No flourish was too much - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n16/bridget-alsdorf/no-flourish-was-too-much <comment><USER2> > No flourish was too much

Well, that's an uninformative title!

It's about the life and work of the 19th C painter Tissot.

<comment><USER3> It's good for HN readers to have to work a little. Not too often, and not too much—but enough to interrupt the reflexive circuits.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22work%20a%20little%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20reflective%20reflex&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><USER2> Thank you! I spent a wonderful hour reading things you wrote and linked to. All admirably sensible and insightful, as usual.

"The most interesting writing is that which does not quite satisfy the reader. Try and leave a little thinking for him; that will be better for both. The trouble with most writers is, they spread too thin. The reader is as quick as they; has got there before, and is ready and waiting. A little guessing does him no harm, so I would assist him with no connections. If _you_ can see how the harness fits, he can. But make sure that you see it." – Emerson, in _Talks With Ralph Waldo Emerson_

[https://archive.org/details/cu31924014317105/page/n39/mode/2...](https://archive.org/details/cu31924014317105/page/n39/mode/2up)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think about a simpler syntax that compiles into LaTeX? - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking of starting a project that is aimed at creating a simpler syntax for LaTeX, for cleaner and speedier document creation.
Check out the project notes, ideas, and examples at http://github.com/chetan51/eX.
There already exists a syntax called Multimarkdown, but it doesn't support a lot of basic stuff (AFAIK) like multi-line equations, theorems, etc. Basically, it's not as simple or specifically tailored for LaTeX as I would hope.
My vision is to make simple LaTeX document creation easier and faster using this shorthand notation, and to make LaTeX more accessible to the non-technical masses.
What do you think? Is this a project worth spending time and effort on? Would you use it? <comment><USER2> My initial take on it (and take it with a grain of salt, I am not a LaTeX power user, I just wrote my thesis in it and a few documents and haven't spent much time thinking about shorthand but,) is that there are basically two types of users who write LaTeX: people who author complicated documents and typeset equations and need LaTeX as their bread and butter of publishing and casual users who just want to write an essay or two.

Sounds like you're targeting much more of the latter group to increase accessibility. However, for that group of people a few LaTeX IDEs already exist that make it even easier than typesetting with a simpler mark up.

A lot of _very_ smart people have spent a lot of time thinking about (La)TeX formatting, syntax and interaction and I doubt giving it a simplistic interface will do it much justice or introduce it to someone who found the original markup inaccessible.

Just my $0.02.

</comment><comment><USER3> To what extent do the non-technical masses spend a lot of time writing formulas? That seems to be a big gating factor on the audience for this.

Is there an unmet need (other than formulas) that is solved by writing documents in latex? obviously, a lot of the tags in HTML 1.x/2.x are derivedish from LaTeX so this has worked out well for at least one person previously. On the other hand, as Yan points out, DEK and company are smart people who have given this a lot of thought.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would love it if it had support for source code listings too.

<comment><USER5> "\usepackage{listings}" should do the trick for you. <http://www.usq.edu.au/users/leis/notes/latex/code.html></comment></comment>


MIT OpenCourseWare Turns 10: What's Next for Open Education? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mit_opencourseware_turns_10_celebrating_a_decade_o.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29&utm_content=Netvibes <comment><USER2> For the next step I would love to see:

• A standard across multiple courses so that you don't have some courses publishing assignments and recorded lectures while others just post assignments.

• A new degree type. Not an associate's degree nor a bachelor's degree, but a lesser degree that could be earned completely online from a solid institutions like MIT.

<comment><USER3> There are Bachelor of Arts/Sciences (3-year General) that can be earned completely online (I'm sure you've heard of Open University in the UK but there's also University of Waterloo in Canada - <http://de.uwaterloo.ca/undergraduate.html>). For UW, I know they offer certificates too (you just need to complete X number of specific courses but definitely less than what you need in a 3 or 4 year degree).

Unfortunately though, they do charge tuition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Communities of convergence, aggregation...students and educators communicating more effectively, more foreign language translations of content, sharing & combining what's been mentioned here as well as

Khan Academy + Bittorrent [http://www.hackeducation.com/2011/02/11/khan- academy-and-bit...](http://www.hackeducation.com/2011/02/11/khan-academy-and- bittorrent-partner-to-distribute-educational-videos/)

Gaming: [http://www.phibetaiota.net/2010/09/video-visions-of-the- game...](http://www.phibetaiota.net/2010/09/video-visions-of-the- gamepocalypse-possible-futures-waking-up-thinking-and-creating-a-better- world/) \+ [http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd404x-c11/playable.ht...](http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd404x-c11/playable.html)

<http://hackety-hack.com>

<http://cnx.org>

<http://www.writework.com>

<http://www.fhsst.org>

<http://www.unclasses.org>

<http://www.coursehero.com>

<http://www.varsitynotes.com>

<http://www.livemocha.com> (language)

<http://openstudy.com>

Connecting educators & students to communicate more effectively using these and more:

<http://edublogs.org>

<http://www.connectedprincipals.com>

<http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/blogs/index.html>

<http://piratepad.net>

<http://primarypad.com>

<http://typewith.me>

<http://sync.in>

<http://sketchpad.cc>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Knowledge is becoming a commodity thanks to this kind of initiatives

</comment><comment><USER5> MIT OCW is very cool, and they were front runners.

What's next? Putting more course materials on the net isn't really it. What _should_ be next is much more challenging, but has immense payoffs... something like Khan Academy is doing with personalized learning.

How awesome would it be if MIT did something like that, incorporating some of their incredible material?

<comment><USER6> Their first intent when creating OCW was actually for professors to connect:

"We set out to create a resource other faculty could draw on to improve their classes..."

It seems independent learners were an after-thought. There is immense amount of free educational content out there right now. The next step from here may be challenging. All of the what is available is great for independent learning. But the tools for engaging and collaborating with other students or professors is lacking.

We need something to connect teachers, students, independent learners together with the library of free material. Provide simple tools for collaboration inside documents like notes, bookmarks, etc. Add more extensive tools for authoring documents together.

The Khan Academy is great. But imagine giving the professor the ability to weave those videos and exercises into a textbook built from a library of other creative commons books. That would be exciting stuff.

<comment><USER7> There are companies working on this! I wish I had a link, but there was a talk about this at the 2010 Students for Free Culture conference in DC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Peer 2 Peer University is what's next. Think of it as a social wrapper around free educational content. <http://p2pu.org>

<comment><USER9> I know this may sound as if I'm just trying to make a dirty joke, but I am being sincere. To me, the domain reads, "pee 2 poo dot org" Yes it's a short domain, but is it a good branding choice?

I see you work at Twilio, so if you aren't involved with P2PU, that's cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would love to see more videos spezially the compiler and PL courses. That would be awesome!

</comment><comment><USER11> Existing for 10 years doesn't mean it's perfect. I still cannot find video lectures of many math & statistics course at MIT OCW (course slides as PDF's are not really helpful).

What I would like to see is the entire curriculum of e.g. Computer Science undergrad program at MIT (with video lectures). Of course, it is a dream.

</comment><comment><USER12> Congrats to MIT for such a valuable service!

</comment><comment><USER7> cough cough <http://noteshub.org> cough</comment>


I Have a Great Startup Idea - Now What? - <AUTHOR> http://timkastelle.org/blog/2013/11/great-idea-now-startup-edition/

<comment><USER2> Work it out, create an MVP, create a mailing list (first) and some buzz (afterwards, when you launch you're MVP), report you're progress regularely, ...

If you aren't investing time in it, who else will :)</comment>


Analysis: Why wikipedia does not accept free money - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/11/20/the-full-faith-and-credit-of-wikipedia.html

<comment><USER2> We must put pressure on Wikipedia to make them accept bitcoin for donation!</comment>


The iPhone X - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/2017/12/the_iphone_x <comment><USER2> "After two months using an iPhone X, I'm convinced Apple succeeded. The iPhone X is a triumph, a delightful conceptual modernization of a ten-year-old platform that, prior to using the iPhone X, I didn't think needed a modernization."

There's the tldr. And for anyone accustomed to Gruber's writing, it was a predictable conclusion.

<comment><USER3> I would agree with this summary. I think Apple knocked it out of the park this time, confounding my expectations that everything would be generally terrible post-Steve.

They can reinvent something spectacularly well. But can they create something entirely new that is also wonderful? This is the real test they have yet to pass.

<comment><USER4> I know everyone is all poo poo on the iPhone x in here. But my prior phone was 3 years old (original 6+, the battery was already starting to... well have issues, was already at over 1k cycles), so I bought the X.

Have to say I like it, its just thinner enough width wise. And the one feature it has is brilliant in winter. I can unlock my phone without removing my gloves. And yes, these gloves are the ones that work with capacitive touch screens. Good luck getting gloves to work with a finger sensor, or to be able to type anything with them reliably in -20F weather.

So... basically it seems like a solid release overall. Of course I have gripes, the control center swipe is annoying to hit for example but overall its fine. Expensive sure, but if I upgrade every 2-3 years whatever.

<comment><USER5> ha, same upgrade here (6 Plus to X). The swipes are the one area where the notch is almost a feature: swipe down from left of notch - notifications; swipe down from right of notch - control center. Doing it in landscape is doable but sometimes I'm not 100% certain it is going to end up where I want it.

I'm very pleased so far. I was tired of having the larger phone yet wanted the better camera. Do I know if it is was worth the price premium? Not sure, but it seems I had a choice between two of three items in price, performance, and size. I chose performance and size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brian-armstrong This is an incredibly fanboy-y article even by Gruber standards. I'm not sure he's physically capable of criticizing Apple, even if he wanted to.

<comment><USER6> My take on Gruber is to not take him seriously. Don't take his recommendations, he'll flip on a dime. For example, when the Pebble was announced he was first in line on the Kickstarter. It shipped, he liked it. As soon as the Apple Watch came out, the Pebble was suddenly a piece of shit.

I'm also convinced that he recommends things that he's either never used, or took money to recommend. An outstanding example is a weather app he gushed about that I'm convinced he never used because it was horrible (as in, the forecasts weren't even close), and the visual design was something he'd typically tear into.

For me, Gruber is in the "Dvorak/Cringley" bucket: entertaining, sometimes on point, but for $DEITY's sake don't take it for gospel. But despite all that, I read every post.

<comment><USER7> I don't recall ever overly praising the Pebble. Here's everything I've ever written about Pebble:

[https://daringfireball.net/search/pebble](https://daringfireball.net/search/pebble)

I really only wore mine for about a week, finding it more annoying than useful. As I stated here: [https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/02/24/pebble- time](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/02/24/pebble-time)

I like Apple Watch, but only as one of several watches I own. The others are mechanical, not digital.

I don't know which weather app you're talking about, but I've never recommended anything I haven't used, and the only posts I get paid for are the once-a-week sponsorships, which are _always_ clearly noted as being sponsored.

<comment><USER6> I will say first that as it concerns the Pebble: _I react my statement_. (Can't edit now, sorry.) Ugh, I made a decent effort to find what I was talking about, but you sure wrote a lot of mentions about Pebble. :-) All I have to go on is an increasingly faulty middle-aged memory, despite your giving me a handy list of posts, so I'll leave it be.

As for the weather app, it might very well have been sponsored. But here's the thing: despite my critical comments above, I still take you as a person of integrity even for sponsorships. Now maybe that's just naive of me (I grew up on Paul Harvey, I should know better), but even if you're paid I just assume you tried the product and said, "yeah, I can sincerely praise that." Naive or not, I just know that when I downloaded it, my first thought was "no way Gruber's seen this running, it's horrible and I'm not _nearly_ the font and design nut he is. That, and the forecast looks like it's for Florida, not Seattle." Again, maybe that's on me: it was an ad, clearly labeled as an ad, caveat emptor. Made a good faith effort to find my purchases in the App Store to back this up, but Apple apparently isn't going to make that easy on me.

Finally, had I even suspected you might see this I probably would have not used a Dvorak comparison. I meant it to mean "can go on a rant, but a rant that'll be worth consideration; whether you agree or not", but that was Dvorak 30 years ago. I truly do enjoy reading what you write, and do read every post, and that comparison was unfair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The iPhone X hardware is great but they dropped the ball big time on software quality/reliability. I still encounter major home/swipe related glitches that require a reboot a couple of times per week. It seems like the point releases are causing more problems than they fix which is concerning. iOS seems to be in a nasty downward spiral of reliability.

<comment><USER9> I hear people saying this a ton, aside from the slow face unlock, I haven't experienced many glitches. What am I not doing wrong? Is there a specific gesture to trigger one of these bugs (genuine question)?

<comment><USER8> The home/swipe related bugs seem to be related to accidental touch detection and/or swiping before animations fully complete. For example this morning I had to reboot my phone because I couldn't swipe to unlock from the lock screen. It was stuck in 'notification mode' so it thought my swipes were to view my notifications instead of unlocking. Immediately before this happened I had cleared all my notifications which resulted in a very choppy animation. My previous reboot before this was caused by getting stuck in Music after trying to swipe down in Music to get off the 'now playing' screen. For some reason this always requires multiple tries so I probably set off some accidental touch detection lockout.

It's a death by a thousand paper cuts thing. There is no one bug that can be easily fixed. It's dozens (maybe hundreds) of small annoyances like the keyboard absolutely refusing to register a keypress that goes against it's prediction of what I want to type. Another fun one is I get floods of old notifications randomly usually from phone/messages -- like a voicemail notification from a month ago. I don't even care if Siri doesn't work well or if I have to enter my PIN slightly more often because of FaceID. I just want the fundamentals to work reliably.

<comment><USER10> Did you select set up as a new phone or restore from a backup

I had all kinds of problems like this until i just bit the bullet and did it clean slate, and i haven't had a single performance issue since. Not a single reboot, nothing. The regular iOS11 gripes are still there but nothing truly awful like this

It's a bit like doing a clean install when you order a new laptop right after you take it out of the box. It's usually a good call, even if it's a bit of a hassle

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it's worth noting that even for someone like Gruber who often defends things about apple others attack, he still craps on the notch in landscape mode.

I have an X, and i have very few complaints about it. It's an awesome device pretty much all around, and i wouldn't trade it in for an 8 or any other phone. They did a bang up job on performance, display quality, battery life, and i think the updates to the interface are spot-on.

But holy shit is the notch annoying in landscape, and so many apps that are "updated" for the X still handle it HORRIBLY. Especially games.

They really screwed this one up, and they need to be way harsher on developers who want to use the "ears" in-game to actually take the shape into account. I find myself actually wishing i could force thing into the "letterbox" non- updated app mode sometimes.

Fortunately this is something that could be fixed later, because it's software, but right now it's _so_ bad. It doesn't even bother me in videos, just when i need to actually interact with crappily thought through games and apps treating that area like usable display

</comment><comment><USER11> _In short, with the iPhone X Apple took a platform with two primary means of interacting with the apps — a touchscreen and a home button — removed one of them, and created a better, more integrated, more organic experience._ [...] _Android handset makers seem willing to copy everything and anything from Apple they can get away with..._

<comment><USER12> That's pretty funny considering the iPhone X is the most Android-like phone so far, what with a) getting rid of the home button b) AMOLED screen (welcome to 2009) c) wireless charging. Finally an iPhone with some decent hardware features.

<comment><USER13> Getting rid of a physical button is hardly a decent hardware feature. I would've been massively disappointed if apple had gone the android route and just slapped a virtual button i can tap onto the screen.

If you want to say apple ripped some one off with removing the home button, it wasn't android. It was Palm. Welcome back 2009 indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reads a lot like sponsored content.

<comment><USER15> If you were to write a review of a product you really liked, how would you do it differently?

<comment><USER16> Perhaps one might admit that Apple are late to the game with OLED and edge-to- edge displays?

<comment><USER17> Admit? Like it's a secret he's trying to cover up?

Apple people simply don't care. They know Apple's "late." (Inasmuch as someone else has done a similar thing, or used a similar piece of tech "first".) Because Apple is _almost always_ late.

Late to touch. Late to smartphones. Late to fingerprint readers. Late to face identification. Late to attention detection. Late to wireless charging. Late to big screens. Late to music streaming. Late to video services. Late to the TV. Late to the wrist. Late to the wireless headphones. etc.

<comment><USER16> I agree, but he attempts to shame other firms when they decide to copy something from Apple. He comes across as a hypocrite.

Personally I find many of Apples "innovations" abhorrent and it frustrates me that they have been universally copied. They have popularised disposable, unrepairable, slippery, ultra-fragile phones!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "And for reasons I've never been able to understand, Android handset makers seem willing to copy everything and anything from Apple they can get away with... but none have copied the iPhone's mute switch, despite the fact that it's a brilliant idea." OnePlus 5 and onwards? Although I think it may be the only Android phone to have one.

<comment><USER19> I could do without that switch - I use Tasker to toggle silent mode based on location rules, and I prefer to e.g. use a timer to turn on no-disturb for a movie, rather than needing to remember to re-enable sounds.

The probability that I'm e.g. at a meeting and don't want to be disturbed is far less likely than simply keeping the phone on silent for the whole work day. It just doesn't fit a use case for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a beautiful way of looking at the X from a very zoomed out perspective. To an extent, I agree with much of what's said and felt the same way when starting to use my X.

But, and this is the important but here, we're existing users. I saw iPhones develop over time, so for me this is evolution and I put up with it. But what about new users, that are new to the platform.

Apple made some interactions so unintuitive that even I was confused. One example is purchasing an app. Pre-X, you'd tap the "get" button and place your finger on the home button or enter your password. With the X you have to tap the button, look at your device, and then follow the most unintuitive animation to actually press the physical side button.

That's where I think we start to see the difference between evolution and compromise.

<comment><USER21> I've had the X for a few days now. The animation to press the physical button totally had me stumped the first few times! Overall I'm a fan (such as great camera and great screen) but some of the new interactions are taking some getting used to.

<comment><USER22> Yeah the explanation for the side button tap should be considered a straight up bug — I had to google what to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This bit especially irked me:

"In iOS 11 X, almost every role of the home button has been subsumed by the display, with the remainder reassigned to the side button:

\- Wake the device: tap the display.

\- Go to the home screen: short swipe up from the bottom of display.

\- Go to the multitasking switcher: longer swipe up from the bottom.

\- Even better way to multitask: just swipe sideways on the home indicator.

\- Accessibility shortcut: triple-click the side button.

\- Authenticate: just look at the display.

\- Reachability: swipe down on the bottom edge of display.

\- Siri: press-and-hold side button."

5 out of 8 of those things are already achieved without the home button since the 6S.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I was really surprised the long-press-left-edge wasn't a gesture that made it to the X, among other things.

<comment><USER13> I loved that gesture, but I was shocked how many of my friends/coworkers didn't know about it. I think the iPhone X up and over arc is more reliable to trigger(once you figure out not to do up and hold).

<comment><USER25> it doesn't have to be up and over, you just swipe left and right on it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How did the move of the sleep/wake button from the top to side EVER get approved ...? I've been ranting about this since the iPhone 6... I can't count the number of times I've:

\- inadvertently activated Siri while reaching blindly for my phone

\- put the phone to sleep when trying to use the hardware shutter button while taking a picture

I don't understand how this flaw has escaped widespread criticism...

<comment><USER10> The true face-palmer here is the new screenshot shortcut on the X, wherein you press volume up + side button to take a screenshot

i seriously take probably 5-10 screenshots a day just trying to lock my damn phone. I've taken to crooking my finger on the other side so it's far from the volume buttons just to avoid this.

Seriously my only major UI complaint

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some of the descriptions are so overwrought:

My acclimation to the iPhone X has made using an iPad feel _anachronistic_ — I want to swipe up from the bottom to go home there too.

With Touch ID, after you tap a particular notification in the middle of the display, you then must move your finger down to the home button to authenticate. I always found that annoying. Now that I'm used to the iPhone X, I find it to be _intolerable_.

Whereas the first bumps, on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, were like _blemishes_. If you're going to have a bump, have a _fucking bump_.

But if I pick up or glance at an iPhone without it, I'm _skeeved_ out.

Things I notice instantly: the display looks very small, the colors look too cool at night (because of the aforementioned lack of True Tone), and the perfectly square corners of the display seem downright _crude_.

It's unique in Apple history — if not all of _consumer computing history_ — for the same version of the OS to present two distinct interfaces that are so markedly different.

<comment><USER27> It's called good writing. He has a unique voice.

<comment><USER26> There is too much Bill Walton in that review. We have an X and it isn't life changing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The extra step to kill processes on the X is bad enough that I would call it a serious bug (i.e. it is harder to view processes in the first place, you can't swipe them out, and you can't even _see_ the kill buttons without a delicate push-and-wait). This _has_ to be easy to do because there are just too many apps that can enter weird states, e.g. bank apps that will never accept log- ins again once they encounter their first server blip.

Also, whether it is software or the X itself, sound is _atrocious_ : it is very easy to generate nasty and loud pops/glitches/stutters on a regular basis.

<comment><USER29> I'm with you on the killing processes part. There are a lot of things I like about the X, but that one is annoying and (as far as I can tell) pointless. It seems like Apple intentionally made it harder in order to discourage people from habitually killing apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I like Gruber, but this article has so many words for so little content.

As far as I understood it, he basically said, in many words, that iPhone X (and, by extension, removing the home button) is the beginning of a new age for the iPhone. That's well and good, but I don't agree with him.

The competitive gap between iPhone and everything else is WAY smaller than it was in 2007, and with Google in the mix and actually-good cameras being available on Android now, that gap is becoming smaller by the day. Face ID is all well and good, but I don't think it's a major differentiator like multi- touch was in 2007.

<comment><USER13> I think that this can be a fundamental shift for the iPhone and iOS without being a paradigm shift that puts apple years ahead of the competition. I also didn't pick up an implication that this puts iOS years ahead of android while reading the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> All in all, I'm pleased with the phone. There are some things that are pretty rough, though, and that compensating for the removal of the home button has caused a glaring problem. Shutdown being the biggest one so far for me. The Konami code that you have to enter in order to initiate getting the slider to appear is nothing short of amazing. I'm hoping at some point a button to activate the slider ends up in Control Center.

<comment><USER31> By "Konami code", do you mean lock button + volume up button?

I mean I understand it is hard- _er_ , but I wouldn't call it hard.

<comment><USER5> for me, volume up + lock button typically fires off a screenshot even if unintended. I use tap volume up -> tap volume down -> hold lock button.

<comment><USER32> What about holding volume _down_ \+ lock button simultaneously? Basically you only have to squeeze two buttons at either side for a couple of seconds.. I do not find this very hard to do at all.. With the added benefit that you disable faceid at the same time.. Useful in some situations..

<comment><USER5> didn't know about that one, thanks. Seems there are different ways to go about it with this being less steps than the tap up, tap down, hold lock I've been using and doesn't interfere with screenshot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Cut Gruber some slack. He needs to stay in Apple's graces.

<comment><USER34> That's where we are now. We integrated sponsored content so much, that we don't even get angry when some bloggers, writing under his own personal name, seems to have been paid to write a piece of ad, in what is supposed to be a personnal opinion.

This whole culture needs to go down the sh_tter. We tolerate youtubers lying about things they like, bloggers lying about their own opinions, companies hidding abusive conditions in their terms of usage, reselling private data, and we consider it all fine because it's made for the purpose of gaining money.

Man, capitalism isn't _about_ moral, but even capitalistic societies need some kind of ethic...

<comment><USER33> This isn't about being paid. Gruber has too much integrity to do such a thing and a serious journalist would never risk their reputation. What Gruber isn't above is heavily criticizing Apple for fear of getting blacklisted because, for a pro Apple blogger, that would be a death sentence.

<comment><USER34> The crux of the matter is : does he say what he thinks is the truth, or not. And if not, is it for any reason other than money ?

<comment><USER29> I am pretty certain that Gruber says what he thinks. Some of it may be biased thinking, but I believe it's genuine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> There's so much to hate about the iPhone X - I'm glad it's failing because I never want to see another phone like it again.

My biggest gripes are that I like buttons (even the fake iPhone 7 home button is better than swiping) and I like rectangular screens without notches in them. I also think Face ID is a terrible idea with no future. I predicted (and got downvoted here on HN) that it would fail miserably - and it did. Haha!

I like things to be simple and always work. The iPhone X with all of its anti- features fails to do that. I will never use a phone with any kind of gimmicky Face or Touch ID system.

<comment><USER36> It's not failing though, it's selling more than its stable brethren combined: [https://9to5mac.com/2017/12/26/iphone-x-outperformed- by-8-an...](https://9to5mac.com/2017/12/26/iphone-x-outperformed- by-8-and-8-plus/)

<comment><USER35> Yeah - during the first month. And then people figured out how bad it actually was.

<comment><USER37> What metric are you basing that on?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much time does it take you to write a technical blog post? - <AUTHOR> I've been writing a technical blog post for my company, in which we present some models and architectures, and the features we're building based on them.<p>I started to get very self-aware of how much time it's taking me. What are the time frames you give yourselves when writing technical content? <comment><USER2> Maybe 2-4 hours for a first draft and then 3-4 edits of 15-30 minutes each. Much more if I have to research the topic too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on the size of the article as well. The "ideal" article is about 300 words (picture the average side colon article in magazines), which is too short for a technical article.

For longer articles, e.g. 1500+ words with graphs and reviews, I would say up to two working days is fine.

</comment><comment><USER4> A good one is about 3-4hours, more with examples. I don't write as much anymore except as notes for myself</comment>


Prions jump species barrier - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080904/full/news.2008.1080.html

<comment><USER2> Oh, joy.

Among other things, I guess this might be a big step on the way to proving a mechanism that relates bovine CJD to human CJD.

Nice article. I didn't know that there was a single "prion protein" that was causing all the trouble -- I had assumed there were different misfolded proteins causing different diseases. (Which, in a sense, there are -- the exact structure of the prion protein differs from species to species, which is what this article is about. And perhaps there are other, unrelated proteins that exhibit the same sort of problem, and this is just the first one we've found?)

<comment><USER3> I can't recall if it was already proven that bovine CJD came from feeding them scrapie sheep? Or was it scrapie sheep that were not heated high enough to save money.

In any case, prions are scary fascinating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" - great book btw - but it mentions in passing that we still feed cow nervous tissue to pigs and chickens, which seems kind of scary in light of this article.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting article, but it seems to me that this is one of those instances where science takes nature farther than it might go on its own. I can't see that these tests prove anything other than that we can induce a reaction between prions from one animal brain protein from another. I don't believe that this alone can be used as a predictor of real life occurrences. There are a lot of things that we can force to occur in a test tube that would never occur by themselves.</comment>


John Tate, a giant in Elliptic Curves, has left us - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tate <comment><AUTHOR> Tate supervised Joe Buhler, with whom I co-authored the article that got my Erdős number of 2. He also supervised Carl Pomerance[0] who invented the Quadratic Sieve[1] method of factoring, still one of the fastest algorithms.

He also supervised Ken Ribet[2] whose work was fundamental in the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem[3], and Joseph Silverman[4].

I never met him, but his work has influenced many of the things I've been involved with. Here is a chart of (part of) our combined PhD ancestry[5].

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

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

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

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_H._Silverman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_H._Silverman)

[5] [https://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/JohnTateJr.png](https://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/JohnTateJr.png)</comment>


Kubernetes state management with Pulumi and Python - <AUTHOR> https://maxromanovsky.me/blog/kubernetes/2020-04-21-pulumi.html <comment><USER2> hi, i've authored a set of OSS CLIs in this space based on my previous experiences orchestrating VMs, containers, IaaS resources:

\- [https://get-ytt.io](https://get-ytt.io) (for templating/overlaying)

\- [https://get-kbld.io](https://get-kbld.io) (for image ref updates)

\- [https://get-kapp.io](https://get-kapp.io) (for deploying)

i would be interested to hear your take on comparison with your current pulumi setup.

i've been somewhat spoiled by using tools above so here are some benefits of using them that might align with some of your points within your article:

ytt:

\- start with existing YAML configuration and "upgrade inline" with necessary templating

\- fully sandboxed configuration building with a python-like language (no accidental dependencies on time, network, disk, etc. like you would experience with "regular" programming languages)

\- ability to use both templating and overlaying to "shape" configuration data quickly and reliably.

kbld:

\- adds image references to make deploys more deterministic

kapp:

\- deals with ordering of CRDs, namespaces and other resources in one go

\- works with resources in bulk (tracks them automatically via labels, prunes them when they are no longer needed etc.)

\- waits for common resources to complete deploy

\- does not store any state except one configmap with generated label (no complex failure scenarios).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will definitely take a look at them</comment></comment>


Facebook's iOS crash symbolization tool for Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebook/atosl

<comment><USER2> You could also use dump_syms from the Google Breakpad project[1]. Run it on your dSYMs on OS X and it emits the symbols in a easily parseable text format[2] that you can then consume on any platform. It's designed to work with the breakpad stackwalker binary for symbolizing a minidump generated by the breakpad client library but there are other consumers[3,4].

1\. [https://code.google.com/p/google- breakpad/](https://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/)

2\. [https://code.google.com/p/google- breakpad/wiki/SymbolFiles](https://code.google.com/p/google- breakpad/wiki/SymbolFiles)

3\. [https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/compiler- rt/trunk/lib/asan...](https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/compiler- rt/trunk/lib/asan/scripts/asan_symbolize.py)

4\. [https://github.com/chromium/crsym](https://github.com/chromium/crsym)</comment>


Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving-strategy-is-outdated-and-possibly-dangerous/ <comment><USER2> Waymo keeps plugging away. Each year, for the last few years, the number of miles between disconnects they report to the CA DMV has doubled. Three more doublings, and that number will be bigger than average miles between accidents for human drivers. Then they can ship a product.

Nobody else is even close.

This problem is slowly being solved, by normal engineering practices. The "fake it til you make it" players are being left behind. Uber has been shown to be totally incompetent. Tesla really just has a good lane follower and an mediocre car follower. Apple has been trying to hand-wave by talking about "significant disconnects" vs. the all disconnects DMV requires them to report.

The LIDAR industry is struggling, but there is progress. Quanergy seems to have been mostly hype.[1] Continental, the big European auto parts maker, bought Advanced Scientific Concepts, which makes and sells a good but expensive flash LIDAR used in DoD and space applications. They packaged it up for automotive use, and are waiting for the self driving industry to catch up. That technology uses exotic indium-gallium-arsenide sensor ICs, which are expensive in small quantities but would probably be affordable if they could sell a few million a year.

This looks like a problem that's being solved. Just not fast enough for startups used to quick payoffs in software.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a- bil...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a-billion- dollar-autonomous-vehicle-startup-lost-its-way)

<comment><USER3> "Three more doublings, and that number will be bigger than average miles between accidents for human drivers. Then they can ship a product."

I am skeptical of that, because I expect that even if disconnects are ultra- rare overall, and the testing is representative of normal usage, there will be enough people that frequently use the technology in ways far off on the tail of the distribution that for them, disconnects will be much less rare. And that might create a PR blowup or worse.

I think what is worrying me may be something called "heteroscedasticity".

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

<comment><USER4> For self-driving cars, what would that be? You can misuse a non-self driving car by speeding, giving you above-average chances of accidents. You can be old, giving you above average chances of being involved in accidents (per km driven). You can smoke, giving you above average chances of getting lung cancer. You can misuse a partially self driving car by somehow convincing it that you do follow the traffic while actually not following it, and then blame any accidents onto the self-drive feature.

But fully self driving cars only have two inputs: starting point and destination. Doesn't matter whether you are old, sleeping, 13 or a dog. Unless some roads are more susceptible to accidents than others, or manufacturers let people also fiddle with how much a car should risk accidents in order to get a little decrease in travel time, I don't see any way possible. And if manufacturers really do give that option, it's truly their fault.

<comment><USER5> > Unless some roads are more susceptible to accidents than others

By chance do you happen to live somewhere without icy roads?

<comment><USER6> I live in Minnesota and have my entire life. I hope very much that self driving cars lead to a more sane response to icy conditions, which is to not drive. If the vehicles are in a position to enforce that at a technical level then all the better.

<comment><USER5> I agree. I was simply pointing out that "unless some roads are more susceptible to accidents than others" certainly happens, very frequently.

But I too am hopeful that machines are better than human drivers in all scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a few things to keep in mind when discussing self-driving tech.

1) Self driving tech doesn't exist today. It simply does not. There's lots of people working on it and they are using different strategies, but it is not clear how long it will take, which strategy is technically superior, which strategy is more economical, etc etc. There's a lot of very strong opinions floating around (LIDAR is essential! No, vision and lots of data! No, 3D maps or bust, etc etc). It is important to keep in mind that we don't know the future, the people busy inventing it don't know how things will play out and outside observers know even less. The tech industry is littered with strong opinions which have aged terribly.

2) Musks's first principles aside, Tesla was never going to do LIDAR. They're in the business in shipping real cars to real people and there was never any possibility of mixing that with LIDAR. If they had gone with LIDAR and started a research program like Uber, they would have started years after Google, with less data, far fewer resources and absolutely technical advantage. It is far, far more likely that this program would have bankrupted them than beat google. In essence, whether Musk's first-principles is real or a sales pitch doesn't matter. Tesla's choice was their current approach, or nothing at all.

<comment><USER8> > They're in the business in shipping real cars to real people and there was > never any possibility of mixing that with LIDAR.

Can you explore that a little? We have consumer products that contain LIDAR already (e.g. Neato Vacuums). The sensors no longer cost thousands of dollars, and could supplement other types of inputs to provide a broader picture of the road.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but you can't install a LIDAR over a software update. They've been promising full self-driving mode and getting closer by updating the software - the owners that already have the current car won't be to thrilled if they get cut-off from the state-of-the-art in Tesla's self-driving tech.

<comment><USER10> ... particularly since they were charged up to three or five thousand dollars more for Elon's "promise" that some day (apparently this year) it will be available...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've always found that half the issue is with the name: Autopilot. On an airplane, autopilot means you can take your focus off of both the physical and mental act of moving the plane through the air, and if it needs you to intercede there is pretty much no emergency in which you wouldn't have a few seconds to react.

In a car, Tesla's Autopilot simply doesn't give you that. If you are reading and your autopilot exits, you could be dead before your focus can return to the road. Planes fly in wide open spaces far from hazards. Cars drive in busy, tight spaces where a fraction of a second lapse in control can be fatal.

I get that Tesla's implementation is analogous to what you find on a jet. But the environments make them very different. So start by dropping the name. It's not auto pilot, it's handsfree driving.

<comment><USER12> I don't think this accurately considers how the term "autopilot" is actually used in aviation. Autopilot can mean anything from "hold a gyro estimated heading but not pitch or speed" to "maintain airspeed and follow the localizer down a glide slope while cross checking GPS and ILS."

> if it needs you to intercede there is pretty much no emergency in which you > wouldn't have a few seconds to react.

Traffic avoidance is certainly one. Airspeed dropping while the autopilot tries to maintain altitude is another. This can result in a stall and complete loss of control under the wrong circumstances.

Autopilot does _not_ mean "read a book and let the plane fly itself." You are always cross checking instruments, visually scanning for traffic, running checklists, rehearsing your next steps, etc.

<comment><USER13> You're absolutely right, but the issue isn't what an aircraft autopilot actually is. It's what the word "autopilot" evokes in the minds of the non- pilot public. To them, autopilot means fully automated with no oversight. ("Planes fly themselves!" and other such nonsense.)

<comment><USER14> Please don't force marketing to conform to the lowest common denominator.

People have _some_ responsibility to educate themselves about the products they're using.

<comment><USER15> You are being ridiculous.

The definition of autopilot has been this way for decades. You could literally ask anyone of any age what it means and everyone would have the same answer.

<comment><USER16> That's not true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've read so many of these articles obviously written by someone who has no hands-on experience with the Tesla Autopilot and what it actually does for the driving experience.

Maybe Tesla will get to a point where my TM3 will drive me to work while I nap, or use my phone. One thing that's pretty amazing is that if they can get to that point, it will come as a free automatic software update or an available for purchase hardware upgrade on my current car.

This month my car will be getting 5% faster acceleration from an OTA update - how cool is that?

But right now, the reality is that I can engage AutoPilot on the highway and it immediately and dramatically changes the driving experience. Instead of focusing on _steering_ the car, I am focused on situational awareness. I am not just looking down my lane, I am looking at the cars around me, who is passing who, what might be coming up around that bend, that guy on his phone next to me, etc.

I can look at over drivers and assess whether they are paying attention and avoid them if needed.

Because the car is actually lane keeping — not what everyone else calls lane keeping which (surprise) is a total lie - but actively steering the car in the lane around curves and centering the car in the lane probably more precisely than I would be if I were steering manually.

I strongly believe, if AutoPilot never truly advanced much beyond its current capability, and as the currently functionality becomes more widespread, we will wonder 15 years from now, how did people operate their vehicles without this level of assistance? How could you be properly aware of your surroundings if you had to be so preoccupied with minor steering inputs?

If you use your phone and watch a movie or put on makeup while driving, you are breaking the law and endangering yourself and those around you.

Every time a new technology comes to cars people say it will distract, or hypnotize, or lull drivers into distraction (see wipers, radios, automatic transmissions, original cruise control) and anyone who has actually driven with AutoPilot knows this feature is no different.

As a Tesla owner I enjoy and appreciate Tesla's real-world approach to self- driving and it makes my life better and my drive safer. Thank you Tesla.

<comment><USER18> Issue is Autopilot is more of a feature that is geared towards convenience.

You are doing all of the driver attention work, but someone who activates Autopilot isn't required to. I think a lot of the argument against Tesla is that Autopilot isn't doing enough in that arena.

GM's Super Cruise is a lot more feature-full with regards to driver attentiveness. It might not be as useful in terms of being able to be used everywhere, but its definitely more well-rounded in terms of forcing driver attentiveness.

<comment><USER17> Anyone who drives a car is technically, legally, and ethically responsible for being capable of operating the machine and to do so in a responsible manner.

Tens of thousands of people a year fail to do exactly that. Tens of thousands of fatalities every year, not to mention maimings and injuries, countless billions of dollars in property damages and lost wages, because humans generally fail in their legal, and ethical responsibility to operate their motor vehicles responsibly and in conditions they could handle.

There have been a few cases where Tesla drivers have made the same failing. Sometimes the AutoPilot feature was engaged at the time. Sometimes they were just pushing the vehicle too hard and ended up on the wrong side of physics. The Tesla is stupidly fun to drive and sometimes I drive more spiritedly than I should. Being too fun to drive could get people hurt or killed too (and it has)

I strongly believe a responsible driver is more safe with than without an AutoPilot feature, mostly from my own personal experience, as the data point I used to cite is somewhat controversial.

Just like the amazing cornering and torque of the Tesla can be abused and even lead to fatalities when pushed too far, so can the AutoPilot.

I personally think it's a mistake to make the feature significantly less useful to a responsible driver to try to possibly prevent these edge cases. If it were possible to make the attentiveness features entirely non-intrusive than absolutely they should be added. But in reality the attentiveness features are already intrusive to a responsible driver and detract from the experience.

Interestingly Volvo seems to be going in a different direction. They believe as the manufacturer it's their responsibility to create a product that even a human attempting to operating irresponsibly or illegally should be kept safe. They're adding hard speed limits well below the functional limit of the hardware, and contemplating even systems like breathalyzers and fatigue detection which would entirely disable the vehicle.

I personally don't want to live in a world where every product I use is sizing me up and deciding how I should use it, whether it's a chef's knife, jet ski, automobile, or semi-automatic.

In the meantime what I love most about AutoPilot is how it can only possibly get better over time, and every single car in the fleet is benefiting from that. That's as long as the regulators don't fuck it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The top editor promoted comment[1] on the article summed up very well.

      The attention problem is well known in engineering.
      It is very hard to get a human to concentrate on something
      that will turn up good more than 99% of the time,
      even when there's serious or fatal consequences of failure.
      Trains are the classic example - tracks are amost always clear,
      signals are almost always correct which means you have to
      devise all sorts of systems to keep the driver alert.

[1]: [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving- str...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving-strategy-is- outdated-and-possibly-dangerous/?comments=1&post=36970595#comment-36970595)

<comment><USER20> Sadly, Silicon Valley companies don't think that best practices of engineering apply to them. It's all about disruption, both with products and safety.

<comment><USER21> "We're going to apply well known engineering to an existing problem" doesn't sell VCs as much as "We're going to disrupt things and launch satellites illegally"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's funny how much people have danced around all this, including this article, but what Musk has done with his statements on self-driving capabilities is called _lying_.

<comment><USER23> If someone has a delusional idea, is it still a lie? I don't think Musk 'lies' to earn more money. I think he is delusional for how long certain things take to do and at worst is trying to keep his companies afloat so he can continue with his ideas. I'd say his sins are less than the CEO of Enron for instance. It's hard to blame the guy when he successfully built a rocket company.

<comment><USER24> You could almost call him the successful / less pathological Elizabeth Holmes.

He promises the future before it has arrived, but unlike Theranos, he actually delivers a product. That product might be inferior to what was promised, but it is an improvement on the status quo nonetheless. And once released, Musk does not lie about its capabilities.

<comment><USER25> This is on the order page for the Model 3 right now:

> Summon: your parked car will come find you anywhere in a parking lot. > Really.

Except that feature hasn't shipped and there's no ETA. I call that a lie. I appreciate what Tesla is doing to the industry but I wish they wouldn't be so dishonest in their marketing.

<comment><USER26> Actually that particular feature is currently in beta testing and the ETA is a few weeks.

It has a limit of 150 feet and I'm sure in practise it will just annoy other drivers unless the parking lot is fairly empty, but there you are.

[https://electrek.co/2019/03/01/tesla-enhanced-summon-self- dr...](https://electrek.co/2019/03/01/tesla-enhanced-summon-self-driving- parking-lots/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > "We already have full self-driving capability on highways," Musk said during > a January earnings call.

Except for obstacles that coincide with whitelisted locations their sensors can't handle. It's only a matter of time before someone dies because of that hack.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is a (perhaps short-term) failure of first principles reasoning. Elon's known to favor thinking about things from first principles, and there's no theoretical reason that vision can't work. However, technical limitations might take a while to overcome.

<comment><USER29> Vision alone fails pretty frequently even with a human brain and 700 million years of evolution behind it. Count me as a skeptic that cameras + computer will produce a safe self-driving system.

<comment><USER30> _> 700 million years of evolution behind it_

Sure, but only about 0.000014% of that time occurred while cars existed. It's not like we evolved to control big metal objects hurtling down artificially made flat surfaces.

<comment><USER31> On the other hand, while our brains did not evolve to control cars, our cars were designed to be controlled by our brains. A system designed from scratch for autonomous vehicles would look radically different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I got a Tesla last year. I love it. But it's been painfully obvious to me that Autopilot is nowhere close to something that will let you take a nap.

Often when I'm stopped at a light, cars that are standing completely still will appear to be constantly moving forwards and backwards on the display. My best theory so far is that the Tesla's spatial model is getting thrown off by the other car's turn signal. This does not inspire confidence.

In general, I find the radar-enhanced cruise control very reliable (so nice in bad traffic), but autosteer is flaky at best.

<comment><USER10> > In general, I find the radar-enhanced cruise control very reliable (so nice > in bad traffic)

Which is great but hardly unique to Tesla. Every major manufacturer out there offers adaptive cruise control. My car even recognizes the difference between in traffic stop-and-go/rush hour, and "queue" mode (exiting parking lots after events, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> IMO Tesla does not have the hardware on the Model 3 to do full self-driving.

I believe that stereopsis (multiple cameras using parallax to solve for per- pixel depth) is necessary to get a practical, well-functioning self driving system working. LIDAR is just too expensive and not good enough, but stereopsis is extremely flexible and can have extremely high angular resolution.

Combine naive stereopsis with temporally-coherent sensor fusion (e.g. a well- designed Kalman filter), and I think you could have very robust ranging. Humans are already very good at this with two narrowly spaced eyes (stereopsis to 1/4 mile range is not unreasonable for a person)-- but a car is not limited to a 1.5 inch stereo baseline; it could have a stereo cameras on opposite sides of the windshield. That would _hugely_ increase the depth sensitivity, even at moderate resolution-- parallax can be detected well below the Nyquist limit (since Nyquist cuts off frequency, but does not destroy phase).

Tesla is totally failing at even the basic level of environment awareness (c.f. cars which have been driving into exit dividers), which is what I consider to be the easy part of self-driving (the hard part is getting the machine to participate in a nonverbal social environment, which is what the roadway is). Rumor has it that Teslas can't detect obstacles far enough ahead to avoid them at more than 30mph-- absolutely abysmal, if true.

If it were me, I would put cameras on the Tesla windshield in this pattern:

        xXoO      OoXx

Where x and o are long-range and wide-field cameras, and caps and lowercase are dynamically exposure-adjusted to capture both brights and darks. Each pair has the largest possible parallax baseline. And I would do a big, fat sensor fusion on all eight of them to get a high-res, depth-augmented HDR map of the surroundings. No fancy, expensive sensors. Just a large number of cheap cameras and sophisticated software. Maybe do some tricks with cycling 'attention' or multi-res hierarchies to keep the computation load down and realtime.

Tesla has only three cameras with different FOVs and a very narrow baseline-- I doubt they are doing stereopsis. And I don't think they can do the job without it.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm confused.

The article seems to extrapolate that Tesla has failed in autonomous driving because it removed some lines from its Autopilot page. It's still very much in progress and progress is routinely confirmed by the company. Musk is known for blowing timelines but they do get delivered.

When it talks about "old approach" I'm again confused. No one else crowd sources driving data from a real world fleet. They have a unique unsupervised learning datasource from shadowing drivers.

As for attentiveness. I don't see how drivers not paying attention is any different to mobile phone use. Currently Autopilot is very clear on telling at every chance its an assistant. Saying it will kill people is like blaming phones for drivers texting while driving and getting killed. These people die because they are breaking the law and not in control of their vehicle.

<comment><USER35> > Currently Autopilot is very clear on telling at every chance its an > assistant.

Yep, hence why this article is just clickbait for Tesla haters. Every Tesla owner is fully aware that it's not self-driving in the sense that you can take a nap.

<comment><USER34> Arse Technica indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wonder, though, if this had more to do with how much they are actually investing in AI vs electric car tech. Surely Tesla is an EV company first and an AI company second. I know they like to brag about their autopilot but it eems to me that having a lower cost car is more important than having an expensive lidar system on board.

<comment><USER37> Most car companies make lots of money on add-on features. The base model couldn't be super profitable, but the base model with the self-driving package probably makes some good money. Or it would if the didn't have to keep doing recalls to upgrade the hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> TM3 owner, car has EAP. I have the option to buy FSD for two thousand but haven't jumped. I not only don't believe it but I don't have a need for it. Now it might be useful down the road for resale.

That being said, two thoughts.

First, if they want me to buy it then demo it in passive mode in my car. That is, there is space where the current speed limit is shown. Use that space and below that to show what signs and signals it has seen recently and the order of importance. Currently it does not see speed limit signs and it that is wholly FSD territory then Tesla is overcharging compared to other systems.

Second, just at a stand still cars around me jump and I am not sure it sees stationary cars when I am driving. The best example I have is a two lane road through a subdivision I usually take, the outer lane is a long turning lane but people tend to stop there to let kids out for the water park. I cannot recall my car showing a car when someone is loading/unloading kids but it does see cars moving in that lane when I over take them. So is it just going by too fast for the stopped car in the lane over to register? It knows its a lane. I am not sure but I will wait to see how it develops.

</comment><comment><USER39> I am still trying to figure out what started and sustained the enormous self- driving car hype of the last few years. I understand why people who don't know much about technology would buy into it, but I don't understand why so many relatively tech-savvy people have bought into it and why huge amounts of money have been invested into it. It should be obvious - and should have been obvious when the hype started, as well - that to create fully self-driving cars that can operate as well as a competent human driver in a full spectrum of real road situations would require solving extremely difficult technical problems that are nowhere near solved and that cannot necessarily be solved any time soon simply by throwing money at them. So what explains the hype and the investment money? Out of the people responsible for the hype, what fraction were/are merely deluded and what fraction were/are lying?

<comment><USER40> We desprately want it to be true, so we ignore the truth long enough to try earnastly to make it so. It the brave and ignorant charge of the new generation. Which begs the question; Is it enough to mean well and act in earnst, or is ethics reserved for those who have the luxury of self- reflection?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Not having LiDAR for anything over level 3 self-driving capabilities seems like a very bad idea...Computer vision right now just does not have the spatial awareness that you need for self driving capabilities. I wish Tesla would work on something similar to the Kinect v3 but for long range (above 20 m).

<comment><USER42> Having LiDAR in any car for self driving seems like a prohibitively expensive idea though. For instance: See how no company has released a commercial product with LiDAR.

And I definitely think Computer Vision will get better before LiDAR gets cost competitive.

<comment><USER43> I agree.

However, suppose the opposite: Suppose LiDAR gets cheap first. Like, I don't know, $1000 per unit and compact enough to not be a big burden on the rest of the vehicle.

Tesla charges $5000 for the FSD add-on. In principle, they could easily afford to retrofit vehicles with the cheap LiDAR plus maintain any advantages the full computer vision system would add (such as identifying vehicle types to assist in predictive behavior modeling and avoidance strategies).

So trying to go the full Computer Vision (with ancillary radar) route actually has pretty low opportunity cost for Tesla.

Another thing: I wonder how much simply much-improved geolocation could help? That failure from last year of driving right into a (failed) collision attenuator (where an off-ramp split off) could've been avoided simply by having high confidence, half-meter-or-better geolocation (from GPS, cell, IMU, etc fusion) and good mapping. And with good mapping/geolocation combined with other sensors, the sensors could focus on identifying changes to the expected road condition, perhaps increasing their robustness. (and when networked, they could use sensing from other vehicles ahead of the current vehicle to assist in navigation as well)

<comment><USER42> AFAIK all the big companies working on this problem include high-definition mapping as a major component. The problem is gathering that data without having an actual LiDAR. So some companies like Waymo will literally just have cars with LiDARs drive all around every street and map it for them. This is great but means they're limited by when they travelled the road and conditions at the time.

Ideally, you have a mapping system that is constantly updating (every time your fleet drives by something new like construction on the road it auto- updates the map).

Comma.ai is working on a vision+GPS Kalman filter solution along these lines up to 10 cm accuracy. I'd guess Tesla is as well.

And then yes, after that the vision would be primarily for localization.

<comment><USER43> Indeed, as recent Tesla patent(s) show: [https://electrek.co/2018/12/09/tesla- patent-technology-accur...](https://electrek.co/2018/12/09/tesla-patent- technology-accurate-gps-positioning-for-self-driving-vehicles/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> _" Self-driving cars also benefit from lidar sensors, and the best ones cost thousands—if not tens of thousands—of dollars each. That's too expensive for an upgrade to a customer-owned vehicle. But the economics are more viable for a driverless taxi service, since the self-driving system replaces an expensive human taxi driver."_

That's probably the crucial point. For now, lidar is needed for safe operation, and too expensive for mass deployment in private cars.

<comment><USER45> Commercial (not even taxi, but transport) will be the first to be autonomous because of the larger savings possible. That we'll see useful autonomy for a $50k car driven by individuals, rather than in a $1M transport vehicle operated by a huge logistics company isn't likely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> ITT: Hacker News devolves into Slashdot

[https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/az2c2i/life_well_spe...](https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/az2c2i/life_well_spent/)

</comment><comment><USER47> If self-driving can navigate US streets fully autonomously, even in bad weather, that will be impressive. Now transplant that to just about anywhere else in the world, and it will be impossible. Mexico City, Rome, Buenos Aires. Hah, no chance.

</comment><comment><USER48> Are there efforts to invert the problem ? instead of fully independent vehicles, having a bit of road signaling system (a reincarnation of 50s US embedded radio track).

</comment><comment><USER49> Tesla has taken on so many things that have never been done before and succeeded, it would not be surprising if it failed at one of them.

</comment><comment><USER50> The big missing piece is not LIDAR, but causal reasoning. Autopilot and similar 'AI' cannot reason; it doesn't have a mental model to ponder 'what if' and can't use counter-factuals to ponder what would happen if it didn't do something. It's just glorified pattern matching currently.

Reading Judea Pearl's The Book Of Why certainly sobered my outlook on AI.

<comment><USER51> Well, that's not necessarily true... self driving in particular usually uses planning, which is basically all about 'what if'. But it's true this is relevant to AI in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It also has a factory automation strategy that other companies abandoned decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER53> Anthony Levandowski seems to have the same opinion. I'm a big believer in vision, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

</comment><comment><USER43> Interestingly, for air travel, there's another strategy: Rely entirely on GPS and commanding from air traffic control (with systems and structure in place to minimize damage in case those systems fail or are insufficient).

That's what Zipline uses for their _fully operational_ medical delivery system in Rwanda.

The drones are completely blind, directly, but they travel in pre-defined flight paths and communicate with one another and follow directions from flight control.

For self-driving cars, a similar situation may be extremely good GPS geolocation combined with network-wide sensor fusion and mapping. In principle, you could even do real-time optical or synthetic aperture radar from orbit or via persistent aircraft to allow the central controller to identify hazards and obstacles and to update maps in real time without much at all happening on-board except low-latency reactions. Most highways already have much of their length covered by cameras for the local Department of Transportation, and even many intersections and sidestreets have surveillance cameras. A low latency connection to that system, upgraded with higher fidelity, could significantly help autonomous systems. Might be another very helpful public good for cities to provide, much like GPS is provided.

...and on the engineering side, you can have vehicles designed specifically to reduce pedestrian injury, such as not having those large, boxy grilles on SUV. Such things are almost entirely cosmetic and reduce efficiency, so Tesla doesn't have them on their cars. Going beyond that, external airbags may help as well. Zipline uses a foam body and a fail-safe parachute to stop the vehicle if there's a problem.

<comment><USER54> If a plane can only get a GPS fix to within a 15m radius that's no big deal, whereas if a car has a 15m fix it's running down pedestrians on the sidewalk. Planes also don't have a habit of flying in tunnels or urban canyons where obtaining a gps fix is even more problematic.

<comment><USER55> Planes already have a problem with GPS outages or military jamming exercises. Imagine if all cars within a 100 mile radius all of a sudden would stop working.

<comment><USER43> ...that's why you develop systems designed to bring them to a safe stop (in addition, stable IMUs can assist for several seconds, plenty of time to come to a safe stop). That should be standard on all autonomous systems, TBH.

And BTW, there are 4 GNSS systems, each run by a different country/entity. The odds of them all failing at the same time is very small.

<comment><USER56> GPS is (negatively) affected by atmospheric variability. Are the other 3 systems immune from it?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Logitech's Adaptive Gaming Kit Finishes What Xbox's XAC Started - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/logitechs-100-adaptive-gaming-kit-finishes-what-xboxs-xac-started/ <comment><USER2> I am not significantly disabled in any way, and I can think of quite a few usecases for non-traditional controllers that act like traditional controllers.

Please, bring us more, Logitech and Microsoft.</comment>


Cloud Startup Values are Getting Insane - <AUTHOR> http://cloud.gigaom.com/2010/09/24/cloud-startup-values-are-getting-insane/

<comment><USER2> "Writes to the service have been disabled, we will be bringing everything back online ASAP"?</comment>


Graphing the distribution of English letters  - <AUTHOR> http://www.prooffreader.com/2014/05/graphing-distribution-of-english.html

<comment><USER2> zifij, zokob, ...

Looking at graphs, this could be a convenient way to generate short, pronounceable, easily-spelt, yet _uncommon_ names for a new product or service that you want to launch.

<comment><USER3> toy extremely quick and dirty version: [http://jsfiddle.net/g6JS8/](http://jsfiddle.net/g6JS8/)

The results are both hard-to-pronounce and hard-to-spell, unfortunately.

Edit: and here's a version with letters in their most common positions - [http://jsfiddle.net/tqC5L/1/](http://jsfiddle.net/tqC5L/1/)

<comment><USER4> ading ci6 of 'y','i','o','e' makes a nice difference, giving "bouncy" names. Generating more gives more chance of good names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How can I apply this information to improve my Wheel of Fortune performance?

<comment><USER6> I'm thinking of how to apply this to Scrabble performance. This explains why it's so difficult to make words with Z, because you look for words that start with Z, and that corpus is very poor. In other words, think of words like vuvuzela, not zeal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its interesting the vowels all have very similar distributions except for e.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I would assume it is due to e being used so frequently as a modifier of other letters in the form of silent e to change the pronunciation of other vowels.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for Recommendations on Affiliate Marketing SaaS - <AUTHOR> Hi,
We at http://draftss.com provide unlimited graphic design on subscription model and are looking forward to add referral/affiliate program on our website.
Any suggestions on what would be the best way to do this? <comment><USER2> You should check out Rewardful ([https://www.getrewardful.com/](https://www.getrewardful.com/)) if you're using Stripe. It was built from the ground up for SaaS and subscription businesses.</comment>


Ask HN: Is finals over for you guys? - <AUTHOR>

 How did you stay focused? <comment><USER2> I stayed focused by:

1) Frequently switching revision activities between writing sample answers, creating cheat sheets, drawing mind maps, cramming and participating in group study sessions.

2) Working out for half an hour every day. Kept energy levels up.

3) Taking three hours off every night (from 9pm to midnight) which I spent socializing with my friends and my girlfriend -- cooking, watching movies or playing Mario Kart. Having something to look forward to at the end of the day kept me motivated.

4) Saving coffee for later in the day (after 3pm). I've found that I become tired X hours after my first cup of coffee in the day and, given that I'm naturally energetic in the morning, I like to save the boost until late in the day.

5) Working in a room with fresh air and good natural light. Kept me happy.

PS Shameless little plug here but if anyone has just finished finals you can sell your old notes on www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk, my little startup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Finished this Friday 20th. Stay focused? Well, HN didn't help! :P</comment>


How Boeing Will Get the 737 Max Flying Again - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.com/watch?v=QvUpSFGRqEo <comment><USER2> A proper solution is either to add a third AoA sensor, or to remove MCAS altogether and let the MAX be a different aircraft type. All else is questionable.</comment>


A Researcher Has Come Up with a Mathematical Model for a Viable Time Machine - <AUTHOR> https://pionic.org/a-researcher-has-come-up-with-a-mathematical-model-for-a-viable-time-machine <comment><AUTHOR> Paper here: _" Traversable Achronal Retrograde Domains in Spacetime"_ ~ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236095](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236095)</comment>


DIY Thermal Imaging System for under $200 - <AUTHOR> http://spill.tanagram.com/2010/11/24/diy-thermal-imaging-system-for-under-200/

<comment><USER2> low cost low resolution bolometer arrays are easy to make if you have even a simple semiconductor fab ([http://www.eee.metu.edu.tr/~tayfuna/papers/akin_c20_mems2001...](http://www.eee.metu.edu.tr/~tayfuna/papers/akin_c20_mems2001.pdf))

The problem with anything built for military/medical/emergency service use, is that by the time you have ruggedized it, packaged it, setup service and support and got it approved by a dozen different agencies - well even a simple flashlight really does end up costing $100

<comment><USER3> > even a simple flashlight really does end up costing $100

Not at the army surplus store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fair warning: have your Readability bookmarklet ready. The page is black text on a horrendously bright yellow.

</comment><comment><USER5> From what it sounds like, using my arm as a sensor would have a similar resolution thermal imaging, with perhaps a faster scan rate.

I was intrigued that this came from an actual business and not a DIY hobbist, so looked into Tanagram and couldn't figure them out. A strange company... seems more design than actual engineering.

Isn't the better way to make something cheaper by inventing new components and then mass producing, vs. taking a stock, cheap, 8x1 thermopile array?</comment>


Show HN: Faster ruby I18n backend written in C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/instructure/i18nema

<comment><AUTHOR> We did a two-day hackfest at work recently, and this was my project. As canvas-lms has grown, we've seen our GC runs get slower and slower, and this seemed like some good low hanging fruit (especially as we keep adding more languages).

I moved the translations out of the ruby heap, so as to speed up GC runs, and there were some other enhancements in both ruby and C to speed up lookups a bit.

It's still pretty new, so as I continue to refine I hope to bring those benchmarks even further.</comment>


Top Voices by LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> https://lists.linkedin.com/2015/top-voices <comment><USER2> This is probably the most popular posts on LinkedIn instead of "Top voices" per se. Tech blog posts are that that I value, like Ben Horowitz and Sam Altman's are not even on there.</comment>


Did FireFox 19 break webapps that rely on PDF-s being as-is? - <AUTHOR> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/951147

<comment><AUTHOR> Explanation: It seems that since they made embedded PDF renderer (via PDF.js), which is awesome step otherwise, they add the URL to the print (but not PDF preview) as they do when you print webpages. example: <http://cdn.arosoftware.com/files/IMG.pdf>

The problem is, I don't see a way to disable that, so it seems 100s of users of hypothetical webapp that needs PDF-s to look exactly as they were generated (imagine some contracts, reports, invoices, ...) and use FF, have a problem. Do you noww have to require them to fiddle with settings, download and print all invoices or switch to another browser. Which is all bad, I want that it just works and that they keep using what they want.

The page says the fix (with moznomarginboxes, which if I understand would have to be added to the HTML behing PDF.js rendeder) will come in v 22. But what until then?</comment>


Cabinet of curiosities: A bunch of cryptographic protocol oddities - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bjrn.se/2016/08/cabinet-of-curiosities-bunch-of.html <comment><USER2> _He also seems to be the only one who has a soft spot on using little endian representations of integers in his cryptographic designs. This in a world that is largely dominated by big endian protocols._

The middle and lower layers of the network stack are historically big-endian, and the ones published as RFCs also tend to be the same, but I've seen many more proprietary little-endian application-layer protocols. That's probably because most systems are LE today and so it's simpler overall to read into memory and operate directly on the values without having to reconvert them, but in crypto there is a real benefit in working with multibyte integers, since carries propagate forward.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I've designed some and seen some designed which are LE. There were mostly newer and all used where latency performance was very important.

I saw one working group designed a protocol such that the serialiazation format was equivalent to how gcc on 64 bit, intel linux machineas would pack C structures.

This was of course never mentioned in the official description, as it was supposed to be architecture/compiler/machine neutral, but I kept wondering why the odd padding here and there, and then it dawned on me.

So if someone was going to play fast and loose, they could just simply cast packet data directly to a C struct. If anyone happens to have a different, compiler / architecture / etc they'd have to jump through hoops a bit inserting seemingly awkward pad bytes and do le-to-be conversions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IPsec is indeed an odd protocol in that it's almost too flexible, but I think that was probably inevitable - it's part of the TCP/IP suite after all. The various vendors probably wanted support for all kinds of weird scenarios built-in.

That doesn't make it particularly good, however. I've looked at it a few times in hopes of implementing my VPN's with it, and there doesn't seem to be any simple intelligible documentation on how to implement it with the basic Linux / FreeBSD tools. It feels like getting into birdwatching with all the different Swans and the weird jargon. Until now, OpenVPN has prevailed.

I'm hoping WireGuard [1] will get widescale support soon enough.

[1] [https://www.wireguard.io/](https://www.wireguard.io/)

<comment><USER5> Add to IPsec the fact that it was cryptography developed under US export restrictions. This is probably the reason why it has AH for data integrity and ESP for data protection and/or, well, integrity, rendering AH actually excessive.

> Until now, OpenVPN has prevailed.

Which is somewhat funny, as FreeS/WAN derivatives are much more convenient to configure than OpenVPN with its tons of options that you need to put either on server side or client side (and those differ greatly) and routing that is very, very easy to screw up.

Also, I always say that OpenVPN is a weird case of a program open source from the ground up that has a closed communication protocol. No specification and extracting the protocol from the source is difficult in this case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is this great presentation on MS-CHAPV2:

[https://youtu.be/qjBHTS6BKX4?t=5m36s](https://youtu.be/qjBHTS6BKX4?t=5m36s)</comment>


Swiss to offer spy-proof cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/03/swisscom-cloud-idUSL5N0IM1XR20131103

<comment><AUTHOR> A related article: [http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/switzerland-wants-to- offer-...](http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/switzerland-wants-to-offer-the- world-a-spy-proof-cloud)</comment>


Hacker Monthly #9 is out - <AUTHOR> http://hackermonthly.com/issue-9.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks for another great issue! My brain tells me only the content should matter, but my eyes just love the magazine layout.

<comment><USER3> You are welcome. Great content deserves better design/layout.

<comment><USER4> pg just shed a single tear.</comment></comment></comment>