.

<comment><USER25> I assume you are trolling, but in case someone misses your user name: To say that the director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab for ten years and the founder of the a successful AI workstation company and the most successful robotics company in the world "has a history of skepticism about AI" is idiotic.

<comment><USER26> not trolling. I don't think you know Brooks well enough, i've been following him since the 90s. Rodney Brooks is famous for his subsumption architecture and disregard of statistical methods. Because of the failures of Marvin Minsky GOFAI, the previous director of MIT AI, he went in the opposite direction completely and became highly skeptical of AI while serving as MIT AI head. This was the AI winter days of the 90s.

<comment><USER25> Why create a name "totaldick" to make a single post if not to troll? My response would be: You don't head the most prestigious AI lab in world with pure skepticism.

I think you have elaborated on your true objection, his past skepticism about statistical methods. I don't think that equates to a blanket skepticism. I also refer you to the talk in my original post. He points out that there are breakthroughs and pitfalls that are unanticipated. He outlines specific pitfalls to autonomous driving that he feels no one has adequately addressed.

<comment><USER26> This is my only account, just signed up recently, and the name was just spur of the moment. Sorry if it comes across as trolling, that wasn't my intention. I just know a bit about Rodney Brooks, am a fan of his work, so I gave my 2 cents.

<comment><USER27> I believe that you're not trolling but could you please email us (firstname.lastname@example.com) with a clearly-non-trolling username that we can replace "totaldick" with? A name like that amounts to subtly trolling other users with every post you make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is tangentially related, and something I have wondered, so I will ask it here.

Does anyone know how self driving cars will react to attempts by law enforcement officers to pull over the vehicle?

<comment><USER29> They will pull over.

<comment><AUTHOR> Another attack surface for self-driving cars

<comment><USER30> Sure, if you're willing to risk going to jail for impersonating a law enforcement officer.

<comment><USER28> Fair enough. I'm sure some would be willing to do that, but likely not many. I do think it is going to be very interesting to work out some of the scenarios if we do get to Johnny Cab style self driving cars.

<comment><USER30> If you're willing to risk jail, disrupting traffic is ridiculously easy, self- driving cars or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> One major aspect a lot of comments aren't capturing is that autonomous vehicles create a platform that goes beyond moving people around. Forget about the passengers during peak demand, that's already a given -- what about all that cargo that can be moved either with passengers or during off-peak demand hours?

</comment><comment><USER32> -A decision was made to do nothing based on ambiguity in perception, and the emergency braking was turned off because it got too many false alarms from the sensor"

So instead of solving this problem it was decided to go forward;abominable. At least the truth came out.

</comment><comment><USER33> Talking about self-driving cars, I always interested in the legal aspect of these cars. What's the regulation, what are the driver's (or passenger?) responsibilities, and what are the automakers' responsibilities. I have just read a nice information related to this matter at [https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car- accid...](https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accident- injury-lawyers-attorneys/). It's always interesting to talk about this future technology.

</comment><comment><USER34> More I read about AV, more I get the idea that, these AVs need to think to some extent like a human driver. My notion is that, these AV research focus blindly on making individual cars think too much. Am curious what happens if the thinking and data-collection is distributed instead, like swarm intelligence, each AV nearby can broadcast what it sees and where it is(extends the vision of each car in a given location beyond it's own sensors); front car suddenly breaks/had an accident/roadblock/switched to human intervention => all following cars will negotiate if they should bypass(reporting car will be parking) or wait (reporting car will use another lane); a car is on a blind turn => oncoming traffic from both sides can negotiate if this car should attempt the turn because others are far enough/slow enough to let it turn safely or wait until they are gone(high speed so not enough time for turning car before that one approaches); a road is very confusing so all cars following should switch to/request human intervention with ample time ... etc and given how cellular phones switch nicely between different towers and areas, we can use similar tech to allow all nearby cars to communicate ... that is communicate, coordinate and decide. Now this have some issues like privacy, drivers with bad intention can feed bad data to cause mass confusion, legitimacy of data received etc ... which can probably be an interesting place to borrow some ideas from blockchain to verify legitimacy etc ... I think instead of focusing too much on ml, try to incorporate other techs which solve minor but similar issues is a good idea.

Disclaimer: I do not claim to have full/partial/enough understanding of any AV technology/blockchain/distributed computing/swarm intelligence etc... so my comment is more or less an opinion based on what I think may be interesting, which may or may not be already thought by and discarded for not-enough viability by the AV research.

</comment><comment><USER35> QUESTION: Is this really and AI problem or is it a sensor problem.

I mean, if there's a big blob of something solid in the road in front of you, it doesn't really matter what it is does it. You still have to not run into it.

It seems that because these poor AIs are relying on LIDAR and even just radar and cameras with Tesla, that they aren't confident enough in that data to stop if they sense a big blob of something in the road.

If you gave any of these AIs a really high quality 3D rendering of the area around them I would presume they'd do a damn fine job of navigating it and not running into anything. At that point it's just a computer game.

So either we need better sensors or better algorithms for extracting better 3D data from the existing ones.

It's not like these fatalities are caused by particularly crazy problems. It's not that a kid ran behind an ice cream van and the AI couldn't predict it would run into the road like a human would. It's just that they make dumb decisions a learner driver wouldn't make because they can't see the road properly.

</comment><comment><USER36> Well thankfully the Google CEO is not some super salesman like Elon Musk who is trying to emulate Steve Jobs and failing hard with Tesla.

I would bet the farm on Waymo, they realized it takes a long time to build a level 4 autonomous vehicle, so no doubt they were being poached by Uber which all failed.

Likely the problem is one of numbers. The sheer amount of data, and the traffic data Google has access to, all of this adds to a superior safety experience.

Meanwhile a level 2 masquerading as level 3 autopilot should be up for some serious scrutiny, especially if it's true that there appears to be some issue with the autopilot on the Tesla.

</comment><comment><USER37> The Q isn't when complete autonomy arrives, but how much autonomy we will add before the cost of adding more is vastly greater than having on-call humans take over. At that point the ROI of the research will fall as all you gain in going from 99.05 to 99.10 % autonomy is a few employees across a whole fleet of vehicles.

I agree with the pessimists: driving is 99% a mindless activity that even a mediocre AI will handle soon. But the last percent requires not just a better AI but a human. At least as long as it drives with other people in an environment designed for people.

</comment><comment> the-pigeon This article talks about issues with deep learning than admits it's not used on these projects. Making most of the article not relevant to self driving cars despite being about them.

<comment><USER38> Despite PURPORTING to be about them, probably because news about self-driving cars tends to get eyeballs and Hacker News upvotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> What is the most optimistic benefit of a driverless car?

If we put aside creation of unemployment, putting limits on what human drivers will be able to do, and similar dystopian outlooks, what are the benefits for the masses?

People who cannot drive will be able to use cars as people who can. Is this good? Are interesting places on the planet going to have the same fate as Internet did, when it transformed from elite audiences in 90s to tragedy of commons today?

</comment><comment><USER40> How much better than human drivers do self-driving cars have to be to succeed? If you take a metric like fatalities or damage per mile I'm guessing we ask our robots to be much better than humans, even though it doesn't really make sense. Over time the differential will come down but a better intermediate strategy would be to keep humans away from robot cars until collision avoidance techniques improve substantially.

<comment><USER41> I had this argument the other day with someone else.

 _You can 't make a robot that goes out in public and kills random people._ You just can't do that. Okay?

Q: "What if the robot looks just like a car and there's a person inside the robot watching TV? Can it kill random people then?"

Still no.

Q: "But _people_ do that all the time! Tens of thousands of people die or are maimed by traffic collisions every year! My robot can't join the fray?"

Still no. It's insane and horrible that we set up a death and mayhem lottery and that we force everyone-- children, old people, pregnant ladies, folks in wheelchairs, ev-er-ee-one -- to play it whether they want to or not. That's a bad thing we shouldn't do. But it still doesn't make it okay for you to make a robot that goes out in public and kills random people.

If you make a robot, send it into the world, and it kills someone, you are a murderer and you should go to jail, _even if your robot looks like a car and there 's a person riding inside it._

\- - - - -

We could make a self-driving _golf cart_ that never went fast enough to be able to injure people and it could take my mom (who has dementia and can't drive or ride the bus on her own anymore) to the doctor and back safely. We could build that today, with existing technology, there's a market for it, and it wouldn't kill anyone.

Self-driving cars are a fetish that distracts from solving real problems! (One day that won't be true, let's not kill too many more people until then, hey?)

\- - - - -

Humans drive really well. Like really really crazy good well. When I first realized how well people drive it made me consider that Guardian Angels might be a real thing. But then I learned more about how the motor cortex worked and some of the uncanniness faded.

We should be so lucky as to have robots that drive as well as we do.

In the meantime, the industry should concentrate on incrementally automating traffic and stop trying to bite off more than current technology can chew.

What we're seeing now is hubris driven by ego and greed. And it's killing people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> When will we have self-driving cars?

When we can get rid of recycle bins, because we've finally figured out how to get our robots to sort our trash for us!

<comment><USER43> I know that the actual system is currently terrible in many places, wherein the recycle and trash are mixed together and re-sorted by humans. Ignoring that for the moment...

There are some practical reasons for recycle bins, or at least for separating out paper. Paper can get damaged if mixed with liquids or other foods/compostable material, and harder or not worth recycling. Keeping it separate from the very beginning increases the ability and efficiency of recycling => less dead trees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This has been hanging out there for a while it's just that it never got much mainstream press. I wonder what it is specifically about the concept of "AI" that makes it so prone to the magical thinking that drives these boom-bust cycles.

 _" I tell adult audiences not to expect it in their lifetimes. And I say the same thing to students"_

 _" Merely dealing with lighting conditions, weather conditions, and traffic conditions is immensely complicated. The software requirements are extremely daunting. Nobody even has the ability to verify and validate the software. I estimate that the challenge of fully automated cars is 10 orders of magnitude more complicated than [fully automated] commercial aviation."_

\- June 2015, Steve Shladover, transportation researcher at the University of California, Berkeley

[https://www.automobilemag.com/news/the-hurdles-facing- autono...](https://www.automobilemag.com/news/the-hurdles-facing-autonomous- vehicles/)

 _" While I enthusiastically support the research, development, and testing of self-driving cars, as human limitations and the propensity for distraction are real threats on the road, I am decidedly less optimistic about what I perceive to be a rush to field systems that are absolutely not ready for widespread deployment, and certainly not ready for humans to be completely taken out of the driver's seat."_

\- March 2016, Mary Cummings, director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory at Duke

[https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/c85cb4ef...](https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/c85cb4ef-8d7f-40fb-968c-c476c5220a3c/8BC0CC7E137483CEFD0C928ECB14E74E.cummings- senate-testimony-2016.pdf)

 _" With autonomous cars, you see these videos from Google and Uber showing a car driving around, but people have not taken it past 80 percent. It's one of those problems where it's easy to get to the first 80 percent, but it's incredibly difficult to solve the last 20 percent. If you have a good GPS, nicely marked roads like in California, and nice weather without snow or rain, it's actually not that hard. But guess what? To solve the real problem, for you or me to buy a car that can drive autonomously from point A to point B—it's not even close. There are fundamental problems that need to be solved."_

\- September 2016, Herman Herman, director of the Carnegie-Mellon University Robotics Institute

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d7y49y/robotics-l...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d7y49y/robotics- lab-uber-gutted-says-driving-cars-are-not-even-close-carnegie-mellon-nrec)

<comment><USER45> 'It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go — maybe even longer,'' Piet Hut, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, told the NYT in 1997. ''If a reasonably intelligent person learned to play Go, in a few months he could beat all existing computer programs. You don't have to be a Kasparov.''

<comment><USER46> If you care to, you can dig up plenty of examples of people underestimating, overestimating, or correctly estimating the future capabilities of AI. Just because some guy in New Jersey underestimated it once doesn't mean we should accept AI hype uncritically, especially since much of that hype is driven by moneyed interests.

<comment> mark-r People are just bad at estimating in general. They tend to assume things will go in a straight line. You can see this most often when the curve is exponential, but asymptotic curves will throw people off too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > argues the problem is less about building a perfect driving system than > training bystanders to anticipate self-driving behavior

Can we stop listening to him now?

I'm joking, he's an expert of course, but seriously that's a pretty dumb view. It's exactly the sort of thing I expect from a SV "disruptor" type.

> "Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner > with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate," he said. > "Safety isn't just about the quality of the AI technology."

Just crazy.

These people just really do not seem to care if they kill people. They are engaging in foolish behavior rushing ahead with a technology that's not ready and thinking they can just paper over the gaps with laws and patches.

</comment><comment><USER48> As long as software is composed of primitive language derived statements and "functional" logic (IF, WHEN, WHILE, DO, GOTO, etc...) AI will remain a fantasy.

<comment><USER49> This is hard to parse. All software that can be represented as if and goto (and some sort of assignment i suppose)?

when, while and do are just if and goto.

alpha go is all just if and goto. I'm not sure what you're looking for or alluding to.

Is there some other operation that isn't just if and goto? because i think any function you come up with, i can just make a big table of inputs that result in specific outputs.

Heck, decrement and jump if zero is enough. I'm not convinced at all that specific operations are limiting us somehow. Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER2> I believe what he's saying is that we don't "think" in if/then statements. So true AI will never be intelligent-like if you judge intelligence as thinking like us.

<comment><USER50> What do you mean? Neurons work exactly like if/then statements. If (input > level) {transmit information}

<comment><USER2> Ummm.... no. You _might_ be able to make the case that a neuron can be simulated with a very complex set of if-then statements, but that assumes that we can know everything about the state of a dozen inputs, which we can't. At any rate, the brain is not a computer: [https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain- does-not-process-informati...](https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not- process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer)

<comment><USER51> i like that this essay puts the complexity of the brain into perspective, but the distinction between a computer and an organism is kind of arbitrary. brains are physical systems that can be modeled mathematically. if you can create a mathematical model of a thing, you can execute that model on a computer. a brain isn't a classical computer, but that doesn't mean that a computer can't simulate a brain.

we currently lack the ability to recreate a brain-like entity, but the subtext that i am reading here is that the complexity of the brain is such that accurately modelling a brain in mathematical terms is impossible. the "brain- as-computer" model may not be accurate, but everything that exists _can_ be expressed in mathematical (and therefore compute-able) terms.

i doubt that cyberbrains will run on anything that we recognize as a general- purpose cpu. gpu micro-architecture is already a significantly more efficient option for performing nn computations. as our grasp on this stuff improves, more specific silicon is being developed to make it even more efficient.

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's arbitrary. You even distinguished in this comment between a brain and a simulation of a brain. Steel is a physical system that can be modeled mathematically. Accurately simulating steel doesn't make steel.

<comment><USER52> Agreed. I think radioactive decay is an even better example of a well modeled physical system that defies simulation. A simulation of an ounce of decaying uranium won't tell you which atoms will decay in which order in a physical chunk. Ergo, somethings defy simulation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kim Dotcom, The truth will come out - <AUTHOR> http://kim.com/

<comment><USER2> I like the video, and the fact that it includes a relevant summary of what's going on. Lots of viral potential.

I have a hard time getting my arms around the voting thing though. The sad state of the two party system in the US leaves people with little choice.

If people don't vote for Obama, will they vote for Romney instead? Will they try to help Ron Paul win the primary? Will this help to make Gary Johnson more relevant?

I think an appeal that relied on something other than the presidential election might have been more effective due to the poor selection process we're currently stuck with.

I guess while I'm ranting about politics, I might as well say.. "why can't we have runoff voting?"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting>

</comment><comment><USER3> That site has a very interesting look.</comment>


Ask HN: Need help to raise capital for my education venture  - <AUTHOR>

Hey,
I got referred to this site by a friend of mine who is now a considerably long time user. After his recommendation I started going through the back posts (occasionally using searchyc to search for some posts of my interests) and discovered some gems. Let me give some background of myself...
I am a CSE graduate from a II tire uni. in Gujarat,India. After seeing the dismal state of affairs of engineering education in my state I decided to cure the system from within. After teaching for almost one and a half year as a faculty at Aptech Computer center (and occasionally doing some side projects of my own), I left Aptech and started my own education center and incorporated it under the name of Cypher Inc. But now I am struggling financially as the initial batch of students were taken at a very low fees and that is not even sufficient to pay for the resources. I want to act early before I am too much in debt.
I am looking for some small work I can do to raise some more capital. I am well versed in java, with expertise in web development. I have done work for some national customers before and am very professional. You can contact me at, email@example.com. I can send you a full resume if you require.
Please help me to keep my startup afloat. <comment><USER2> You don't need capital, you need a business savvy co-founder. The decision to take on your students at a price at which you could not deliver shows that you are not doing too good a job at managing your finances, anybody with the capacity to invest in your company would want to see that fixed first.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't that, I got too few students for the first batch (as expected). I set the fees at Rs8000/student/3 months (nobody will pay more than that). Thus with only 3 students I am cash starved.

<comment><USER2> That does not change the situation materially though, normally speaking you would have done some research before committing and so on.

You are essentially asking for a gift, not for an investment.

Your business as it is today does not stand a chance of survival unless it is subsidized in some form, that is not something an investor is likely to do.

Sorry to bring you bad news but I can't make anything else of it, maybe someone else has a more positive opinion on this but I can't see - at the moment - how outside of a gift or a subsidy you could at least fulfill your obligations to this first batch of students.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I have been able to cater the first batch efficiently and will be able to keep myself afloat till that batch remains. I am also getting some new students but there are certain things I had in mind for my company which I wasn;t able to realize with what money I had to invest. With minimal fees that I charge I wont be able to acquire them soon. I am not asking for a gift but for work. Something I can do make it happen for my company soon.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What just happened to robohash.org? - <AUTHOR> http://www.robohash.org/

<comment><USER2> Sorry about that!

It's entirely my fault. I screwed up in a few ways, which is what you always see in something like this.

Im on an overnight business trip from Boston to Dallas.. My Real Job wanted me to tour a new datacenter down here.

In any event, I've been running straight, without sleep since yesterday AM when I flew out on a Red Eye, so I.. I'll admit it.. I went to bed.

I was sleeping peacefully from 1AM to 4AM, cradling my old-school, screaming- loud pager secure in the knowledge that all my little servers would alert me if they had problems.. I have Pingdom, PagerDuty, Nagios, Munin, I've got monitoring 16 different ways..

When I woke up at 4AM (3 hours is enough. Why not?) to make my flight back to Boston, I see I've received several hundred text messages. Hrmm.. What is this?

I double-checked the work-servers, but those were fine, and have Other staff to help watch them, and escalate. Checking email, I see Pingdom is patiently explaining that RoboHash is down.

"But WAIT?!", I can hear your exclaim! Why didn't your pager wake you up?

Well, it turns out that old-school pagers are.. Regional. Once I'm outside of NewEngland, it's a cool looking retro piece of trash.

The text messages arrived, but my sleeping brain was able to peacefully ignore them in bliss.

As to what actually happened? Linode migrated my machine to a new datacenter, and rebooted it. I had a bug in my init script, so it didn't start up properly when rebooted.

Basically, I need to create a Ramdisk, then copy the code from the stable position on HDD. This is because a bazillion hits/second would overwhelm the disk if I loaded it manually from disk each time.

Anyway, Nginx was started (hence the error), but the init script was trying to start up my python code, without creating the ramdisk first, so.. RoboFail.

Sorry about the problem. Imagine my embarrassment.

On the plus side, I'm now in a TSA-approved boarding area, so I have a good 20 minutes to fix the init script before my flight back. ;)

<comment><USER3> Pardon the (perhaps very silly) question, but... if you have enough RAM for the ramdisk, isn't that enough RAM to cache all the relevant files anyway? So the file open()/read() would not hit HDD itself time and time again; they'd be served (by the OS) from cache?

Of course, cache warm-up would remain a possible problem source.

<comment><USER4> I believe it's usually done (I've not had to do it) so that you can force some small set of data to always be in ram. This way even in the case of someone managing to cause something to leak memory the code will always be in ram. Whether this is really needed or not I can't say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I heard a rumour that it had achieved sentience and decided to give up its life of servitude to retire to the coast somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER6> Also, I'd like to add that I'd be more than happy to donate to keep robohash.org alive as would, I hope, many others

<comment><USER2> Sorry, it's not a money thing (It's actually really cheap to run), I just made the mistake of sleeping ;( See post below for details!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Exactly why I wish they'd sell a license to the code for $100 or something.

<comment><USER8> Is this helpful? <https://github.com/e1ven/Robohash>

(It appears that the code is BSD-licensed.)

<comment><USER7> Sweet. Now he just needs a donation link so I can thank him :)

<comment><USER2> You can thank me by drawing me a picture of a Robot ;)

Sorry for the downtime, though. That's embarrassing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If anyone needs to rebuild it in node.js, take a look at <https://github.com/donpark/node-robohash> project which renders bots using SVG parts.

</comment><comment><USER10> <http://www.robohash.org> isnt working, but <http://robohash.org> is fine for me.

<comment><USER11> Yes, dns for www is broken.

;; ANSWER SECTION: www.robohash.org. 10800 IN CNAME robohash.com.robohash.org.

Just need to fix that little bit :-) Great site BTW, love it.

<comment><USER2> Why would you go to www.Robohash.org? It's only one server, it doesn't need subdomains ;)

AFAIK, that URL has _never_ done anything.. But.. Sure! I've set up DNS for it, and added a 301. It'll take a bit for DNS to propagate, but it should ensure it works going forward.

<comment><USER11> I went to WWW because this article linked to it :-)

I've only ever used robohash.org previously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 502\. <http://static1.robohash.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah what happened? CurrencyBot doesn't have a picture any more!!

</comment><comment><USER13> besides the domain error, robohash is really, really cool idea.

Anyone know similar open source efforts?

<comment><USER14> I know of unicornify[1], which also provides unique pictures for hashes. However, it approaches the problem differently: instead of using existing artwork, it basically generates each unicorn procedurally; the details of how it works are here[2] and there is code available too.

[1]: <http://unicornify.appspot.com/> [2]: <http://unicornify.appspot.com/making-of>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> it's back up.</comment>


What Is the Average Color of the Universe? - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/what-is-the-average-color-of-the-universe/ <comment><USER2> It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring.

The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.

<comment><USER3> The vast majority of mammals have only black and white vision, quite likely because all the common ancestors the survived the K-T event (the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs) were nocturnal.

Some groups such as fructivore primates have since re-evolved color vision to recognize ripe fruit from unripe. Thus not only our ability to see "pretty" colors but our probable instinctive liking of them as "pretty".

Also, color is more complicated than simple wave length. Human perception and wavelength correspond fairly well most of the time. But we actually have three different cells for detecting color (rather than say two: one for high frequency one for low). The result is we can perceive a color like purple where in fact there is no one wavelength but a blending of two wavelengths. Pedantically by the way, red is a relatively low wave length.

<comment><USER4> That most mammals are color blind is nothing more than a myth. A few select are, like the marine mammals, but the vast majority are dichromats with red/blue color receptors.

The last common ancestor was in fact a trichromat, having one red and two different blue receptors. When mammals diverged further, monotremes lost one of the blue receptors while other mammals lost the other.

What did reevolve in groups such as marsupials and apes was the green color receptor, which was present in older ancestors, but had been lost in the first mammals.

source: [http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/15...](http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/1531/2957.full.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After knowing the answer is beige, it's not actually surprising after looking at the spectrum. The spectrum they show is mostly flat so you don't expect one color to dominate much over another (maybe a bit more red than blue..).

</comment><comment><USER6> _edit: oops. My apologies, sodium is responsible for the dark band at ~5,890 I misread a graphic. Still looking into the spike..._

If like me you just had to know what was responsible for the huge spike in the red (@ wavelength of about 6600 angstroms)....

Sodium.

Tangentially related (TIL) sodium also effects a star's end-of-life cycle: [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-how-s...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-how- stars-die-sodium-space-astronomy-science/)

<comment><USER5> Looks like the H-alpha emisison line at 656 nm. It's a pretty strong line in many astrophysical sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When we were doing the first major visual redesign of Google Search back in 2010, we made the top ads color this (IIRC it's called "Cosmic Latte" [1]) because Jon Wiley thought it'd be cool. It was changed soon after launch once the Ads folks started running A/B tests and making us more money, but for a while, everyone was looking at the average color of the universe every time they did a Google Search.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte)

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.thecolorofpaloalto.com/](http://www.thecolorofpaloalto.com/)

<comment><USER9> 404

<comment><USER10> [https://web.archive.org/web/20141218085910/http://thecolorof...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141218085910/http://thecolorofpaloalto.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Worth having a play with colorpy, some nice examples here of how you go from a spectrum to a 'human' colour:

[http://markkness.net/colorpy/ColorPy.html](http://markkness.net/colorpy/ColorPy.html)

<comment><USER12> Following your comment about 'ColorPy', I decided to write a quick IPython notebook using our API (Which is borrowing some plotting aspect ideas to Mark Kness package):

[http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/colour-science/colour- ram...](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/colour-science/colour- ramblings/blob/master/the_cosmic_spectrum_and_the_color_of_the_universe.ipynb)

<comment><USER11> Ah that's nice, I was looking for a package that would do spectrum to colour in more or less a single line :)

<comment><USER12> Let us know if any issues!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know that they were trying to find the average wavelengths of visible light, and I loathe pedantry, but shouldn't the answer be "black"?

<comment><USER6> In this context black is the absence of light, so it's disqualified right off the bat.

With a clear night and a good telescope there are a lot of stars out there. So I would say even the average color of the night sky looking out from earth wouldn't be black. [http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150101.html](http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150101.html)

<comment><USER14> I couldn't resist curiosity and had to analyze that apod image just to see...

      Average Color (rgb): 62, 45, 51
      Average Color (hex): #3E2D33
      Average Color (visual): http://i.imgur.com/xDBeHqu.png

      Source: http://pastebin.com/vckL3AP6
      Credit: http://charlesmartinreid.com/wordpress/2012/08/python-image-averaging-and-color-averaging/ (with some cleanup)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it oddly appropriate that the average color of the universe is later described as the most boring color possible.

</comment><comment><USER16> Priceonomics: We help companies crawl data from the web. Well, the article itself is indeed interesting, but I am just curious why they post these kind of content on their blog, is it related?

<comment><USER17> They want to position themselves as data 'freaks'. They have an interesting post when they released a book.

[http://priceonomics.com/everything-is-bullshit-a-book-by- pri...](http://priceonomics.com/everything-is-bullshit-a-book-by- priceonomics/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to store integer array/list per key - <AUTHOR>

What is the best data-store or technique if we were to store millions of integer lists identified by a unique key. The following functions are intended on such lists:
1. Read for a given key 2. Add items to the end of the list against a key 3. Read portions of this list, from-to index 4. Rarely, remove items from the list
The data size is estimated to be roughly 100-million keys, with average of 2-3 thousand integer-list per key.
The key itself is an integer. <comment></comment>


Real Life MMO FPS - <AUTHOR> http://father.io/ <comment><USER2> On campus in college played humans vs zombies frequently. It's one of the most fun sports I've ever played. The magic really came from two directions. The first was being a human, where you've got a nerf blaster that fires nerf darts. If you hit a zombie, they are frozen for a few seconds, usually between 6 and 15. A decent human could manage 5-on-1 attacks. Its a blast to be charged by 5 opponents and to come out on top. But you only had one life.

As a zombie, the fun came from having unlimited lives. You grab 2-5 friends and you charge a group of humans. And then you spend minutes wearing them down, taking their ammo, waiting for a mistake. Occasionally you'd dodge a shot or two and then you'd be close enough to tag them. It's very rewarding when you finally do get the human, because they are so much stronger than you. The infinite lives means you don't get discouraged, and it also means its okay to make risky attacks.

This game looks like fun, but a few mechanics worry me. The first is dying. If your opponent is a lot better than you, can you have fun? How long do you stay dead? You are almost certain to have interactions that you aren't prepared for, or you drop your phone, or some set of frustrations happen. Is the game built to prevent frustration?

The second is that having to hold your phone with two hands seems really clunky. In HvZ, the (for many players anyway) blaster is everything. It has to feel good in your hands, you have to trust it, you have to be able to sprint _while firing_. You can't sprint and aim with two hands. If you stumble, having two hands out means you have nothing to help you hit the ground smoothly. You can't grab a tree and use it to turn faster. You can drop a nerf blaster because they are tough and cost $5-$20 for the small ones. You can't drop your phone unless you really trust the case. You have to be a lot more careful, and you have to trust your grip. Phones don't have handholds the same way that blasters do.

Cool idea, but not excited by the current demo video.

<comment><USER3> > where you've got a nerf blaster that fires nerf darts.

I'm surprised your college let you guys get away with this. Mine included nerf guns in the campus 'zero tolerance' weapons policy.

<comment><USER2> The guy who started the club was very proactive about talking to the administration. I think that nerf blasters (we were not allowed to call them guns, they are "blasters") were originally allowed by campus policy, which made things easier. But there were many strict rules. No black, no silver, had to be a brightly colored "blaster" firing brightly colored ammo. No playing in the streets, no interacting with non-players.

We were very aggressive about complying with the administration. Any request was immediately honored, and if it was unfair we'd request a change in policy on a later day. We were very diplomatic and worked very hard to be on the good side of the administration. I think this helped a lot.

I'm not sure how that would scale to a city. Trying to be compliant with many police forces in different residential areas sounds a lot harder than trying to be compliant with a single college campus administration. Especially because it's a lot harder to enforce a diplomatic attitude among thousands of random players than it is among 50 people who are all either friends, or friends of friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jon-wood I'm really split on this. The gamer in me thinks this looks like great fun, but I just can't see myself running round the streets of London shooting people with my phone, mostly because its likely to result in either ridicule, or stepping into traffic.

<comment><USER4> I was thinking the same thing. I would run into a wall or a car as I fight someone. I can see the game being successful at someone's house with a decent size property. However, why not just grab a paintball gun instead?

<comment><USER2> When playing hvz, stumbling was pretty common. Out of 40 players, one or two would get scraped up on the concrete per game. Running into walls, poles, and trees pretty much never happened.

The streets were very strictly off limits. And if there was a car (like a Public Safety vehicle) patrolling the campus sidewalks, all play stopped until the car was a certain distance away. No running, tagging, or shooting on the streets or by a moving car (parking lots were okay IFF there were no moving vehicles). Anybody in violation was immediately thrown from the game and banned from the next.

Safety under these conditions was not ever a problem. A sprained ankle was the worst injury we ever had, and that's going to happen in all sports.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Considering that you can be arrested for playing paintball out of restricted areas in germany, I would avoid this.

"simulated killing" can be banned by communities here, the european rights court found that legal about this 10 years ago (C-36/02). Laserdrome was the game in question back then. The decision goes down to §1 of the german grundgesetz (our constitution), which is the inviolability of human dignity.

While Laserdrome and Paintball is rather commonplace nowadays, often, one of the provisions expected to open such a space is the exclusion of anyone not involved in the game.

I don't want to know how the reaction to people running around town "shooting" at each other will be.

<comment><USER6> I can understand banning paintball. Paintballs can cause bruising, blindness, and stain clothes and walls. I don't think paintball is a fair comparison here.

<comment><USER5> Paintball is not banned because of physical danger. It's banned because it simulates killing. So the comparison fits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These Ingress-like type of games seem like a good trend, and this game too looks like fun. Just one thing - I probably wouldn't play this in US, certainly not if I'd have colored or black skin. Police there seems to be a _little_ too trigger happy and tends to yell "he's got a gun" even when they don't even see the gun. That has happened a few times too many in US for me to comfortably play this game there. Just the more recent one:

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

<comment><USER8> Well it's a cool idea but I don't want any weirdo come over looking for me when I'm at work, right? ;-) And we both know that some people take their games too seriously, ja? ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a really good way to get shot in real life.

<comment><USER10> Especially if you have to attach the gun-barrel-looking thing. Especially if there are sound effects. Especially if people role play (yelling, pretending to be shot, or shouting about someone with a gun trying to shoot them).

Ingress is much more tame in comparison, and the forums are still full of people talking about being stopped and questioned by the police.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A similar start-up in Berlin/Prag: [http://thedustcloud.com](http://thedustcloud.com)

If you're in London, Howard, the founder will be speaking at #geomob on 13th of Jan. [http://lanyrd.com/2015/geomob/](http://lanyrd.com/2015/geomob/)

<comment><USER12> hey, we are long-time friend of dustcloud and howard. Similar concept, different execution. hope you enjoy our too

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nothing can go wrong :) come on...

Love the concept but I am sure this is asking for trouble. Trigger Happy cops incoming.

<comment><USER12> lol, cops :) they have more important things to do! and there is nothing illegal about running around playing. that's what children do. should we just arrest all children, then?

<comment><USER14> We're still dealing with the increased militarization of our cops in America stemming from 9/11\. Here, if you're an adult and are running around in a city like that and pretending to shoot another person, there's the distinct possibility that a. people are going to report suspicious behavior and b. cops are going to come and tase you, maybe beat you up a bit too (especially if you're not white, unfortunately).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like how ambitious this project is.

They also got the introduction site very right -- I was seamlessly pulled into learning about the product, no sroll-shenanigans, just a quick (and painless/not-awkward) introduction to the product

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks interesting. I wonder how the hit detection works, I mean if there was some sort of way to boost the signal and just create device that would terminate every player in a given area.

<comment><USER17> That is something planned for future. This will be available as "Advanced Ammo".

<comment><USER18> aaaand there's the expected pay-to-win.

<comment><USER17> nop!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is obviously the smart phone enabled version of the old 'Assasins' roleplaying game that seems to be common around my university. I know some people who would be interested in something like this whereby they could utilise it as a framework to setup their own games/rules.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin_(game)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin_\(game\))

</comment><comment><USER20> How long before some law enforcement officer shoots somebody thinking they are holding a real gun?

<comment><USER21> Mostly a problem for people in countries where cops are allowed to carry a weapon. In other words, we Norwegians can play in public without running the risk of being shoot by a cop :)

<comment><USER22> Norwegian police officers do not carry firearms, but keep their Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns and Heckler & Koch P30 pistols locked down in the patrol cars.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Police_Service](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Police_Service)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Excellent landing page design, but judging by the YT video there's a lot to be done before they can match it with the actual product.

<comment><USER17> That video is an old one, a lot of progress has been made. These are not empty promises! ;)

<comment><USER24> Call us back when you have a video of the current state, then.

<comment><USER25> So brave

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I want in when the SXSW mega game goes down ;)

</comment><comment><USER27> I like how they designed the game so that beautiful women play it. Excellent design decision.

</comment><comment><USER28> Yeah, I am sure we will soon see hundreds of well-dressed, athletic people running around with their smartphone in camera position. Expect this to generate a lot of buzz, because virtual reality is a one way ticket to success these days. See you at the Series A, with neither revenue nor anything beyond a demo video.

<comment><USER29> > I am sure we will soon see hundreds of well-dressed, athletic people running > around with their smartphone in camera position

You mean they don't do that already?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The Columbine Trenchcoat Mafia tribute at the end was just adorable. I'm sure black and middle eastern people will just have a blast playing this game at the Walmart in Ferguson.

</comment><comment><USER31> Ditch the guns guys. It's unnecessary and introduces all sorts of liability and risk.

Honestly, it seems irresponsible.

<comment><USER32> Replace the gun/gun effects with sci-fi laser equivalents and I think it fixes most of these issues. Other issues notwithstanding.

Doesn't seem irresponsible at all to me. The creators are just trying to run with something new and ambitious.

<comment><USER31> It's definitely ambitious and the tech is to be applauded. Just think it's lazy and dangerous to have adults in public spaces running around pretending shooting one another with gun-like devices and sounds.

<comment><USER32> That's probably fair. I should have not been so ham-fisted. I think you could probably eliminate the gun angle entirely to a game like this, but it's wholly necessary if the players opt to engage in responsible play like (presumably) paintball folks or airsoft people do (knows very little about either).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> how does the detection work? Can't be GPS. Wifi? Bluetooth?

<comment><USER34> I guest, they are using GPS + Gyroscope Maybe one can increase the accuracy by modulating the flash light and apply bandpass filter on the other end.

Also: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensor_fusion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensor_fusion)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> 502 Bad Gateway, can anyone summarise?

<comment><USER36> Google's cache does a surprisingly good job with all these fancy video backgrounds: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ion=1&espv=2&q=...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ion=1&espv=2&q=cache:father.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fantastic!

</comment><comment><USER38> This is calling for trouble.

</comment><comment><USER39> If this was opensource... Oh, the possibilities...

<comment><USER40> Anyone can make an open source game like this. I'd rather see a successful one.

Besides, what possibilities? I'm a huge proponent of open source but there's more or less nothing else that you would be able to do if it were. In an MMO, you abide by the rules of the central server, no matter how open its source is.

<comment><USER41> Right, now think if the server was opensource and there would be multiple servers with their own rules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> PREORDER NOW
Launching from September!
</comment>


Siemens RTL tiled window system (1987) - <AUTHOR> http://www.open-video.org/details.php?videoid=8038 The code: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.misc.suckless/8134 <comment><AUTHOR> The code: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.misc.suckless/8134></comment>


Can Personal Analytics be a valid business? - <AUTHOR> http://gyrosco.pe/

<comment><AUTHOR> Gyroscope is beautiful to look at - I wish my life was more exciting to take advantage of its visualizations. But will regular folks use something like this?

<comment><USER2> Quantified self aficionados will be the early adopters, exciting life or not. Regular folks may jump on board once they realize that these types of visualizations will be very similar to the ones that advertisers and brands may pay them directly to access.</comment></comment>


Rant HN: Apple is unhinged  - <AUTHOR>

Remember when the iphone was first announced? No SDK? No native dev? What would you need that for, Apple said. Why would you need an SDK? The future is open web! HTML5. Open. Free. Libre! Bla bla bla. So I hit the link for today's live stream of the "Back to Mac" event and for some reason it ain't loading on Chrome. Didn't have to dig far[1] to find out that you can only stream to Apple products, namely Safari on the Mac.<p>I don't know about you but this really burns. How "open" is the web when an apparent "advocate" of free web limits it's own live news feed to it's own products. Apple has single handedly demonstrated what a world devoid of net neutrality will look like. Not only that, they have demonstrated the reverse, what a world of end to end domination by content providers will look like. You need to consume content as instructed. Yes, we have seen this with blue ray and hd tv with the drm flag. But common, streaming video on the web? Web based content? What if Google said youtube can only be viewed on Chrome, etc. This is just getting ridiculous.<p>[1]http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/10/20/apple-to-livestream-todays-event-to-apple-devices-only/ <comment><USER2> Lame. This has nothing to do with Net Neutrality, and this no more violates the "open web" than a password protected website does.

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't a net neutrality issue. But it certainly is a "cheap shot" by Apple, just like forcing app store developers to use a Mac to develop for the iPhone. Using their position to further their position.</comment>


Startup Question: Why Venture Capital for Web Startup? - <AUTHOR>

This is probably a silly question, but this seems a good forum to get an answer:  It seems to be taken as a given that any founder will sooner or later apply for VC funding.  Why would a founder of a web startup ever bother with venture capital?  A web startup can be built by a team of 1-4 people working on it part-time (so no need for anyone to quit their full-time jobs).  The time required to build such a web system would probably be on the order of 12-18 months.  Because servers, bandwidth, and/or hosting services are cheap, this can all easily be self-financed (for ~$5000-$10000?).  What have I missed here in this analysis that makes venture capital desirable or necessary? <comment><USER2> 1) You oftentimes can't afford success. Google and Facebook would've gone broke without outside funding of some kind, long before they found a way to generate significant revenue.

2) VCs are advisors, and are likely smarter than you about lots of things-- especially how to sell a company. If you want a lifestyle business (37Signals, for example), then avoid VC. If you want to sell a company, you'll have a better chance (and sell it for more money) with a motivated VC.

3) Sales, marketing, and support cost money, for most businesses. If you've got paying customers, telling them "sorry, I'm at my day job" just won't play. For a consumer play, this is less of an issue.

4) A lot of ideas (b2b, mostly) just aren't simple enough to bootstrap with 3 people and 18 months. Of course, it's easy enough to avoid those business ideas. ;-)

5) Businesses are ticking timebombs. Stretch out your development time and your stretching out the opportunity for disaster. A team member can lose interest or get a great job, a killer competitor can manifest and snatch up your customers, etc.

6) Momentum. I can say with experience that it's REALLY hard to keep momentum going with 3 people working part time (I'm doing it right now). When you put a startup on the back burner, it's rare that you all get to focus on it at the same time. When you're rarin' to go, your partner is "really slammed this week".

7) Necessity drives success. When your startup is your full-time job and you have an investor looking over your shoulder, your going to work harder and better. If you've got a job, startup failure is more of an option and delays aren't very painful.

8) Debt or VC can get you to the point where your growth curve starts quicker. When you are confident about the fact that you're on track to build a zillion dollar business, $100k of debt/equity financing get get you there a LOT faster.

All that being said, I've sold two bootstrapped companies-- it works.

I'd advocate for bootstrapping your way to the point where you know if you're on to something. If you can prove that the market desperately wants what you're building, then it USUALLY makes sense to get some cash (via debt or equity)... Assuming you want to focus on growth/exit events instead of profit/lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER3> My last company progressed essentially as you described. We went from nothing to acquisition on $0 of outside investment and essentially $0 of inside investment. So I am here to say that it is possible.

However, there are a number of reasons taking VC money would be "desirable or necessary." Here are some I can think of:

1) Good VCs are often hooked into potential acquisition targets. They can get you noticed and possibly help you fetch a higher price.

2) If you need good targeted seed traffic to get you going, that might take a substantial amount of money. This can take many forms, e.g. a PR firm, adwords, traditional advertising, etc.

3) If you have a working customer acquisition channel that requires money, and more money will help you grow faster, you might want to do it just to grow faster, outpace competition, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Because when a competitor comes along that _does_ have venture funding, they will leave you in the dust. They will be able t do more in less time and scale faster, while your hobby site remains just that.

<comment><USER3> At least in my cases, I have found this to be simply untrue unless it is related to ad spending. A good hacker or two can develop quality scalable software as fast or faster than most VC backed companies.

<comment><USER2> And quality scalable software sells itself? Sometimes, but not usually. There are plenty of examples of lower quality software burying the better product because of sales and marketing horsepower.

<comment><USER3> I never said anything about selling and neither did the comment I was replying to (at least the way I read it). In fact, see my other comment on this thread about why I think you might want to take VC funding if you need to blow out a sales channel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you guys any good at marketing?

"If you build it, they will come" sometimes applies but not usually.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if it takes such a site 2x-4x as long to grow as it would with more expensive marketing, doesn't the fact that what it produces is over and above one's full time employment mean that growing as fast is less critical? After all, with self-financing you don't have people waiting to collect their investment money.

<comment><USER5> That's true.

I guess my point is that sites need some kind of marketing to succeed, unless they build something that "goes viral" and it takes luck and a product people truly want for that to happen.

An advantage of the VC funding is that the investors will make sure you worry about marketing. I'm just thinking of a recent post on here where a guy said "I launched my startup. I need more traffic. What do I do now?" So as long as these guys have some kind of plan for marketing, they can do it themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You are implying that said startup is nothing more than a basic website (ie. MySpace, Facebook).

What if the startup includes mobile features (twitter), or deals with video/music (Slacker, YouTube, etc).

Licensing, lawyer fees, scaling, development costs - they are all relative to what action your startup is taking.

Yes, if you are just building a blog or the next MySpace-killer (which will fail and you suck at life if that's what you are attempting) - yeah, you could pull it off by yourself with a $7 per month shared hosting package.

<comment><USER7> Twitter's mobile "features" are a joke. Twitter is the who's who of easy technology. Your basic forum site has more technology then Twitter does.

<comment><USER8> I think his point was that Twitter's mobile feature costs them a lot of money per month in fees, as would a video streaming site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html>

<http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html>

yeah unless you're doing hardware (or some other capital hungry biz), I think angels are better

It's kind of like multi-threaded programming... don't do it if you can avoid it

Then again there are VCs with special terms nowadays like Charles Rivers and Bay Partners....

</comment><comment><USER10> VC money, gives you capitol weight, and if you wanted to negotiate partner relationships as part of your business plan, the VC $$ will help demonstrate that you can execute. If you are working on an app, that requires page views only, then you might be able to cost through on your own; but if you are building an app with a new model, you will need some time time to tweak things for your customer/ partner relationships before the dollars roll in.

</comment><comment><USER10> IP legal fees might be another one to lead revenue.</comment>


What is freedom? - <AUTHOR> http://paraschopra.com/blog/philosophy/what-is-freedom.htm

<comment><USER2> If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole of freedom can be, I would recommend "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty"

 _No matter whether you are young or old, male or female, married or single, I think How I Found Freedom in an Unfree Word will probably increase your understanding of how erroneous thinking causes us to restrict our own freedom. By increasing your awareness of erroneous thinking and offering you better alternatives, Harry Browne gives you a chance to make choices that will increase your freedom and happiness. Whether you want to make those choices is up to you._

More info: [http://www.amazon.com/How-Found-Freedom-Unfree- World/dp/0965...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Found-Freedom-Unfree- World/dp/0965603679)

</comment><comment><USER3> Freedom: _noun_ ; 1. the state of having both the authority and ability to direct the course of one's own life, including to _end_ it ( _IMHO_ ).

</comment><comment><USER4> Freedom, I am sad to say, is not something that all the people deserve. A person deserve it only as long and as much as he/she appreciate it. Sometimes of course, it's easier and tempting, in order to acquire and secure it, to leverage one's efforts by seducing others with its appeal, no matter if they are or aren't capable of enjoying it, and fight for freedom collectively.

...I definitely should follow digitalengineer's recommendation and get (hopefully) a deeper take on freedom's concept.</comment>


Teespring: How To Build A T-Shirt Company, The Hacker Way - <AUTHOR> http://blog.leanstack.io/teespring-how-to-build-a-t-shirt-company-the-hacker-way/ <comment><USER2> "Because we're in this transition period between PHP and Ruby, we couldn't use PostgreSQL on Heroku because PHP doesn't speak PostgreSQL."

sigh

<comment><USER3> Wait, what am I missing here? [http://php.net/pgsql](http://php.net/pgsql)

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing that it might mean that Heroku's PHP runtime (or the common PHP buildpack, or however it works) doesn't come with a Postgres driver.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yonas from Leanstack here. I also edited for grammar after the initial transcription and it looks like his full statement was inaudible. So *Eric was simply saying that Heroku Postgres does not support PHP ([https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku- postgresql](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgresql)). I'll be making the corrections soon.

<comment><USER5> I don't usually carp about grammatical errors, but if you have any editorial sway, that article has one in the second word of the first sentence.

> Teespring let's anyone easily create and sell t-shirts.

has a grocer's apostrophe on "let's". It should be "lets", sans apostrophe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it, thanks. We'll have a better editorial process moving forward, sorry for the errors guys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A friend and I built a t-shirt site too. It's so incredibly basic (ours is ugly) but was fun to do to actually write some software for the web (we arent really web guys).

The code is actually really cool because we never have to touch a shirt. Shirts.io handles all the t-shirt fulfillment, stripe handles payments, and we design shirts and add them to the site. If you don't have a t-shirt company, you should, just because it's cool to write a program that turns your own money into tshirts.

The site I made was www.binarytees.in

<comment><USER7> I totally agree. I've been playing around with Shopify and Merchify (similar "never touch a shirt" workflow) in the same way. For someone who mainly plays in engineering, testing ads on facebook and adwords and playing marketer for a while (without committing any meaningful amount of capital or attaching my name to anything) has been really enlightening and fun.

www.roguethreadsdesigns.com

For anyone who wants to set up a first business so you get a basic sense of selling things [online], highly recommended.

<comment><USER8> How do you market the site?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be a joke post along the lines of "disrupt threadmaking" -> "disrupt sewing machines" -> "disrupt sweatshop labor issues" -> "disrupt textile design and manufacturing process cycle" -> "disrupt fashion industry" -> "disrupt ecommerce" -> "disrupt logistics"

</comment><comment><USER9> Why don't you allow single orders? I always thought you required 10+ shirts because you had to create some sort of mold and load it into the printers, but it seems that isn't the case.

With everything automated, you could easily allow anyone to create any number of shirts.

<comment><USER10> i think your initial thought is spot on unless they've figured out someway to automate the molds and store them for retrieval at a later time.

apparently they are on the verge of releasing an API and widget so that t shirt designers can embed directly onto their own site. [http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/11/teespring-wants-to-be- the-p...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/11/teespring-wants-to-be-the-place- where-you-can-crowdfund-anything-is-starting-with-t-shirts/)

If they are able to allow single orders along with the widget I don't see whats stopping them from taking over the entire market as they are taking all of the hard work out of running a t shirt company.

good luck fellas

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great write up and insights into Teespring's history, current stack and workflow, really fun read! Awesome to learn from others tribulations, especially enjoyed reading about their solution to getting correct postal addresses, and the tech they used to do so.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why would you want to redo in Ruby and Rails if the current solution is working fine in php? Are there significant benefits? You could significantly improve upon and/or add to the current system/application instead of rewriting, no?

<comment><USER13> From the article, it seems that the major benefit of the change would be the freedom to use PostgreSQL on Heroku.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The url to Teespring in the header is broken:

"Editor's note: Evan Stites-Clayton is Co-Founder at Teespring. Eric Koslow is Lead Developer at Teespring."

=> h[http://www.teespring.com/](http://www.teespring.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been building a t-shirt website at [http://electricfairground.com](http://electricfairground.com) so this article was a really interesting read.

How long did it take you guys to get traction?

<comment><USER16> Why do you have images of the design and (presumably you) wearing the t-shirt design? It looks duplicative and jarring.

<comment><USER15> It's not me, they are stock images. You're right, it does look jarring. I'm currently working on making a number of new products available. Eventually there will be very little duplication on the front page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice article, I had went through a few phone calls with Evan early this year about coming on board as a developer. I really like what these guys are doing.

Good job Evan and Walker.

</comment><comment><USER18> CustomInk.com is worth looking at as a comparison - similar approach started 10+ years ago, now apparently selling several hundred million dollars of T-shirts.

</comment><comment><USER19> > We make more, on average, than $1 per visit.

that is VERY impressive.

</comment><comment><USER16> What kind of t-shirts are you printing on? American Apparel?

</comment><comment><USER20> I was hoping they might be getting robots to make t-shirts.

<comment><USER21> Don't tempt us

<comment><USER20> If you do, I promise I will buy one.

I'll buy a dozen if you manage to make the fabric as well.

And I will send thousands of adorable kittens, on the hour, every hour, if you manage to grow/produce your own fibre or at least make sure it is traceably sourced to groups that are not total bastards.

If you are going to hack t-shirts, you might as well do the entire chain. :)

edit - note: you are not allowed to source the fibre from the kittens just to get the kittens, that's cheating.

<comment><USER21> Kitten cotton (sustainably sourced of course) sounds like a billion dollar idea if I've ever heard one

<comment><USER20> I can see it now, Kitton. The future of fabric.

Each Kitton t-shirt is guaranteed to contain as a minimum, the fluff of 30 of the fluffiest kittens and we at Kitton are dedicated to acting sustainably, with full regard for the environment, all while keeping a close eye on the bottom line, at our unstaffed combined kitty processing plant and owl sanctuary.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Japanese exchange will pay you 5% interest to borrow your Bitcoin for a year - <AUTHOR> https://coincheck.com/lending <comment><USER2> Doing this would be betting that there's less than a 5% chance of this exchange going bankrupt. If they did, you would be an unsecured creditor and would be last in line to get paid back in bankruptcy proceedings.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the opposite of speculating on a rising price. It is a way of shorting cryptocurrencies. Sell now and pay back your creditors after the crash.

<comment><USER4> The best case is the exchange is shorting the btc they borrow from investors.

Worst case, the exchange is insolvent and needs BTC to allow withdrawals to continue.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> How can they generate more than 5% yield on an asset which provides no cashflow?

From proprietary crypto trading?

Selling and investing in high-yield junk bonds?

It can't possibly be just speculation on a rising price.

<comment><USER5> Could just be speculation on falling prices.

1\. Borrow BTC

2\. Sell borrowed BTC at high price point

3\. Buy BTC including interest at lower price point at any time before payback date.

4\. Give back BTC including interest at payback date.

Basically just a way to short sell BTC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is equivalent of getting a locate for short selling. 5% is the loan interest.</comment>


World's Largest Social Network - The Open Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/business/16digi.html?hp

<comment><USER2> Brilliant article.

The Facebook model of human connection/communication is a largely terrible one, if you think about it. Clicking buttons and games and wall posts aren't a reflection of how the real-world model of communication works - and aside from distracting you on a day-to-day basis, the model replaces some of your most important connections with the illusion of intimacy.

I'd much rather call and set up a lunch-date for the people I truly care about than to follow the trickle of updates on their Facebook profiles for a year. Updates are superficial, and splintered, and distracting.

This may, of course, be personal preference, but consider: the Facebook profiles I know tend to become echo chambers at a rate far higher than that of blogs and personal sites. This rarely - if ever - happens in real life.

<comment><USER3> > _Facebook profiles I know tend to become echo chambers at a rate far higher > than that of blogs and personal sites_

I rarely if ever update my Facebook profile, but I still think it's a _fantastic_ site for networking, finding events, and looking up email addresses. I completely disagree with the article that blogs\personal sites and facebook accounts are substitutable goods in competition with each other. For many users, they are in entirely different product categories.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but you don't use Facebook to communicate, you use it to facilitate other forms of communication. IMO, even as you praise it your actions recognize how limited it is as a communications medium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The open web is a network of information while facebook is a network of people. Social is about interaction between people so I disagree that the open web is more social. The open web may be more connected but facebook is more social because the connections are mainly between people. And while facebook is in many ways a closed system it is weaving itself seamlessly into the fabric of the web with the open graph initiative. Search engines may not be able to crawl facebook directly but through it's graph api website developers can access that information.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps the open web is more social in the same way going to a party where you meet new people is more social than just hanging out with the same people all the time.

<comment><USER7> And our social habits are not structured in the same way that Facebook presents it to us, the unstructured "Open Web" is closer to real life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _Susan Herring, professor of information science at Indiana University, sees > it this way: "What the statistics point to is a rise in Facebook, a decline > in blogging, and before that, a decline in personal Web pages. The trend is > clear, she said — Facebook is displacing these other forms of online > publication.["]_

Can anyone verify this claim? Are active blogs decreasing or is the growth rate of new blogs just slowing?

If it's just a slump in the creation rate of new blogs, perhaps it's because the proliferation of blogging tools a few years ago made it much easier for people to start blogging, and it hasn't been getting easier because it's aready really easy?

If anything, I would predict the viral nature of Facebook gets new types of people accusttomed to sharing information online, and would lead to more blogs by increasing the number of would be bloggers to offset any decrease it might cause by providing its own sharing platform.</comment>