PaintCode - Vector Based Obj-C Graphics Code Generator - <AUTHOR> http://paintcodeapp.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm waiting for someone to tell me what's horribly wrong with this before I click the "Buy" button, but it's taking effort to resist the urge. This looks extremely excellent.

<comment><USER3> Core Graphics drawing is actually quite slow. On the Retina iPad, drawing is 4 times as slow and uses 4 times as much memory as the 1st gen iPad, and all the CPU cores in the world are not going to help you.

Having recently ripped out most of my -drawRect: methods, replacing them with custom rendered UIImages, I can attest to the significant performance gains that UIImage gives you. On the Retina iPad, I think it's pretty much mandatory.

With that in mind, I think most people are better off using a tool like this to produce PDF data rather than raw CG calls, and use generic code to render that PDF data to a UIImage. PDF data produced by Quartz is going to render exactly the same as raw CG calls.

It makes for easier project management, and much better performance.

Of course, if you don't need resolution independent graphics, just use png.

<comment><USER4> Its not that Core Graphics is slow, just that CG doesn't guarantee that drawing will take place on the GPU. It turns out that CG typically prefers the CPU for its its drawing. In comparison, when you load images into a UIImageView, you know that the drawing will be done on the GPU, instead.

Quick question: How does UIImage's -drawInRect: and -drawAtPoint: differ?[1]

 _With that in mind, I think most people are better off using a tool like this to produce PDF data rather than raw CG calls, and use generic code to render that PDF data to a UIImage_

The CGPDFPage* functions that Apple provides are document-oriented (remember: the D in PDF stands for "document"), and don't necessarily work well in all cases, either. A compromise could be to render your CG calls into a context that is then turned into a UIImage that gets cached and stuck into a UIImageView for display. This way, you can do your drawing in CG*, get GPU- backed rendering, and don't have to deal with clumsy PDFs to get images.

So, my advice? Click the "buy" button. Drawing in code is just another tool to have. No reason to avoid doing so, if the situation calls for it -- and the trick to any tool is knowing when to use it.

1\. If you guessed that -drawInRect is CPU-backed and drawAtPoint: is GPU- backed, pat yourself on the back. Simply having your resources in a UIImage isn't enough to guarantee GPU-backed drawing. And drawing on the GPU isn't enough to guarantee that it will be fast.

<comment><USER5> drawAtPoint: and drawInRect: both call through to drawInRect:blendMode:alpha: which calls through to CGContextDrawImage. CGContextDrawImage has some optimizations to handle unscaled blends and further optimizations for unscaled blits, but it doesn't use the GPU on iOS. Even if it did, it would be using the GPU to draw into a temporary buffer that would have to be drawn again when the QuartzCore scene is rendered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707421>

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm interested in pretty much the exact opposite of this product.

I've worked on a few apps where I need to pre-render some high-quality images and include them in the app bundle. In some cases they are relatively difficult to hand-draw in an image editor (at least the sort of image editors I can afford) and I've had to write a Mac app to draw the image. Basically the sort of thing that a CAD program would be good at.

So I'd love to have something that I can script in a relatively high-level language that renders really sharp antialiased graphics at 2x resolution with control over things like end caps.

</comment><comment><USER8> IANAL, but does this violate the part of Apple's iPhone Developer License Agreement that says "applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript"? The code is "written" in Objective-C, but it was "originally" not code at all.

<comment><USER9> I don't think that's part of the developer license agreement any more. Considering how successful Unity, Corona and other non-obj-c development tools have been I'd be surprised if it was.

<comment><USER8> Don't know. The last I heard of it was mid-2010, and there doesn't seem to be new information saying it's changed. Apple seems bent on killing Flash, and that wording was a perfect way to deal with CS5. Unity, on the other hand, has a good relationship with Apple, so there's no reason for Apple to invoke Dread Section 3.3.1 against them.

<comment><USER10> That is not part of the license anymore.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for clearing that up. I just didn't know and couldn't readily find it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hardcoding... graphics? Why?

<comment><USER10> People are currently using PNGs

So you're hardcoding either way.

Additionally, paintcode has the flexibility of making say, a button that shrinks/grows based on the shape of another view, say, as is caused when you rotate an ipad, etc.

I've been very happy with the product so far.

<comment> shock-value This product just outputs Obj-C, which must be baked into your source code, right? That's what I think of as hardcoding. I wouldn't call loaded PNG's from outside of the binary "hardcoded".

I can certainly see where having easy programmatic access to the primitives that make up a vector drawing would be useful though.

<comment><USER10> It outputs code that you can customize dynamically though...unlike pngs</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you watch technical videos? - <AUTHOR> Do you watch on your computer and try things out meanwhile? Or do you watch on your phone while in bed or when you want to pass some time? Do you also make notes?<p>I find it a bit difficult to actually stop and watch a full technical video while trying things out. Any tips? <comment><USER2> I (very) rarely watch technical videos because:

> I find it a bit difficult to actually stop and watch a full technical video > while trying things out.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a bit clumsy when it comes to mechanics, so to avoid silly mistakes I usually watch bike repair and tuning videos before and/or during doing maintenance.

As for programming tutorials, I usually vary the playback speed up to 1.5x during parts that resonate well with me, and go back to 1x and pause and rewind as needed when trying out code during the more difficult parts.

</comment><comment><USER4> 90% of technical videos I watch are udemy courses.

Usually I play videos at 1.25-1.5 speed. I just watch the lecture, pause, switch into the editor to follow instructions and write down some code, switch back to paused player(that has the code I need) if I forget what I need, sometimes rewind if I've missed something. Then I resume watching.

</comment><comment><USER5> What do you mean by technical? Live-programming?

I've watch car/Home howto videos. Usually I watch them beforehand to determine if I can do the job casually.

Then get the parts/tools, coordinate timing, and get the job done while having the video nearby.

The constant rewinding is a pain as an afternoon job is condensed into 30 minutes of video.

</comment><comment><USER6> I play them at 1.5x or 2.0x of normal speed and pause them to take notes when needed. Then, when I get to use that code in real life I just re-watch parts that are related to my task.</comment>


How to Grow, Part 1: Pick a Goal - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kirigin.com/pick-a-goal

<comment><USER2> This is great. At Airbnb we usually track one metrics and have a drag-metric to control for quality. Often people over-optimize to a local maxima only to find out that they just pushed the conversion drop to another part in the flow. For every volume metrics we have a quality metric

<comment><AUTHOR> Fascinating. Can you give an example?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You need to have something worth growing before you spend energy on growth. I treat this as step 0

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. How do you measure it? Picking that metric is what you need to do right at the start.

You can't just spend the months or years before product market fit without a lighthouse to guide your efforts.</comment></comment>


Series AA Equity Financing Documents  - <AUTHOR> http://www.ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html

<comment><USER2> .doc?

<comment><USER3> Remains the international standard for legal/biz docs, particularly docs that need to be redlined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=275328>

</comment><comment><USER5> Hey man, where'd they go? Anyone got a copy they want to share?

<comment><USER6> I had to doublecheck the comments to see if it was up previously. After seeing the article on the 404 test, I get very suspicious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Patiently waiting to have a copy</comment>


Self-Hosted "SQL-Not-required" Data Analytics and BI Tool. Inspired by Looker - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mariusandra/insights <comment><USER2> Shameless plug for Metabase, which is also open source and does not require knowledge of SQL: [http://www.metabase.com/](http://www.metabase.com/) [https://github.com/metabase/metabase](https://github.com/metabase/metabase)

Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Microsoft SQL Server, AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, Druid, H2, SQLite, Oracle, Crate, Google Analytics, Vertica.

<comment><USER3> Serious question even though as I read and reread it, I am aware it does sound like snark...

How is this a sustainable product/company? (AKA How do you make money?)

Is love to dig in to what looks like an awesome product. But to justify the time investment, it would be helpful to know how it will be around long term.

<comment><USER4> We offer white label licenses for embedding, do a bit of hosting and are going to be launching adjacent (paid) products.

(another person from Metabase)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I strongly feel that if a domain language is not significantly more complex than the domain itself, then the person who is supposed to have domain knowledge should be able to learn the language without much difficulty. I've seen a lot of attempts to build 'simple' analytical systems without SQL, and it works well for simple queries - but 'business people', when they're smart and motivated, soon start asking more and more specific and detailed questions, with additional conditions and joins - and it soon turns out that SQL is, in fact, an appropriate instrument for complexity that they need.

Your examples seem pretty simple. What about a question like this: how did our 5-week cohort (users that at the time of the event were registered between 4 and 5 weeks) ARPU vary over time and over character class they chose at registration? Is there a statistically significant corellation between participating in any of the 20 custom events we've done in the last half a year and user retention (which must be calculated relative to each users' cohort)?

Of course, a lot of business analysts are moving away from SQL to R, but I doubt that they're after simplicity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed my examples are simple. However this was the problem: there was no tool around to easily answer those simple questions. Now there is... at least one that fits my arbitrary definitions of what such a tool should do.

Hopefully having a tool to ask these simple queries will give rise to smarter questions, which will either prompt the development of custom dashboards or improvements in the tool itself.

I agree in theory that "business people", if and when they start asking these questions, can and should learn SQL. However my experience seems to point the other way. They'll ask the developer to do more and more reports, eventually hiring someone for the "data analyst" role.

<comment><USER5> > eventually hiring someone for the "data analyst" role

Oh, I was presuming that a 'business person' and 'data analyst' is the same person. However, usually 'data analyst's job isn't just to write SQL - he's a person who understands the product, marketing, dives into data and researches it, and comes back with actionable insights for the whole business.

And if you're looking for easier scenarios, Excel and it's pivot tables are usually quite enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey, this is cool. Thanks for making it available for free to the world.

Note apart, I feel like knowing SQL is something that every developer should be comfortable with. The amount of magic that an ORM does, will tend to zero the more SQL you know. It's weird that we as developers don't know how to query our main data repository, don't you think so?

Once again, thanks for making this available, I feel like this would be useful for a lot of people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I totally agree that every developer should know SQL. Even if you're a COBOL developer.

The point of this tool is to remove the developer as a bottleneck for when business people want to ask questions.

I will eventually add a "generated SQL" view where you can see how the sausage is made if needed... but I assume most of the time it'll stay hidden.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks interesting.

A few suggestions for useful features: Time Series functionality would be handy (Exponentially weighted moving average, centered moving average etc).

Aggregations across sliding intervals (by shift / by day/week/month/ Finical year etc). Being able to quickly answer questions like What is the production for week to date, current shift etc. How about previous week/shift etc.

One other comment I will give is I find SQL to be useful as a protection against product lock-in. It's essentially the lowest common denominator language for dealing with data extraction/transformation etc. Our business has been burnt before by having our reporting/BI written in a tool specific language it made migrating away from the product very difficult. Ever since I've very much been of the mindset to do as much using SQL as possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

We already support the most basic sliding intervals: day, week, month, quarter, year. Custom ones would be convenient, I agree.

Check the menu when you hover the header of the column "week confirmed_at" here: [http://insights- demo.mariusandra.com/explorer?columns=Order....](http://insights- demo.mariusandra.com/explorer?columns=Order.confirmed_at!week%2COrder.user.country.name%2COrder.id!!count&sort=-Order.confirmed_at!day&treeState=Order%2COrder.user%2COrder.user.country&graphTimeFilter=last-365&facetsColumn=Order.user.country.name&facetsCount=6&graphCumulative=false&percentages=false&filter%5B0%5D=Order.confirmed%3Dequals%3Atrue)

The plan is to add a view called "generated SQL", where you can see and copy/export the raw query that went into generating the data. This way you can always validate the data and get some "insight" into how it's fetched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wanted to share about my BI startup here for those who're interested too: holistics.io - we're a small, self-funded BI startup in Asia (Singapore). Started 2 years ago and have customers around the globe, from small startups to big unicorns.

[https://www.holistics.io](https://www.holistics.io)

We're not free or open-source, but a lot more affordable than other competitors. Our pricing starts with $50/mo for 5 users. We have a few customers who moved to us from open-source alternatives or other commercial competitors.

We support PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Redshift, Greenplum, BigQuery, Presto, etc.

If you try it out let us know you're from HN and your first 2 months are on us.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to build something in this area that used NLU ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_understanding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_understanding)) to let the user ask an actual question, after they have marked up their database schema. That would be a fun product to build.

<comment><AUTHOR> Go for it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For anyone interested in running a Docker/CentOS instance: [https://gist.github.com/mrw34/d60fa30a08c864286e819647fc0eaa...](https://gist.github.com/mrw34/d60fa30a08c864286e819647fc0eaac2)

</comment><comment><USER11> Does it support Redshift?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't tried, but if it doesn't, it shouldn't be hard to add.

So far I have only tried with PostgreSQL (full support) and SQLite (some date functions break), however any SQL dialect should work fine... except maybe when it comes to the date functions, which everyone has implemented differently.

<comment><USER12> RedShift is very close to PostgreSQL (it even uses PostgreSQL drivers to connect to their clusters from programming languages or data IDEs).

A sneakier difference is query latency. RedShift is scalable for queries that scan through very large amounts of data - but there is overhead for each query. One complicated JOIN can be faster than 50 small queries that ORMs and web apps like to make.</comment></comment></comment>


HN: The Good Parts (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ <comment><USER2> PG's essay "What I've Learned From Hacker News"[0] is on point:

 _COMMENTS: Bad comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions. While the quality of links on the frontpage of HN hasn 't changed much, the quality of the median comment may have decreased somewhat.

There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. There is a lot of overlap between the two—mean comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb—but the strategies for dealing with them are different. Meanness is easier to control. You can have rules saying one shouldn't be mean, and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on meanness.

Keeping a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is not so easily distinguishable. Mean people are more likely to know they're being mean than stupid people are to know they're being stupid.

The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than anything specific to comment threads. Probably it's simply that stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones.

Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. So one advantage of forbidding meanness is that it also cuts down on these.

Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.

Maybe the solution is to add a delay before people can respond to a comment, and make the length of the delay inversely proportional to some prediction of its quality. Then dumb threads would grow slower._

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)

<comment><USER3> I think the top submissions have declined somewhat over the years. Maybe it's just my personal taste that's changed, but I like two types of articles. The ones that are interesting and the ones that are actually useful to me. There is still a lot of interesting articles on HN, that diver story from yesterday is a great example of one. It's rare I see an article that's actually useful though. Google cloud being down, and google engineers explaining what was going one is one of the few useful thing I've seen on HN in 2019. (And that actually mainly involved the comment section).

I realise that you will always get a lot of hype-technologies on a technology focused social media, but they are actually not that interesting to me. Sure Rust is cool, but chances are that I won't actually ever meet someone who uses Rust professionally in my lifetime. This frankly makes the majority of Rust related content rather irrelevant to me, and I say Rust, but I could be mentioning a range of the other cool, new and not-adopted technologies. Now, I'm not saying that those articles shouldn't be here, because I think they absolutely should. It's obviously more news-worthy to write about something new and cool, rather than something old and tried. When the majority, or all, the content is made up of technologies that will probably never see real world adoption, however, well then HN becomes somewhat irrelevant, at least to me. Maybe that means I'm just on the wrong web-page though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to take this moment to highlight the contributions of HN user philipkglass. Their comments on energy-related articles are always well informed and well explained.

</comment><comment><USER5> I used to really love HN for the good parts. Even back when I first started lurking, you would see waves of mean and incorrect comments, but it ebbed at times. These days the good stuff seems to be getting drowned out more and more. It feels like the polarization of discussion based social media is finally consuming this place like a cancer. I'll always love the things I learn here, but I'm driven away from the discussions more and more.

</comment><comment><USER6> That intro leaves much to be desired in terms of inviting the reader to what comes after it.

<comment><USER7> Why, the intro perfectly describes a comment such as this one :-)

<comment><USER6> Which part of the intro? Was my comment mean? Was it wrong?

<comment><USER8> It was short ;-)

 _(Oh, sorry, it was the quote in the top comment that warned against short comments)_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have only lurked here for a few years, but from the beginning it seemed to me that the HN zeitgeist is slightly sociopathic. It does not stop me from lurking, however, perhaps because it is one of the last bastions of text only web.

</comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me, I was planning to extract my own most-highly-voted comments and see if I could make some sort of book or longform piece out of them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Do you put comment licensing in your profile? I do.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes, comments on HN are mostly a time waste or even total garbage, as are comments everywhere else.

BUT, there's the occasional nugget hidden in that pool of filth that makes it worth digging through :-)

<comment><USER13> So how would you judge your comment by that metric? To me it seems you just repeated what OP said many times without adding something new.

<comment><USER14> >> _So how would you judge your comment by that metric? To me it seems you just repeated what OP said many times without adding something new._

One could say exactly the same thing about this comment - and the one I am making right now. Comments about comments should be kept to the bare minimum as they invite flame wars and add noise.

<comment><USER13> I know. That was, what I was pointing out. Complaining about bad comments with a bad comment, while feeling superior.

... so did my comment raise the bar? I don't know. It maybe made the poster thinking. Because what bothers me actually much more than a non expertise comment is a snarky elitist comment, failing to see their own ignorance.

Maybe because I was a lot like that. I am very smart. But I know (now) that I can be very stupid as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> dan, please set max-width: 40em; on your content. It's unreadable as-is. I will read this later on Pocket.

<comment><USER16> You can use reader mode if your browser supports it. But I agree.

<comment><USER17> FWIW, I immediately enabled Reader Mode in my browser and was _very_ confused when the topic of the article changed abruptly because I was running into the other articles on the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Most HN comments are gratuitously mean or incorrect, but it has good technical comments.

This is so true. Posting work I've done on Show HN is like going back to an abusive relationship with someone who just wants to crush, dismiss and ridicule every creative thing you ever did or wanted to do.

I've spent a lot of (necessary, but still feels wasted) time getting over the trauma of commenters on Show HN and their cruelty. I find their comments contribute to the self-doubt inner narrative I have and I hate that, particularly the idea that some random abusive person on the internet can influence your future choices by convincing you you are stupid, or your work is bad or whatever. But I consider I just have to find my own way to get stronger about this and to somehow be resilient to that. Because people are like that every where you go.

In processing this emotional/comment abuse trauma, I also have spent quite a lot of time thinking about what makes each person say something mean, when they could have pointed out something in a considerate way. I think the path to become an abusive HN commenter is different for each person who goes that way, but one thing I think must be behind it is people who feel crushed, or dismissed creatively themselves, and wanting to perpetrate that on other people as a substitute for making something themselves. It's common that the meanest commenters don't have any "submissions" or at least no personal "this is something I did" submissions.

Creative communities don't have to be like this. OpenProcessing, Glitch are some very supportive places I've seen for creative work. IndieHackers, Product Hunt, the same. Here it seems that the community "tolerates" this behavior and possibly views it as some sort of sport or entertainment, as unhealthy as that is. I'm not dissing entertainment like that, it has its place, I just wish/expect it were not here.

But that leads to a second theory I have about abusive commenters, that this is a "tech" or engineer thing, and not a creative person thing. Tech has an asshole problem, and maybe there's correlation between people who are technically good, but emotionally abusive or lacking in empathy.

I find often mean comments are disguised as not, to give the abuser an "out" or plausible deniability. So they get to perpetrate their cruelty under a cover of just being helpful, or whatever.

Anyone want to share some strategies they have for processing this trauma in an efficient way, or some strong responses they have for it?

<comment><USER13> Well, you should be aware that a lot of people who spend a lot of time on HN are bitter, because their own ideas did not flourish and they are stuck in a mediocre job, so wandering on HN and alike to get inspirational spirit, but with jealousy, so not eager to love new things at first sight, but to smash them. But they are also able to applaud something if they love it.

So of course it is possible that your work is not the best, if random internet strangers can crush it easily.

I found HN to be a much nicer place than most other places on the internet, but still, you should not expect anonymous people to be nice. Not in this internet, not in this world with all its freaky, unhappy people. Happy people usually have other things to tend to, that makes them happy, than posting all the time. So don't take it too personal. View it as a challenge and don't try to please a internetmob.

<comment><USER19> > you should be aware that a lot of people who spend a lot of time on HN are > bitter, because their own ideas did not flourish and they are stuck in a > mediocre job, so wandering on HN and alike to get inspirational spirit, but > with jealousy

That's quite an assumption, don't you think?

<comment><USER13> Yes it is. And I know, I got no data to back it up, just experience and logic. And yes, there are some people who really like to post a lot here and enjoy it. But they are the exception.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Omek Interactive Could Blow Microsoft's Project Natal Out Of The Water (Video) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/omek-interactive-project-natal/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just like he said in the post, we are closer to Minority Report than people think I guess...I was amazed when I saw the video!</comment>


A.I. And Big Data Could Power a New War on Poverty? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/opinion/ai-and-big-data-could-power-a-new-war-on-poverty.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region <comment><USER2> AI will far more likely power a new war on the poor than power a war to fight poverty. Through new ways to discriminate in lending/housing (1), and new ways to discriminate in hiring (2), new ways to discriminate in policing (3.) AI will be no boon to the poor. It will be a new tool for the wealthy to use math as smoke screen for practices they have used for centuries to keep the poor poor and the rich rich.

1)[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x44dp/ai- could-r...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x44dp/ai-could- resurrect-a-racist-housing-policy) & [https://www.americanbanker.com/news/is- artificial-intelligen...](https://www.americanbanker.com/news/is-artificial- intelligence-a-threat-to-fair-lending) 2)[http://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/economy/article/2112786/u...](http://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/economy/article/2112786/updated-laws-needed-hong-kong-can-embrace- artificial) 3) [https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk- assessm...](https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments- in-criminal-sentencing)

<comment><USER3> I am not sure exactly how you would fight a "war on poverty" without also fighting a "war on the poor."

This is some "we are going to invade your country and force you to be free" level Orwellian thinking.

<comment><USER2> By helping the poor out of poverty instead of strengthening the mechanisms that put them there to keep them there.

I'm not sure how exactly that's Orwellian thinking, please explain.

<comment><USER4> "War is Welfare" is fairly Orwellian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is talking about analytics. Analytics will have a marginal impact at best on reducing poverty. Of course people working in analytics have been benefited by it through the income it has given them, but the cumulative effects of analyzing data will not lead to some epiphany that will help us to end poverty.

In order to bring about structural change of the scale needed to end poverty, we need to reach levels of technology, productivity and social organization that we have not yet reached today. We will not ascend to this level by analyzing some set of socio-economic data. We will reach this point by building machines that can do work for us and automating entire supply chains so that labor no longer impacts production costs.

<comment><USER6> > In order to bring about structural change of the scale needed to end > poverty, we need to reach levels of technology, productivity and social > organization that we have not yet reached today.

They been sayin' this since the wheel, methinks!

Jesus said, "The poor will always be with you." Not being a Christian, I still see the wisdom in this statement.

In wealth-oriented societies, rich people have been fighting a war to get rid of poor people since the beginning of time--throw them in jail, lock them in ghettos, deport them, wall them out. The structural change needed is in people's attitudes, society's values, not our technology.

It's getting worse, not better, and the more hopes we pin on our techno- fantasy, the harder the crash is going to be.

<comment><USER5> But you're leaving out the fact that the average person is much better off now, materially, than they ever were in the past.

<comment><USER6> The average person might be a little better off than a decade ago, but the gap between rich and poor keeps getting wider, and even worse, the poor are actually getting poorer. If the rich get even richer, the average keeps going up, well done!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Second, we can bring what is known as differentiated education — based on the idea that students master skills in different ways and at different speeds — to every student in the country. A 2013 study by the National Institutes of Health found that nearly 40 percent of medical students held a strong preference for one mode of learning: Some were listeners; others were visual learners; still others learned best by doing._

This study was a 100 person survey with no experimental evidence to back up people's beliefs. I've been working with educators for a while, and they've said that "learning styles" are just a myth with no solid evidence. All this survey says is that people think they learn best via one method, but people are notoriously bad at knowing what is an effective way of learning. In surveys people overvalue the "intensity" of a learning experience [1], which makes them think things like a 3-week bootcamp are more effective, when really spaced repetition is a better use of time.

At least in the US, there are many easier ways we could improve our education methods before resorting to ML-driven customization.

[1] [http://www.pnas.org/content/114/37/9854.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/114/37/9854.full)

<comment><USER8> I don't really have experimental data to back this up. But after struggling for my entire life until recently with learning this is the experience I have had studying for my last course(after a decade of struggling to study).

I use to write everything down, it was the only way to retain whatever little information that I was capable of retaining. I never had enough confidence to NOT write everything. Realizing that all my abilities were impaired because of improper cognitive development. I decided to start from scratch, having nothing developed and picking one area that I was suited to. I have been practicing reciting rap lyrics of Eminem and Nas(not really for any reason, it was just fun). What I realized is that now my ability to recall information was significantly improved at least from a verbal learning style perspective. And it only took a few months develop. While studying for my final I went back to my old habits of writing every single detail down and realizing I will never have enough time to write it all down. So I started reciting knowledge the same way I would recite rap lyrics and I retained EVERYTHING. I have never studied so little, yet I aced my exam got an A in the course and was proud.

Moral of the story is that people are different, and while most people may learn from one method, it doesn't mean they will have that capability developed at the time they need it. So they have to learn to adapt with what is available to them.

edit: I will add that again poverty is the source of all this. My parents grew up in severe poverty and never were able to develop these skills properly and I had to suffer because of that.

<comment><USER9> Mind if I ask what was responsible for your "improper cognitive development"?

<comment><USER8> Very complicated issues, but mostly traumatic childhood of my parents which was mirrored by my brain and had to be undone before any serious cognitive development could happen. Trauma = Disassociation = Brain functions become disconnected and do not work properly. It becomes harder when you have to bootstrap your brain to work well and you are basically starting over 20 years later than everyone.

<comment><USER9> > _Disassociation_

Interesting. Do you mean like depersonalization and/or derealization?

<comment><USER8> It is probably all of the above. It is the umbrella term that covers everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I doubt it will help to combat poverty.

It will be used as a tool by the rich to extract more money and increase poverty.

Who will wield these AI tools that is supposed to be used to fight poverty?

Corporations are for-profit and a corporate sociopath cannot be concerned about limiting profit to help the poor. They'll want to use AI as a new tool to increase profits. This will come at the expense of the human populace at large.

My government in the United States of America is rapidly falling to greed. Corporations only act nominally concerned about the poor as a PR act to prevent the rage of the populace from using government against them. Since my government is even further down the slide into plutocracy than ever before, this government will neither stop the greed-based corporate use of AI nor will it use it to help the poor, because there's no money for their rich patrons in helping the poor.

Even you want this magic AI tech to help the poor, who will do it? Where will you get the data in the first place to feed into this A.I. and Big Data magic machine? I argue the two sources above will not be a help in so far as they might threaten the greed they exhibit.

</comment><comment><USER11> The more likely outcome here is that AI and Big Data will be used to extract some of the remaining funds that poor people have by tweaking business models and marketing to become just that much more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER12> Poverty is a social issue, it has almost nothing to do with tech fundamentally and tech normally only amplifies social beliefs, it rarely fixes them.

<comment> wu-ikkyu Indeed, it seems what we need to end poverty is more "heart" (empathy), rather than mind (intelligence)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can we quit having wars on things ? Everything we have a war against gets worse.

<comment><USER14> It's not a real war. LBJ noted that war seems to get heaps of money shoveled on it while basic domestic stuff goes unfunded. So declaring a war on poverty is a way to anchor the amount of money spent up where people think of funding wars instead of down where they think of funding welfare programs.

<comment><USER15> All true, but I think geggam still has a point. What if framing these things as wars is somehow part of why they don't work?

<comment><USER16> You might find this paper interesting, into explores the idea of framing things as war:

[https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/575/F01/lakoff.johnson...](https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/575/F01/lakoff.johnson80.pdf)

There's a book from the same authors that contains a more expansive list of metaphors and examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _But the condition of poverty often entails one or more of these realities: a lack of income (joblessness); a lack of preparedness (education); and a dependency on government services (welfare). A.I. can address all three._

Wow, and not in a good way. Reading that makes me apoplectic. My first instinct is to write something full of swear words and insults that wouldn't meet HN guidelines.

First, poverty is gendered. One of the things that drives poverty for women is the cultural expectation that we provide caregiving to our own children and other relatives essentially for free and that society owes us nothing for this imposition on our time and energy. There are other factors, but that's a big one.

The next thing that drives poverty is various intractable personal problems, such as health issues, learning disabilities and mental health issues. One thing society can do to reduce the degree to which such issues separate the Haves from the Have Nots is to provide universal health care.

Dependency on government services is driven in part by poor design of services such that getting on them actively cripples your ability to get off of them. This entire article sounds like a snide way to blame poor people for their problems rather than look for actual solutions.

I can't believe they say in the same article that a) jobs are outright going away and b) the solution for unemployed people is superior job matching services. If there are no jobs to get, you don't have a matching problem.

This is such utter drivel. Wow.

<comment><USER18> > One of the things that drives poverty for women is the cultural expectation > that we provide caregiving to our own children and other relatives > essentially for free and that society owes us nothing for this imposition on > our time and energy. There are other factors, but that's a big one.

You have a source for that? I would think that the wage gap would be a much more significant factor than cultural expectations. And I would hope that people would provide caregiving to their own children for free.

<comment><USER17> There are many sources. Off the top of my head, you can look for books, articles etc about _the feminization of poverty, pink collar ghetto_ and _the second shift._ I have read far too many books (articles etc) over the course of decades to remember them all.

 _And I would hope that people would provide caregiving to their own children for free._

So would I. But why is it only _women_ are expected to provide such care and are classified as _gold digging whores_ if they think the father should provide for them while they do so and also provide some compensation into the future for the lost career building opportunities it costs them? _Parents_ should both be responsible for the product of having gotten jiggy together, not just _mothers._

<comment><USER19> In the USA, alimony and child support serve this purpose. Other developed countries are similar, or have strong non-gendered social security.

In USA, while women are in poverty more than men, likely for the reasons you highlight, women receive more social services than men, for those same reasons. Homelessness disproportionately impacts men (by far), because woman and children have more access to social services.

<comment><USER20> According to [https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/adult-poverty- rate...](https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/adult-poverty-rate-by- gender/), poverty rates between men and women are comparable; only 3% difference. Also, besides poverty, I would expect a comparable expectation on men to make up the deficit by working harder. I'm guessing the disparity is really driven by a significant disparity between single mothers and single fathers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What this article describes is a terrible, confused, scary nightmare.

From the very first picture that begins the article on-down, Elizabeth Mason advocates an absolutely frightening system that is made even more scary by how she comes through as genuinely/naively believing in it all.

> Big data promises something closer to an unbiased, ideology-free evaluation > of the effectiveness of these social programs. We could come closer to the > vision of a meritocratic, technocratic society that politicians from both > parties at state and local levels — those closest to the practical problems > their constituents face — have begun to embrace.

First, meritocracy was first brought up as a joke by the author who coined the term. Second, who is advocating for this "technocratic vision" short of Silicon Valley CEOs? This "vision" of centralized, unbiased analysis by top- notch planners was what we had in Vietnam or with GOSPLAN in the USSR, not what we need now.

Third, AI works fast, which means even if it's 75% less "ideological" or whatever, it's rate of speed is so fast that it will magnify any and all biases that might be lurking inside. To imagine that it is unbiased is crazy, let alone to think that it wouldn't be used to some horrible malevolent end (cough _China_ cough).

This article made me sick, but it was so uplifting and wonderful to see all the other negative reactions on here and that this is not representative of HN.

</comment><comment><USER22> Unemployment is only at around 4% right now, extremely low. Want to take a huge bite out of poverty? raise the minimum wage and increase benefits so that folks don't need to work three jobs just to pay their rent. no AI robots needed. just garden variety wealth redistribution that's sorely needed.

<comment><USER23> Raising the minimum wage will simply result in jobs being replaced by kiosks.

Not that it won't happen soon anyway, but why hasten it.

<comment><USER22> Here, argue with the Economic Policy Institute regarding this very basic and widely recognized economic fact: [http://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage- workers-poverty-...](http://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers- poverty-anymore-raising/)

<comment><USER24> The EPI piece actually doesn't address the other commenter's point in any way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There will be a big hurdle of _political correctness_ when the machine spits out answers that don't conform to establishment dogma -- e.g. [https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/02/machine-learning-and- human...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/02/machine-learning-and-human-bias- an-uneasy-pair/)

Chris Stucchio writes about this in depth: [https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_...](https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_and_discriminatory_algorithms.html)

<comment><USER26> Those issues aren't different, morally, than good old-fashioned _racial profiling_ , or really any other discriminatory use of stereotypes.

If you're cheering for _guilt by association_ to make a comeback just because the evil establishment thinks it's a bad idea, I'm at a loss of words. Any other fundamental freedoms you'd like to abolish because smart people happened to think they are good ideas? Presumption of innocence? Habeas corpus? The 5th amendment? Suffrage?

<comment><USER25> > _If you 're cheering for guilt by association to make a comeback just > because the evil establishment thinks it's a bad idea, I'm at a loss of > words._

I'm not cheering for anything. I'm pointing out that machines may have a distasteful view of the world and that this will be a stumbling block for using them effectively.

> _Any other fundamental freedoms you 'd like to abolish because smart people > happened to think they are good ideas? Presumption of innocence? Habeas > corpus? The 5th amendment? Suffrage?_

I'd appreciate it if you could tone down the hysterical moral outrage, particularly when aimed in my direction.

<comment><USER26> My outrage isn't directed at your moral failings,which are unfortunately all too common, but at your intellectual failures.

You are misrepresenting the status quo when you're insinuating that some "establishment" conspiracy will be suppressing the usefulness of violating fundamental rights, such as assumption of innocence, in their quest to defend "political correctness".

This is obviously wrong. Such rights, and others like privacy or the right to a fair trial, only make sense under the assumption that their violation would in some ways benefit law enforcement. Otherwise there'd be no need to protect them.

While the argument that, for example, "torture doesn't work" is sometimes made, it is always secondary to "our civilisation is better than that, and it is strong enough to accept a (small) hit in effectiveness in the defence of fundamental rights".

So when you believe you've stumbled onto some greater truth, and that the world needs to hear some tough talk of realism, you've simply missed the essential message of enlightenment, and are reverting to 16th-century morals.

<comment><USER25> > _My outrage isn 't directed at your moral failings,which are unfortunately > all too common, but at your intellectual failures._

Would you care to enumerate the moral failings of mine which you have identified? Or is this just an indiscriminate attack?

> _You are misrepresenting the status quo when you 're insinuating that some > "establishment" conspiracy will be suppressing the usefulness of violating > fundamental rights, such as assumption of innocence, in their quest to > defend "political correctness"._

I have made no such statements nor insinuations. There is no conspiracy. If this is the only such intellectual failure of mine which you have (mis)identified, then I suggest you recalibrate your moral outrage meter and try a less scattershot approach to fighting ideas and messengers which make you uncomfortable.

As to the rest of your statements, I think I agree with them mostly. We should not violate fundamental rights including the presumption of innocence particularly. I agree with prohibitions on torture on moral grounds and not simply consequential grounds.

I have not missed the essential message of the Enlightenment and in fact uphold such ideals as a core part of my identity. So in summary, I reiterate my concern that your outrage is indiscriminate and scattershot, and you have misunderstood my position and statements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I admire the authors optimism but this is just another wishy washy article that someone seems to to have thought up while sitting on the toilet.

 _Her_ main points are, while AI will put people out of jobs "big data" can help match people who lots jobs with all the unfilled positions we have (like picking fruits in a field or bathroom cleaning or something like that).

AI can help "tutor" our kids so teaching can be tailored to each child/person without lobbing us into classrooms with the same curriculum

and lastly, it will help distribute welfare services efficiently (or something)

<comment><USER28> The author is a woman

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Despite the consensus that the article is pretty bad, the discussion here is pretty good (edit: or at least was to begin with). For a hot-contro submission, that's rare. So instead of downweighting the post itself, I'm going to leave it unpenalized except for a question mark of protest in the title.

</comment><comment><USER29> Eh, if jobs are going away, we need more jobs more than we need matchmaking for existing jobs. I can tell you from personal experience that there is a huge difference between working when there are more jobs than qualified workers and working when there are more qualified workers than jobs, and the humane way to balance that equation in favor of us workers is to create more jobs.

(It is interesting, though, because who is qualified is a subjective thing; either to the whims of a human manager, or whatever hidden statistical correlation the ML algorithm found. Right now, my impression is that standards are much higher for new grads than when I broke into the industry, and much lower for the higher end jobs that I now compete for.)

Which isn't to say that the matchmaking problem isn't difficult or important or interesting, but it's certainly not the whole of the problem.

(Also, where I am, my employer pays a rather large cut of what I earn to the matchmaker. like 30% though it varies a lot, as far as I can tell. Rather more than I pay in rent. At my end of the market, my marginal dollars are devalued to the point where I'm still making a really good living on my 70%... but if I was making a lot less, that 30% could really matter. From that perspective, inserting a matchmaker into the low end might contribute to the further impoverishment of the poor.)

</comment><comment><USER30> The article seems a little shallow. Many questions are left unanswered. Just projecting where the future jobs will be OR customizing learning based on preferable modes of learning, probably will NOT eliminate poverty. Universal basic income along with more humane policies could help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love the comments on here. I posted this article not because I agree with the article's take, but because I wanted to see what the HN community thinks of the article (and the topic). I haven't been disappointed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> There are two sides in every war, and in the war on poverty, those fighting to create and preserve poverty currently hold most of the cards.

Harken back to 2000 and let us read the business press...I will pick one article by example ( [http://money.cnn.com/2000/05/05/economy/employ](http://money.cnn.com/2000/05/05/economy/employ) )...what does the article say?

"Joblessness at 30-year low...The U.S. unemployment rate tumbled to a 30-year low of 3.9 percent in April, the government reported Friday, as worker-starved companies raised wages and went on a hiring spree that created 340,000 new jobs. But the good news for workers on Main Street sparked fears on Wall Street"

What? Workers looking for a job being more easily able to get a job is something that _sparks fear on Wall Street_ ?

"Still, the markets took the data in stride...The markets harbor no doubts of the Fed's concerns over labor market tightness."

Both "the markets" and "the Fed" are concerned that so many people are employed?

Basically this CNNfn article is saying, correctly, that Americans wanting a job being able to get a job is something that is _feared_ by Wall Street, "markets", The Fed etc., not something that is desired.

As that is the way the system is set up, and this is not the only business press article or pronouncement of that time saying this, one has to be skeptical of the desire for a "war on poverty". Because as it says, Wall Street, "the markets", The Fed and most of the powers that be are deathly afraid of that happening. They are in the business of preserving poverty, and creating it when necessary.

Of course, this article was written by a corporation owned by people who feel this way. So this is about as blunt an explanation as you're going to get from them, or the mass media, which is completely owned and controlled by them. For a clearer explanation of all of this from a source independent of that, you might try consulting a source such as this - [https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion- and...](https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and- stagnation)

</comment><comment><USER32> It would be awesome if people stopped talking about the alleviation of societal ills by saying that people will "go to war" on them.

Poverty isn't something you war on. Poverty's something people are lifted out of.

</comment><comment><USER33> Wars on poverty often become wars on poor people. I was there when Clinton reduced max coverage to 2 years. It was a sentence of lifetime poverty for people who had no option, and that was strongly enhanced by the "human glue".

<comment><USER19> War on Poverty was a Johnson program. You can't cite Clinton's _backing away from_ War of Poverty as an argument against War on Poverty.

<comment><USER34> I think the idea here is that cutting benefits could be construed as part of the War on Poverty by the argument that the benefits locked people into poverty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash As excited as I am for the breathtaking advances in machine learning over the past decade, I am equally displeased with the media's mad rush to tout AI as a magic elixir of the modern era.

Our societies have been constructed over a long period of time with gaping inefficiencies. Case in point: the automobile. Yes, back when the alternatives were capital-intensive railroads or poop-intensive stagecoaches, automobiles offered unprecedented mobility. Yet in our blind rush towards our perceived ideal of modernity, we built cities to satisfy the needs of the automobile first, and people second, or last (thanks GM!).

Self-driving cars could make transportation easier, faster, and more accessible, but it's an awful lot of assumed progress that doesn't factor in the inherent and damaging inefficiencies of the automobile:

-Cities are built for cars. Wide streets make walking worse. When I spent a month in Rome I never needed to use a car because everything was so much closer to my front door.

-Suburbs are unsustainable. They require a scale of infrastructure (water, electric, gas, pavement, internet, etc) that is far more expensive per mile than in dense cities, and anybody whose home street has been pulverized to dust can tell you that there is simply neither money nor will to pay forward our expensive past mistakes.

-More roads suck. Anybody from car-centric cities (LA, ATL) knows that with massive 8 lane highways comes equally massive amounts of drivers. LA has highways everywhere and they're basically always packed. Is that a sign of a working or a breaking system?

-Cars are expensive. People who need cars to work get tied into expensive loans which hamper their economic potential. And Uber is not even on the same planet of being close enough in price to replace ownership with access. If poor people didn't need cars, they would be less poor. Poor people in the developed world who spend a great deal of their paychecks on transportation are the first world equivalent of the third world villager who spends most of their productive time securing fresh water for their families (which we take for granted comes clean out of the tap).

If we really want the world to improve, we cannot simply tweak the edges of a broken system. Just the example of automobiles shows how fiddling with algorithms only serves to further bake-in our structural inefficiencies. We have to be willing to put anything and everything on the table for debate.

In short, we have to restructure all of our society to attain the lowest cost of living for all people. Otherwise we will keep developing radical technologies while scratching our heads and wondering why the poor keep getting poorer.

</comment><comment><USER35> Maybe. It's also possible that self-interested parties will use AI to further disenfranchise the poor. For example black box denial of access to a checking account into perpetuity due to an AI-driven risk score.

</comment><comment><USER36> Is it so far fetched that perhaps the existence of so much poverty is intentional, or at least caused by human action and inaction? The power structures have a lot directly and indirectly invested in keeping the common man down. With current technology and productivity, humans should be capable of lifting even 20 billion people out of poverty but market inefficiencies caused by corporate greed and border controls reduce that capability by orders of magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER37> As they say, the cleverest minds are too busy trying to optimise ad clicks.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm bad for only having read the headline, so far. But the only way I see this playing out, is in a bad way, i.e. war on the impoverished.

Human history has a long and fairly consistent set of precedents. More and more, the domestic U.S. from 1945 - circa 1980, appears to be the exception rather than the rule. (An exception not equally shared and also purchased at the price of some populations abroad, e.g. with respect to natural resource extraction.)

</comment><comment><USER39> The only way this can succeed is if it can be proven that the rich and powerful can become even more rich and powerful through the reduction of poverty.

</comment><comment><USER40> Rather than focusing on poverty, I wonder if we should be focusing on wealth disparity/inequality instead. It seems like reduction of poverty is being used to distract from and even justify the increased wealth inequality. Reducing poverty is a noble goal but the scary systematic problem to me is the ever growing concentration of wealth amongst a tiny elite and the decline of the middle class.

And I don't see how AI/machine learning + big data can decrease wealth inequality when a small few control the data and the AI.

<comment><USER41> I fail to see how wealth inequality is a problem worse than poverty. I also fail to see why we can't try to fix both poverty and inequality at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Well, so far AI is being used to squeeze more money from people.

Advertising, pricing, getting people to spend more time, etc.

<comment><USER43> And on the other hand: spam filtering, web search, reducing power consumption in data centres, reading MRI images, etc.

Good things.

<comment><USER42> We all benefit from these products and services, but at a cost that we do not always understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> all your big Data A.I. matching of people to jobs won't amount to much because lack of mobility keeps people in areas where there are no jobs.

I am very sure many unemployed would love to work if they could be where the job is and be where it is I mean in the same town, something they could drive or bus to.

</comment><comment><USER45> Good lord.

This comment of mine is probably going to get deprecated down to -1 and beyond, but it needs saying anyway:

We already have a perfectly good technology for combatting poverty. It's called socialism.

How many people read this article on the way to work, on their expensive new Christmas phones, absentmindedly stepping over homeless people they only semi- see.

It's not the tech that's the problem. It's us. All of us. Shape up and start giving your resources away. If you need specific recommendations, ask.

<comment><USER46> How do homeless fare is socialist nations?

Hint: You might want to start looking in the mass graves.

(See also: The Scandinavian countries repeatedly having press conferences to say no, we are not socialist.)

<comment><USER34> That's because they combine the welfare state with free market capitalism, known as the "Nordic Model".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is really petty, but the phrase "war on poverty" makes my emotional mind think you're _against_ the poor, not uplifting the poor.

<comment><USER48> hmm, it is a war on poverty, not on the poor.

<comment><USER49> The "war on drugs" wasn't a war on drugs, it was a war on drug users. I can see why the OP was confused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is load of reasonable sounding horseshit. This tech is excellent at extracting every drop of potential value that flows through organization boundaries and little else (self driving cars aren't reality yet, when my mother is in a self driving car my opinion will change) The thought of an online system that can do this being bolted onto government IT systems on this scale is hilarious, the bottleneck here isn't knowledge of AI or deep learning. It is an idealistic future that fails to take into account all the shit it will have to be built upon. I'll interpert the title in it's literally sense -- another way for the poor to get fucked over by something they don't understand!</comment>


Show HN: Unscreen – Automatically remove video backgrounds with ML - <AUTHOR> https://www.unscreen.com/sample_videos <comment><USER2> This has been submitted multiple times as a "Show HN" but as it is a paid service, I guess this is a marketing strategy.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unscreen.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unscreen.com)

<comment><USER3> Doesn't this violate the spirit of Show HN? I thought only the authors could submit them unless they are all authors of the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to get traction, you need to be far more creative in your business model. The main application of background removal is online meetings and its already well implemented but it leaves a lot to be desired. One thing you can do is to make service completely free. Offer a desktop app that creates a virtual camera that you can use in Zoom, Teams etc. Differentiate yourself by adding features such as much more cool and fun background wall papers or even live videos. Focus on adoption, not revenue. Once you get traction, offer premium background images or videos. Create a marketplace where people can buy/sell. Focus on buyout by big players because ultimately they have the platforms with millions of users where you can provide far more value.

Removal of background in images is also big (your site only seem to offer video/gifs). I've personally tried half dozen solutions and all fell short in low lighting scenario. If you are actually doing good here, you can beat competition. There are probably hundred websites out there for background removal for images, none works well.

<comment><USER5> There is a reason background removal sucks on chat apps. I fiddle around with the state of the art approaches, it takes a very expensive machine to get to an acceptable frame rate. It wouldn't scale.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty happy with XSplit VCam ([https://www.xsplit.com/vcam](https://www.xsplit.com/vcam))

<comment><USER7> Anything like this for macOS?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From same authors that make tool for removing backgrounds from images - remove.bg

It was discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601)

<comment><USER9> BEWARE. remove.bg seems to have a malware/fake Chrome update popup.

<comment><USER10> Fresh Chromium installation, no adblocking or other content blocking plugins. Zero advertisements and popups on that site. I keep reading these kind of comments on HN and everytime it seems to be only that one person reporting the problem that sees that behavior. Are you sure your network is not compromised?

<comment><USER9> > Are you sure your network is not compromised?

It's definitely not. Also used 3 different browsers - each one showed the same dialog but with the name and version of that browser. It doesn't happen on my mobile over WiFi (rules out network injection).

This is what I'm seeing: [https://imgur.com/a/o9PNmaU](https://imgur.com/a/o9PNmaU)

It's being inserted via a .js file on static.remove.bg:

[https://static.remove.bg/remove-bg- web/38c6be57b031c26a2186b...](https://static.remove.bg/remove-bg- web/38c6be57b031c26a2186be68133e5eeaec32f4b7/packs/js/application-b38f0b2216d2fa06c6dc.js)

(search for 'out of date' )

So either the site owner is complicit, or they've been hacked.

Edit: Fired up a VM of Windows 7 - Same message - so unless my routers been hacked to inject that script somehow, i'm 99% certain it's not me.

<comment><USER11> Looking at the code, it is using a script from Browser Update[1] to determine whether to show that message.

Here's the line from the js you linked to that checks the browser version:

        window.checkBrowserVersion = function() { i()({ required: { i: 12, e: -4, f: -3, o: -3, s: -1, c: -3 }, insecure: !0, unsupported: !0, reminder: 0, reminderClosed: 168, style: "corner", api: 2019.06, test: !1, onshow: function() { window.track && window.track("BrowserUpdate", "outdated_version_dialog", "Browser version outdated dialog") } }) }, $((function() { window.checkBrowserVersion() }));

The c: -3 is the crucial bit that should cause it to trigger if your version is at least 3 versions out of date.

Yours isn't though. Can you access [http://browser-update.org](http://browser- update.org) ? If not, then there might be something with your DNS settings. Have you tried tethering through your phone? Have you changed your user agent?

1\. [http://browser-update.org/#install](http://browser-update.org/#install)

<comment><USER11> Just checked, and my Chrome is on version 84. Version 80 is out of date.

You need to update Chrome.

<comment><USER9> To be frank, I don't _need_ to do anything. I'll update Chrome when I'm ready, thanks.

What I object to, is a dodgy popup appearing on an unrelated website.

<comment><USER12> You don't _need_ to call an ambulance when you break your leg, but your browser has at least five high vulnerabilities (and one critical vulnerability).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's actually quite funny that the Zoom auto remove background does a pretty good job. I can't get the same results easily in Adobe Premiere actually.

Snapchat filters are even more impressive and it is magnitudes more difficult and time consuming to get similar results in After Effects.

I really wondered if I was missing something so watched a lot of YouTube tutorials on background removal and object tracking and all I see is that it is very laborious and even than not always a good enough results with edge/transparency artifacts etc.

Adobe really needs to implement new features for this because the expectations are changed by these apps and the bar is much higher.

<comment><USER14> In my experience zoom does a horrible job. It's a flickering mess, half the head is missing, etc. Perhaps in great lighting conditions it's better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks very impressive, but it seems cripplingly expensive.

I don't play with this much, but when I use my green screen, I'm often doing 15 minute videos, so it is well out of my hobby budget.

<comment><USER16> The application of this would probably be different from what your use case is (since you can use green screen).

<comment><USER17> Most kinds of professional applications I could think of would better off with a green screen. On the other hand, using this for editing videos in the wild with messy background still not good enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks cool, this model is start of the art I believe [https://app.wandb.ai/stacey/greenscreen/reports/Two-Shots- to...](https://app.wandb.ai/stacey/greenscreen/reports/Two-Shots-to-Green- Screen-Collage-with-Deep-Learning--VmlldzoxMDc4MjY)

<comment><USER19> I believe this is homegrow from their photo background-removal tool remove.bg

Probably frame by frame, not real-time. But not less impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks very impressive, but please do not autoplay all the videos at once on the website. My computer fans started to spin like crazy!

<comment><USER21> It killed my Android tablet running Firefox! First everything slowed down, then the status bar disappeared, then... black screen. Had to restart.

<comment><USER22> I'm genuinely surprised my Pixel 3 phone had no problems with it in Chrome. That was a lot of video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Video background removal, when hair is involved, is painful. Clearly this is not targeted at webcam footage. Anyone who has had to manually remove a background using a tool like Premiere or After Effects from pre-recorded video would see the benefit of this tool/api. It is pricey but i can see motion graphics studios using this regularly.

</comment><comment><USER24> € 1.98 / minute - wow.

<comment><USER25> It's for 30 FPS. And only up to 1080p.

> Up to 30 fps: Base price

> 30-60 fps: Base price × 2

> 60-90 fps: Base price × 3

<comment><USER26> That pricing looks very much "what it costs to run the service, plus some profit margin".

A service run by anyone with any business acumen will charge what customers will pay, modified for benefits that customer brings the company (like referrals, bigger revenue leading to a higher company valuation, etc.).

None of that depends on the frame rate or resolution.

<comment><USER27> Video processing tools in the cloud very regularly use frame rate and resolution as pricing inputs, similar to GB with storage solutions

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think some of the artifacts on the video at 0:12 (handbag thing) are very noticeable. Same thing at 0:19 (cat)and at 0:28 (cat again). Otherwise, looks nice :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Some scenes, foregrounds, backgrounds, lighting conditions, movements, etc work better than others - there's a lot of potential for errors in videos and the videos from the examples page are straight from Unscreen Pro. We're continuously working on improving the AI though (NB: We don't use video uploads for that - see unscreen.com/privacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is sort of the inverse of gimp's "foreground select tool". It was a PHD thesis on the algorithm to select foregrounds that was contributed to the gimp photo editor as open source.

[https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground- select.html](https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground-select.html)

And the paper with an overview of the algorithm is here: "Image segementation by uniform color clustering"

[https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/pubs/tr-b-05-07.pdf](https://www.inf.fu- berlin.de/inst/pubs/tr-b-05-07.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is an area of research called natural image matting that has been going on for over 20 years.

Some influential papers include:

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/poissonmatting_siggraph04.pdf)

[https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/papers/Mattin...](https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/papers/Matting- Levin-Lischinski-Weiss-CVPR06.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER31> I feel like this could be presented in a much more engaging manner.

There's one quick video on the main page which shows replacement backgrounds, but the "Examples" page shows about 15 or 16 examples of the same thing, removing a background. It quickly gets to the point of "Ok yeah, so what? Show me something cool to do once the background is gone."

I get that it may be difficult to remove a background the way this service does, but the customer is going to be less impressed with the fact that it works correctly than they are going to be about it having an actual engaging or useful purpose.

<comment><USER32> You can try it with an uploaded video or GIF here: [https://www.unscreen.com/upload](https://www.unscreen.com/upload)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Since it doesn't do live video so no chat background virtual camera tools - but what if you did a video in the area you wanted to remove could you then use that for some sort of baseline for removing the background? So you do a video in the area you want to use your virtual camera in, and then when you're live it knows what the actual 'background' looks like so it can be used to remove live.

<comment><USER32> If you can keep the camera at a fixed position, that's surely a great option. I think that's not the use case this tool is for. A green screen would also work obv.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I want to integrate your service to remove background for product images. However, not everything works well, especially when background and foreground color are close.

that's fine. The thing is that on the website, there is a tool to fix imperfect results, but with the api, there is no such tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since you mention images I assume you are referring to remove.bg, not unscreen.

We're working on an SDK that will allow for editing on external sites. You can sign up to our mailing list if you want to get notified when it's ready: [https://www.remove.bg/blog#subscribe](https://www.remove.bg/blog#subscribe)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your comments and feedback - some great great advice and ideas in here!

This is the MVP release of Unscreen Pro, so there's many more things to come in the future, from quality improvements, to an API, integrations, editing tools and more. Appreciate all the inputs :)

</comment><comment><USER35> Looking really cool, I just hope a Premiere / After Effects Update won't kill your business.

<comment><USER36> At the prices they're charging, they're rather asking for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Very impressive results and great presentation.

I imagine this can be useful for business that want to record small 360 of their products, but not invest in a big Physical setup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yes, professional 360° product shots are way too hard to produce right now and we're aiming make them much more accessible, particularly for smaller vendors

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> the autoplaying movies are massacring my crappy cell internet connection

(my home is currently one of the hundreds of thousands without power on the US east coast)

<comment><USER11> Set uBlock Origin to block media elements larger than 50KB or whatever threshold you want. More info: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per- site-switches#no-...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site- switches#no-large-media-elements)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Looks great and is exactly what one needs for professional screencasts if she doesn't want to fiddle around with a greenscreen. Thumbs up!

</comment><comment><USER40> Looks Great! How tool is built?using computer vision,image processing?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a combination of deep learning and traditional computer vision algorithms. We do a lot of basic research, evaluate many different approaches, train them in dozens of variants and ultimately combine what performs best, then try to make it as easy to use as possible

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Whats the tech stack this was built on?

</comment><comment><USER42> Somehow I parsed the title as next-gen adblock. Well, it is great to see the required technology is already here.

</comment><comment><USER43> How long before this is used to help fake political videos from existing footage. Sigh

</comment><comment><USER44> Need longer demos to show temporal contiguity.

<comment><USER32> I think processing is done frame per frame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Product hunt is full of this kind of stuff, is there anything different on this project?

</comment><comment><USER46> $1.98 per MINUTE?

I thought I'd woken up in 1980.

But I guess this is aimed at people making professional video presentations etc rather than for webcam meetings.

It seems to work pretty well, but none of the examples have any sudden movement, which is where there's often tearing etc.

<comment><USER47> It works on pre-recorded video so webcam meetings are not their target market.

<comment><USER46> Exactly as I concluded, and said above.</comment></comment></comment>


Uber CEO: Self-Driving Cars Are the Future, Drivers Are Not - <AUTHOR> https://recode.net/2014/05/28/uber-ceo-self-driving-cars-are-the-future-drivers-are-not-2/

<comment><USER2> He's not wrong. But he probably wishes he didn't say that.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What a turd. He treats his customers (surge pricing) and now suppliers (drivers) like garbage.

What's the best viable alternative to Uber?</comment>


Cultivating Your Data Lake - <AUTHOR> https://segment.com/blog/cultivating-your-data-lake/ <comment><USER2> I find it odd that the words 'consent' and 'permission' don't appear anywhere in this article. I realise it is a purely technical article but is it off topic to include consent in an article about collecting customer data? It seems to me that sitting above all the various architectural layers, there should be a 'consent layer'.

> If you take one idea away from this blog post, let it be this: store a raw > copy of your data in S3. I would have been happier if the 'one idea' was > this: First get your customers informed consent before you collect their > data.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As heavy users of all of these tools in AWS, we'll share some examples, tips, and recommendations for customer data in the AWS ecosystem. These same concepts also apply to other clouds and beyond.

1\. S3 or Google cloud storage as a cheap and reliable storage layer

2\. Athena or Big Query as a SQL query layer

3\. AWS Glue Catalog as metadata store

4\. EMR as a transformation layer</comment>