The Case Against Eating Fish - <AUTHOR> https://thewalrus.ca/the-case-against-eating-fish/ <comment><USER4> I think this kind of article is downright irresponsible - when you weigh the small amounts of extra toxins you consume, the effects are always going to be lesser than the enormous benefits of consuming fish.

> Drs. Mozaffarian and Rimm put this in perspective in their analysis in the > Journal of the American Medical Association. (1) First, reviewing data from > the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere, they calculated that if > 100,000 people ate farmed salmon twice a week for 70 years, the extra PCB > intake could potentially cause 24 extra deaths from cancer—but would prevent > at least 7,000 deaths from heart disease. (source: > [https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fish/](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fish/))

I'm certain a similar argument can be applied to the dangers of mislabeled fish or micro-plastics. To put it in perspective: if the sort of argument this article presents convinced even 7% of people to not eat fish, it would counteract the 7000 potential heart disease deaths in the above example.

<comment><USER5> Does the consumption of fish matter? It seems like the linked article encourages consumption of more Omega-3.

Also, I'm generally confused by Omega-3 studies anyway (I'm not a scientist). In the early 2000's lots of research came out linking Omega-3 to health. But, then more recently, I thought that Meta analysis studies showed no relationship.

(Could someone explain like I'm five?)

[0] [http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article- abstract/135726...](http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article- abstract/1357266)

<comment><USER6> The article you linked is about supplementing Omega 3. Many times in science we isolate out the one thing we think that is causing the health benefit and supplement more of it. Usually we don't find the result we are looking for. Food is a very complex item and it could be many factors and they all need to be present together to get the effect. Lycopene supplementation doesn't seem to have the health benefits seen with eating tomatoes, etc., etc.

<comment><USER7> That's not really an indictment of the scientific method though. So isolated lycopene isn't as good as eating a tomato. Surely there are scientists that are iterating on that, trying to find the combination of compounds that does give the desired outcome, right?

<comment><USER8> There may be other factors, or the form it is delivered in which creates the bioavailability. It's not always additive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Okay; mislabelled fish happens but it always has. Boycotting things you work with is a bit of a trend once the the initial shock kicks in but usually when we look from the inside we overblow the impacts of these things.. How many of us in the marketing/analytics/tracking/social media biz have Facebook profiles or browse signed into google?£

A lot of restaurants also sell ox or bison instead of beef.

Fresh fish is loaded with omegawhatever and is completely delicious.

Instead of cutting out one thing instead just maintain a balance like a grown up. Eat fruit, nuts, fish, cattle, paper clips, the fear of junior developers etc etc. If you only eat loads of cheap mislabelled fish then the problems warned in this story might come true but who really does that?

I buy whole breams once a month or so and with some greens on the side I consider it a completely healthy (and delicious) meal.

I grew up eating crabs and lobsters weekly and it didn't kill me.

What's the case here?

<comment><USER10> Honestly I'm so tired of the latest "hey, there's potentially _nasty-sounding stuff_ in _common food category_ that could possibly _do vague bad things_ under _vague unspecified circumstance_ , so stop eating it!"

From all the blogs about various pesticides, pollution, feed issues, animal cruelty, we might as well just go back to sustenance farming and grow/raise our own... oh wait we can't do that because fracking and industrial soil pollution! You can't trust your back yard! /rolls eyes

So much of online "health advice" is a series of micro-optimizations at best.

<comment><USER11> My rule of thumb is: if the _common food category_ was really as bad as they say, you'd see people eating it dropping like flies, and the _nasty-sounding stuff_ would become a public health emergency.

<comment><USER12> Well, cancer incidents have been rising for decades now, so all that stuff might just be killing us slowly.

<comment><USER13> People also live longer on average, thus increasing chances of getting cancer. Sure, young people get it and there are stories of tumors through time - <USER2> age is a defining risk factor.

<comment><USER14> People really need to stop regurgitating this red herring argument (pun intended): cancer rates are increasing _by age group_.

Colorectal cancers in young people have increased 40% in just 16 years. Melanoma rates in young people have increased 250% in four decades.

<comment><USER13> Skin cancer has risen. It started about the 20's when vacationing and getting tan on vacation (to show off money) became popular - and rose more with the popularity of tanning beds. The conspiracy theory states it jumped upon the introduction of the FM band, but I'm guessing that is just coincidence.

Colorectal cancers would increase because detection has increased. It became fairly popular to get a probe done at a certain age. I seriously can't give these sorts of numbers credit, just like having a percieved increase in autism after including more folks in it and having better screening and awareness.

<comment><USER14> Incorrect, the rates are rising among young people: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/well/live/colon-and- recta...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/well/live/colon-and-rectal- cancers-rising-in-young-people.html)

Why do some people insist on rationalizing these trends away?

<comment><USER13> I do stand corrected on colon cancer.

However, I stand by my general stance. Many cancers simply wouldn't show up in a population with a much shorter life expectancy. I'm not about to say it isn't partially environment or lifestyle (other things do cause cancer), just that we notice because of our life span and ability to detect these. I get this from articles like the one listed at the end, which states: _The main reason cancer risk overall is rising is because of our increasing lifespan. And the researchers behind these new statistics reckon that about two-thirds of the increase is due to longevity._ Colon cancer seems to be an outlier, and there are a couple of these. Cervical cancer is caused by a very common virus and often affects younger women, just to give another example.

[http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/02/04/why- are-c...](http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/02/04/why-are-cancer- rates-increasing/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Related, this video on youtube which made me not want to eat fish anymore: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH6wH1dqbwc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH6wH1dqbwc) WTF?!

<comment><USER10> You realize that's specifically talking about farmed Norwegian Salmon and not all fish everywhere, right?

<comment><USER9> Farmed salmon is really fucked up. We used to catch ones which broke out from freshwater farms (mostly accidentally) and depending on the time of year the flesh would be grey (they feed dyed meal before they go to market) and they all had weird extra fins and deformities..

I'll eat it, I know where it comes from at least though.

<comment><USER16> All salmon flesh is naturally pale in color (look at their close relatives the freshwater trout).

The pink or red color you see in some wild-caught fish is from carotenoid pigments in the krill they consume (or that has been consumed by other creatures that are then consumed by the salmon).

The farm-raised fish are given the exact same pigments before they are sent to market.

There are reasons to avoid farmed fish, but the color isn't one of them.

<comment><USER9> Well, where ever they get it seeing salmon you catch that isn't pale pink but grey is disturbing and not something which would occur naturally.

I fly fished wild salmon since I was in my early teens and they were always pink. We stole enough fish from the fishfarms to see a difference (either grey or insanely over coloured) ;)

I think maybe Pacific salmon are different to the kind we get in Scotland though? Ours only spawn once and they don't eat when they're back in freshwater (as a consequence the tail end of the fishing season is horrible; black skinny things that fall apart when you touch em)

<comment><USER16> Only Atlantic salmon are farmed in the United States and Europe. There's some farming of Pacific salmon in Chile and New Zealand, but overall it's a rounding error compared to the amount of farmed Atlantic salmon.

Most salmon (Atlantic or Pacific) only spawn once and then die, but occasionally an Atlantic salmon will survive to make another trip.

There's really no hard and fast distinction between what's called a "salmon" and what's called a "trout", other than salmon typically spending time at sea. For example, _Oncorhynchus mykiss_ is called a "rainbow trout" if it remains in freshwater its entire life. It naturally has pale flesh (though farmed rainbow is often given the same pigments as the farmed salmon). If it spends time at sea, the exact same fish is called a "steelhead" (occasionally, a "steelhead salmon") and has red or pink flesh.

A near-relative, _Oncorhynchus nerka_ , is called the "red salmon" or "sockeye salmon"if it spends time at sea, but "kokanee", "kokanee trout" or "silver trout" if it remains landlocked.

And so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I read these types of articles and the myriad of "studies" that come out daily, I always think there's really only one way to eat as healthy as possible for the typical "urban westerner" \- To eat a bit of everything, no big rules, or removing any specific food from your diet. Just integrate lots of variety and never get accustomed to consume too much of anything.

Include the notion of not being loyal to brands or geographic origin.

Examples: Don't eat too much tuna, but when you buy tuna always buy a different brand/type. When you buy meat, don't always eat beef or pork, alternate, and choose from different brands suppliers. Same with vegetables, etc.

By all means avoid sugar added / too much processed foods, I think these 2 points are above reasonable doubt today.

It's a real luxury and privilege to have access to the variety of foods we enjoy today, we should exploit it more IMHO.

<comment><USER18> This makes me think of that 'antifragile' principle. Sounds like a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's hard to take something like this seriously when it spends 3 (large) paragraphs scare mongering about the fact that fish "may" contain plastics, only to end with:

>> Even though current research shows we do not absorb most plastics, it's possible that a small amount (about 1 percent) can still accumulate in our bodies over time. That number might change: research on microplastics in our food is still in its infancy, and while some studies have documented the detrimental effects of plastics on fish and other aquatic animals, we still don't know much about their long-term effects on humans.

So, all current scientific evidence points to this not being a problem. But it _might_ _maybe_ _someday_!

edit - I've also never heard of any food safety guidelines that specify different storage temperatures for different species of fish. The whole thing is pretty suspect.

<comment><USER20> > So, all current scientific evidence points to this not being a problem.

Do you mean our _lack_ of current scientific evidence? The fact that we have _no idea_ about long term effects of ingesting those plastics should be alarming enough.

I didn't sign up to be a guinea pig for this experiment. Thanks to this article at least I know I'm part of one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Labeling is a major issue for all products, but I have to say, I think he'd stop eating everything else he's eating if he was also a scientist in touch with their production.

The food we eat is mass produced, we should assume very low quality and environmental sustainability.

Now, should I stop eating fish? Nothing was proven a health concern, what's the effect of the small plastic I'll ingest through fish?

Most studies I've seen on health correlate healthy individuals with eating fish. Now, those are probably a few years or decade old, is fish worse today? I think it's still inconclusive.

<comment><USER9> Right! How many places did you work that made you vow to never use after seeing behind the curtain?

We live in happy ignorance of the horrible shit in most of our food but we have pretty reasonable controls that none of it is complete poison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I treat fish with much suspicion after reading (ZeroMQ author) Pieter Hintjens' opinion, which is based on similar reasoning: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11626182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11626182)

<comment><USER23> To be fair, it seems like he's making a case against eating sushi, and not all fish in general. But yes, good point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This again. There are a few good takedowns of the Oceana report and how even the seemingly modest 20% is vastly exaggerated for click bait reasons. Even The Huffington Post attacked it, not exactly a site known to go easy on businesses:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tamar-haspel/mislabeled- fish_b...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tamar-haspel/mislabeled- fish_b_2759879.html)

I can't find it, but there is an even better article that explains how the US fishing industry got Congress to make imported fish be called something else so they wouldn't be seem as competition. Can't find that though.

</comment><comment><USER25> That is my understanding also. That said, I have started eating fish again on the advice of my doctor: I have been on the Eat to Live diet (no red meat, little meat in general, no dairy, no sugar that is not in whole fruit, lots of seeds and nuts). My doctor likes the diet but asked me to add two servings a week of oily fish high in omega 3. Expensive, but there are a few brands of Norwegian sardines packed in water that taste good to me.

I won't eat fish in a restaurant or from a grocery store chain.

<comment><USER26> Not sure if you have access to a good place that smokes fish but you may want to give it a try. I really enjoy it and find my body craves the oil. Smoked lake trout is my favorite because its very oily and to me tastes delicious. It can be a little salty though if you have to watch your salt intake.

You can get it with head on and skin so you can tell what kind it is. Also if you ever do try it, try to get a whole one smoked with bone in. Something about leaving the bone in makes it have a slightly different texture and taste, to me at least.

One other thing is make sure its smoked well, meaning if it isnt smoked long enough it can be too moist. I wouldnt want anyone to try it and sort of get a soggy smoked fish lol. Nothing "wrong" with it but I think its better eating.

Edit..person who posted about smoked sardines just made me so hungry! never had em and its going on list, thanks for suggestion!

<comment><USER27> > One other thing is make sure its smoked well, meaning if it isnt smoked long > enough it can be too moist. I wouldnt want anyone to try it and sort of get > a soggy smoked fish lol. Nothing "wrong" with it but I think its better > eating.

Would you say that this applies to smoked eel as well? It's always quite moist when I buy it and while I love it, now I'm curious if it could be even better.

<comment><USER26> In my experience smoking it longer dries out almost every meat. I notice smoked fish is not like steaks where "well done" "rare" etc are sort of standard. It took me a fair amount of years before I found my fave smoked fish place because of those difference.

I think this thread prompted me to buy a smoker and start learning to do it myself.

<comment><USER27> That sounds like a great hobby to have :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Here in India we eat mainly river fish, not seafood. So, does it also have the same issues?

</comment><comment><USER29> Health-wise, I'm unable to summon the tiniest bit of concern about anything in this article. Naturally the environmental situation with the ocean blows.

<comment><USER30> Looks like we and the rest of life on earth is just going to have to evolve to tolerate plastic in our systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Rather than handwringing over what meat it is OK to eat, just don't eat meat.

<comment><USER32> Meat has all essential amino acids, has Vitamin B12, can be minimally processed, is the only food source of creatine. Plus, we've been omnivores for millions of years.

The empirical health benefits of vegetarianism vanish once you control for health-consciousness.

Trying to paint some bleak health picture on all meats is plain FUD.

<comment><USER33> After watching "What the Health"[1], it seems like there is no small amount of FUD coming from the meat industry. And the long-term health benefits of plant- based diets are well-established[2,3,4,5].

[1] [https://vimeo.com/ondemand/whatthehealth/203617202](https://vimeo.com/ondemand/whatthehealth/203617202)

[2] Vegetarians less likely to develop cancer than meat eaters, says study [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jul/01/vegetarians-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jul/01/vegetarians- blood-cancer-diet-risk)

[3] Vegans live longer than those who eat meat or eggs, research finds - <USER3> three per cent increase in calories from plant protein was found to reduce risk of death by 10 per cent [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health- and-families/...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and- families/health-news/vegan-meat-life-expectancy-eggs-dairy- research-a7168036.html)

[4] 16 Studies on Vegan Diets – Do They Really Work? [https://authoritynutrition.com/vegan-diet- studies/](https://authoritynutrition.com/vegan-diet-studies/)

[5] How Not To Die: The Role of Diet in Preventing, Arresting, and Reversing Our Top 15 Killers [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXXXygDRyBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXXXygDRyBU)

<comment><USER34> I do not necessarily disagree with your claims, but few people will take you seriously if your sources are a sensationalist newspaper and youtube. Even the nutritionist's blog in not particularly reliable, given how poor replication is in this discipline.

Also, OP made a specific claim about controlling for health-conscious behavior that is not countered here.

<comment><USER35> The Guardian article links to the paper, which has this in the introduction:

        Relative risks (RRs) were estimated by Cox regression,
        stratified by sex and recruitment protocol and adjusted
        for age, smoking, alcohol, body mass index, physical
        activity level and, for women only, parity and oral
        contraceptive use.

I wouldn't disagree that there's still a lot of uncertainty, but at least for cancer, I'd bet on a small but significant effect. Anyway: what is pretty much proven is that living like a vegetarian is quite beneficial. You can probably even continue eating meat.

(One possibly life-prolonging behaviour observed more in vegetarians: not considering the Guardian to be a 'sensationalist' newspaper)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Microbeads get a small mention yet they went viral, with a clambering of global policies and government bans; and endless industry activity in response.

Now you can't buy Nivea face wash for example, with these beads. Their R&D team came up with a replacement, done and dusted by the end of 2015.

Change happens rapidly when reputation and sales are on the line.

</comment><comment><USER37> If anyone wants to skip over the veganism, and the locavore and the organic and the ecovore and all of that, it's going to come down to this:

You should only eat animal products that came from your pets, i.e. you observe their lives, empathize with what's happening to them, and take responsibility* for their subjective experience.

Beyond that, on the cosmic scale, it doesn't matter what your practices are. We can disagree about what constitutes a subjectively good experience for a chicken or a fish. Future generations will disagree on those things too. They won't judge you for where your empathy steers you, but they will judge you for opting out of the responsibility.

If you want to pay someone to take care of "your" pets, that's fine too, but they're just your employee. You can leave your dog with the dogsitter, but you're still responsible for their care. The same is true of chicken you eat. You're still the CEO in that interaction, and still responsible for the life of the animal, so due diligence is necessary.

Ecological care, health, animal welfare, labor welfare, all of these things naturally shake out empathy and responsibility.

Vegans will be looked down on the same as meat eaters, because they are not taking responsibility for animal welfare either. They use "vegan" as a proxy for "humane" but it's not good enough. It's better than a meat eater who is absconding responsibility, but not as good as a meat eater who is taking responsibility. The vegan myth is that it's possible to produce food with no animal impacts.

"Don't eat fish" or "Eat local" or "Don't eat animal products" all suffer the same fate: they're rough heuristics in a process where we need actual responsibility. Before computers it was too hard to actually understand what was happening to your "pets" or where your "vegetables" were coming from but now that we have computers we can do it.

<comment><USER38> I don't understand the argument that opting out of using animal products is avoiding responsibility. Isn't that equivalent to saying that by boycotting sweatshop products we aren't taking responsibility? Are you arguing that we should work within the system?

> Vegans will be looked down on the same as meat eaters, because they are not > taking responsibility for animal welfare either.

Vegans aren't interested in animal welfare in the way we usually think of it, i.e. in terms of bigger cages, access to fresh air, etc. Vegans are interested in animal rights as in not using animals at all. It might not be possible to product food without hurting some animals, but there's a moral difference between accidentally and intentionally hurting someone.

<comment><USER37> Vegetable farming kills animals outright and displaces others. It's often a smaller number than the animals killed and displaced for animal products, but not always. Veganism is about keeping your body "pure", it's not actually about doing a real accounting of your relationship with the animals in the ecology that feeds you. At best it's a rough heuristic for "low animal cruelty", but it's rough enough that e.g. many hunters have lower animal impacts than the standard vegan diet, despite outright murdering animals.

How many fieldmice do you have to maim for it to be considered equivalent to a quick death for a deer, after a happy, wild life, in a region where that animal was effectively torturing other animals through overgrazing? How many rivers can you dam, destroying entire ecologies, before it's equivalent to someone taking care of a pig like it's their own child for a year and then bopping them on the head and slitting their throat before the pig knows what's happening?

Certain vegan products constitute outright animal torture. Palm oil from burning orangutan habitat is the classic example. How is torturing orangutans to get palm oil better than killing a deer who is torturing other deer?

Veganism is appealing to people who want to pretend that violence doesn't happen. But violence is an inevitable part of ecologies functioning. Consuming calories is violence, despite what it might feel like in the supermarket. The best we can do is deliberate respectful violence in place of unnecessary violence (torture).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> How dangerous is it to ingest microplastics? Isn't this stuff just coming out the rear end completely unprocessed?

<comment><USER40> it also acts as a sponge for toxins.

can microplastics pass membranes or get stuck?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Too late now.

We have created an incredible dependency on fish:

\- "Fishmeal", fish based product fed to animals.

\- "Fish emulsion", fish oil used as fertilizer for our crops. Yes, your vegeterian meal might not be vegan.

\- Fish fed to other animals including other fish

\- Fish, fish that we eat

</comment><comment><USER42> If you're going to eat meat, fish has the least ecological impact. That is, if it's produced in systems that don't trash natural ecosystems. Or use wild- caught fish as food. The point is that fish, being ectotherms, don't waste energy keeping warm.

<comment><USER43> Populations of commercially-important species are only about 50% of he size they were 100 years ago. And, i shit you not: that is a rather conservative estimate.

Don't take my work for it. The most cited number is 10%.

And farmed fish are wreaking havoc in the local marine environment wherever they are. Most countries have laws protecting water from "overnutrition" (which kills most marine life) yet the farmed fishing industry seems largely exempt from those laws. Outside my home town of 100.000 inhabitants they just opened a new salmon farm that lets out as much nitrogen into the water as would the whole town's sewer system if we just dumped it all at sea.

Fish might be sustainable from a co2(e) point of view, but most fisheries and fish farms are not.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, I get that. That's why I added the proviso about ecosystem damage. I'm talking about designed ecosystems that process human waste into soil, plants, fish, and finally potable water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This both interesting and depressing.

When I grew up cod was a "love it or hate it" thing, because of it's strong taste. Nowadays, cod means some white flaky texture with no taste.

</comment><comment><USER45> >The Case Against Eating Fish

>thewalrus.ca

It's the little things.

</comment><comment><USER46> And here I am trying to eat less meat and more seafood thinking it's more healthier.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think that this problem probably isn't just restricted to fish. I think if you dug deep into any kind of food, you would find similar issues.

<comment><USER48> By what mechanism would it get into other foods?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Ok admittedly I'm a Costco fan boy but I only buy fish from there because I believe their supply lines are more trustworthy.

</comment><comment> noir-york I just had an awesome monkfish with scallops for dinner last night. And earlier this week a John Dory. And they were great!

But then again, I don't order fish from any restaurant, but go to a fishing village and the restaurants there show you the fresh fish for you to choose from. Good fresh fish is not cheap.

I cannot understand why the writer, a scientist, engages in scaremongering instead of presenting a holistic picture. A dinner of fresh fish paired with an excellent white wine makes for a healthy and very enjoyable evening.

<comment><USER50> You clearly didn't read the article.

<comment><USER51> Insinuating someone didn't read the article is against the guidelines of HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Oh look - another item on my list of justifications for my vegan diet. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER53> We are destroying the planet</comment>


The Truth About Aging in the Tech Industry - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/aging-in-the-tech-industry-6a0e116bdf09 <comment> BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 An IT career is now a lottery. Either you get equity in a successful startup or you get dumped when you turn 35.

<comment><USER2> I know it happens because I read about people not being able to be employed in their 50s. But it's not what is happening my experience.

I'm in my 50s. I'm a software engineer at a startup in Seattle. I work with people in their 50s, 40s, 30s, and 20s. I have a couple of friends in their 50s, they both just got jobs at amazon as software developers, before they had been in local Seattle companies like microsoft, google, facebook and many other smaller companies that I won't name so as not to out myself. I've also been through startups, big companies, dev and management roles going back and forth.

What does IT mean in this instance? A family member is also in his 50s, I worry that he could lose his jobs, he's on tech support (networking, server software stuff) at a big company but apparently still has confidence in his employeability.</comment></comment>


Steve Jobs would probably very upset with what Apple has become - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/822818/steve-jobs-would-probably-very-upset-with-what-apple-aapl-has-become/ <comment><USER2> I'm not convinced that constant, continuous innovation is really necessary all the time. I mean, we're talking about an industry where the two most popular code editors still used today were written in 1976. Does every new Macbook need to be a "revolution" in design?

I imagine most people are okay with the idea of "last year's model but thinner/lighter/faster/stronger", up to a point. People hold on to their six year-old Macbook Pros and their 10 year-old Thinkpads because they're reliable. It seems to me that the bigger backlash is against Apple's attempted "innovation" which felt gimmicky and unnecessary.

<comment><USER3> Late 2008 Aluminum 13'' Macbook here. Going to upgrade.

Can't really understand all the fuss. It's Apple. Making this polemic decisions has been their bread & butter for a long time, always dropping standards that have peaked for new ones. Causes a pain in the short term, yes, but it's certainly not something new.

<comment><USER4> Well, the thing is they're getting 'better' and 'better' at dropping standards. They drop things which still see a lot of use, for which there are no viable alternatives which perform at least as well as the current standard. It is almost as if they're trying for some form of abstract 'perfection' as defined by the dictum that 'Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away'. While nice in theory, in practice people buy computers to perform mundane tasks with 'imperfect' hardware with odd interfaces like HDMI, SD or analogue audio. This might go against the purist's dream of a perfect world but it is the one we're living in, warts and all. If you want to buy a computer as a personal statement you may be willing to live with the restrictions such 'perfection' brings with it, but those who want to upload their photos are left out in the cold. Yes, they can use an adapter or some sort of dongle but surely that is even less 'perfect'?

<comment><USER5> You bring up some interesting points. I think we all agree we want to be able to make progress on connectors. The question is how we do so.

\- Before something is widely adopted, how do we decide which connectors to use on future products?

\- How do we transition from one to another?

Some thoughts that came to mind when reading your comment: What did people do before computers had HDMI ports? SD slots? How about audio systems that have 1/4" plugs (not 3.5mm)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why? Because a bunch of reporters are shitting on a new Apple product they haven't even tried yet? I'd imagine he was pretty familiar with that phenomenon.

Remember "then don't hold it that way?" And they gave bumpers to iPhone 4 customers for a few months to shut up the press. BTW the iPhone 4 sold very well, with very high consumer scores, for 2 more years _after_ the bumper program ended.

Steve Jobs was a guy who spent most of the time between 2001 and 2007 releasing incremental updates to existing products. I have to wonder how many of those keynotes this writer has seen. Most would be incredibly boring and pointless to view today. "Wow, 802.11g has the speed of 802.11a, but uses the backward-compatible 2.4 GHz band." This was like a 5 minute section in multiple keynotes.

</comment><comment><USER7> "While Jobs was explaining why he thought old tech giants had fallen from grace, he probably wasn't thinking about Apple at that time. "

I doubt that. Just read Ed Catmull's "Creativity Inc." (highly recommended) and all his thoughts that went into making Pixar (Steve's other company) sustainable and returning a fallen Disney animation around. The question what went wrong elsewhere is central to that. Also there are the early years of Apple where Apple fell from grace. Steve was acutely aware of the fragility of his businesses and wanted to protect them.

Steve knew about the critical importance of culture. The spaceship follows his earlier work on the Pixar building. Enabling people to come together and build something great, insanely great.

Apples products tended to deliver value seen from the customer perspective. Proper waterproof phones is a step forward that does not look great, is hard to do, is hard to charge for but delivers value every single day. The "insanely great" perceivable customer value was missing in the presentation of the last macs for a lot of reasons (memory, keyboard, cable integration with iPhone out of the box, mag-safe, extension cord, higher price etc.).

<comment><USER3> For me knowing that soon, once peripherals makers and also cable makers catch- up, I'll be able to use just one type of cable to connect to anything (and I'm assuming cable makers will stop doing sub-par ones and just stick to Thunderbolt 3 capable), is probably a huge win. No more USB/HDMI/MagSafe mix (with the different ports on the peripheral side to increase complexity).

After that, wireless.

<comment><USER8> > _I 'll be able to use just one type of cable to connect to anything_

If you're talking about USB 3, sorry to burst your bubble, but you won't. There are a lot of different varieties of USB 3 cables.

You're thinking of "connector", and yes, the USB 3 connector is now used for wildly different things. Cables are different _even though they have the same connector_.

<comment><USER3> Please read my comment again, I did say:

> I'm assuming cable makers will stop doing sub-par ones and just stick to > Thunderbolt 3 capable

<comment><USER8> > _I 'm assuming cable makers will stop doing sub-par ones and just stick to > Thunderbolt 3 capable_

Thunderbolt 3 cables are expensive (just like regular Thunderbolt cables), and there's no chance that cable makers drop cheaper cables. None, zip, zero.

Furthermore, _all it takes is one manufacturer_ making the non-Thunderbolt 3 cables to make things as I described…and remember, using the "wrong" cable can hurt your machine.

The situation with USB-C isn't good and it's very likely that many machines will be damaged as a result of not using unique connectors for unique capabilities/requirements on the cables themselves.

<comment><USER3> What's the market share for USB-C compared with USB-A/B?

Would hope that as it passes USB-A/B, it becomes as cheap as, or at least close to.

Also people will start to name & shame bad cable manufacturers, both when they are the ones not reading the cable specs (in which case it will alert people to do so) or when the cable specs do not match the actual cable capabilities (in which case the cable manufacturer is liable).

The other thing is as mobile phones/tablets change, you'll also get cables bundled with the device, which will probably be of a decent quality at least (they don't need to be Thunderbolt 3, just not fool the devices by violating USB-C specs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Or he probably wouldn't. We don't know. And either way, it does not matter. Either way, it won't/wouldn't change anything. As all things do, Apple evolves.

</comment><comment><USER10> If Steve Jobs was still Apple's CEO, the only thing that is certain is that he would keep the Skeuromorpihsm UI.

For anything else there is no proof.

</comment><comment><USER11> Its either they are asleep at the helm or are furiously working on something else, like VR, not too focusing product renewal of current product lineup... It is an essence of a magic trick. You follow left hand while right one is about to surprise you, isn't it? I hope they are working on something extraordinary.

<comment><USER12> They haven't done anything remotely extraordinary since Steve J left. I don't know why people are so charitable towards Apple when everything indicates it's a company that's no longer what it was.

To quote someone, "revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yeah I'm sure Jobs would be so upset to see that Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world. I'm sure he would think the fact that Apple now makes a computer you can wear on your wrist is "meh" and the new MacBook Pro should have kept the functions keys.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd hate to have to live up to the spectre of Steve Jobs.

Maybe we shouldn't care about satisfying the dead. They're not around to care anymore. This post is the equivalent level of discourse as saying he's turning in his grave.

</comment><comment><USER15> When it comes to the Macbook Pro, something like the Razor Blade laptop keyboard would have been much much better than getting rid the upper row.

[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0talSSC5ToI/hqdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0talSSC5ToI/hqdefault.jpg)

Imagine the screen on the right of the size of an iphone. I would have opened a much larger set of possibilities. Want to test and develop iphone apps ? want to use this for video or music production ? or want the num pad back ? The num pad is redundant yet useful, and replaced by a screen the surface is big enough to offer interesting possibilities for pro users.</comment>


Four companies control over 60% of the world's seed sales - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/opinion/sunday/dan-barber-seed-companies.html <comment><USER2> Worst UX ever. Even more annoying then slideshows. You click the link expecting to be able to read the story but instead you're forced to sit through the most annoying opening sequence ever. Pro tip: click over and over again and it finally does go away and you are allowed to scroll down, but be aware when scrolling down the story disappears into a full screen image with a single line of text several times. Is there another source for this?

<comment><USER3> [http://archive.is/C6DN5](http://archive.is/C6DN5)</comment></comment>


The Architecture of Morrisons OrderPad - <AUTHOR> http://martinfowler.com/articles/orderPad/

<comment><USER4> This is a very disappointing project. I would imagine the IT people who worked at Morrisons were rolling their eyes as the consultants came in and delivered a way over engineered / overly complex system.

The problems outlined in the article were solved with simpler methods 10 to 15 years ago. Why use a tablet at all? Symbol Technologies was making wireless handheld computers with scan guns 15 years ago.

In a modern supermarket inventory is updated every time an item is scanned at checkout. Spot checks of inventory are constantly being done to check for discrepancies.

The timing of orders was solved in supply chain applications years ago.

Whoever payed for this project I'm sure had a lot of nice meetings with the contractors. But in the end they got an overly complex system when off the shelf components in use for years would have done the job better and more reliably.

<comment><USER5> Having developed software for point of delivery (similar market and devices) on Windows CE approximately 6-10 years ago, I would suggest that they did indeed pick the best solution to the problem now.

The symbol/intermec handhelds are expensive, terribly unreliable, slow, require a lot of maintenance and are terribly fiddly especially for people with gloves on (as you'd expect in the freezer department in Morrisons). As for the software development side of things, you're pretty much limited to a subset of win32 that isn't very pleasant to use or a mobile CLR which is so incredibly slow it makes you want to hang yourselves. Then there's the incredible deathly pain of deploying the code to all those devices.

It took us three years to deliver a point of delivery system with the same staffing level with much smaller scope which was simply signing for stuff and listing a delivery schedule. The integration was done by a third party - <USER3> just passed messages back and forth.

They did a damn good job at TW on this one if you ask me.

<comment><USER4> I disagree with you on a number of your points

 _The symbol /intermec handhelds are expensive, terribly unreliable, slow, require a lot of maintenance and are terribly fiddly especially for people with gloves on (as you'd expect in the freezer department in Morrisons)._

I had different experience with industrial scanning equipment from reliable manufacturers. I found them to be reliable. They could be dropped and still function and they had a much wider functional temperature range. If the operator is wearing gloves I would expect that the environment is outside the functional temperature range of a tablet.

 _As for the software development side of things, you 're pretty much limited to a subset of win32 that isn't very pleasant to use or a mobile CLR which is so incredibly slow it makes you want to hang yourselves. Then there's the incredible deathly pain of deploying the code to all those devices._

There were many devices that supported OS's other than Windows CE as well as Windows CE device that didn't require the CLR for applications. There were also thin client models where the code executed on the server which made deployment much simpler.

 _It took us three years to deliver a point of delivery system with the same staffing level with much smaller scope which was simply signing for stuff and listing a delivery schedule. The integration was done by a third party - <USER3> just passed messages back and forth._

You had a remarkably tolerant customer.

 _They did a damn good job at TW on this one if you ask me._

I disagree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > (4/25) We needed to support working offline should the user go out of range > of wi-fi.

> (8/25) When offline, any actions that require a GET to the server results in > an error message to the user.

I would argue right there that you failed to deliver a product that met the user's requirements, and this sort of limitation is why I have to write native code when writing a web app would be much easier.

> (21/25) Development team consisted of 5 developers, 1 business analyst, 1 > tester, and 1 project manager (times 2 years for development time)

> (21/25) Production code is 20K LOC of Java, 10K javascript.

I'm not sure on what planet that is considered a reasonable level of output, but it must be nice there.

<comment><USER7> Regarding the need to do a GET when not connected: How would a native app solve this problem any better? Presumably, there's live data that sometimes needs to be fetched. If you're not connected you're not going to get that data whether you're in a browser or an app.

<comment><USER8> My favorite solution for this periodic offline/online access is CouchDB for mobile or PouchDB for html. But it's use would require another device between the back end CouchDB and their Oracle server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On slide 6/25, why would you not do a straight 'update order quantity' and 'sendUpdate' using JQuery? (last 2 steps, ok apart from checking the size limit). Why all the ceremony in between? (genuine question).

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm reading a lot of Not Invented Here in that front-end stuff - building your application on top of jQuery is terribly pre-2012. I bet they spent a considerable chunk of time on that.

<comment><USER11> Heaven forbid that they go with something stable with which they have years of experience delivering products. Desperately uncool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is the two-year timeline reasonable? (ok, the 1st version to production took 7 months)

Ok, so they have more testing code than business code, this is not a "quick and dirty" app, but it still looks like a long timeline and a large team for the app's description.

<comment><USER13> _Is the two-year timeline reasonable?_

I really hope it isn't. I've made much shorter estimates for a nearly identical application, with time penalization clauses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "since all the data is stored inside the DOM as field values or HTML data attributes."

That doesn't seem like a very good idea. Seems like the opposite of what we've been doing for the last few years.

<comment><USER15> If "what we've been doing for the last few years" means two-way binding of data models, then I agree that either that or using direct field values is a bad idea but the one I am thinking is bad may not be the same one that you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The presentation is nice. Does any one know if the tool used for generating type of presentation is available?

It would be great format for presenting to upstream project management and friends.

<comment><USER17> I suspect thats its a custom tool set [1]

[1] [http://martinfowler.com/bliki/Infodeck.html](http://martinfowler.com/bliki/Infodeck.html)</comment></comment>


List of Machine Learning APIs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mashape.com/post/48074869493/list-of-40-machine-learning-apis

<comment><USER2> Favourite would be NuditySearch?</comment>


PowerPoint should be banned. This PowerPoint presentation explains why - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/26/powerpoint-should-be-banned-this-powerpoint-presentation-explains-why/ <comment><USER2> We have a guy at work who insists on using PP, including the company template. Well OK. But when you have only one slide, maybe just put it in an email as text (it's always a table of info) and save us the bother of downloading a PP with a lead in and lead out page with your one table of info there in the middle.</comment>


Ask HN: Low demanding job to support you - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on a software project for a while that I'm hoping will bring me income when done. Until then, I'm digging into my savings but it's running out faster than I'd planned. So I need to get a job, but it shouldn't be mentally and/or physically demanding, otherwise my rate of progress will plummet. It doesn't have to be in my field and I'm OK with minimum pay as long as it covers my rent and food.<p>Any advice on what kind of job qualifies? <comment><USER2> Freelance writing is a quick and highly liquid way to earn marginal income. During college and summer vacations I wrote for TextBroker[1], which pays per- word for SEO keyword articles in pretty niche topics. If you score well on their grammar and writing tests, you can make 1.5 cents per word or $7.50 per 500 word essay. The upside is that it's really easy to convert spare time into extra income -- you can claim one article at a time and write as many as you want. The downside is you'll be writing for some pretty scuzzy SEO folks, and if they ask for revisions it'll tank your cents-per-word estimate. It was a great way to round up some extra grocery money when expenses got tight, but it would have been difficult to sustain for many hours per day. On a good run I could make $40-50 over five hours before burning out.

I've recently come across Scripted, a more writer-friendly service that focuses on content quality instead of brute-forcing SEO keywords.

TextBroker: [https://www.textbroker.com/](https://www.textbroker.com/)

Scripted: [http://scripted.com/](http://scripted.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hotel night clerk, security, housesitting, or just about anything in banking back office. The idea is you get paid a low hourly while spending a lot of the time working on your software. My friend finished version 1 of his application using RDC through his tellers' station, and the bank purported to be strict about personal computer use.

I agree consulting is best but it needs to be easily available and wrap up neatly, or else it'll eat into your creative time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Instead, get a part-time contracting position doing software development. I did this while I was building my startup. I worked around 20 hours per week and had the rest of the week to do what I wanted. I quit contracting about 9 months ago.

It worked pretty well.

The problem is that the only jobs that aren't mentally or physically demanding will be low-paid and most likely boring to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good idea and I've thought about it, but it's not easy getting a part time job around here (Sydney). But I'll look into it.

<comment><USER5> It's good timing to take a look at the Seeking Freelancer thread on HN. You may not find a client close to you but as long as you can deliver a project in exchange for what you're looking for, then it's a good deal.

<comment><USER6> I would definitely be curious where that thread is. Do you have a URL?

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems recent: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127243)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Every Member Got to Congress (opengraph) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/26/opinion/sunday/paths-to-congress.html <comment><USER2> It seems like the "science or engineering" circle is smaller than the "no bachelor's degree" circle, and it's equal to the amount of people who played professional sports.

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised it's that large.

Analytical, engineering-type folks are not widely known for their social aptitude or political savvy. Their interests and aptitudes also align in a way that usually the most gratifying or most remunerative activities they can engage in are in private life.</comment></comment>


This Bio-Hacking Anti-Aging Product Has a Unique Cult Following: Doctors - <AUTHOR> http://observer.com/2017/07/elysium-health-basis-nad-supplement/ <comment><USER2> JFYI, Elysium is currently in a lawsuit with its supplier of the two key ingredients for its Basis product.

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/16/a-new-lawsuit-alleges- anti...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/16/a-new-lawsuit-alleges-anti-aging- startup-elysium-health-hasnt-paid-its-supplier-and-is-in-breach-of-agreement/)

<comment><USER3> EH actually has their own supplier now. At least that's what it says in this forum: [https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CDXC/community/](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CDXC/community/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 10% of Basis users are doctors according to their PR director? I'd love to see some sort of citation on that. If that's true, that is pretty incredible.

<comment><USER5> maybe all homeophaths :)

<comment><USER6> They didn't say M.D.s, did they? Or, they could have only 10 customers and 1 is an MD (and a shareholder?).

<comment><USER5> only skimmed the article, sorry :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dreamcast Emulator Redream 1.5.0 Progress Report - <AUTHOR> https://redream.io/posts/progress-report-february-2020 <comment><USER2> The Dreamcast is by far and large one of my all-time favourite consoles.

SEGA's level of innovation here was extreme.

From great developer support, online play (even if the Broadband Adapter for Ethernet was extremely rare); the VMU, and an extremely impressive library of quality titles (Skies of Arcadia, Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur 2, etc) - it was literally a situation that seemed geared to greatness.

If it had a DVD player, I think it literally could've saved SEGA, after the awful litany of repeated terrible decisions they made in the mid-90's. (Here's looking at you, 32X...)

I was just at A&C games here in Toronto, lamenting to an employee of the demise of SEGA's consoles - but the Dreamcast, in particular, deserved better than it got.

The Saturn will always have a special place in my heart, though, as an extremely early example of multi-processor architecture (the Saturn technically has 7 processors, each for a different task - 2 GPU's, CD I/O, sound, etc.)

<comment><USER3> There is a hack that you can do (soldering on an IDE cable) that allows you to connect a DVD drive and boot games and access files from DVDs. The Dreamcast modding community is still very active to this day. A lot is known about the internals which I find fascinating.

<comment><USER4> Say what? The Dreamcast used a GD-ROM which was 1 gig, hence it's name. The was an alleged specific model CD-Rom drive with modified firmware that could have read the GD-Roms directly from a PC. Rippers used a DC with the Ethernet adapter to rip games however.

Now you can also mod the Dreamcast to use an IDE hard drive with Dreamshell and modified bios since the Dreamcast used and IDE bus for the GD-Rom.

There are 2 drive emulators for the Dreamcast where you replace the GD-ROM with a device that allows for either SD card storage or USB.

I have not seen this DVD rom hack you are talking about though

<comment><USER3> The DVD ROM hack works exactly as the Hard Drive Hack does. Just swap out the IDE HDD for an IDE DVD ROM Drive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A note here since I did not know this: It looks like Redream is no longer open source. As far as I can tell its not formally acknowledged anywhere. It seems like it was silently closed source when it moved from GitHub to GitLab some time ago. I feel like people ought to know since some folks may be under the impression it is open source when it's not. I usually don't bother trying to use closed source emulators personally, for practical reasons (At the very least, closed source anything is a pain in the ass under NixOS.)

<comment><USER6> Good spot. It used to be GPL licensed. How odd. If you goto the gitlab project at [https://gitlab.com/inolen/redream](https://gitlab.com/inolen/redream) it's basically just a support forum. Anyone got any more details on this? Is this an attempt to monitise the work?

Edit: I see you can upgrade to "premium" but it's a one-time fee of only $5 so money can't be the motivation here. Same at [https://gitlab.com/inolen/redream/issues/957](https://gitlab.com/inolen/redream/issues/957) An acknowledgment of the situation is at [https://gitlab.com/inolen/redream/issues/543#note_91625154](https://gitlab.com/inolen/redream/issues/543#note_91625154) but sadly no explanation.

<comment><USER7> There's some reasoning in this thread: [https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/7p2rik/redream_h...](https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/7p2rik/redream_has_gone_closedsource/)

Notably, this comment by the developer (with followups): [https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/7p2rik/redream_h...](https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/7p2rik/redream_has_gone_closedsource/dseekwo/)

<comment><USER6> Cheers for digging that out. Seems like a reasonable course of action all things considered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Small anecdote: many years ago I tracked down a working Dreamcast and acquired Sonic Adventure 2, arguably one of the best SEGA games ever created. At the time, I remember spending $40 for a used copy of the game that was now a decade old. After just scanning eBay, it looks like SA2 for Dreamcast is still selling for between $20-$70/ each. Incredible.

Other side note: one flaw of the original Dreamcast was that the circuit board that houses the controller ports had a capacitor that would occasionally fail. To the uninitiated, the console would become a brick since you can't play without a controller. I used to buy large sets of "broken" Dreamcasts, and could usually fix more than half of them by simply swapping internal components. I miss the days of this level of modding. Though the OG Xbox was pretty fun too in this hacking space.

<comment><USER9> > many years ago I tracked down a working Dreamcast and acquired Sonic > Adventure 2

You make it sound like a relic! There are plenty for sale and new games are still made for it

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great work - the Dreamcast brought me many years of fun and I can't wait to check this out on a Raspberry Pi!

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice but no source code, which makes it sadly not count as preservation.

</comment><comment><USER12> Impressive stuff, this will be massive for archive efforts. I am still yet to find a good performance emulation experience for the Play Station 2 console.

<comment><USER13> PS2 is legitimately really hard. It's both just fast enough that cycle accurate is off the table and probably always will be on conventional processors, and is just barely old enough that it has tons of little special instruction streams that need to be in close sync with each other, sometimes without explicit synchronization in their code.

<comment><USER2> PCSX3 exists, now, and while I understand the underlying complexities of the PS2's architecture, I am very curious about the challenges, in particular, of PS3 emulation, especially with regards to the Cell processor.

Anyone with more knowledge that myself with regards to emulation care to chip in? I'd love some insight, or related articles.

Saturn emulation has been a fascination of mine for 15-some years.

<comment><USER14> There are three killers here: self-modifying code, synchronisation, and parallelism, all of which are major headaches for a JIT.

The PS3 does not have self-modifying PPC code (SCEI forbade it), which means the PPE blob can be compiled ahead-of-time (RPCS3 converts it into LLVM). The SPE data can self-modify, however, but (to my knowledge) does not require extensive synchronisation, therefore each SPE core can be put on a thread.

The PS2 code has fairly extensive use of self-modifying code; Naughty Dog in particular will frequently load parts of the executable in and out of memory on both the PS2 main processor (the EE) and the PS1 processor (the IOP), and rely on the synchronisation between these two separate processors to be fairly tight. Trying to make the EE and IOP separate threads running simultaneously breaks this synchronisation, so the EE and IOP have to run on the same thread.

Additionally, the PS2 has two vector units; VU0 is associated with the EE (it can be used as a floating-point SIMD unit in the EE instruction stream) and VU1 is associated with the GS [the PS2's GPU, the Graphics Synthesizer] Interface (GIF) (it can directly output primitives to the GS). This means that VU0 needs to run on the same thread that the EE runs on (because there is instruction stream interlocking), and VU1 needs relatively tight synchronisation to the GS (it _is_ feasible to put it on its own thread, but games can be quite picky with timings)

<comment><USER15> Very interesting, thanks for the writeup!

Sony did manage to ship a PS2 emulator that ran on the second-generation PS3 though (1st generation PS3 had actual PS2 hardware inside, but the second generation was software-only emulation if I recall correctly?). Besides knowing exactly about every hardware detail, any idea how they pulled that off on hardware that was _much_ weaker relative to a PS2, compared to a modern PC?

<comment><USER16> It wasn't very accurate, though. [https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/PS2_Classics_Emulator_Compatib...](https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/PS2_Classics_Emulator_Compatibility_List)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A highly efficient, real-time text-to-speech system deployed on CPUs - <AUTHOR> https://ai.facebook.com/blog/a-highly-efficient-real-time-text-to-speech-system-deployed-on-cpus/ <comment><USER2> Personally, I find I dislike any "emotion" added to TTS -- I find Alexa's emo markup, a la:

[https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/blogs/alexa/alexa- skills-...](https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/blogs/alexa/alexa-skills- kit/2019/11/new-alexa-emotions-and-speaking-styles)

to be disturbing and without much added value. (Such as used with games like Jeopardy.)

If used, the application of these tags needs to be both meticulous in its proper context, somewhat non-deterministically applied, and with randomized prosody. Repeated usage of the same overstated emotive content is annoying and unnatural (worse than a "flat" presentation) and only serves to underscore the underlying inflexible conversational content.

<comment><USER3> I agree. All I care about is that the pronunciation is contextually correct, and smooth. Accents are fine, and necessary. But I don't want a non-human simulating human emotions. Now if they aren't simulated, that's another story...

<comment><USER4> +1. And I know I'm in the minority here, but I prefer it if computers don't use actual human voices at all. I like my computer to sound like a computer. (I wouldn't go so far as to add distracting retro affectations though.)

I'm visually impaired, and I often use a screen reader when browsing the web. Here's my favorite voice to use with a screen reader:

[https://mwcampbell.us/tmp/hn- comment-20200515-1.mp3](https://mwcampbell.us/tmp/hn-comment-20200515-1.mp3)

<comment><USER5> That's amazing. Thank you for sharing.

I could not comprehend that. I tried a few times. IIRC, people can learn to "speed hear".

Make me think of the Star Trek TNG Bynars meets the FEDEX speed talker.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11001001](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11001001)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1o2wg5wqko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1o2wg5wqko)

<comment><USER4> I only run my TTS moderately fast. I have blind friends who run it faster. I have some vision, so I only use a screen reader part of the time, and not for programming.

Also, I think speech synthesizers can do a more consistent job of enunciating at high speed than humans can. I didn't quite understand everything the FedEx speed talker was saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Exciting to see our research making broad impact across the industry! [https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08435](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08435)

<comment><USER7> Absolutely, it's super impressive work (as is your later work with Marat :) ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Speech Synthesis has always baffled me. You could run a reasonable (albeit strangely accented) version on 16Mhz Macs without major CPU impact. The code including sound data was less than a megabyte.

In order to achieve modest improvements in dictation we're throwing entire GPU arrays at the problem. What happened in the middle? Was there really no room for improvement until we went full AI?

<comment><USER9> IIRC, it was _with_ major CPU impact. A 8 MHz machine couldn't do much else while talking.

Also, the original MacinTalk sounded a lot better if you fed it phonemes instead of text. It didn't know how to pronounce that many different words, and wasn't really good at making the right choice when the pronunciation of a word depends on its meaning.

For example, if you gave it the text "Read me", it always pronounced "Read" in the past tense. That always seemed the wrong bet to me, and I would think the developers had heard that, too, but apparently, fixing it was not that simple.

I also think it didn't know to pronounce "Dr" as "Drive" or "Doctor", depending on context, or "St" as "Saint" or "Street", to mention a few examples, and probably was abysmal when you asked it to speak a phone book, with its zillions of rare names (back in the eighties, that's an area where AT&T's speech synthesizers excelled, I've been told)

And that's just the text-to-phoneme conversion. The arts of picking the right intonation and speed of talking are in a whole different ball park; they require a kind of sentiment analysis.

<comment><USER10> hee hee, the best mispronunciation from Macintalk had to be chihuahua.

chee-hoo-ah-hoo-ah

<comment><USER2> The TI/99 TTS was the bomb! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a pity that all the best text to speech and speech to text systems are cloud based with heavy vendor lock in.

</comment><comment> Avi-D-coder Any chance of a open source implementation of this?

I could really use a better tts for Linux.

<comment><USER12> No, it cannot be open sourced. It literally has no source to open.

<comment><USER8> Huh? It appears to be written in PyTorch according to the article?

The training data could also be considered source.

And I agree that this is of limited use if I have to access it by uploading and downloading everything from Facebook servers. Not only do I have privacy implications, but there's the need for a solid fast low latency internet connection that I can't guarantee.

<comment><USER12> AI is not written, AI is trained using dataset, PyTorch, and lot of computer time (and manpower).

Dataset is not a big problem (if you can speak, you can create your own). PyTorch is already open.

<comment><USER13> Depending on the architecture, though, it's possible to export the trained model into a stand-alone file that can be imported by somebody else's program, de-coupling the network's training data from model it produces.

This is done pretty frequently in areas like computer vision and speech recognition, with the pre-trained weights for YOLO and Mozilla Deepspeech[0] being available for download. I'm not sure if the word "open-source" totally applies here, since as you pointed out, apart from downloading the dataset source might be tought, but OP's question might be answered by having the resulting models made publicly available with the source code of the networks they used to train and deploy it?

[0] [https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/releases/v0.6.0](https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/releases/v0.6.0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Impressive but also still sounds "robotic" like AWS Polly. I wonder if they'll fuse that tech where you can sample someone's voice from a paragraph and build something. Then you could hire a voice actor(ress) and maybe license their voice? I don't know how that would work.

<comment><USER15> Personally, I quite like Polly's voices. But Polly already offers custom voices, such as trained with a particular person's voice. [0]

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/polly/features/#Brand_Voice](https://aws.amazon.com/polly/features/#Brand_Voice)

<comment><USER14> Which one do you use? I built something 3 years ago been using Kendra, not sure if Joanna is new that one sounds much better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How long until computers can brainstorm all sorts of exciting new voices for characters removing the need for pesky contracts and royalties paid?

</comment><comment><USER17> That video at the end really is deep in the uncanny valley.

<comment><USER18> Meh. The synthesis quality is not terrible, but calling it "state of the art", quality-wise, is a bit of a stretch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The weaknesses of TTS twig different people in different ways. For example, Microsoft Zira and the older Google TTS voice rank near the top for me, while I find every single one of the modern Google voices so horrible as to provoke instant anger when I hear them.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yeah, awesome! This proprietary transcription algorithm must make it a hell of a lot easier for NSA databases. If this is deployed and used by FB so they send the finished and full transcripts of calls and other voice traffic [1] instead of the original audio to be transcribed later, it will all be more efficienct! // sarcasm

[1] [https://theintercept.com/2015/05/05/nsa-speech- recognition-s...](https://theintercept.com/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition- snowden-searchable-text/)</comment>


Laying the Foundation for a Data Team - <AUTHOR> https://monzo.com/blog/2016/11/30/laying-the-foundation-for-a-data-team/ <comment><USER2> What do you call the team that creates, operates, maintaines, and improves the "sanitised (filtered for sensitive personal information) data and analytics infrastructure"? That feels more like an appropriate fit for the data team moniker, and the "autonomous" team described is something like a BI team. Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice writeup, "Engineers shouldn't write ETL" and "Every analysis or data pull that we do, we will need to update or repeat eventually". Good stuff.</comment>


I'm a builder, not a seller. How do I grow my startup? - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/@RickVanHaasteren/im-a-builder-not-a-seller-how-do-i-grow-my-startup-12cd631b7f <comment><USER2> Hi Rick,

I'm the director of sales at an insurance brokerage. I spend a lot of my time thinking about how we can get more prospects into our funnel, and once they're there, how to convert them into a sale-- (apologies for the business jargon, I actually really care about my clients lol)

Let me start with some of the things I feel you are doing correctly. You have a content blog- excellent! Now people who are hunting for info can discover you as a source of reliable and useful insight. How many readers do you get per week? How many people email or comment and engage in a conversation with you? These are valuable metrics, and they should be increased through any means possible.

Your website is clean and flows well. Your pricing is rational. And your understanding of needing sales is also a prerequesite for selling, usually :)

Here's some of the things I need help understanding about your site--

1) What results does your tool deliver? I am reading the list of things it does, but at best I feel like this is a competitive, commoditized market. If your tool can promise me more users and more retention of users, then I would be inclined to start the free trial.

2) Where can I see your tool in action? I think most people are a bit hesitant to start a trial of something, even if its free, of something that they don't understand why they should be using it. Make a youtube blog about things you enjoy explaining, but also make a youtube video that clearly and quickly demonstrates your product. This would encourage me to use your demo today.

3) You have a lot of users-- congrats! How often do you pitch them the paid version? What level of information do you have about your users? It sucks sometimes feeling like you have to proactively poke and prod your users into considering going to the paid version, but many users will appreciate that you are reaching out to offer them a customized success experience. Most of your sales will come from your free tier of users-- how many users are you willing to get in front of with a full on sales presentation in order to make money, at the expense of pissing a few people off for being "too pushy"?

Good luck, I'd be happy to help, let me know if I should email you</comment>


Mangle: Orchestrating Chaos Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://vmware.github.io/mangle/ <comment><USER2> Hello,

I am a part of the Mangle team. The tool has the capabilities of Chaos Monkey and a lot more. You can introduce faults not just at the VM level but also within an application context. Currently it supports JVM applications (allows you to tinker with the CPU and Heap Mem usage of the application). The team is working on supporting other interesting faults such as making your application throw exceptions, introducing latency at the java method layer, Out of file handle errors etc to name a few. Do enter your wishlist here [https://github.com/vmware/mangle/issues](https://github.com/vmware/mangle/issues) and we will work towards developing support for them.

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone interested in this type of stuff, check out:

\- Of course, jepsen.io

\- For JS devs, [https://github.com/gundb/panic- server](https://github.com/gundb/panic-server)

</comment><comment><USER4> How does this differ from Chaos Monkey?

<comment><USER2> Hello jedberg, I am a part of the Mangle team. The tool has the capabilities of Chaos Monkey and a lot more. You can introduce faults not just at the VM level but also within an application context. Currently it supports JVM applications (allows you to tinker with the CPU and Heap Mem usage of the application). The team is working on supporting other interesting faults such as making your application throw exceptions, introducing latency at the java method layer, Out of file handle errors etc to name a few. Do enter your wishlist here [https://github.com/vmware/mangle/issues](https://github.com/vmware/mangle/issues) and we will work towards developing support for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excuse my ignorance: is this like chaos monkey or more a tool for fuzzing?

<comment><USER6> More like chaos monkey. From reading the user guide, I didn't see anything that looks like fuzzing (injecting random or bad data in requests/responses). Looks like it messes with the infrastructure or the application's performance.</comment></comment>


Show HN: YouTube browser extension. Watch and vote on videos synced with friends - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-party-playlist/koeemjjlmgnhkllifjjgnngfkkdbkahh <comment><AUTHOR> It's also for firefox: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/youtube-party...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/youtube-party-playlist/)</comment>


Apple watchOS 3 announced - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/13/11902034/apple-watch-os-update-announced-features-apps-wwdc-2016 <comment><USER2> Okay - now this looks interesting: write with your finger on the watch to send short messages! I think this may actually be the feature that tips a lot of people over the edge from "The smart watch is just a toy" to "I can actually do something useful with this thing in my productive life".

I wonder if it would be an effective way of doing an interview and taking notes. Reminiscent of the Graffiti days!

<comment><USER3> Sounds like another gimmick to me. It's slow and not convenient. Might be good to write where you parked your car, but I doubt it would be convenient for taking notes.

IMO Pebble got it right. The watch is a companion to your phone, not another phone.

<comment><USER4> I still don't understand why smartwatches need their own OS and power hungry processor...

Why not make it an accessory for a smartphone that simply displays everything from it and inputs to it, using its processing power mostly?

At least then they would last a bit longer...

<comment><USER5> Probably because the power hungry processor is less power hungry then the amount of power that would be required by the wireless chipset if it needed to offload everything to the phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is great to know that WatchOS3 will have better performance, and background processing for fitness apps will also help, but aside from that, I don't see any other big Watch OS news for developers.

</comment><comment><USER7> Takes guts to do a rethink like that. I like a hungry and threatened Apple.

</comment><comment><USER8> Do all these performance improvements require the new Apple Watch 2 hardware?

<comment> k-mcgrady What new Apple Watch 2 hardware? There is none.

<comment><USER8> Supposedly this OS release is supposed to coincide with a hardware refresh.

<comment> k-mcgrady Possibly but they wouldn't demo anything that would only work on unannounced hardware. As far as the demos were concerned Watch 2 doesn't exist. They usually demo extra stuff that requires the hardware when it is announced officially.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where can I learn about startup operations? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I run a productized service (unlimited, done-for-you modern design service for startups) that requires a lot of operational complexity. Mostly the work requires handling briefs, dispatching tasks to designers, following up the work, maintaining the quality etc.
I would like to know if there are any interesting resources on running startup operations, knowing which metrics to track, how to properly create SOPs, etc?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I can't think of any resources for you, though I was in a similar position over a decade ago, learned something very valuable (to me) and would like to share.

Be very careful about investing time into operations, especially standard operating processes when you're still in startup phase. Scale will fuck with SOPs like nothing else and if you hit a flashpoint, you'll likely discover that SOPs actually handcuff your early employees. A far better use of your time (at this stage) would be selecting/training staff to think more like a founder, demonstrate initiative and think their way through fucked up messes.

Metrics are relatively useful, but you've got to be very careful not to look at them as absolute measures of productivity and rather look at them as more of a sign of an upcoming problem. If you focus too much on productivity, there's a very good chance that you'll optimize away the employees who actually belong in a startup.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am just reading chapter 2 of High Output Management which is about how to select effective indicators. Highlights so far: \- measure output not activity (closed sales not sales calls) \- pair a quantitative measure with a qualitative measure \- think of the 5 indicators you want to check first thing every morning.

</comment><comment><USER4> This seems like an oxymoron

A startup needs to be lean, so seeks to track success rather than indicators

<comment><USER5> Lean analytics is not an oxymoron: [http://leananalyticsbook.com/](http://leananalyticsbook.com/)</comment></comment>


Pack arbitrary files into PNG and access them using JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/haxorplatform/web-bundle <comment><USER2> I first learned about this technique from Cody Brocious' post ([http://daeken.com/superpacking-js-demos](http://daeken.com/superpacking-js- demos)) about his WebGL demo 'Magister' ([http://demoseen.com/windowpane/magister.html](http://demoseen.com/windowpane/magister.html)). That file has a .html extension, but it's also a valid PNG. In his post, he discusses this technique as well as others.

Cody's goal was to compress already minified WebGL code and achieve some pretty impressive results from a ridiculously small file for a demo contest. He also put the JS loader (which is much smaller than the linked decoder) in a custom chunk on the PNG itself. By doing it that way, you can have a PNG that when renamed also contains a web page and/or more Javascript.

It's an interesting technique, for sure, but I've never been able to find a real use for it beyond the compression. With a content-type sniffing vulnerability or something, it could be an interesting way to deliver content to browsers, but otherwise it's really just a curiosity as best I can tell.

<comment><USER3> This is really clever. Unfortunately, the linked page doesn't seem to have the bootstrap code that has the magic of getting from a PNG to a web page. Is this around somewhere? (I could download the demo PNG and extract it myself, but I'm hoping not to have to do that...)

<comment><USER2> Right, just rung strings on the demo and you'll see the custom PNG chunk:

``` jawh<img onload=with(document.createElement('canvas'))p=width=4968,(c=getContext('2d')).drawImage(this,e='',0);while(p)e+=String.fromCharCode(c.getImageData(0,0,p,1).data[p-=4]);(t=top).eval(e) src=#> ```

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is pretty great. I also built something similar a while back that would let you post torrents to message boards as images:

[https://github.com/mnutt/hid.im/blob/master/public/firefox-e...](https://github.com/mnutt/hid.im/blob/master/public/firefox- extension/screenshot-1.png?raw=true)

</comment><comment><USER5> I guess this would be useful with Amazon's free unlimited cloud photo storage.

<comment><USER6> Only if they leave the photo as a losslessly compressed png. They might convert to a lossy JPEG on upload, which means your data is toast.

<comment><USER7> Two can play at that game. You can store data in JPEG that can even survive recompression with lower quality. If it's worth it to you to go to all that trouble, that is.

<comment><USER8> Interesting paper: Bypassing Cloud Providers' Data Validation to Store Arbitrary Data [1]

>JPG & PNG Steganography Encoder (JPG-PNGStega). The purpose of this encoder is to inject data (hiding it) in JPG and PNG files. It takes a File Format Sample (JPG or PNG) and, for each pixel, it injects 3 bits of data in the LSBs (Least Significant Bit). There are more sophisticated image steganography methods already widely discussed. However, the use of this encoder shows that even basic meth- ods of JPG and PNG steganography are possible in SaaS applications, and the exploitation of such method may bring impacts

[http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1404/1404.2637.pdf](http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1404/1404.2637.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only use I see for this is for compressing files uploaded to a hosting where you can't enable gzip encoding. I already use static gzip encoding in all my deployments and I got less problems with cross-origin requests from custom-coded binary files than from images.

<comment><USER10> Most people won't find any real-world use for this, but it's cool/clever enough by itself that it's worth the author's time and effort.

<comment><USER9> Definitely. In fact it's one of the first things I considered when I started moving the mesh format of my engine from JSON to binary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure what the use case for this is, but you can also add arbitrary data to PNG files by adding a custom chunk. As long as the chunk is marked as ancillary (the first letter of the chunk type is in lower case), it will not affect image decoding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Contrarily to the appending trick that you mention, this allows you to apply PNG compression to your arbitrary data, and then make use of the browser's decompression capabilities on it.

Though that's still kind of an odd use case, since we have gzip encoding for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Any ideas why I would want to do this?

<comment><USER13> Circumventing censorship; need to move arbitrary data, but only convenient transport is image format.

<comment><USER14> Imagine if lots of sites added a 1MB image that contained the information that various governments want censored.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice, how large can the archives become? I guess there is a size limit, which may be different for different browsers.

Also, I wonder how difficult it would be to port a decompression library to asm.js.

<comment> eduardo-costa Author here!

The need appeared when I was doing my WebGL game engine and wanted to pack/compress mesh, texture, xml and any other stuff that would bloat my loading time with tons of HTTP requests!

Also the browser's native PNG decompression would be faster than any external JS lib for lossless decompression.

I limited it to a 16k x 16k PNG (but I think modern browsers can take more than that), allowing 1GB of data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Significantly reduce the number of HTTP requests allowing fast page loads

I wonder how true this holds with HTTP/2.0, where resources are loaded in parallel over a single TCP connection.</comment>


Amazing Charts showing Viral Loops - <AUTHOR> http://productplanner.com/gallery/

<comment><USER2> I'm very interested in this, but I do not see the chart. Could you please post a comment on how I can see it and why you find it interesting.</comment>


Universal Laws of the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/laws/ <comment><USER2> >We can expect "miracles" to happen regularly, because in a world with 7 billion people the odds of a one-in-a-billion event are pretty good.

In my mind a miracle is something that can't be explained by science (walking on water, resurrection, etc.). I'm wondering if they mean "coincidence" instead of miracle. Something that is extremely unlikely, but wholly explainable by science. For example, I once went on a trip with my daughter to a far away city. Everywhere we went she ran into someone she knew. We went out to eat and a friend (who was from an entirely different part of the country) was seated at a table next to ours. We went to a venue that seated 20,000 people and it turned out that the people right behind us were friends of hers that she hadn't seen in ages. I don't think any of those meetups were miracles. They were just a bunch of coincidences.

<comment><USER3> That may be what you define as a miracle, but there are a lot of people who regard 'coincidences' as meaningful and evidence of synchronicity and the supernatural such as ESP/psi, and love to recount stories as proof thereof. (These days, the spooks now have names like 'racism', but the logic is the same.) If you trace Littlewood's law back to the Freeman Dyson essay which coined it ( [https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood#origin-of-littlewoods- law-o...](https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood#origin-of-littlewoods-law-of- miracles) ), you'll find that it's a review of a book titled _Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience_. You can easily surmise why the book would go into discussions of how unlikely coincidences are actually likely, but Dyson makes it clear what is being debunked by Littlewood's law:

> The book also has a good chapter on "Amazing Coincidences." These are > strange events which appear to give evidence of _supernatural_ influences > operating in everyday life. They are not the result of deliberate fraud or > trickery, but only of the laws of probability. The paradoxical feature of > the laws of probability is that they make unlikely events happen > unexpectedly often...

So, since people do regard these coincidences as 'miracles', it is necessary to point out that they would happen frequently in a world completely devoid of any kind of 'supernatural influences', and thus are poor evidence for the supernatural.

<comment><USER4> > (These days, the spooks now have names like 'racism', but the logic is the > same.)

I don't understand what you mean or are referencing here. Can you clarify? I couldn't figure it out from the context. Thanks.

<comment><USER5> An example of something offered as an explanation (of a phenomenon or an idea), looks like.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paradox in Game Theory: Losing Strategy That Wins - <AUTHOR> http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9500E3D71F3DF936A15752C0A9669C8B63

<comment><USER2> That's weird. A professor of mine told me about this years ago! OMG, Parrando stole this paradox! oh wait, this article's 8 years old.</comment>


Bay Area sheriff seeks drone for thermal imaging and surveillance - <AUTHOR> https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2012/oct/19/alameda-county-sheriff-seeks-drone-thermal-imaging/

<comment><USER2> Thermal cameras can help spot indoor pot growers, which is the likely purpose of such a drone. Growers may insulate their walls, but probably have not done so with their ceilings.

Of course people with terrariums and other heat sources may be victims in the cross fire of the War on Drugs.

Incidentally, afaik, current US law says aircraft must fly five hundred feet above any man made structure. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights>

<comment><USER3> There was a Supreme Court decision that said thermal imaging of a person's home is a "search" and requires a warrant.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States>

Before this decision they could do a thermal image of your home and if it gave off a certain heat signature, the police could use that a probably cause to get a warrant to search the home.

Now, they need a warrant just to do the thermal imaging.

<comment><USER4> But is it enforced?

<comment><USER3> Not sure what you mean by "enforced".

Do cops currently do thermal scans of random citizen's homes? Probably.

Can they go to a judge and say "the thermal scan says this house has a marijuana grow-op in it, give me a warrant"? No.

<comment><USER5> But they can file bogus paperwork saying an informant told an officer that the house has drugs in order to get a warrant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If people aren't up in arms about the TSA at airports groping them, they sure aren't going to do a darn thing about drones watching them.

Police know people are lazy and/or complacent.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what sort of shotgun load you need to take out a drone, would that be more like a pheasant or a goose load?

<comment><USER8> The drone will probably be considered a military officer just like dogs. Either that, or it's the same as shooting a police officer's car when he's not in it. Don't forget about the consequences.

<comment><USER7> Probably correct. And probably a bad idea to blind it with laser pointers too. But as a person concerned with the continuing erosion of civil liberties I get a bit frustrated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Prediction: it will be shot down within the first month of operation.

<comment><USER10> I'm sure it will be shot _at_. Shooting something _down_ is pretty hard.

<comment><USER11> I predict the first US citizen to shoot down one of these will instantly become a folk hero.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Plenty of drones with camera are available. The problem usually is the length of time they can stay up there. Battery power has not caught up with the current demand.

</comment><comment><USER13> stuff like this really drives home my fear of a dystopian future where police bots patrol the skies using all sorts of cameras and sensors to find 'the bad guys'. Facial recognition, thermal cameras, speech patterns and other tech we haven't even though of yet all used to find 'Bad People'. Creepy.

<comment><USER14> Casual use of thermal cameras is indeed too much (and as someone else pointed out, illegal.) Other things, like matching faces, speech, or even listening in public places, seem fine to me. (Someone else pointed to laws about flying so low, but if that can be worked around...) I know that's a popular image, but, if this is a new tool for officers patrolling, then I don't see what's so dystopian about this.

As long as we're not talking about cutting other officers and patrols, I would fully support police stations hiring a couple of people to alternate flying a dozen or so drones around the city. Just put some charging stations on top of light poles or city buildings, and have them automated to fly back when power is sufficiently low.

I really don't get why people are averse to such things so long as we keep in mind that they are tools are to help people. They're not magic robots that can not completely take the place of people. If we ever get to a point where it even seems like that, then that's another conversation to have. But we're not there yet, and I see no reason to not use tools if they seem worthwhile.

/edit: I understand that any tool can be abused, but can someone explain to me why this is met with such anger? Barring thermal or other vision modes, what's the huge difference in this and patrolling? (Aside from not being seen.)

<comment><USER13> Constant surveillance is one of those societal boundaries where the line is hard to find. We all agree that public spaces are... public but if a plane can follow everywhere you go and record all of it, you start to get into weird creepy stalker territory. If that plane is controlled by the state then it is doubly creepy.

There aren't easy answers but it ultimately goes back to the 'Why do you need to hide anything if you don't do anything bad?' argument. And we already know plenty of answers to that argument.</comment></comment></comment>