The autonomous Google car may never happen - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.single.html <comment><USER2> The conclusion about map generation is a bit naive. Yes, if google's self- driving car requires them, and google can't currently produce them at scale, then maybe google's current solution isn't going to explode onto the marketplace. But could the current solution be used in certain cities? (start with San Francisco, then expand city by city as the demand exists) Sure. Could google come up with a different solution? Sure.

There are other companies working on self-driving cars - BMW, Audi, Tesla, others. The darpa grand challenges in 2005 and 2007 didn't rely on this kind of detailed map data.

Will self-driving cars ever be able to handle all possible driving situations? Probably not. But humans can't handle all driving situations either. A more relevant question is whether self-driving cars will be better than human drivers. It's silly to say that we need strong AI for that, since we've already seen several prototype systems that do better than humans in many situations without strong AI.

The other thing that this conclusion ignores is what the changes to the road system might be. If everyone gets semi-autonomous cars for commuting, and they work fine except for one intersection where people need to pay attention and negotiate it themselves, then there will be pressure to change the intersection. Maybe besides the carpool lane, you might eventually get autonomous lanes. It's a bit chicken-and-egg, but if there is a system that is useful enough in some situations for people to buy, then it will progress from there.

<comment><USER3> The main point is still valid. In an emergency situation, as long as a self driving car has to choose between hitting a ball and a kid chasing after it, or a woman and a shopping cart, or a laid down motorcycle and its rider, and not know which is which, there is no way these cars can be deployed in mass. And this is an extremely hard problem.

<comment><USER2> In an emergency situation, just stop. Don't hit the ball or the kid. Let the human take over, or wait for the emergency to pass. The car will break faster than a human could. If the car can't drive itself safely in a given situation, make humans drive.

There are valid points to be made about liability and legal concerns, increases in road congestion, etc. But technical considerations are not really an issue.

You don't need to completely solve all potential problems before entering the market. You just need to provide enough value.

If you've got an hour commute over highways every day, even being able to do highway driving automatically will be a huge win.

<comment><USER4> That's usually the right answer, but you have to be careful. For instance, you say the car will break faster than a human could. But if it does, the human- driven car right behind it is in trouble.

<comment><USER2> Yes, you'd want to have some sort of sensors behind the car as well, so that if it's possible to avoid hitting the object and avoid being hit by the car that you would brake at that speed. If it's not possible, well, it's still an improvement over a human driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Coming from Europe, I can see self driving cars work in the USA, your roads are just so big and... well "easy" to navigate. Now come to Europe. Narrow winding roads, no grid system in cities, lots one way traffic, uneven 'brick' roads, blocked often by wrongly parked cars, thousands of bicycles.

I have a hard time navigating here myself. A lot has to change before the automatons take of the streets :(

<comment><USER6> And yet the Magyar Tudományos Akadémia (Hungarian Scientific Academy) is doing exactly this kind of research in self-driving cars, in Budapest. Self-driving cars could ultimately be far safer than human drivers in adverse situations, especially since a self-driving car will never be surprised by a one-way street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be fine with a car that was automated only on highways. I could drive manually on local routes, and then for big journeys I would just head on the highway and turn on autopilot and take a nap, and wake up the next morning in Yellowstone or something.

It seems like standardizing information about just highways would be magnitudes easier than getting every single local route right. Companies could work with the government to standardize traffic and construction pylons/signals to be ideal for detection by robot cars. Traffic, construction, weather, and accident information for highways could all be standardized.

<comment><USER8> THIS THIS THIS. Why is no company working on this? This really seems like it could already be here...just use the HOV lanes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, I never knew you had to have a 3D map of the road you wanted to use and it was so much a hassle, first time I read it after so many articles on the subject, I feel a little cheated.

<comment><USER10> A friend of mine working for Delphi Automotive (electronics supplier for car makers) recently told me that the google's autonomous vehicle needs exact 3D maps, and at that time I found it hard to believe. Watching Eric Schmidt's youtubes you get the impression like the technology is already there for the car to drive everywhere in the US. Coast to coast distance is 3000 miles as oppossed to 700.000 the car has already driven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't really buy the crux of the argument much, which basically boils down to the idea that the car will have trouble with unmapped objects. I would be pretty surprised if all these cars didn't come equipped with an ability to phone home and update the central repository of maps with newfound objects. Thus, when encountering a new object the car could slow down, devote some processing power to mapping it, and then cars traveling through the area in the future should get the latest update downloaded and can handle the previously unmapped object automatically.

If you think about it, it's a really fun problem to get to solve, wish I was working on it.

<comment><USER12> I agree that "never" is a pretty strong word to use in the context of computing. But I don't think what you described is the most interesting or difficult aspect of the problems that remain.

We're talking about a car, not a mobile phone. It's a 3000-pound chunk of metal that moves fast enough to kill anyone who comes into contact with it, and sometimes even those who ride in it. The ability to consult with a remote server would be nice, but the car should perform just as well even when a neighborhood prankster jams the cell & GPS signals.

So the entire approach of relying on a map might be misguided, regardless of whether the map is precompiled or JIT-crowdsourced. It seems that the current generation of autonomous vehicles rely too much on maps and too little on situational awareness. The next generation will need to make a lot of advances on the latter. Ideally, a car should be able to make all millisecond-by- millisecond decisions by itself, offline if necessary, and use the map only as a hint.

<comment><USER13> And google's approach is not the only one that scientists are exploring at the moment. Some are relying on more "reactive" strategies see e.g. Professor Alberto Broggi's work with the university of Parma ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Broggi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Broggi)). His vehicle doesn't make use of such an heavy map as the one used by Google.

What I liked in this article is that it reveals to the public that google's communication on the topic is really skewed. They try to make people think that the problem of autonomous driving is basically solved while many big challenges remain.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, most of the hype around the self-driving car don't come from Google, they come from people who are ... let's just say enthusiastic but who lack exposure in the subject matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I always wondered if it was possible to have a dedicated autonomous car lane on the highway, similar to a HOV lane. To get on, you would park your car at a designated area. The computer would start to sync with all the other cars traveling in the lane, and it would take off and just add itself to the caravan of cars. You could go to sleep or do whatever else you wanted. When you reached your destination exit, the car would park itself again and wait for you to resume control of the car for the local streets.

You still have to deal with things mentioned in the article: random objects on the road, rain, sunlight, human driven cars crashing into your lane. But I think that's more manageable then having to deal with humans crossing the street, stop signs and traffic signals, random road changes in the middle of the night.

<comment><USER16> A lot of toll highways in Spain are severely underused and basically bankrupt. They definitely could devote a whole lane to autonomous cars.

<comment><USER17> What a nice testbed too. Google should leverage this kind of failed states.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Liability, lawsuits, litigation, lawyers. The future of autonomous cars is not limited by engineering smarts. The future of the industry will come down to how punitive the jury feels when Google Inc. dragged before the courts after a Google vehicle kills people. And these vehicles will, of course, kill people. But I don't see the "they statistically kill LESS people" argument working against "a machine made by Google ran over my children." Someone needs to be sueable, right?

<comment><USER19> An Uber driver attacked a passenger with a hammer. Another driver ran over some people. Neither of these events have had any appreciable effect on Uber.

T'll be interestin to see how the public reacts when a Google autonomous car kills someone.

And so many people currently use Google services I wouldn't be surprised if people have already died as a result of something Google has done.

<comment><USER18> In the Uber case you can sue _the driver_. So when deep-pocketed Google is the driver, I wouldn't be surprised to see people throwing themselves under the vehicles. (If anyone is about to retort with "webcams!" you're missing my point. _Someone_ needs to be sued. If Google convinces law makers to enact laws to endemify them, then the State will be sued first, then Google.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Self driving vehicles are a new transport paradigm, potentially. The trajectory of these things is complicated with all sorts of intertwined positive feedbacks between technology, infrastructure, preceding technologies and succeeding technologies.

Roads were built for oxcarts. They followed routes used by donkey trains which followed paths used by walkers who followed pre existing animal runs wherever they could. The width of road cars and train tracks were based on the width of old roads. Shipping containers were designed to fit on trains and trucks. Ships were built to handle shipping containers, as are ports, depots and such. If you want to use something other than a standard shipping container, you probably need to design it to fit in to the shipping container world. It can all be traced back to wild goats making a path from one place to another.

The development os self driving cars as a major mode of transport depends on the development of stuff around it. Infrastructure is probably the big one. Our roads are built for human drivers in standard cars. If when roads start getting features designed specifically for robots, the whole thing could accelerate. I don't just mean physical infrastructure of roads, but maybe the whole ruleset and/or economics of it.

Many old cities have a problem with 10 sq Kms of inner city traffic. Some ban or limit vehicles here. But, if people use robo taxis instead of cars, these inner cities can have different vehicles. Instead of big cars that must deal with trucks and highways perhaps inner cities can be handled by slower, lighter and safer like vehicles like golf carts. This might help solve some safety issues.

</comment><comment><USER21> "The autonomous Google car may never actually happen."

Directly underneath that, an image captioned: "A Google self-driving car maneuvers through the streets of Washington in 2012."

This article is rubbish. It makes lots of arguments that sound valid, but are actually nowhere near being insurmountable. Take the first one, for instance. Supposedly, the need to map the roads is a huge burden. Well, what if they just design the cars so that when a road is unmapped they need to be manually driven, but after that has been done a certain number of times, can be driven on that road autonomously? Only a tiny proportion of drivers would even encounter that situation, and even new roads would become autonomous- compatible from day one. (or thereabouts)

Overall, the article acknowledges that varying degrees of autonomy are already being built into vehicles. To not come to the conclusion that these will be iterated on and become (more or less) full autonomy is short-sighted.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3oc1Hr62g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3oc1Hr62g)

</comment><comment><USER22> All the effort is spent for safety. But is it worth it? The fully autonomous approach may never make Google's self-driving car economically viable to reach the same level of human driving safety. Note that humans are actually decent drivers. WHO reports 7.6 road fatalities per billion vehicle km in the US. Now Google's self-driving car has reached 1 million km, and that's under ideal conditions and human monitoring. If it wants proper validation of the safety of autonomous driving, it requires at least several billion miles of driving, which would cost much much more than a lot of low hanging fruits of improvement at driving safety (autobraking, obstacle radar, auto lane keeping etc).

Now that you can see a slow version of self-driving car already out there with 25 mph top speed and impossible to cause serious injury in the first place. This might be the future of self-driving cars, to provide accessibility and enable those who can't drive.

<comment><USER23> > If it wants proper validation of the safety of autonomous driving, it > requires at least several billion miles of driving

No, it doesn't, the same way we don't need decades of testing to build an edifice or centuries of flying to test an airplane. Actually, as every human driver is literally a different person, by your logic we would need driving tests enduring several billion miles.

We can make tests using the worst situations, corner cases and even simulated accidents to see how the driving AI reacts. The problem is hard, but engineering is a finer art than what you imply.

<comment><USER22> Note that I was comparing with Google's methods of testing self-driving cars: idle roads, good weather, precision maps, human monitoring, no accidents. If Google's miles of safe driving mean anything, if means it has 99% more miles left before a level of validation. If you look at it for the effective miles where actual accident recovery happens, it will be much much shorter.

And yes, UMich/Ford's self-driving car project is making a testing field specifically designed for increased hazardous environment. But that environment is always artificial, and the hard part is to catch the last 1% situations, or the last 0.000001% in order to reach a level of billion miles safe record, because you don't even know what those are.

Autonomous navigation is fancy on all side (Yes I do this research), but all field experts know any security audit can probably reveal a bunch of failure modes because nobody has really worked on making it robust again adversaries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They forget that Google also own a high resolution satellite company and they're working on a drone project - all which could be very useful for real time mapping.

About parking, this is less important for a taxi company.

And the incentives for self driving cars are huge , even as regional taxi companies, so connecting the traffic lights into the net(read only) as backup doesn't seem like a big problem.

The real interesting question is: does it really need "generalized intelligence" , or all the examples the article mentioned could be coded decently enough on a case by case basis, to a point where self driving car is much safer than a car ? We don't yet know the answer, but the current safety of Google's car are promising in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER6> Instead, it will simply be the autonomous BMW, Volkswagen, or Daimler. Or Tesla. It's not as though Google is the only company in the world working on autonomous driving. They're just the only one the American tech media has noticed.

<comment><USER25> You didn't read the article did you?

There is no reason to assume those European companies have solved this problem anymore than Google has. They most likely will come up with the exact same "solution" with the same limitations.

<comment><USER6> No. I know what the Europeans are actually researching. Google seems usually to think in terms of the knowledge they gain from universal data availability. Driving, to Google, is an outgrowth of mapping.

The Europeans are looking at a scaled approach of driver assistance. There are cases where automation is already making driving safer and easier, on the road _right now_ in production cars. It's a much more holistic and interesting approach, and while it will make use of data if available, it's not locked into it.

So no, they're not coming up with "the solution" \- they're coming up with a wide variety of solutions, with much fewer limitations in the aggregate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought the key point of Googles new tiny & _slow_ self-driving car is that it is so slow, that "just stopping" is the adequate solution to _all_ unforeseen issues. This would give the driver enough time to wake up & take over. (Or someone does it remotely). And really, from all issues that might be open, I am sure that traffic lights are a solved problem. How hard would it be to pass a law that requires all (mobile) traffic lights to send out some radio-signal to communicate with self-driving cars? Such an emergency stop signal would also be useful for human-driven cars.

</comment><comment><USER27> You don't need a map of the whole world/country in order to operate a regional taxi service. Nor do you need intelligence for parking (except in the taxi garage - which can be done by humans if necessary). You just need a smaller map of the region that the taxi will operate in, and the ability to "phone home" when it sees new objects in the map (which can be analyzed by humans / really big computers and added to the map in real time).

</comment><comment><USER28> Yeah, four years ago, we totally didn't have driverless cars! [http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/10/27/driverless.car...](http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/10/27/driverless.car/)

</comment><comment><USER29> General object recognition will help with nearly all of these challenges. The technology is far from perfect, but every year, the needle moves.

</comment><comment><USER30> In the immortal words of the (quite literally) immortal Treebeard: "Never is too long a word even for me."

</comment><comment><USER31> The level of new insight this article provides is summed up well by the author quoting a _comment_ on someone else's article[1] about the challenges self driving cars face before the second paragraph is through.

[1] [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden- obstacles...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden-obstacles- for-googles-self-driving-cars/)

<comment><USER32> > someone else's article

Lee Gomes is the author of both articles.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Current top post does not have option to add comment. - <AUTHOR>

I am new to HN. The post below does not have option to add comments. How do you submit post without having comment option. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967058 <comment><USER2> YCombinator-funded companies have that special privilege. It's only used for job offers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I submit my comments to such articles as blog posts :) :

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967401></comment>


Why the world is full of buttons that don't work - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/style/article/placebo-buttons-design/index.html <comment> a-dub I don't buy this argument that they were explicitly installed as a placebo. Instead I think they're basically a form of technical debt. In the elevators, they probably once did work, but then the ADA stuff came about or the maintenance people just didn't see the point of hooking them up. For crossings, some of them do work, and perhaps many. What's easiest, roll them out uniformly or install a hodge podge? ...and for the motels, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if it's cheaper to buy a residential thermostat with a knob than a commercial temperature sensor. Maybe that even worked as well...

Engineers and builders don't care about "placebo effects on users" except for in the most carefully built UX scenarios. We're talking about basic infrastructure here, no one really cares about UX that much as long as it meets basic requirements. All these buttons exist as an accident, or they're detritus from an era when they did work, or it was just cheaper to get the panel with a button than a blank.

"Let's put a placebo button in to make people feel better." said no traffic engineer, elevator installer, motel HVAC installer, ever.

<comment><USER3> Lots of devs are now using fake loading bars to emphasise certain tasks e.g. Spinning up a Droplet on Digital Ocean.

I heard that loading bar is just a placebo to emphisise the creation of a new droplet as being important. Apparently the droplet is finished initialising long before the loading bar's 4 or 5 second length. It's probably why this loading bar apprears to load so perfectly -- it's not timed on anything but a counter.

In fact I had to draw out the experience of topping up in our app. It happened too quickly and people didn't know what was just happened. They clicked their pay button and were brought to the balance screen.

They all panicked for some reason and ran back to history to check the transaction went through. We put in a success message before being brought to balance screen and panic is gone. The success messasge is just elaborting on what already happened -- it's a placebo.

I think you're right about the real world. Real buttons are often just broken but in the world of software theres lots of bright and dark patterns behind the buttons -- no software button broke from mechanical failure.

<comment><USER4> Visual feedback is not the same thing as a placebo effect though.

A placebo would be adding a button that says "accelerate droplet launch speed" that does nothing. It's something that the user takes action on that is irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this an American phenomenon[1]?

If I forget to click the pedestrian button, cars in the same direction as me will get green light, while I wait for red.

Most elevators don't have a close button in Denmark. But it definitely worked in Japan.

I can't remember ever sitting in an office with a temperature control knob available.

[1] ... or am I just fooling myself on these accounts?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the pedestrian section is clearly an optional part of the cycle at most traffic lights I interact with (Dublin). If no button is pressed, then some other part of the cycle is extended and the pedestrian light is skipped.

This isn't the same as pressing the button indicating that traffic will be stopped in 20s or similar, but I don't know of anywhere traffic lights ever worked like that. You're still going to have to wait for the allocated "pedestrian" time, but it will never come without a button press

<comment><USER7> Agreed. All traffic light buttons do something in Dublin, as far as I can tell. Most lights are at junctions. If you don't press the button there, there will be no point in the cycle where you're guaranteed no cars will cross your path. If you do, there will.

Some traffic lights are just for pedestrians crossing, away from a junction. Normally those work pretty quickly - traffic stops in 10 seconds, so long as the last stop was at least 30 seconds ago.

In some countries, pedestrians can get a green light while cars are still allowed turn across them. I'm not sure if that's the case in New York, but it might explain some of the confusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The fake thermostat is the most frustrating example and tends to make me angrier than anything else. The problem is, fake thermostats tend to tell you what the temperature is. And no matter what you set them to, which has no effect, they continue to mock your failed attempts to become comfortable by continueing tell you just how very cold you are. And nothing is more upsetting than turning up the heat, only to see the actual temperature continue to drop.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure I understand the logic of that when it's a hotel room, but in an office environment it's fair enough. As long as the maintained temperature sticks to what we understand as a typical room temp (21-23°C).

What makes me think that is the attitude to weather in the UK, where the polarity shifts as soon as summer transitions to winter and vice versa. As in, thermostats in most UK shops and pubs and bars in the summer are set to levels of cold you would only begin to experience as November approaches; they're practically icy and an amazing example of desert conditions when night falls.

But then winter approaches and everything is fired up to the point where you're practically sweating if you're wearing full on winter wear. The total lack of humidity prevents the sweating but the heat goes beyond cosy.

I hate this, so my idea of getting a comfortable temperature doesn't align with the normal situation. But if I was to change it to suit my needs then that would have a negative affect on everybody who justified the need to freeze their ass off every time they walk into a shop when the sun takes its hat off.

So when it comes to local climate control, it's practically impossible to please anybody. You can't give one person the power satisfy their taste at the expense of everybody else, that's why air conditioning fucking sucks. The best you can do is maintain a comfortable average, remove or restrict the thermostats, and provide other solutions that allow comfort without changing it for all.

<comment><USER8> Oh yeah, the thermostats in offices totally shouldn't work - that would be maddening as everyone fought over temperature.

I'd just rather have nothing at all than something which both pretends to do something while also making it very clear - via the temperature display - <USER2> it does nothing.

At least at a crosswalk or in an elevator, I can pretend that what I'm doing has an effect.

<comment><USER10> _Oh yeah, the thermostats in offices totally shouldn 't work - that would be maddening as everyone fought over temperature._

In a former job, people just opened the windows when they didn't like the temperature. So we had cold in winter, heat in summer and I guess a pretty high energy bill. But no wars, people opened _their_ window. Oh and I was just a contractor so no chance to complain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My favourite button that doesn't work is The DFA fader [0]. Basically, a tool of the audio engineer to give difficult clients an auditory placebo effect when they want to 'get it just right'. There is even a paper on its effect [1]. There was the story of a famous record (I can't recall which) where after endless battles in the studio the audio engineer let the artist twiddle an unconnected dial so they felt they tweaked it just right. Maybe using a Rane PI 14 [2].

[0] [https://intelligentsoundengineering.wordpress.com/2017/08/15...](https://intelligentsoundengineering.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/what- the-f-are-dfa-faders/)

[1] [http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18711](http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18711)

[2] [http://www.rane.com/pi14.html](http://www.rane.com/pi14.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> I challenge the notion that there can be any net-positive effect from deliberately misleading the public and insulting people's intelligence. As word spreads that people are being actively deceived, overall trust in the system is eroded. These placebo buttons are a fraud and should be removed.

<comment><USER13> I agree, but I will settle for a sticker that says "disabled."

Also, when I press a "close door" button in an elevator, I expect a so-fast- it's'-silly Star Wars closing speed.

Or realistically at least a reaction within 0.5 seconds or I get instantly annoyed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are three crossings near me that exhibit some different behaviours you'll see in the UK

1\. There's a major crossroads (junction of a bypass). The natural phase design means that vehicles will be stopped before each crossing in the phase anyway. So the buttons _almost_ do nothing. Why "almost" ? Well, in the middle of the night with almost no traffic, the phases stop being automatic, bypass traffic gets a green all the time. If something comes on the side road, the phases will happen, but you don't want to wait for that as a pedestrian, your buttons will cause all the phases (even the ones you don't care about for crossing motor traffic) to happen so that you can cross. In practice of course at this hour few pedestrians push the buttons anyway, they can see there's no traffic.

2\. The high street nearby has an old-fashioned Pelican crossing, and the buttons work as expected. A Pelican is a familiar design, traffic lights control the motor traffic and red/green lamps are attached for pedestrians, facing them from the far side of the road, the pedestrian presses the button, a timer starts, and after some configured delay the traffic signals bring motor traffic to a halt, then you can cross.

3\. But it also has a newer Puffin crossing. The Puffin crossing is superficially similar to a Pelican, and road vehicle operators need no extra training, but for a pedestrian the operation is improved in one immediately visible and one invisible way: Visibly the red/ green lamps are moved to the pedestrian's side of the road, positioned so that when looking at them the pedestrian can also see the road with oncoming traffic (in the UK this will usually be to their right, but in some cases it's the left and the Puffin is adjusted appropriately). This reduces the hazard of pedestrians stepping in front of traffic when they have a green light but a motorist hasn't slowed. Also, the timer now starts when the crossing is used, and inhibits further crossing activations. For a busy crossing this makes no difference, but at a quiet crossing it means if you arrive after a long lull it will activate immediately, since the traffic has not recently been interrupted. A big improvement.

Elsewhere in my city I've also noticed examples of the Pegasus and Toucan, which are similar to the Puffin except that they're intended to also accommodate horses (Pegasus) and bicycles (Toucan) where routes allow these in addition to pedestrians.

<comment><USER15> The nearside Puffin crossing display can be obscured by crowds. The reason they are mounted low is cost: the same unit can be used for command and display.

They therefore require looking down, whereas farside displays keep the head lifted which makes it easier to transition to looking at the road. In _all_ directions. Which is why nearside displays aren't used at junctions.

Puffin crossings are an excellent example of a system being redesigned to reduce cost and then having bogus UX 'justifications' pasted over it.

<comment><USER14> How are two mechanically separate components "the same unit" exactly ?

The Puffin displays are replicable, which is how Pegasus crossings work (a person on a horse obviously can't reach down to the level of a pedestrian button, the crossing is functionally similar to a Puffin but adds a picture of a horse & rider, and is replicated higher up the pole)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've found an ice/hot pack around the thermostat, packaged with a bubble envelope, quite effective at controlling temperatures to my wishes.

</comment><comment><USER17> What's more frustrating is the lights in my town literally won't give you walk, ever, unless you push the button. So some do nothing, and some are required. That makes all required, and that is frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER18> In the UK, the majority I run into seem to be near-placebo, but they do actually work in particular scenarios, it's just influenced by an algorithm.

The key one is Tube train buttons. For indoor stations, they are effectively placebo buttons, but once the weather gets very hot or cold and the Tube train is outdoors, they tend to become active. By the inconsistent way they're activated, I believe it's the train driver in control but that may be different on different lines.

The part that interests me is just how many people fail to notice they have no effect indoors - whilst it's potentially difficult to spot with an isolated button (eg at a road crossing), it's blatant for the Tube as everyone's door opens at the same time and everyone emerges at basically the same time just after (with tiny variations).

What stitches to tourists in London, is that it's the other way on UK railway trains (near London at least) - they usually do work always, and thus the inconsistency provides a further barrier to figuring it out!

<comment><USER19> I like the way the Swedish subway system works. Door buttons are normally inactive, but when they are active they are lit up.

<comment><USER18> Yes, that's ideal

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > These features, such as tactile paving and audible traffic signals, help > people with visual impairments cross the road and are only activated when > the button is pressed.

Unless I'm living in a different version of London to the authors, it is unfortunately not the case that pressing the button invokes an interstitial foot massage.

<comment><USER20> You placed your feet wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> That is one long non-article. Let's try:

It's an aplication of the placebo effect. It gives people the feeling of having an impact on critical systems which work better automated when they have not, like on traffic lights. A net-positive effect is widely observed.

<comment><USER22> Can't agree that the effect is net positive.

It adds another level of confusion and doubt in technology, since occasionally people will figure out what's going on or read articles like this one.

How about showing a timer on the traffic light when they will turn green, or temporarily disable traffic lights when there is little traffic (using live data).

<comment><USER23> "How about showing a timer on the traffic light when they will turn green"

In some areas they have these and it's really nice.

<comment><USER24> Yea having been to cities where this is deployed widely (e.g. Taipei), it's a shame that they aren't in use everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why this myth 'elevator close door button does not work' keeps reapearing every now and then? _It 's not universal_ \- in some places it works, in some it doesn't. Why the obsesion to find a single 'truth', is so hard to accept that it's not the same everywhere? Same goes for pedestrian crossing button - I've missed quite few green/red traffic light iterations on my way to work, because I forgot to press a button and had to wait for another round.

<comment><USER26> It's a creative writing problem. It's fine when creative writing is writing for writing's sake, but when dubious facts and over-generalisations are mixed in, myths start to develop. It reminds me just a tiny bit of the "carrots are good for night vision" myth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> In Japan, elevator close buttons not only work they are used everyday all the time. The doors are set to close with a long delay, so everyone habitually closes the door manually.

Now that I'm back, I notice that elevators in the US often close immediately upon pressing a floor button. But also, most elevator close buttons do actually work.

</comment><comment><USER28> Actually I believe they often DO work in service elevators and other 'back of house' situations.

In a normal elevator I imagine they also do work when in a privileged mode (such as an EMS key override).

</comment><comment><USER29> I would love for the elevator door close to work for me, but I thought they still existed for operation during a fire. You can see a key where the firemen can override the system and keep doors open or shut as long as they want. Here is one site[1] that seems to verify that the close door button is used during emergency operation.

[1][https://www.wikihow.com/Operate-an-Elevator-in-Fire- Service-...](https://www.wikihow.com/Operate-an-Elevator-in-Fire-Service-Mode)

</comment><comment><USER30> >As for the lights, a growing number of them are now integrated into an electronic system that detects traffic and adjusts intervals accordingly (giving priority to buses if they're running late, for example), which means that pressing the button has no effect.

Surely pedestrian presses button is a valuable input to any such semi-smart traffic management system?

If the system is smart enough to know about _late_ buses and their routes then this very binary input should be easy to integrate...

<comment><USER31> Thou if the buttons were used for pedestrian management (stats) then a certain group of people would still 'hammer' them like on old arcade machines just for the heck of it. (note the high-stress people that repeatedly smash these buttons that never work)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> A local Sydney paper just did an article on how the pedestrian buttons in the city dont actually do anything during the day because they are on preset timers [https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/when-pushing-the- pedestr...](https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/when-pushing-the-pedestrian- button-works-and-when-it-doesn-t-20180820-p4zykp.html)

<comment><USER26> > "Pedestrian council chairman Harold Scruby"...

Any time this so-called "Pedestrian Council of Australia chairman" (Harold Scruby) is covered by an Australian reporter, doubt should be heavily cast on the validity of the entire article or reporter's credibility.

Look up who Harold Scruby really is. I'll say no more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> In the city I live in, the crosswalk buttons are not for making the lights change, but to tell the crosswalk to play an auditory signal the next time it changes. This is of course for the visually impaired.

</comment><comment><USER34> "World full of buttons"... Describes only three buttons.

</comment><comment><USER35> These buttons aren't really non-functional. They work to spread disease.

</comment><comment><USER36> The same is unfortunately quite true of the web.

</comment><comment><USER37> warning: Safari "reader" mode can't fix that page, so you get little dribbles of text separated by pictures that don't add to a pretty minimal "story" (TLDR: various buttons are placebo in the US. Some, like elevator "door close" buttons, for ADA reasons -- they're really there for emergency personnel anyway, and some just as placebo, like some crossing signal buttons).</comment>


What Does a Data Scientist Think of Google Optimize? - <AUTHOR> https://www.abtasty.com/au/blog/data-scientist-hubert-google-optimize/ <comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone else see a problem with a session based approach to a/b testing (that Google Optimize uses)?</comment>


Hire For The Ability To Get Shit Done - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eladgil.com/2011/09/hire-for-ability-to-get-shit-done.html <comment><USER2> I can relate to this, but I can also relate to the other side of the question. Sometimes it isn't me, its you. Take someone who gets things done and suddenly in your organization they aren't delivering. Could be them, but it could also be you.

I had this experience working at Google. I had a horrible time getting anything done there. Now I spent a bit of time evaluating that since it had never been the case in my career, up to that point, where I was unable to move the ball forward and I really wanted to understand that. The short answer was that Google had developed a number of people who spent much, if not all, of their time _preventing change_. It took me a while to figure out what motivated someone to be anti-change.

The fear was risk and safety. Folks moved around a lot and so you had people in charge of systems they didn't build, didn't understand all the moving parts of, and were apt to get a poor rating if they broke. When dealing with people in that situation one could either educate them and bring them along, or steam roll over them. Education takes time, and during that time the 'teacher' doesn't get anything done. This favors steamrolling evolutionarily :-)

So you can hire someone who gets stuff done, but if getting stuff done in your organization requires them to be an asshole, and they aren't up for that, well they aren't going to be nearly as successful as you would like them to be.

The other risk is of course the people who 'get a lot done' but don't need to. Which is to say they can rewrite your CRM system and push it out to the world in a week but only by writing it from scratch.

<comment><USER3> Word f'ing up. I was recently fired from a remarkably relatable situation where a _hot ninja_ startup had no effective intake process, so for orientation I had one pair-programming episode regarding an intensely technical internal aspect of the application before being sent off to fend for myself in their repository. Couple this with an office and project management style predicated on "who can interrupt the loudest?", having multiples of these conversations occur simultaneously, and an absolutely open office plan.

But hey, the CEO had sold a previous company for good money so this means he knows what he's doing. I'm sure they'll be a huge success.

I'm not saying that I'm God's gift to college-dropout programmers, but I'd never had a problem succeeding in a job until this one. In reaction to this state of affairs I had considered that maybe I need to be at a huge company that has better processes, but your Google tale says maybe otherwise.

</vent>

<comment><USER4> since there seem to already be quite a few employees when you started I think most of the problems there was a culture clash. coupled with the fact that they did not properly educate you on how they operated. I'm not judging different cultures but there are plenty of steps a company can take to make sure new hires fit.

<comment><USER3> If by "quite a few" you mean "less than 10," several of which had previous worked together, I'm not sure that it qualifies as anything more than process ignorance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "As part of our hiring process at Mixer Labs, we would often give people a half day coding exercise. "

I (and many people who I've hired) don't have time to waste on your startup. I can tell within two minutes if someone can code or not. I've never understood the need to have someone write code (and then nitpickingly critique the code because it doesn't look like _my_ code) when I can just ask them and know if they are lying or not.

And I've hired a LOT of super fantastic programmers.

<comment><USER6> If you can do this reliably, you should start a business.

Common knowledge is that hiring programmers is insanely difficult. If you have a gift for it, you could make craptonnes of money!

<comment><USER5> I did start a business. But I should state that I learned how to interview and hire for years working for other people.

<comment><USER7> Your parent probably means you should start a business of helping other people hire good programmers.

<comment><USER5> I did. It does quite well. But I am no longer involved in it day-to-day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Two things: a) I once heard a good quote and I think it's often true and helpful to think about if hiring: "Talent doesn't come in convenient packages".

b) The best traits of someone are very often some of their worst as well. Be mindful of that when trying to find the "perfect" candidate. Example: Someone who communicates well might also communicate (i.e. talk) a lot instead of working at their workstation for extended periods. The point is to not expect perfection from people. And by perfection, I mean excellence in several types of disparate skills.

<comment><USER9> This is one of the best comments on here. 'Talent' is not a one dimensional scalar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> With the exception of Lazy, I've seen almost all of these at our fund:

I find most of these are pretty easy to fix:

        Lack of urgency.

This one is simple, give a deadline for every task assigned.

Good people will hit their targets or let you know well in advance if they won't.

        Easily distracted.

Hmmm, I'd say something here but there's that old expression about the kettle calling the pot black:)

        Starts but never finishes things.

I'm not sure how this is allowed anywhere, but for us we follow the Peter Thiel principle,

that you have one major task to do and that's what you'll be judged on. This seems more of a management fail.

        Argumentative.

This is where we fail the most.

We try to hire smart people and fortunately/unfortunately smart people have strong opinions on how things should be done.

We've settled on a hybrid of the Microsoft, you own your area for smaller decisions, and the "disagree and commit" style of decision making for larger decisions.

        Slow.

Unfortunately this is a deal breaker for us.

If you can't keep up then you don't make partner at your 3 month review.

       Perfectionist.

This just follows from the "Lack of urgency" and the "slow" categories.

You can code your algos and systems as well as you want as long as they work and come in on time:)

</comment><comment><USER11> Something about this mindset is depressing to me. Obviously we all want to get shit done, and every company wants to hire people that get shit done, but this definition of 'get shit done' seems very narrow and robotic. The author seems to want to evaluate a programmer's efficiency the same way we evaluate the efficiency of an assembly line or a sorting algorithm.

The problem is that the smartest, most creative, and overall most productive people often don't think this way at all. Instead of slogging away obediently at a problem for six hours, they might dilly-dally on twitter for two hours before having a lateral insight that lets them solve the problem in 15 minutes. They might go to Thailand for the first 3 weeks of a 4 week project then, in a semi-sleepless 100 hour binge, produce a technical masterpiece with a beautiful UI and additional business-savvy features no one else could have thought of thrown in on the fly. Would it be better for your company if this person just sat at his or her desk and focused perfectly and coded 10 hours a day like a good little robot? Does it matter? The same qualities that make some people brilliant will tend to make them unable or unwilling to work like this. You can gripe about irresponsibility or lack of discipline, but they are indeed getting shit done, just not the same way you do. You can pass on them because they don't fit your mold if you like--a more open-minded company will quickly be there to capitalize on the value they offer.

</comment><comment><USER12> ""As part of our hiring process at Mixer Labs, we would often give people a half day coding exercise. "

I'm just letting you know, I'm not working with you. Luckily, after years of experience I have been able to arrange lines of clients wanting me to get stuff done for them so I'm capable of screening companies like you on simple cues like this.

Have fun finding a slave who'll just do what you ask, no questions asked, no creativity involved.

Of course, I'm lazy but only about things that don't really matter. Only stupid people laboriously move huge tons of mass by dragging them; smart people invent a wheel and an internal combustion engine.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't fully agree with this, it depends on what type of project you are working on.

There is a certain type of cowboy programmer that depends on thinking quickly and having a good memory. This type of programmer can write code that works, really quickly -- provided the size of the project can fit entirely in their head. Because of this, they can do really well on small size projects but they never learnt proper code design and architecture skills, because they never needed them. This type of programmer ends up not being able to scale as the size of the project gets larger, because eventually they reach the limit on how much code they can remember at one time, and the lack of code design that lets you reduce the number of things you need to be aware about in order to write new code without breaking anything really starts to bite you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I did not state things very well. This isn't just about short term projects. Some things will take many months of work to complete (e.g. v1 of some key scalable infrastructure).

It is not about doing short fast sprints - it is about being long term productive as a member of a team. Productivity includes good design and thinking through what is needed up front. But it is also about marrying thoughtfulness to efficiency.

<comment><USER14> _e.g. v1 of some key scalable infrastructure_

Just so I understand: You're always willing to trade intelligence and experience for someone who produces more, for essential key components of your startup. So you would hire a less experienced person who writes more code over a very experienced slow developer, do I have that right?

All that does is trade the short term risk of not having as much developed with the long term risk of having a broken system. It means you're potentially betting your business on someone who isn't the best, just because they seem more productive.

In summary, you risk making a Friendster instead of a Facebook.

Let me know if I misunderstood your point.

I hire on both: smart people who get it done. And getting it done is relative. Unless you're in consulting, velocity is almost never the issue compared to correctness, so a smarter, slower person is sometimes the right choice. A member of my team took a long time to come up to speed, and is now kicking ass and making the right decisions to keep things on track.

<comment><AUTHOR> No. What I am saying is intelligence and experience are crucial (intelligence more then experience in my book). Also crucial is the ability to get shit done and culture fit.

I want candidates with all these things.

If someone is very very bright but not very effective, or terrible for the culture of my startup, I would not hire them.

If someone was an amazing culture fit, but not very bright, I would not hire them.

"Coming up to speed" makes sense. It is all about the context in which the person is working, what they did before etc. Productivity takes time to scale, as does trust in one another, working as a team etc.

But there are some people that you give a lot of time and attention to that just don't get a lot done.

<comment><USER14> _crucial is the ability to get shit done_

Ok, so what exactly does that mean? Are you concerned with velocity or correctness?

<comment><USER15> Do you want me to meet you at the right place or on time?

You want both. It's a false dichotomy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I call bullshit. In my experience it's very rare for people to fall into almost any of those adjectives naturally... _especially_ developers. These are people who almost universally _love_ to write code.

Most of the observations listed here I'd be more likely to line up with a lack of investment and clear alignment of goals and priorities. The tone of the article seems to further support to me the lack of an environment that's nurturing to the team members' motivation.

<comment><USER17> In my experience, the difference between a GSD engineer and an average engineer is the understanding that it is up to you to be motivated, focused, and effective.

And, I've worked with many GSD engineers, so they definitely exist.

<comment><USER16> I'd agree that it's up to them to identify and communicate things that are challenging their effectiveness, but not always to fix them... and early in someone's career even identifying them can be tough.

I'm just arguing that it's contextual way more often than it's fundamental, and the tone of the article left me with the impression that the author isn't interested in playing much of a role in people's motivations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies if my tone set up the wrong impression - I think the environment, manager, motivations etc. are all crucial, and some people are very productive in some settings but not others.

That said, I also think there are many people who just aren't that productive, and screening for people who are great at GSD is crucial for a startup.

<comment><USER16> Likewise, I apologize if I took too much from tone.. I think the bottom line is that we disagree here:

 _"... there are many people who just aren't that productive..."_

I don't think that's the case. I think the steady-state for most people is working (hard). People who aren't productive are generally _frustrated_ that they're not productive. I get it though, there are people who require very little from the outside world to move forward. They'll "GSD" as you put it without much outside influence. I've worked with people who score high on that metric, and I'm genuinely humbled by their ability to make forward progress even in less than optimal conditions.

That said, I think it's tempting to value them above resources that are more sensitive to their context but I'd warn against missing an opportunity. In my experience the developers your talking about will absolutely 'GSD'.. Even when all you ask them to do is 'S'.

I frankly like surrounding myself with people whose motivation falters when they don't feel connected to the problem we're solving for our users, or when we're calling too many bullshit meetings, or when they don't believe in what we're doing. Keeps us honest. Those employees are your canary in the mineshaft. I think where their interest goes, our market is likely to follow.

After all, if my team isn't excited to build it who the fuck do I expect to pay me for it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "I don't care how smart someone is - if they are unable to work hard and crank out a large amount of high quality work, they will weigh down your startup."

Don't forget that you need to pay them like-wise.

It's acceptable to accept slower (but still high-quality) work in exchange for less pay, etc. And sometimes it's even acceptable to let the quality slack for the same reason.

<comment><USER19> Oh yes, if you want people this perfect (and it is a good list) then pay them accordingly.

Unless of course he missed off his other criterion "will work for peanuts".

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree you should compensate people for being really good. Is there someplace I stated otherwise?

<comment><USER20> Although you agree on this, a lot of people including ones from start up's aren't comfortable with paying people proportional to their productivity.

There are many reasons for that, most are happy with flat salary models where can they pay a donkey and a horse the same salary under the premise that they assume both a donkey and a horse can carry weight and run. Unfortunately that's how badly people think of when they pay. Or they are just afraid they may end up setting a trend productive people end up earning big all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this is some of the best advice on hiring for a startup I have seen in a while. I just don't think the typical "reverse all the words of a sentence in place" is as helpful. With stuff like StackOverflow, it seems much more valuable that someone can figure something out and "get shit done", especially in a startup where there is so much to do.

Going forward, I will probably only hire someone after seeing them work on a small project, maybe even pairing with them in the process.

</comment><comment><USER22> For every one true GSD person you'll find, there are ten who'd rather spend all day arguing about how their tools aren't perfect or they are waiting on X person/thing. In larger teams it becomes easier and easier to blame the 'X'.

A good rule of thumb to spot these people is how much yak shaving they require before they will start adding value. If they walk in and say "well I need new new system A from IT, and hours B approved by HR, and version control system C, and software stack D, and my last company had E, and, and, and etc..." The big red flag is when they ask for all of this serially and not in parallel. Then you know you've got somone looking to setup excuses for why they haven't delivered. A true GSD will carve through obstacles as much as possible.

A good analogy is the out of shape person who wants the platinum gym membership, new workout clothes/shoes, the trainer, and the diet plan, but always needs something else before they can start working out. Meanwhile the GSD person is going for a jog and doing pushups.

</comment><comment><USER23> Expecting 1/2 day free labour will filter out experienced, non-desperate engineers. I've put up with that kind of stuff in my early 20s but certainly wouldn't any more, unless my personal situation was desperate.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have to say that some combination of these negative traits can describe me _at certain points in time_. I'll set out to try to build the "perfect" thing, and then snap to reality and use the quick-and-dirty solution.

Procrastination, distraction, laziness, lack of follow-through, slowness, those all manifest themselves when I have no reason to be engaged in the work. The work might just be a really bad match (example: endless maintenance and toiling through bad legacy code, putting out fires, when I could be designing and building something half decent).

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points. We all have moments where we exhibit some or all of these traits. This is not about an individual moment (or e.g. working for a terrible, demotivating manager, or on a crappy project).

But I do think there are some people who may be very smart or experienced, but who just are not very effective. Some of this could be contextual (in which case it is valuable for both you and them to find them a new home), but sometimes it is just a person's personality or approach to work.

<comment><USER25> Elad, really enjoyed your post. I am a notorious procrastinator, I start things I don't finish, I am very easily distracted, but I also run a small business. I didn't hire GSD types intentionally, but it happened through sheer luck and I would definitely favour those attributes in the future. My two current employees, usually without deadlines or any real structure, crank out work at a great pace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can relate to this post. Specially around Slow and Argumentative. These are cloaks in which faux-smart people hide under. I had experience with a developer who would not want to lift a finger until he absolutely knew that the feature he was about to build was assured unquestionable success. So we would gather some data to figure out users predisposition to use the feature, and still nothing. in the end he would not experiment and we fired him

</comment><comment><USER27> Just about all of these problems can be solved with good agile practices like pairing and scrum.

People are way more productive, focused, and determined when pairing. It's simply much harder to waste time and produce low quality work when you're directly accountable to the person next to you.

Scrum solves the urgency, commitment, follow-through, and slow problems. Each iteration the team has to commit to a set of tasks to get done. If they don't make it they have to figure out why they didn't, and how to improve. This continuous reflection and optimization is how team's get good and fast.

Of course there will be people who can't be brought into the team, but they are few and far between. And you can't tell until you've created a team for them to be brought in to. So instead of focusing so much on the fantasy of hiring a great team, learn how to build a great team.

<comment><USER28> i've found scrum to be the worst possible "methodology" on the planet and can't stand pair programming. i've also been known to get things done on occasion.

nothing about making software is one size fits all. forcing scrum and pair programming sounds like a really good way to get an enthusiastic team, but guarantees little else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a bit too one-sided. Hiring those who GSD is obvious, but it's not the only thing. Context is important -- what are you building? Do you need algorithmic expertise? What about scale? Platform experience?

Applying one aspect to hiring, especially at an early-stage startup, is a poor approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a fair point - you should definitely tailor your hiring approach to your needs. But for all the types of people you mention, I think you would want people who are very productive and able to GSD for their areas.

Do you think this is not the case? Or are these specific types of roles where you think having effective people are secondary?

<comment><USER29> Absolutely, productive people are very important. Especially in early-stage startups, where nearly every day feels like all-hands-on-deck.

However, productivity comes in multiple forms -- just depends on how you measure it. Because of the limited resources in early startups, people need to fire on all cylinders -- productivity and smarts.

<comment><AUTHOR> I 100% agree with you :) I think the way I wrote the post may have stated the GSD side too strongly. I totally agree you need really sharp people who are a good culture fit who also GSD. Thanks for reading the post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can't tell you how much _more_ I would value someone who takes 4 weeks to build something that works 100% of the time over someone who takes 1 week to build something that works 95% of the time. Something that works 95% of the time is worse than useless IMHO.

<comment><USER31> The replies to this topic are the most ridiculous programmer-equivalent of Internet-toughguy posturing.

Have you seen the people, money and time resources NASA put into the code which runs on space flight hardware? The reviews on reviews on reviews, the exactly specified every code path, the complete tracking and investigating of every bug in their codebase ever and checking all of them for wider applicability... and _they_ don't get 100% success in _years_ of applying their processes to a comparatively small and limited codebase.

Wasn't Zed telling us about how 37 signals restarts their Ruby in Rails processes every day due to instability and memory leaks? Guess that makes their lower-than-100% success rate multi-million dollar generating software "worse than useless", eh?

<comment><USER30> Sorry didn't see this at the time. Just for the record, I wasn't saying lower than 100% success rate is worse than useless. I was saying 95% success rate is worse than useless. I didn't set up this false equivalence, the OP did. I know that 100% is a tough or impossible goal, but you really do need to _approach_ 100%. 95% is nowhere near close enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So what should I do if I am reading that article and thinking to myself the whole time "yup, I do that. yup i do that too"

</comment><comment><USER33> How do you "Hire For The Ability To Get Shit Done" when your interview process is going to drive all of the non-masochistic talent away?

</comment><comment><USER34> I hope you would pay me if you expect a half day assignment. Or at least make it fun, like the Google Code Challenge.

</comment><comment><USER35> So... how do I convince an interviewer that I am someone who can Get Shit Done?

<comment><USER36> Show that you have a past record of Getting Shit Done. List things you have accomplished on your resume. Be able to say "I led the doing of X, and it improved the company". If you are fresh out of college, describe your ability to finish your schoolwork early and completely and have recommendations from the professors backing you up on that. If none of this applies to you, start a small open-source project _and complete it_. Also RTFA and see that you meet the author/interviewer's definition of a person who can Get Shit Done since he describes what he's looking for in a fair amount of detail. Having a college degree used to be evidence you could GSD but it's not good enough anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > E.g. "I am average compared to other engineers". For an early stage startup, > average is not enough.

If you bailed them on this, you're process is seriously flawed. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect> As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others" Historical references Although the Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward in 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger have quoted Charles Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge") and Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision") as authors who have recognised the phenomenon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Asking people what they think of themselves is just 1 input. It is not a binary decision. Rather, you need to get as many data points as possible on whether the person is very productive or not and then make a call on whether to hire them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> while there are definitely bad employees, the major problem is the fact that the US school system no longer trains people to be leaders. That's where friction comes in between hiring someone in the early days of the start up. You have a culture clash between a person who's trying to blaze trails and a person who just wants to be along for the ride. I think there's definitely a place for both, but in the beginning you definitely have to take extra time to look for like-minded individuals.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm launching my startup in 3 days - <AUTHOR> I'm launching my startup in 3 days. Site and product will be ready to go live. Where do I go from here? Where to promote it to get the word out? <comment><USER2> Try to see how it organically grows on social media. Create a Twitter page for your company. If you make a blog for the product, you can post your blog posts on your companies social medias. On the blog you can post product update, talk about where the company originated from and more! It helps you build a "voice" and "personality" for your brand.

Reach out to your friends, family and people in your various networks and have them use the product to get honest feedback. If you have people whose feedback you respect, add them into a Trello board and ask them to give you feedback on Trello, so you can track and actually utilize their comments.

Definitely post the website on your LinkedIn as a blog post, so people in your LinkedIn network can see it.

Try to get onto cool podcasts to talk about your product like this one: [http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/06/pitch-your-startup-in- the-t...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/06/pitch-your-startup-in-the-tc-radio- pitch-off-on-sirius- xm-6/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29)

Best of luck!!

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that this is a fantastic collection of approaches - [http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-techniques-startups- use-t...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-techniques-startups-use-to- initially-draw-attention-to-their-product).

</comment><comment><USER4> How can we help if we don't know what your startup does? A startup developing a product to help farmers is not gonna be promoted that same way a startup for electricians is.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a background check for domain names. Full background checks to make sure the domain wasn't "churned and burned" in the past.

<comment><USER5> This sounds like something people buying/selling websites would like, have you looked at communities like [http://www.sitepoint.com](http://www.sitepoint.com) and [http://www.dnforum.com](http://www.dnforum.com)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi,

We haven't launched our startup yet, but we are writing about our marketing techniqes and the things we do in order to bring more future beta users.

See our Marketing Hacks here:

[http://kilometer.io/community/forum/thread- category/marketin...](http://kilometer.io/community/forum/thread- category/marketing-hacks/)

and if you find it useful - feel free to share it :)

</comment><comment><USER7> There are great communities of growth hackers and marketers who would like to give you free advice, that's a great brain storming for them.

Try and ask at [http://growthtalk.co](http://growthtalk.co)

</comment><comment><USER8> If you can identify people out in the real world that are your target market, go talk to them. Do a customer development interview.

</comment><comment><USER9> What's the URL?</comment>


How taking pictures through windows  can inadvertently reveal your location - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ioactive.com/2014/05/glass-reflections-in-pictures-osint.html <comment><USER2> Isn't revealing your location the whole point of taking a picture from your hotel window and sharing it with the world on Twitter? I wouldn't be too surprised if I posted "I'm in Miami, and here's a view from my Hotel window" and someone was able to tell me the Hotel name and which side I was staying on. Infact, I'd be more surprised if someone couldn't!

The techniques used are not particularly ingenious here, especially as most of the photo's seem to depict some obvious landmarks to provide an easy point of reference, especially when given the extra information to focus on a specific location.

<comment><USER3> Yep, pretty much. The article's neat, but isn't the point of the kind of pictures shown in this article to show where you are? I don't think you can call this "inadvertently".

This is a bit like checking in with Foursquare. If there's a security concern with showing it real-time and net-wide, then you just shouldn't.

Reminded me of this: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bm1gMRUCIAA8Y4E.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bm1gMRUCIAA8Y4E.jpg)

<comment><USER4> I think they point is that people would be surprised that you can relatively easily narrow down a vague picture to almost a floor / room number level.

I'm guessing some people may not be comfortable with that.

<comment><USER5> You're not going to figure out the room number based on what lamp is in the room.

<comment><USER6> Not from the lamp, from the geometry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Using the reflections as additional information is very interesting. However, I'm not that surprised that views from windows can be relatively easily located. Andrew Sullivan has been running his View From Your Window contest for four years now and people have been guessing the locations of the photos with scary accuracy (as good as in the linked post).

Here is the archive: [http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw- contest/](http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw-contest/)

Still, it's probably more than 15 minutes work even in the best case scenario (and much, much longer in the worst case), can probably not be automated in any meaningful way (but that would be an interesting project, huh!) and is consequently only of interest to dedicated attackers, not general surveillance.

<comment><USER8> And he doesn't even give a starting city or country. His readers have to narrow down the location using street signs, building types, car types, and other subtle hints. So if you don't want people to find you don't post pictures of where you are.

<comment><USER9> > So if you don't want people to find you don't post pictures of where you > are.

This cannot be said enough.

It's definitely worth educating people to the kinds of things they're exposing when publishing things like vacation photos, but most people shouldn't have a need for that level of information security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Finally, do not forget that a reflection could be your enemy."

On a tangent - I didn't realize that the google maps 3D rendering has gotten so good over the last couple of years. I wonder how hard it would be to scrape the point data and satellite textures to source a GTA map, I'd love to cruise through actual Vice City with the GTA V engine.

If you haven't checked it out yourselves - breath-taking WebGL view of Miami (Chrome, OSX):

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Miami,+firstname.lastname@example.com,-80....](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Miami,+email@example.com,-80.1751686,528a,35y,261.17h,71.49t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x88d9b0a20ec8c111:0xff96f271ddad4f65)

<comment><USER11> If you're on OSX, try it out in Apple Maps, I find their 3D views superior to Google's and it's been available in more locations that I've looked at.

On the iPad you also get more control over viewing angles, I was surprised that you lose that on the desktop.

<comment><USER12> Hold the 'Ctrl' key and you can use the mouse to rotate to any angle you like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me, can't find it right now, but there is a picture circulating on Twitter of a safari park warning sign:

"Please make sure you turn off location and be careful about sharing photos of our rhino on social media, you may give away its location to poachers"

<comment><USER14> [https://twitter.com/robinsloan/status/463343201865048064](https://twitter.com/robinsloan/status/463343201865048064)

<comment><USER15> Trying to find the source of that image - Google lists it on a few tumblrs going back to 2010 (tumblr apparently started in 2007, who knew) - except when you go to the oldest of them it's only just been posted, today, not 2010. Google never seem to have been able to do dates reliably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reminds me of the child pornography case a few years back, where detectives were able to identify the hotels where the abuse took place via imagery of the rooms.

Interestingly, rather than figuring it out themselves (as the search space was too huge), they crowdsourced it by releasing images with the child photoshopped out.

</comment><comment><USER17> Point is: when you post a view or a location name that's when you _want_ to tell the world where you are. I'm not inadvertently revealing my location I'm very much advertently revealing it.

I assume there are much more creepy techniques to tell where I am when I _don 't_ explicitly reveal it.

</comment><comment><USER18> If it comes to stalking someone, why just a hotel picture? Any picture, and previous context (e.g., "Miami, I am here"), can be tracked down to the exact location.

<comment><USER19> I was going to say the same thing. This has little to do with hotels or reflections. Any picture at all with a skyline in it, given a good enough 3D map and some software (maybe the NSA has some already?), should be enough to pinpoint you pretty closely, depending on the nearness of the skyline and the quality of the picture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Views out the window are also very useful for finding the exact location of real estate for sale or rent, when the ad only shows an approximate location.

</comment><comment><USER21> So, 99.9% of the information was gathered based on the actual photo, and .1% of it confirmed with reflections. Impressive. Hmm, this picture of a landmark came from the building near the landmark. How did you get that with just reflections?!?

</comment><comment><USER22> I'll be taking this material and creating a tutorial "101: How to stalk a celebrity and make them feel slightly uncomfortable"

However, in all seriousness, nice levels of deduction going on here and only slightly creepy tweets :)

</comment><comment><USER23> With a set of photos of the same static scene, it's possible to figure out the camera position, angle, and focal length of every camera, sometimes to millimeter accuracy. You just have to correlate the same features in each frame, then solve it.

3d motion trackers do this. (Blender.org has one. You can solve this same problem using it. Bring in public and street view photos of the area. It's a bit of manual work to put all the images in a movie then go frame by frame and tag features... But you could get much more accurate than the article.)

The power is in having access to large databases of photos of everywhere, and even better if all the photos were taken the same way, like google's street view... and large amounts of computing resources to index and correlate all of the features from all of the images automatically.

I would be surprised if there is not a project in some huge company or lab that can identify features in nearly any public outdoor shot and determine exactly where it was taken. (perhaps for intelligence or forensics)

I believe this paper introduced me to the idea in 2006: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ph...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/phototours/PhotoTourism.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is pretty neat, I wonder how hard it would be to automate using gmaps for an approx location.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is hardly "inadvertently" revealing your location: (1) they've told you where they are (extra from the actual Tweets, not the photos) and (2) these places are all near well-known landscapes.

I mean good job on taking the time to actually do it but I doubt this could be done for the vast majority of photos like this.

</comment><comment><USER26> As a countermeasure, the article notes turning off lights and so forth. Seems the author hasn't heard of polarized lenses. Others note that it's not a real security concern, no, but using a FLD lens will result in better photos when shooting through glass! Use it!

</comment><comment><USER27> This only seems useful if it is automated and extremely fast. If you are law enforcement there are faster ways to do this. Like just calling in the city the "bad" guy last checked in at.

And if you aren't, there are much easier ways to get info on the room someone is using, like social engineering. Which I'd actually one if the examples the author gave when he simply asked the victim in twitter what floor he/she was on.

I haven't seen criminal scenarios where the bad guy takes a photo if his view or checks in on four square, that doesn't get rounded up fairly quickly.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wait till the author can tell what you ate based on spectroscopic analysis of the reflection from the building across the shore. A la CSI syle.

<comment><USER29> "Zoom in and enhance"

<comment><USER30> Techniques like superresolution make this quite possible from a grainy video image: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superresolution

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A case for always using polarizing filter ;-)

</comment><comment><USER32> There may come a time when indoor pictures could reveal your location as well. If you were to create a database of lots and lots of architectural plans, you could conceivably use computer vision algorithms for determining dimensions of a room as a few more known bits of entropy for identifying an indoor location.

</comment><comment><USER33> From the title of the article I expected this to discuss a computer vision related technique for enhancing the camera location using reflections.

Using techniques similar to those in photosythn, you can already determine camera location fairly accurately and easier than the manual work done by the article's author.

</comment><comment><USER34> Well, unless I know there is somebody out to kill me, why would I care about giving away my location?

<comment><USER14> e.g. "Finally safe from abusive ex, locked my door, staring out the hotel room window [pic]", or myriad other imaginable scenarios.

<comment><USER29> When you're put into protection (including from abusive spouses), the first thing the agencies involved do is tell you not to contact friends nor relatives. Posting a picture of their accommodation on social media would be the stupidest thing they could do - reflection or not.

So if they proceed to do this even after being advised not to; then I have to question if subconsciously they really do want to be caught (it's saddening just how emotionally dependant victims of abuse are on their abusers).

But this is now taking a tangent onto a whole other topic.

<comment><USER14> What if they just ran away on their own? Anyway the point is there are plenty of situations where you'd want to hide your location but might erroneously think a photo from your window doesn't reveal too much info.

<comment><USER29> _" > What if they just ran away on their own?"_

Happens less often than you'd hope. Usually such victims require support from others.

 _" > Anyway the point is there are plenty of situations where you'd want to hide your location but might erroneously think a photo from your window doesn't reveal too much info."_

I'm sure there might be _some_ fringe examples, but "plenty"? Nobody has yet suggested even one plausible example so far. And even the examples in the article were from people who didn't care about revealing their location to begin with (eg in the first example, the subject announced he was in Miami as well as taking that picture).

But I'm sure there are some examples of people stupid enough to share a picture of their location and not realise it might reveal their location to other people; I'm rarely surprised by the stupidity of the worst case scenarios. But I also doubt those sorts of people who lack even that level intelligence would be the kind to people who read articles like these. So whichever way I look at it, I can't see anyone's life saved (metaphorically nor literally) by the research conducted by this author (as interesting as it might be to many of us).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Possibly more interesting:

Research shows eye-reflections in photos could be used to identify criminals:

[http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/29/eye-reflections-catch- cri...](http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/29/eye-reflections-catch-criminals/)

<comment><USER36> Dual Photography has always been the optical "trick" that's blown me away. Here's the demo video from Siggraph in 2005:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5_tpq5ejFQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5_tpq5ejFQ)

Skip ahead to 4:19 for a succinct demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> You might reveal your location but the person spying on you would have to be a stalker and a total creep, who basically have no life and nothing interesting to do. That's more scary than taking pictures with reflections IMO

</comment><comment><USER38> Reminds me of the ridiculous enhancement processes in Hollywood. Except this time... it's real.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhF_56SxrGk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhF_56SxrGk)

<comment><USER39> What do you mean, Hollywood? Red Dwarf was made in the UK.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i3NWKbBaaU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i3NWKbBaaU)

</comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I would think a person would be more concerned about other things (not location) being relieved in the reflection. Like the strippers you have in the room. Or the drugs.

</comment><comment><USER40> Also, taking photos of meals you are eating can inadvertently reveal your dietary choices.

Look at that burger - you can see from the menu that this is a vegetarian restaurant - that means that the 'meat' isn't really meat at all but a bean and nut mixture.

</comment><comment><USER41> My takeaway: if you want to throw creepers like this guy off your trail, harvest a hotel picture from the internet and post it to your Twitter account.

</comment><comment><USER42> There is nothing inadvertent here.

</comment><comment><USER43> I was halfway through the article before I realized it wasn't going to be about a security vulnerability in MS Windows!

</comment><comment><USER44> Who cares?</comment>


Who Wants to Get Hired Abroad? (August List) - <AUTHOR> https://relocate.me/wwbr?ref=hackernews <comment><USER2> Are those their real emails on the landing page?</comment>


Ryzen 9 3900x and 3950x vs. i9900KS Linux benchmarks - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=28796 <comment><AUTHOR> Incredible to see the gains amd has made in developer and productivity tools.

Competition is great.

Looking forward to seeing intel put out some sort of comeback!</comment>


The Only Thing I Have to Say About Gamer Gate - <AUTHOR> http://thisfeliciaday.tumblr.com/post/100700417809/the-only-thing-i-have-to-say-about-gamer-gate

<comment><USER2> [http://ifunny.mobi/i/Almp6VfO2](http://ifunny.mobi/i/Almp6VfO2)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi, welcome to Earth. Can't we all just play/create games, deal with the riff raff (like every other aspect of life) and move forward?

#hastag-imanidiot</comment>


Show HN: Find usability problems on your website - <AUTHOR> https://getulmo.com <comment><AUTHOR> Ulmo is a sass tool for detecting user behaviors that create confusion, retention, or interest so you can improve your website's usability. Based on the behaviors detected, you can react in real-time with built-in actions (notifications, animations, polls) exactly when an issue happens.

The idea came up while visiting an e-commerce website. I was looking for a product which didn't have enough information or images on the presentation page. Unconsciously, I've got frustrated and started to rage click the next button on a carousel gallery. At that moment, I wanted to talk to someone from the e-commerce website to explain my thoughts. That didn't happen, but I realized what great context there was for the seller to get my feedback exactly when that issue happened.

I'm particularly interested in two areas (but appreciate all comments):

1\. Is the value/proposition for this service simple to understand?

2\. Would you be interested in this service? If not, what is missing from it?</comment>