Sir Christopher Lee dies at 93 - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/11666316/christopher-lee-dies-live.html

<comment><USER2> I have a small Christopher Lee story. I did some extra work on Lord of the Rings when it was being filmed in New Zealand. One very brief scene in the movie is Saruman speaking to the wild-men, telling them how the Rohan came and took their lands from them and that's why they should fight for him.

It was this scene here (towards the end of the clip): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU_zsyulWDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU_zsyulWDg) \- it looks like it was only in the extended edition.

I was somewhere in the back of that mob listening to him do the speech. That's when I really understood what good acting was because I was actually getting stirred up listening to it. I wanted to go after the Rohan's for taking my land! I was ready to fight!

Anyway, it's not much. I didn't even speak to him but it made me realize how great actors project almost an aura of belief around them when they're acting.

<comment><USER3> He also has a Zappa feel. Another pretty charismatic man.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only cast member of LOTR to meet Tolkien. Tolkien also gave him permission to play a role if they ever turned his books into a movie.

He gave him permission to play Gandalf, funnily enough.

<comment><USER5> There was actually a fair bit of grumbling among some hardcore LOTR fans when it was announced that Ian McKellen would play Gandalf, mostly because of his political and cultural leanings.

Of course, Lee made a career of playing villains and monsters, so I find it completely unsurprising that he was cast as Saruman instead.

<comment><USER6> > grumbling among some hardcore LOTR fans when it was announced that Ian > McKellen would play Gandalf, mostly because of his political and cultural > leanings.

Is there a way I can read some of this? Sounds fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He volunteered to fight for the Finnish forces in the Winter War against the Soviets and was then in the proto-SAS:

 _" I was attached to the SAS from time to time but we are forbidden – former, present, or future – to discuss any specific operations. Let's just say I was in Special Forces and leave it at that. People can read in to that what they like."_

That's quite impressive!

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

<comment><USER8> There's the story of filming the scene in Lord of the Rings where Saruman is stabbed in the back by Wormtongue.

From Peter Jackson's DVD commentary:

 _When I was shooting the stabbing shot with Christopher, as a director would I was explaining to him what he should do "... "And he says, 'Peter, have you ever heard the sound a man makes when he's stabbed in the back?' And I said, 'Um, no.' And he says 'Well, I have, and I know what to do.'"_

<comment><USER9> And then the scene was removed :(

<comment><USER10> More importantly the pun about it being a purely bywater joke to refer to New Row as "Sharky's end" never made it to the big screen.

You know nothing Peter Jackson.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The man was making heavy metal albums in his 90s for Christ's sake - [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne:_The_Omens_of_Death](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne:_The_Omens_of_Death)]

An ultimate badass. RIP

<comment><USER12> He also performed with Rhapsody of Fire (formerly Rhapsody) as noted in the original article, including a song off of the Power of the Dragonflame album and throughout the Symphony of Enchanted Lands II album ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_of_Enchanted_Lands_II_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_of_Enchanted_Lands_II_%E2%80%93_The_Dark_Secret)) - this band was his first involvement in metal, and he seemed to have passion for power metal after his first involvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Besides all of the amazing things mentioned here, Lee was also a Nazi hunter in Argentina after WW2:

 _For the final few months of his service, Lee, who spoke fluent French and German, among other languages, was seconded to the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects.[62] Here, he was tasked with helping to track down Nazi war criminals.[63] Of his time with the organisation, Lee said: "We were given dossiers of what they'd done and told to find them, interrogate them as much as we could and hand them over to the appropriate authority ... We saw these concentration camps. Some had been cleaned up. Some had not."[63]_

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

</comment><comment><USER14> The man has accomplished so much that dying was the only thing left he hadn't done.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Lee. You are an inspiration to all.

<comment><USER15> Amazing tribute!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you can find it, I highly recommend watching _Jinnah_ , a film about the founder of Pakistan, in which he played the title role. He often said it was his favorite performance. Sadly it's difficult to find - there's no edition currently on sale, and even on the pirating scene there only seems to exist a horribly low quality version. I look forward to a re-edition of the film.

I don't have any ties to the subject, but I loved the movie for its purely cinematic quality. It would be sad if it stayed forgotten as it is now. Maybe it will only re-emerge when the conflict surrounding this part of history becomes less heated and gives way to peace.

<comment><USER15> As a Pakistani I thoroughly loved how he transformed himself into M.A.Jinnah and did his role. Truly amazing.

Check this if it helps:

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x11f96g_quaid-e-azam- muhamm...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x11f96g_quaid-e-azam-muhammad-ali- jinnah-jinnah-movie-in-urdu-part-2-youtube_fun)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My dad died last year at the age of 74. The first time I heard stories of Dracula and my earliest memory of him mentioning anything related to cinema - was him telling me (when I was 7 or 8) that the great actor Christopher Lee played Dracula. So it always amazed me that a name and actor from my ancient memory (Im in my mid-40s now), and I would've thought any actor my dad admired when he was young would have passed away a long time ago, was not only well and alive, but marvellously ingraining another character (Saruman) into my and my 10 year old son's memories! RIP Christopher Lee.

</comment><comment><USER18> Even though he had quite a varied career, the first and most profound impression he had on me was his voice-acting in "The Last Unicorn".

I always felt that most of his later roles, what the telegraph calls "among the most fruitful" years, were too much of a type-cast.

requiescat in pace

<comment> saiya-jin that's one mighty movie. brought me to tears at the end in a very consistent way, quite a few times... The Audio part of audio-visual experience doesn't get neglected, but story itself is beautiful too.

too bad not many studios have balls to release similar dark stories, most one can expect is darkly-themed, sugar-sweet ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A lesser-known but highly amusing performance, "Never, Never Say Die." The Avengers, Season 5 Episode 10.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azw87CL74Kw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azw87CL74Kw)

<comment><USER20> His voice is so different!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember reading somewhere that Peter Jackson was directing Lee on how to sound when stabbed in the back...Lee promptly told him No. That is in fact not how he sounds when he is stabbed in the back. He knows...(given his military background)

</comment><comment><USER15> Being a Pakistani I loved his performance in the movie _Jinnah_

</comment><comment><USER22> He was a cousin of Ian Fleming and one of the inspirations for James Bond. What a remarkable man!

</comment><comment><USER8> RIP.

IMDB lists 281 acting credits, from 1946 to 2016.

<comment><USER23> IIRC he claimed to have had the most on-screen swordfights of any actor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A sad loss, he was a seemingly constant presence in my childhood, as he would frequently pop up in children's TV shows. I'm very glad that, within his lifetime, he eventualy recieved some of the recognition he so greatly deserved.

</comment><comment><USER25> Brilliant innings, he achieved more than many could even imagine.

<comment><USER26> Between him and Brian Blessed, I reckon they've done enough for 50 normal people lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A life well lived.

RIP Sir Christopher Lee

</comment><comment><USER28> Same day as Ornette Coleman. Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER29> RIP :(

</comment><comment><USER30> Farewell, Lord Summerisle!

</comment><comment><USER31> A true legend. RIP Sir.</comment>


Software-Defined: DevOps Automation Using Infrastructure as Code - <AUTHOR> https://www.tasktop.com/blog/software-defined-it-automation-using-infrastructure-as-code/ <comment><AUTHOR> In this article I take a crack at explaining how Automation using IaC is used to make the shift from classic ITSM to modern DevOps management strategies. Any feedback is appreciated!</comment>


Static is Back - <AUTHOR> https://manas.tech/blog/2016/11/15/static-is-back.html <comment><USER2> While the article mentions at the end the Crystal[1] language. I will say that I found that C# with generics was very approachable, and F# has always been interesting. Wish some of the changes approaching with the acquisition of Xamarin by MS, the openness since ASP.Net MVC, and now .Net Core it's worth looking at again.

I've been in JS/Node land for most of the past 6 years now, and tbh, I've enjoyed it thoroughly, but I wouldn't mind dabbling back in modern C# without some of the "Enterprise" patterns that were _way_ over-used. On the flip side, I still just don't care for Java. Even then, some of the things I might reach for C# to do may be a better opportunity to get into go or rust.

Definitely some interesting opportunities all around.

[1] [http://crystal-lang.org/](http://crystal-lang.org/)</comment>


Chomsky: spying does not protect you - <AUTHOR> https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/06/19-3

<comment><USER2> There is a practical way to reduce terrorism and make the US and the world safer that won't cost a dime and doesn't require compromises on civil liberties.

Stop starting and getting involved in foreign wars, stop supporting the abusive policies of Israel, and stop supporting corrupt and abusive governments around the world.

You don't hear much about that option on TV, but it's by far the simplest and best course for all concerned save a handful of greedy and duplicitous folks at the top.

<comment><USER3> This is copy/paste the same exact response from the top thread on reddit[1]

Been seeing this a lot around here lately...Could be the same user, but I've seen it happening enough that I bet it's not.

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1gxehl/chomsky_sp...](http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1gxehl/chomsky_spying_does_not_protect_you_if_we_had/caorp3s)

<comment><USER4> It looks like the reddit user "kaax" is taking insightful posts from HN and posting them on reddit [for karma?]. See the Bitcoin comments at [http://www.reddit.com/user/kaax](http://www.reddit.com/user/kaax) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929622) .

<comment><USER2> It's kind of sleazy but I guess given the topic that I'm just happy for the words to reach more eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're looking for a simple way to reduce support for the Taliban and start bringing stability to Pakistan and Afghanistan, look no further than grounding the drones.

Vietnam taught U.S. strategists that wars of attrition simply don't work. You'll never kill _all_ of the enemy because every attack creates more enemies than it destroys. In this sense, drone attacks do exactly the opposite of what they're supposed to do. U.S. drones do more for General Atomics than they do for U.S. citizens! Every shot fired generates future business for weapons manufacturers.

The use of drones also sets an ugly precedent. If the U.S. can kill anyone they want, anywhere they want, so too can China or Russia or any other country. Sooner or later that's going to be U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. There will be moral outrage, but no moral high-ground to stand on and no recourse. Just terror.

<comment><USER6> >Vietnam taught U.S. strategists that wars of attrition simply don't work. You'll never kill all of the enemy because every attack creates more enemies than it destroys.

There is an absolutely amazing Rumsfield moment where he acknowledges this, but draws the conclusion that the solution is to kill them more quickly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Favorite quote: "Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists maybe in history."

"Suppose you are walking down the street and you don't know whether two minutes from now the guy across the street and everything around him is going to be blown away by a sudden explosion run by somebody a couple thousand miles away. You're terrorized. And in fact villages, regions, countries are terrorized by these [drone] operations."

<comment><USER8> OK, I can understand Chomsky's argument that drone strikes should be classed as a terrorist operations. But the 'biggest in history'? What about the fire- bombing of Tokyo, the rape of Nankin or the genocide of Cambodia?

<comment><USER9> Terror and murder count don't go hand in hand. They are rather orthogonal.

There were murdering regimes that murdered without sowing too much terror through the population because they were good at hiding and squashing the news. As people disappeared news did spread but it was always rumors that could be dismissed.

Then there is terror -- a single death using a particular technique or weapon withe the particular amount of publicity could be very terrorizing. It is is always attacks on small-town America. Imagine this news story "Cuban drone killed a young family in the small town Idaho because it was believe to be the hiding spot of (Luis Posada Carriles)[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles)], a known terrorist sheltered and protected by the US government"

Ok, so one family killed. Now imagine the terror, the talking heads ("experts") on TV, the news channels, the presidential address, declarations of war, additional security checks etc etc.

See the difference?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In response to stopping terrorism, violence, etc.

It's a fact that humans are products of their environment[1,2]. This has been known for quite some time. However the degree to which we are products of our environment has always been a hot topic of discussion. On one side we have a status quo in the medical profession that insist we are pre determined for disease both physically and mentally. On the other side we have social scientists that say we are solely products of our environment and genetics only gives us predispositions to things like mental illness or obesity and so on.

I tend to agree with the social scientists. We have triggers; genetically. They are either pulled or left alone. The environment in which you live is the catalyst for that type of action.

Going off of that I'll point to Michel Foucault, a mid-twentieth century philosopher and social critic. The bulk of his work focuses on dissecting the ideas of power and knowledge. He understands these two entities to be synonymous with each other, which lays the foundation for his critique of governmental and institutional power. Through his critiques, Foucault positions himself as a post-modernist philosopher interested in the societal controls of modernity. He believes power, and therefore knowledge is not absolute; it is defined, enforced and accepted within the society in which it's institutionalized. This of course is the opposite of modernism, which exercises the belief that science and reason possess the knowledge for an ultimate truth. Stemming from the industrial revolution, modernity reigned supreme through much of the twentieth century and arguably still does today.

Without the willingness to accept that our environment effects so much of what we do we will never understand the means in which to change it. The ideas of violence and power are not born inside of our minds. They grow, over time, from our perceptions. Forcing an ideology or a standard on an environment will not change the behavior of the individuals occupying it; it will only enforce the causation of negative action.

1.) [http://www.mindingourbodies.ca/sites/default/files/suicide_a...](http://www.mindingourbodies.ca/sites/default/files/suicide_and_nutrition_20110415.pdf)

2.) [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1556-4029.2007....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1556-4029.2007.00562.x/abstract;jsessionid=811EC401E930A13C826B1F72CFD0E1BD.d03t04)

\+ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucauldian_discourse_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucauldian_discourse_analysis)

</comment><comment><USER11> Link is down for me; here is a google cache copy: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/06/19-3&strip=1)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, let's all tell google that we're visiting some subversive website. Then when the NSA scoops up the most recent dump of activity, they can correlate all the Verizon and AT&T IP addresses, and the Google cookies, and compile their... "list" of subversive Hacker News readers, right?

Something they wouldn't be able to capture via normal streams, since the HTTPS connection to commondreams.org masks the referrer info so that it can't be sniffed from any plaintext HTTP GETS.

Hey, I wonder why the site's down?

<comment><USER11> If the NSA wants to know who most HNers are, it would be much easier to check our profiles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's a video interview with Chomsky linked to within the OP's link

("What do Takism Square, Google Glass, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and NSA data gathering have in common? Find out in this interview with Noam Chomsky.")

[http://grittv.org/?video=noam-chomsky-on-secret-trade- deals-...](http://grittv.org/?video=noam-chomsky-on-secret-trade-deals- killing-polio-workers-fighting-for-the-commons-in-turkey-the-heroism-of- bradley-manning)

<comment><USER14> That reminds me of a question I've pondered - what will the impact of Snowden's NSA leaks be on a. the perception of Google Glass and b. on sales?

<comment><USER15> Indeed. Given Google's insatiable thirst for data, and the NSA's apparent open-door policy with regards to other people's data, will Google glass essentially be seen as a way for the NSA and chums to watch what everyone is doing, all the time? How do you feel about someone in your workplace/social space/anywhere recording you on behalf of the NSA?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _[Bradley Manning] ought to be regarded as a hero... Like the trade agreement, the public has a right to know what 's being done to them by their so-called elected representatives, but there's a principle that he's violating, namely that power has to be protected from scrutiny...that's the principle of every dictatorship ... you can hear it from the high priests of government. Bradley Manning is violating that._ \-- Noam Chomsky

What else is there to say? And I mean "say", not "squirm".

</comment><comment><USER17> There's a recent philosophical interview where middle-school students asked Chomsky some questions: ([http://www.zcommunications.org/noam-chomsky-beyond- fascism-b...](http://www.zcommunications.org/noam-chomsky-beyond-fascism-by- noam-chomsky))

I liked the discussion of proto-humans, and comparisons to other species. Helps put our violence and self-destructiveness into perspective for me.

<comment><USER18> Do you have any other nice interviews with Chomsky like that? I find it very hard (as a non-native speaker) to hear and understand what he says in interviews, so text is best for me...

<comment><USER19> [http://www.chomsky.info/interviews.htm](http://www.chomsky.info/interviews.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The quote in the linked article from the bit about Google glass was a bit short, so I transcribed it, corrections are welcome (it starts at 11:07).

\--

 _Meanwhile, in the course of this "Terrorist Generation" campaign, for Obama to claim, "you know, I'm really worried about terrorists, so I have to to read -- well, they claim they don't read it -- I have to get information about your email, where you are, who you're talking to, what you have on Facebook; I've gotta put that on my big database"... actually, we're moving into a world which was described, pretty accurately I think, by one of the founders of Google... I don't know if you followed the stories about Google Glass?

Well, Google has some new, ridiculous thing, they're marketing glasses which have a small computer on them. So you can be on the internet 24 hours a day, just what you want. It's a way of destroying people, but quite apart from that, this little device has a camera, and presumably, if it doesn't already it will soon have a recorder, which means that everything that's going on around you, goes up on the internet.

Some reporter asked Erich Schmidt, didn't he think this was an invasion of privacy, and his answer was exactly right, comes right out of the Obama administration, he said: "If you're doing anything that you don't want to be on the internet, you shouldn't be doing it." This is a dream that Orwell couldn't have concocted.

We're moving into it, and it's not the only case. If you read the technical journals, there's more stuff coming along. So, for example, right now there are corporations that are concerned about using computers with components made in China, because it's technically possible to build into the hardware devices which will record what the computer is doing and send it to those bad guys. well, the articles don't point out that if the Chinese can do it, we can do it better, and probably are, so it may end up in Obama's database the next time you hit the computer._

\--

I guess you can scoff about the notion that computer would (need to) have a "recorder", or point out that Glass doesn't record without the user's say so, but still.. considering his age and that it's not his field, that guy is paying more attention to things than many of those geeking out about them. And that Schmidt quote is a smug, idiotic statement; a threat, or should I say, a dare. If he wanted to make a difference and be remembered well, other choices would have been more appropriate for him. Oh well.</comment>


Ask HN: I have been asked to write a statement about my low GPA by Google - <AUTHOR> I passed all my interviews and got matched with a host. But the recruiter asked me to write a statement about why my GPA is low. Anyone else gone through this before? I would really appreciate if someone could give me some tips regarding this <comment><USER2> Working part time to put yourself through school would be an extremely effective explanation if true. If your grades were bad at the beginning but have improved recently you could point out that you've become more mature and serious in your outlook. Talking up the side projects because school is too boring strikes me as unhelpful because it suggests you'll continue that pattern at work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I imagine the best thing would be to just be honest? You obviously passed the interviews and thus are qualified enough. Maybe the coursework wasn't very engaging or a lot of "empty work" was required and you decided to focus on side-projects instead of chasing the high GPA. Or you decided to work on the side? Whatever it is, I believe the explanation would make sense.

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you a new grad or experienced?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am still a student and this is for google's summer internship.</comment></comment>


The new (and legal) way to fund crypto startups - <AUTHOR> https://decryptmedia.com/2018/12/13/how-to-sell-tokens-for-your-crypto-startup-in-2019/ <comment><USER2> It'll be interesting to see if this replaces ICOs and restarts the web3 ecosystem.</comment>


GCC: the impressive and the disappointing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reverberate.org/2011/03/03/gcc-the-impressive-and-the-disappointing/ <comment><USER2> For those who are wondering what the issue could possibly be, if you use the Pascal calling convention in which you push the parameters on the stack and the callee pops them off, then you'll crash when you try to return from a function that was passed the wrong number of parameters. It's perfectly valid for a C compiler to use that calling convention, at least for some functions. It's not traditional, and you need another calling convention for variadic functions, and ANSI C prototypes are a really good idea in that case, but it's certainly valid.

I'm so sure it's valid not because I've actually read the C standard, but because the whole Win16 API was called this way, and Win32 uses a slight variation that passes more things in registers.

Further reading:

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/01/02/47184...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/01/02/47184.aspx) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_calling_conventions> <http://unixwiz.net/techtips/win32-callconv.html> <http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/Page_win32/IczelionTuts/tut1.html>

<comment><USER3> This is incorrect. It's not possible to implicitly use an incompatible ABI for prototyped and vararg functions, since a foo f(bar, bas) function needs to be callable via an unprototyped foo (* )() pointer. Thus, even prototyped C functions need to use a caller-cleanup convention. To use the callee-cleanup convention, the entire Win16 and Win32 apis are annotated with explicit __stdcall attributes and are addressed by distinctly-typed (__stdcall * ) function pointers, of which no vararg variation is allowed.

<comment><USER4> I really wish this were true since it would solve my original problem, but after reading the standard I don't think this is true. From c99, 184.108.40.206 p6:

"If the expression that denotes the called function has a type that does not include a prototype, the integer promotions are performed on each argument, and arguments that have type float are promoted to double. These are called the default argument promotions. If the number of arguments does not equal the number of parameters, the behavior is undefined."

I take the last sentence to mean that an unprototyped function pointer may only be used to call a function that takes zero parameters.

<comment><USER5> That's not what it says. The last statement is talking about what happens at runtime (i.e. the number of values on the stack vs. the number expected, _not_ the number of values passed vs. declared).

Obviously if you don't pass the right number of parameters, the function behavior is undefined (i.e. a pascal function will of course muck up the stack)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> unions are well known for scaring compilers away from many types of optimizations when encountered. For example, if you're writing a SIMD vector class then pretty much the worst thing you can do is put the SIMD data type in a union with a float array.

<comment><USER4> The union is irrelevant, even with a union the compiler eliminated the branch in another test I ran where both functions had the same prototype. I'm on an iPad at the moment so can't verify, but I'd be willing to bet that exactly the same code would be generated if the two function pointers were passed as separate parameters (ie not in a union)</comment></comment>


Wi-Fi Turns Arizona Bus Ride Into a Rolling Study Hall - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/education/12bus.html?hp <comment><USER2> Is anyone else a little weirded out by this? It seems wrong that these kids are sitting quietly on their MacBooks instead of socializing while they're all together on a school bus.

Is the Internet really that necessary for doing schoolwork? Why did that kid need Internet connectivity for GarageBand?

My real question: Why is sitting on Facebook for an hour _better_ for kids than socializing with their peers?

<comment><USER3> well, it seems to be neccessary, or they'd have been using laptops before the wifi.

you think high school is all about socializing, happiness and pancakes? have you ever been in one? have you already forgotten how it is? it's fighting and ruckus every time kids have free time and no work or toys.

don't get me wrong, the kids are still making a ruckus with the wifi. they're just doing it by typing. that's quiet, slower, not as immediate, not prone to escalation (getting your ass kicked over nothing).

<comment><USER2> Heh, I think we mostly agree. My real concern is that I'm not sure school bus wifi really does much to save kids from brain-rotting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, wish I had this when I was growing up.

Hopefully they provide power outlets for the laptops.

<comment><USER5> Me too! This is pretty cool

<comment><USER4> the power outlets will have to be waterproof though, or with plastic covers.... I remember them cleaning down busses with a hose

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> kinda obvious now that it's implemented, right? i mean... kids know they're wasting time by just sitting in a bus for hours and doing nothing else. homework got to be done anyway, so why not use the time now and have more free time in the evening?

> "We're being stalked by a rainbow!" Jerod said.

:)</comment>


Ask HN: Best approach for taking on well funded competitors ? - <AUTHOR>

I recently started a new project in a niche and have reached a stage where I am ready for release. But now I've had a look at some competitors and there is one company that has received $5m in funding and is in an identical space.
Their service has more bells and whistles, but mine is much simpler and quicker to use. What is the best approach to take on the competitor who receives about 100k uniques a month?
Given than I am only working on this project part time, I'm a bit wary of releasing early as I am developing alone and my approach could be mimicked quickly, even if I release often.
Has anyone else been in a similar situation and what approach did you take?. :) <comment><USER2> My advice - launch soon and start making money (charge as soon as possible - tomorrow preferably). There's a unique advantage to not having funding: when you make money, it's all yours.

You should also keep in mind that funded companies are going for the "home run" — which means they're far more likely to keep their services free for longer and tagging on more expensive price tags. It also means that they _don't_ want to make money in the early stages else they be judged on how much money they make rather than the size of their userbase.

When you're developing solo, you don't need to worry about this. You get to focus on developing a financially sustainable product (VCs could care less about this). Financially sustainable for a solo developer might be $5k/mo, while a funded company might need $100k/mo just to break even (which is a loss to the VCs). Use this to your advantage: you can keep lower prices and worry less about becoming "mainstream" and more about getting enough customers to pay your bills and spend more time on the product.

<comment><USER3> One of the biggest advantages of not having funding is you are not going to eat if you are not successful. That's the best motivator there is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been in that situation, but we were 'all in', so, no part timers, just full timers.

Our competitor was funded with 30M and had two major brands supporting them through bundling deals. If it had not been for major mistakes on their side (fancy office, some idiot MBA as a CEO, out of control burn rate) I doubt we would have survived.

As it was though, we won the battle by simply outlasting them, as soon as the big money was spent and they still couldn't turn a profit the investors refused a second round and the company was shut down.

I recall one conversation with that CEO during a talk about a potential takeover and he told me that 'You are going to lose this, because we are playing chicken on the highway and we have just thrown out the steering wheel'. Not six months later they were history.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just out of interest, what happened with your business? Are you still working on it or did your team exit?

<comment><USER3> It's still running (ww.com), it makes some money but not as much as it used to. Our 'exit' was on the table on 9/9/2001, events beyond our control caused that to be put on hold.

After that the person that was going to be CEO and that had brokered the exit left the company to move to Spain and I continued to run it up and until the present.

<comment><USER4> Ai yai yai! If you could avoid the first thing I see on your page being a naked man attempting to contort his body to look like a woman, that'd be awesome.

<comment><USER3> One of the not so nice side effects of having a site that allows people to broadcast themselves on the net is that it attracts people that in normal life you'd not want anything to do with.

This was our 'hidden cost' that we didn't bargain for when we launched the site, we never figured that this would happen (call me naive...) and how much work it would be to keep the site clean.

It is also the main reason that I'm working on different stuff these days, I am in no way 'proud' of my achievement, it's been amazingly successful in monetary terms but I could really do without all the side effects.

edit: This individual has been 'taken care of', thanks.

<comment><USER5> I just looked at your site and was shown a crotch + vibrator. Ho hum.

<comment><USER3> Feel free to suggest any solution that does not require 24x7 oversight.

We've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on salaries doing that in the past and even then it is almost impossible to keep the 'jerks' out.

For every not-so-nice person you block two more will pop up.

And then we're not yet mentioning the spammers, the porn sites and all the other stuff you don't want on your site.

Hang around long enough on ww.com s homepage and you'll see anything that is possible in life (including people being born, dying, marriages and so on). It's got lots of fun stuff but the 'adult' angle is on some days a reason for me to just go and do something completely different for a while because I no longer wish to deal with it.

<comment><USER6> I don't want to take a look at the site because I'm at work, and value my job, but do you encourage any of the site users to help weed out the crap?

I have a few communities and admittedly, they're not webcam oriented (which likely helps), but they pretty much moderate themselves. (Report links, power- users being assigned moderator powers, etc)

<comment><USER3> Yes, we did that too, all the obvious ideas we have tried at some point in the last decade.

Having the users police each other works as long as there is no abuse of that power, as soon as they figure out how to game the system you get 'cliques' that will do such funny things as ban all the gays, all the old people, all the women and so on. Pretty soon there'd be nobody left.

I'm 100% convinced that it is possible somehow though, just that I haven't found it yet so please keep those 'obvious' ideas coming, maybe one of these days someone hits the jackpot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> $5m funding means someone thinks the idea might have legs - so outrun them!

Difficult to do just part time but with a simpler approach you might just be able to do it but only if you release - then you can keep releasing with each step putting distance between you and them.

</comment><comment><USER8> My comment is tangential to the actual discussion. It doesn't so much apply to companies with $5MM in funding as larger competitors. But, I'll post it here anyway because it relates a scenario that a founder needs to be concerned about when taking on a competitor with more resources than they have.

Beware of opening yourself up to any kind of legal attack. Many well funded companies will sue a competitor they know has limited resources just to force them out of business. They view the legal expenses that they incur from such an attack as a cost of doing business.

Many years ago (~15) I had a friend who had started a successful start-up in SFBA that provided specialized HA clustering software for large *nix machines. The start-ups funding rounds totaled ~$12MM IIRC, and the company had about ~50 employees, was cash positive, and growing quickly. After a couple years of nice growth, the company reached a size that caused it to be noticed by one of the large players in the HA space. The large player knew that the start-up, even with a multimillion dollar annual cash flow, did not have the resources to fend off a significant legal attack. They also knew that one of the start- ups' employees (not a key employee in product development or a founder) had worked as a software engineer on their HA product offerings before resigning to join the start-up. They sued. They claimed that the employee had walked out of their shop with IP that was used in the start-ups' products.

My friend flat out denied this, and I believe him. But, there was no way for him to prove it. The start-up did the only thing that they could - have their corporate council counter sue and fight back as much as was possible. After a few months in court and seeing the burn rate associated with such a legal battle, the founders realized that they were pretty much done. They didn't have the money to win, even if they were in the right. They laid off most of their staff and directed all of their remaining resources into the legal fight. They found it impossible to get new funding or customers because of the IP dispute. Then, they started to lose existing customers because of the dispute and the doubt those customers had about their ability to survive it. After all the cash on hand was burned through with legal costs, the company closed up and shut down completely.

The moral I got from the story is to be very careful about IP. VC's and Angels (and usually founders) are very good about doing due diligence on IP that is used to start the company. But, you have to maintain vigilance in regard to having clean IP and avoiding any liabilities.

</comment><comment><USER9> don't worry about what they're doing and stay focused on whatever it was that motivated you to start in the first place.

nothing has really changed other than your perception.

fleaflicker launched in august 2005. i was 23 and living with my parents. that same year, fox sports, protrade ($10M in funding plus celebrity board members), and a slew of other startups also launched their fantasy games.

i fretted over this for a few days and then just go back to work.

fox's debut was widely regarded as a disaster, protrade fizzled (but has since reinvented itself nicely), and the one startup i worried about the most folded before they launched.

as far as timing your launch, i'll just reiterate the same advice that has been dispensed here often: launch as soon as practical.

</comment><comment><USER10> The big question is: does funding help? With funding you can hire more developers, but that may or may not help depending on what you're doing. Is your project capital heavy (ie. do you have to pay lots of money for servers and such)?

If you aren't going to be hiring more developers and your service doesn't require a lot of capital, then the funding advantage shouldn't be so daunting. For example, it's hard to go up against Flickr without funding because you'd have to buy a ton of storage (even if you're just paying for cloud storage, it'll be expensive when people use it). However, going up against Twitter wouldn't require such funding because the capital costs are low comparatively.

Now, clearly there are other barriers than funding, but if your business doesn't need a lot of capital to compete, don't worry about a competitor's funding advantage too much. If you're smarter/better/more awesome, you're funding your project with something even more valuable: your time.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd take a little more time to position yourself against them. If your service is simpler and quicker, it would seem that you may be able to poach their customers. Kinda like your competitor has generated your marketing leads for you.

Perhaps you could make it easy for their customers to migrate to your new service.

Try to figure out the value of "simpler and quicker", and price accordingly. Maybe there's not enough value in "simpler and quicker" and you need to add just a few more bells to be compelling.

One of the benefits of not taking money IMHO, is the luxury of time to position yourself. You only answer to yourself and the only cost is opportunity cost.

Figure out your marketing to hit a quicker growth rate than your competitor when you launch. Stealth is a good advantage.

</comment><comment><USER12> Remember to actually solve a problem, rather than implement your idea. I'm in the same situation, and we keep motivating ourselves by refocusing on the customer centric model proposed by Steve Blank. Small iterative cycles, actually talking to your customers -- that's your advantage. Be small, be nimble, and you'll be harder for the big guys to keep up with.

</comment><comment><USER13> This could work out in your advantage. If you get some traction, they could buy you.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Their service has more bells and whistles, but mine is much simpler and quicker to use."

You just answered your own question. You must focus your marketing on "simpler and quicker" to the exclusion of everything else. (Either "simpler" or "quicker" would be even better, focusing on _one_ thing.)

Jack Trout, in "Differentiate of Die," says it much better than me:

"The best way to really enter minds that hate complexity and confusion is to oversimplify your message. The lesson here is not to try to tell your entire story. Just focus on one powerful differentiating idea and drive it into the mind. That sudden hunch, that creative leap of the mind that "sees" in a flash how to solve a problem in a simple way, is something quite different from general intelligence. If there's any trick to finding that simple set of words, it's one of being ruthless about how you edit the story you want to tell. Anything that others could claim just as well as you can, eliminate. Anything that requires a complex analysis to prove, forget. Anything that doesn't fit with your customers' perceptions, avoid."

</comment><comment><USER15> Look the idea's are really simple. You just have to do it better, faster and cheaper.

It might be simple but that doesn't mean its easy. Hard work is what it comes down to.

</comment><comment><USER16> There is always something you can do better than a competitor no matter how well they are funded compared to you.</comment>


Ouch - <AUTHOR> http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=126530685015771&w=2

<comment><USER2> I also like that nethack will tell you "core dumped" if you eat an apple or a pear.

<comment><USER3> That one gets me every time. And they say Eternal Darkness was the first game to mess with the player.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hello HN! Yep, I'm the person who posted that message to the misc@openbsd list. I've been a very avid silent reader (non-member) of HN over the last year or so... until today. Wow. I made the front page of HN. Hopefully next time it will be for my technical acumen rather than my vivid sense of humor.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some day, fortune really is going segfault, and nobody will look into it because they think "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" is one of the clever fortunes.

A fortune in and of itself.

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of one time in one of our school's labs we somehow rebooted all of the SUN machines and some weird things happened and the log-in screen's wallpaper picture was of a young lady on a beach in a bikini. My first thought, as well as the other sysprogs was that we had been hacked and we ran around for a good hour trying to get to the bottom of things.

The machines ship like that as it turns out as a default wallpaper.

<comment><USER7> Was it this?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> ? I don't get it. Could somebody explain it to more human terms, please.

<comment><USER9> In an effort to make HN more like reddit jokes are being upvoted to the top position.

<comment><USER10> In an effort to make HN more like reddit, its users are complaining about the old news aggregation site they used to go to before they found this one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's just EVIL. And hilarious.

<comment><USER12> All of my systems use fortune, but it is displayed using different picture files; just another way to keep things interesting. :)

To see what I mean: <http://pastebin.org/86456>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I still think this is funniest 'fortune' based story: <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=79993>

This also doubles as one of my favorite (publicly tracked) bugs

</comment><comment><USER14> I used to have a boot-up message on my cell phone that said "This phone is stolen". And even though it was me who set it, it still got me every time I saw it.

</comment><comment><USER15> For those not on *nix: <http://linux.die.net/man/6/fortune>

</comment><comment><USER16> ...

I am actually saddened I now know that. I kind of wish I could have had that same experience.

<comment><USER17> Maybe you should just take up <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE_jumping> instead

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are some things that we shouldn't joke about.</scarred long-time windows user>

<comment><USER19> [http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/bb897558.asp...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/bb897558.aspx) :)

<comment><USER2> This is fantastic! I haven't seen a BSOD in years (no Vista for me), but what's funny is that it's actually microsoft that's distributing it.

Along the same lines: you take a screenshot of your desktop environment with the terminal open in the middle of the screen. Then use that as your bootsplash image. When friends and enemies ask how you did that you just tell them "I reversed the boot process: first I load KDE, then the kernel. It's a lot faster this way."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> % file deletion complete.

</comment><comment><USER21> This may be the funniest thing I've read on HN. Will take a lot to top this one.</comment>


One App in Four Weeks: Week 1 - <AUTHOR> http://chriseidhof.tumblr.com/post/10842079067/one-app-in-four-weeks-week-1

<comment><USER2> While the idea is interesting, the app will have to compete with more general- purpose note-taking apps, e.g. Evernote.

For me, Evernote already provides all the individual pieces (tag by person name, record date, time and location etc.) and also allows to store pictures/audio notes, is multi platform etc. etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use Evernote too for almost all my notes, but I think a very focused app can be a huge win. I did my todo's in Evernote as well, but have now switched back to OmniFocus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I also began a "develop fast and get something out there" challenge this week. My goal is to get my app launched in 7 days. I'm documenting my progress on my blog: <http://jpastika.posterous.com/>. I'm not sure I'll have the app out by the 7 day mark, but I should have a functional product. I like your idea and will follow your progress!

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice Jeremy. What is it you're building?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I came up with a similar idea independently - except it was more of a social game (with foursquare-esque achievements). I envisioned a mechanism for confirmation of the rendezvous whereby both parties run the app and agree the meeting occurred and their proximity is verified. That's about as far as I got.

Edit: looks like with.me did the closest thing to this already.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's with.me and hashable, they do something similar. Also Noteleaf does something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks a lot for posting this series Chris. As a young developer just out of college and getting started in iOS development, this is extremely insightful. I'll be following on tumblr. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's a site which does 31 apps in 31 days: <http://www.appsamuck.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> COME ON CHRIS GO FOR IT!</comment>


The tech giving people power to deal with disability - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35427933 <comment><USER2> My dad is severely vision impaired and I've come to realize how many challenges he faces using a tablet. Pop-ups and overlays destroy his ability to use the device, and he struggles to get through it all. His heyday has come and gone... the new flat design styles with buttons made of nothing but a subtle grey title are a nightmare for him. I prefer the subtle approach, but my views are changing now that I know how hard it is for him.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't forget the people like myself with learning disabilities that require tech to organize and communicate. If schools were more willing to accept students who needed to use technology rather than writing them off as lazy or 'slow' the world would be a better place.</comment>


Heroku vs. Amazon Web Services - <AUTHOR> http://smashingboxes.com/heroku-vs-amazon-web-services/

<comment><USER2> I wanted to plug RedHat's fantastic Paas: openshift. I am using their DIY package and really loving it. I feel it stands on the shoulders of Heroku (Heroku uses AWS let's not forget so it will always be more dear than AWS). But Heroku has been very good to me and I still use it for certain things.</comment>


Baked In: How BenchPrep Is Turning e-Textbooks Into Virtual Study Groups - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1769986/baked-in-how-benchprep-is-turning-textbooks-into-virtual-study-groups

<comment><USER2> Web needs more curating. What better to curate than curriculum?

</comment><comment><USER3> the benchprep webapp is a great use of the backbone.js framework</comment>


Vim for developers that use other software, too - <AUTHOR> http://cream.sourceforge.net/home.html <comment><USER2> A random sidenote (because I can't be bothered to write a blog post about it).

I wonder if I am the only person who feels 'vim shame' (and the closely related 'emacs shame').

'vim shame' - the feeling that you would be a better, more productive coder if only you could master this mysterious editor, but every time you try (about once every couple of years), somewhere between two days and two weeks you find you have drifted back to textmate / sublime editor / eclipse.

<comment><USER3> I feel 'vim shame' too. But in some opposite way. I am ashamed of people discovering I use vim as primary editor and not some GUI-IDE. Therefore I mostly pretend like I am making quick fixes using vim when someone is hanging around.

<comment><USER2> Interesting, must be a culture thing. Here in academia (or to be exact, here in the computing department I am in), most people consider anything other than vim/emacs a 'toy' editor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I really want, and would pay for, is a TextMate or IDE-like interface wrapped around Vim. The current plugins - e.g. NERDTree - are appreciated, but they lack the features, ease-of-use, and consistency of a purpose-built IDE.

I've used various Vim emulators inside IDEs and they're just not the same as the real thing. If you know Vim well, you end up "typing on eggshells", where every keystroke might cause some unexpected chaos. So it needs to be the real thing.

<comment><USER5> If you use Textmate and basically miss the project drawer in Vim, there is a version of MacVim which has that integrated ( see <https://github.com/alloy/macvim/wiki/Screenshots> ) .

There is also Vico ( <http://www.vicoapp.com/> ) which is a new Mac text editor with vi bindings, and well worth taking a look at.

<comment><USER6> +1 for Vico. It's basically all I use at this point. It's still getting started, but I'm fully productive in it at this point, and have already written a couple of plugins for it.

Caveat emptor: it works with TM bundles, but cannot do vim plugins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This kind of thing really appeals to me, I'm very tempted to give it a try.

I have tried emacs and vim a few times, but the problem is that I don't want to use them for everything, and I have trouble getting my head around two totally different ways of working. I recently did a check of the programs I use in the average week. The current list is (in no particular order)

        * XCode, for Objective-C / iOS development
        * Eclipse, for C++ / Android
        * Apple Mail
        * Chrome
        * TeXShop, for Latex editing
        * Sublime text, for other bits of C/C++
        * Vienna, for RSS reading
        * Evernote, for document ordering
        * Wunderlist, for todo lists

And what is great is that all these apps share 90% of my frequently used key- presses. In particular, I'm never at a loss as to what quit/find/open/save are. Each of these tools I have found the best at what they do.

<comment><USER7> You might have something to gain by switching to Emacs. AFAIK of the 9 elements of your list at least 6 can be easily done inside emacs. I leave out web browsing (it can be done but yeah, leaves a lot to be desired imho), Android development (ADT is really really good) and maybe "document ordering", which, depending on what it exactly is, might be done with org-mode.

<comment><USER8> One of the really cool thing about emacs is that you can do so much in it. Everything from listening to music to browsing the web.

Unfortunately it lacks a decent text editor.

<comment><USER9> I've just been playing around with Evil-mode, an new Vim emulation mode (I've previously tried viper and vimpulse) and am finding it fairly enjoyable. I haven't pushed it really hard yet, and to be fair I could still see switching back to Vim for some things (like navigating code with ctags for example). But for things where I want to be in Emacs but hey it would be cool for this buffer to have vi key bindings, I think I like it quite well. (Enough so that I'm daydreaming about trying to contribute code to it once I understand it better).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been a longtime Eclipse / Vim (when I'm ssh'ing) user. However, my Vim usage was really press i and then use arrow keys all over the place. I was even that guy that pressed i, arrowed to the right to the end of the part that I wanted to delete, and then pressed the delete key on my shortened Mac keyboard (that really behaves like a backspace) roughly doubling the keystrokes every time. When I switched jobs a month or so ago, I made it my goal to learn to use Vim the right way. All I can say is that it took me a much shorter time than expected, and the gains are greater than I could have anticipated.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't find cream that useful. There's little interesting about vim other than the input method.

Right now I'm using Emacs (for the extensibility) with Evil mode (for vim key bindings). I've used vi(m) modes in other editors as well, and some are really good. That's the direction I find more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're just picking up Vim and using Chrome, I suggest installing Vimium to get some extra practice. Ignore recent blog posts, for the most part, that tell you to start from a vanilla config. Training wheels help.

On another note, what's the vim-org mode clones looking like lately?

</comment><comment><USER13> CREAM is fantastic. I used it for years, before I switched to OSX. I really wish they'd port it over, for nostalgia's sake.</comment>


The magical thinking of guys who love logic - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/7083/the-magical-thinking-of-guys-who-love-logic <comment><USER2> Framed a bit too much in terms of men v. women, but by the end I liked the article (or rant). In particular:

> This is my attempt to break the spell, I guess. Repeat after me: calling > something logic doesn't make it so. Calling someone rational doesn't make it > so. Opinions from Youtube men are not facts. Getting mad about philosophers > you haven't read isn't reason.

This is why Spock always made me cringe. He would declare something "logical" when the subject quickly bottomed out into unsupported speculative assertions. The logic part would be very, very small, and the rest would be how much you trusted your instincts about what you can't verify.

But Spock would turn into a boring character if every time he said "your conclusion is logical if we grant the following" and then he would list all of the things we think we know but don't really have any clue about in this episode.</comment>


Twitious: easily bookmark your tweeted links - <AUTHOR> http://twitious.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This site was built by Joel Moss in about 2 weeks, using Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.2.

The project is hosted on Codaset (also built by Joel) at <http://codaset.com/joelmoss/twitious> I mention Codaset because, although the source code is private, you can raise bug or feature tickets there and help Joel improve the site.</comment>


Tesla says someone fired a bullet into battery pack of Model S that caught fire - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2018/12/16/tesla-fire-bullet-battery/ <comment><USER2> That's... possibly the best excuse I've ever heard for a car catching fire.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, now we know what trope action movies will use in the future.

</comment><comment><USER4> Although this one appears "self-inflicted," it seems like a pretty important issue for a machine being sold in the US, where road rage shootings are not at all uncommon.

<comment><USER5> one more point to ICE vehicles, they only catch fire if you shoot the gas tank

<comment><USER6> MythBusters made an episode about that [http://www.discovery.com/tv- shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-da...](http://www.discovery.com/tv- shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-database/shooting-gas-tank/) [spoiler alert] "busted"</comment></comment></comment>


In the future, all computers will be tablets (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://meta.discourse.org/t/in-the-future-all-computers-will-be-tablets/6140 <comment><USER2> If i can still put 2x the power in a desktop for half the cost, i dont see myself moving to a tablet.</comment>


Team creates a low cost solar collector with high energy efficiency - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2013-12-team-thin-photovoltaic-device-high.html <comment><USER2> They buried the lede pretty well on this one.

The energy conversion efficiency of this device is ~12%, which is hardly high.

Also, according to the article, apparently crystalline silicon is now expensive (it's not, particularly compared to what they make this device out of).</comment>


Ask HN: What do I do to maximize the chances of getting a job at a tech giant? - <AUTHOR> I really want a job in one of the big companies. I have two years left of my MSc and was wondering what you think I should be spending my time on until then to increase my chances of getting a great job. Thank you.<p>PS I also want to work in Asia. Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan. Any tips here? <comment><USER2> As far as working in east Asia: most of the BigCos have multiple headquarters and internal transfers. It's probably easiest to get hired at an office in a country where you already have work authorization. After a year or two, you can apply for internal transfer and get assistance with visa applications and relocation costs. I know at least two people who have done this.</comment>


Show HN: Browsertime, bringing popcorntime to your browser with webtorrent - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KeizerDev/Browsertime <comment><USER2> I have installed this, but it doesn't work, I can't play anything(there is no play option, its just a movie page with a description). I can't search for anything, there are no series. How is this popcorntime in a browser?

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone finally did it. I had this idea when WebTorrent first came out. This is great!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, you still can contribute. It is not really working at the moment but we are somewhere!

<comment><USER4> What is the status?

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the README

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> yts/yifi is over so what do mean by "Get movies from yify/yts api endpoint."? Is it yts.ag?</comment>


If governments can block top-level domains, is .gay doomed? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/if-governments-can-block-top-level-domains-is-gay-doomed.ars

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't really like the title here, didn't change it because mods always change it back. The story in my eyes is that the US Department of Commerce has brought the proposal for mechanisms to allow national TLD censorship (not that it wouldn't be trivial to implement anyway if you could get everyone on the same network).</comment>


The state of Computer Vision and AI: we are really, really far (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-vision/ <comment><USER2> One of the problems is we still do not have the hardware to begin doing the needed computation to solve the problem.

The brain in reality is quite slow. We know neurons require at least 5 ms to do any computation. But the real power lies in the shear parallelism.

Essentially biology set a limit of 5 ms but evolution worked around it by creating billions of neurons. Even If they are slower, because there are so many of them, they can do more computation in that 5 ms gap than all computers in the world combined ! Its truly marvellous when you sit back and think about that.

When you think about how that gets done just using that information, the modern computer architecture works completely differently , What that means is we do not even have the adequate hardware to start working on this problem.

We can push the current limit of computation to solve sub-problems and it seems under that constrain we have done very well. But its a slow evolution. GPUs gave us a clue, now we have FPGAs and soon we will have better hardware to create "better" intelligent machines. The machinery that is the brain is vastly complex and beautiful, but not well understood. Its a slow and incremental process but we will get there sometime this or the next century.

<comment><USER3> One of the most important thing to remember is the efficiency of the human brain is layered. The ancient parts (vision for example) have been honed to an amazing level of efficiency so even the most powerful computers can't come close, while the other modules (say simple arithmetic) are so inefficient that a $2 calculator needs to uses only 1/100,000th the energy to solve the same problem. The general rule is anything we find easy as humans to accomplish is amazingly hard and ancient, while anything we find hard is relatively easy and recent (evolutionary).

<comment><USER2> One thing to point out that even if the "module" that does arithmetic is slow, the brain understands the context of that calculation.

2 + 2 can be viewed as a computation that happens in nature and our brain all the time.

But the real magic doesn't lie in the pure computation. Our brain understands what that 2 means in the context of all the knowledge of the entire Universe. 2 cows, 2 sheeps, 2 planets ?

Understanding context is what we are really good at, as said in the article "prior" knowledge. So its not surprising that a cheap calculator can outsmart me in computation when it doesn't actually compute the context of its computation, which is sort if cheating.

<comment><USER3> I was trying to stay away from "meaning" since it gets messy, but if you just compare the energy used by sub-conscious human arithmetic with that expended by a simple cpu then the cpu is massively more efficient. We find mathematics far more mentally taxing than visual observation purely because we are so bad at mathematics, not because visual processing is easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He wrote this more recently when convnets surpassed "human level performance": [http://karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from- com...](http://karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from-competing- against-a-convnet-on-imagenet/)

Gains have continued in 2015.

Also, more recent reflections on his research which I think gives a bit more color to the OP: [http://karpathy.github.io/2014/07/03/feature-learning- escapa...](http://karpathy.github.io/2014/07/03/feature-learning-escapades/)

Kind of like with the rise of electricity, the microprocessor, the PC, or internet -- in the beginning, only the people building it understood what all the fuss was about. But that changed quickly over the course of N years (where N ends up being sooner than everyone thinks). If you had started a career in any of those fields before they were obvious in hindsight, you would have probably done quite well.

The author of the post has not quit to go start a photo app as far as I know, he's still doing research on the cutting edge of deep learning because that's where the most promise is.

<comment><USER5> I don't think his later comments really negate his earlier comments.

Neural networks continue to make progress in the narrow field they are designed for and researching these I'm sure continues to be interesting. That doesn't change the point that human don't interpret an image as a couple of annotations but as rich fabric of information far beyond what computer vision current does.

Basically, there is a ocean of interesting, useful and excite things computers can do before they arrive at what humans can do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure how well we can estimate how difficult a task is just based on our amazement at "iceberg complexity".

Just the fact that I was able to read that article the way I did is the product of something enormous. Discovery of electricity and semiconductors, mathematics, development of CPUs and memory, global computer networks, the entire software stack that allows me to display what someone wrote three years ago on a glowing rectangle with no involvement of any paper at all. The entire social and economic development that allows me to read this instead of walking through the woods and trying to impale some creature on an arrow.

That's a _lot_ of solved problems, most of them figured out during the past century. I don't think some image segmentation, pose estimation and semantic reasoning is going to take quite as long, especially with more and more people working on it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Advances in computer vision are being made every day. Image understanding is a big challenge, and the way we tackle big challenges is in little steps.

I was impressed by some video segmentation and object classification results that Microsoft showed off the other day at its Ignite conference. We're a lot farther along than some people realize.

Picture here: [https://twitter.com/MS_Ignite/status/595365048547180545](https://twitter.com/MS_Ignite/status/595365048547180545)

Video clip at the 1:02:00 mark: [https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/KEY02](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/KEY02)

<comment><USER8> In fact, this blog author had published a paper pretty recently on scene understanding.

[http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/)

This got a lot of press:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/science/researchers- announ...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/science/researchers-announce- breakthrough-in-content-recognition-software.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article implies that we will or ought to arrive at the point where a machine can appreciate why an image is funny in the same complex way that a human can. Not to discount the value of AI Vision research and technology, but at some point we must ask "why".

Partly the question goes to the difference between artificial intelligence, and artificial consciousness. According to some definitions, the former is ability to produce relevant information, while the latter is an autonomous system capable of using that information for self interest.

For example, no matter how complex a system like Watson is, it's no more conscious than a rock. Meanwhile, rudimentary life form is something we are nowhere near replicating artificially. This distinction is quite important, and very intelligent AI pundits seem to fail to make it (or understand it?).

While we are quite capable of producing intelligence artificially, the capacities associated with the consciousness become confused easily in the mind. While some intelligence is easy to produce with machines, there are some problems of experience that simply cannot be solved by artificial intelligence, and require consciousness.

But let's be clear: producing an artificial consciousness is orders of magnitude more complex an engineering challenge than building an artificial intelligence machine.

It is also potentially enormously destructive: many times more difficult to create, and at least as destructive as atomic bomb.

</comment><comment><USER10> _> How can we even begin to go about writing an algorithm that can reason about the scene like I did?_

You are doing AI wrong. AI should _learn_ all of that context by itself, from a large amount of stimulus. If it was a good one, it might be able to learn enough in less than N years, where N is the age of a human who would laugh at the photo.

<comment><USER11> I think the author was using a linguistic-shorthand. He is an active researcher in the field: [http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The flash you get out of a joke is build up on a huge framework of human interaction that takes literally years to acquire for the "dedicated" BI of a brain. The fact the AI is only starting to reach the power of facial recognition which is for us a seemingly "low level automatic" function tells us the amount of learning left for an AI to come close to our understanding of the world. Not only in terms of computational power but in length and diversity of the learning process.

Assuming sufficiently powerful Neural Networks, they will probably go through years of learning our world through interaction, just like a kid does, before it "gets" the joke. Doesn't mean it's impossible, and that's quit scary (in a good and bad sense I guess).

<comment><USER13> Years _worth_ of learning. They could learn by watching videos, or playback of sensory data of early AIbots and by playing video games created for the specific purpose of training them which will be much more efficient.

<comment><USER12> Good point. The thought actually actually popped into my mind after I wrote the post : "Wall E" and many more films/books have suggested this accelerated learning path.

However this is information only, not interaction, I suspect this will have a serious distorsion effect on how the AI "perceives". It's a wild guess, but I believe interaction is at the root of understanding.

Edit : yes you also mention interaction through video games, which I skipped when I scanned your comment. But then again video games might be still far from the depth of real world interaction, more of a learning enforcer than the source of it - like books are for us....

<comment><USER14> But there is already so much content on the internet, that accelerated learning could still happen by way of proxied interactions visible in "old" content. Does your AI _have_ to interact with people to learn how to interact? Or is watching interaction good enough?

<comment><USER12> In a nutshell I don't see how any kind of adaptive intelligence can bypass the reinforcement process of trial and error through interaction. Then again you could have simulated interaction, but that may be the equivalent of the machine dreaming :-)

<comment><USER14> You can learn to not touch a hotplate by watching someone burn their hand on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A related post on the front page right now:

"Neural network chip built using memristors (arstechnica.com)" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501119](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501119)

</comment><comment><USER16> To be fair, the author is evaluating a computer based on a task our brains have specifically evolved to be good at, facial recognition, social interaction, and familiar settings. You could turn it around and find tasks that computers are good at. e.g. Watch a month's worth of highway videos and count how many cars passed.

</comment><comment><USER17> The argument in the article seems to be that we are really far away from having an AI with social intelligence. However, AI's do not need social intelligence to be interesting / dangerous. My best guess would be that creating artificial humour is much harder than creating a machine that is dangerously intelligent.

<comment><USER18> A great argument! In fact humour is a tough task for humans as well. We do it all the time but only few people can be consistently funny in the eyes of other people. Also different cultures experience humour differently. E.g., German jokes aren't funny to Chinese and the other way around. It's nearly 100% excluding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 3 years later and computers now outperform humans on Imagenet. While we still have a lot of work ahead, it shows how fast things can change in the exponential world of computers.

<comment><USER20> Can you please give a link showing an exponential improvement between 2012 and 2015?

<comment><USER21> [http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/results.html](http://image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/results.html) One team at 15%

[http://www.image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2014/results](http://www.image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2014/results) Most teams are below 15%, GooLeNet is at 6%

[http://www.image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2014/results](http://www.image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2014/results) Microsoft is now below 5%

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03167.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03167.pdf) Google is now below 5%

I can't really argue whether that's exponential or not, but it amazing progress in a short amount of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We might be really far from a ASI that completely grok every nuance of that picture... but we already have AI that can understand pieces of the picture... and those AI's can be used to do interesting things today. This isn't an all or nothing endeavor.

<comment><USER23> A properly trained AI would have recognized Obama in that picture much faster than I did. As for the foot in the scale, I only noticed when the author mentioned it.

So much for the 'quick glance'. Which brings me to another matter. One of the reasons the author can extract all that information from that picture is because all the elements in it have been 'seen' already. A machine might not be able to extract the whole context, but things like the people involved and that they seem happy? Easy (-ish).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The image makes totally different ideas in a baby and adult. Babies doesn't understand most of the parts, but adults do. Because, adults learned everything from their experience.

We need systems that learn from experience.

<comment><USER25> Though in order to build systems that learn from experience, we first need to grasp a whole lot more clearly just how learning works for us, and how exactly is it that we persist our experience data.

To me it seems we are still in the stage that we have to understand ourselves better, because we simply can't devise and algorithm to solve a problem we cannot solve ourselves.

We can do clever stuff with statistics and math, but that seems to me like more of a hack. For instance, people create models from very small datasets, if you have kids you surely can watch in amazement just how efficient we are wired in that regard. We try to mimic that by feeding huge datasets to algorithms but it still pales in comparison.

<comment><USER24> True, we still don't know how "learning" works in brains. But it works in our neuronal network. What about combining some real neuronal cells with technology?

I remember one documentary in Discovery Channel, where some scientists make use of rat brain cells cultured on a circuit to build a small robot, which learns to avoid obstacles on it's path.

A similar video is here -[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-0eZytv6Qk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-0eZytv6Qk).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> bra-ket just step out of 'Machine Learning' bubble for a sec

there have been decades of research into 'Cognitive Architectures' ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_architecture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_architecture)) and 'Artificial Consciousness' ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness))

there is massive amount of experimental observations on learning and cognition in neuroscience and cognitive sciences (from neurophysiology to psychology) that is largely ignored by Artificial General Intelligence and Machine Learning communities.

On the other hand the progress in Deep Learning, Computer Vision, NLP and Robotics is largely ignored by neuroscientists because these learning models do not respect biological constraints

There is a whole group of narrow domains like Formal Concept Analysis, Statistical Relational Learning, Inductive Logic Programming, Commonsense Reasoning, Probabilistic Graphical Models that don't talk to each other but all deal with cognition and conceptual reasoning using different tools

I think we have a chance to make progress if these fragmented domains converge.

<comment><USER2> Not really,

There are researchers in all the different fields who's sole job is to report what other communities and doing and be the agents of cross pollination.

Everyone agrees that artificial general intelligence is a difficult problem.

Practically its not possible to converge all the different fields and also what is the point of that ?

Each researcher is interested in solving their own sets of problems what they find interesting or have the motivation to be part of the solution.

Progress is being made - maybe not at the rate of silicon valley start-ups but hard problems require time to solve.

It would not be ideal that Computer Vision people suddenly stop doing their research and take the massive risk of putting all their shoes into Deep Learning.

People doing Computer Vision have their sets of constraints and goals. If tomorrow the garbage man, cleaner, cook, etc all stop working and stay "we are all going to work on deep learning". The world will stop working.

As absurd as that sounds that is what the implications would be if theses separate fields try to converge. Even if we do solve the problem of AGI today, what direct change or improvement in human condition would be see tomorrow ?

When that AGI needs to be integrated in a framework like computer vision, robotic, or search engine you need that domain experts, practitioners in the those various fields to still exist tomorrow to maximize the economical benefit of such a technology.

<comment> bra-ket I'm not suggesting experts should drop what they're good at and work on integration, it's a job for engineers, think 'Apollo 11' kind of integration of different sciences into a single working product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The author wrote this in 2011:

>My impression from this exercise is that it will be hard to go above 80%, but I suspect improvements might be possible up to range of about 85-90%, depending on how wrong I am about the lack of training data. (2015 update: Obviously this prediction was way off, with state of the art now in 95%, as seen in this Kaggle competition leaderboard. I'm impressed!)

Thats more impressive than it sounds because each percentage point is exponentially harder than the last. Getting 95% accuracy is not 5% harder than getting 90%.

Just recently machine vision starting beating humans on imagenet. Imagenet is 1,000 classes, high resolution images, taken randomly from the internet. No one would have predicted that few years ago.

Sometimes a notable researcher like Hinton says that something like transcription of images into sentences might be possible in five years, only for researchers to demonstrate it in five months.

I remember reading something about early engineers working on computers were extremely skeptical of the rate of computer advancement. They were so focused on narrow technical problems they didnt see the big picture.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why are we grouping together computer vision and AI? They are two distinctly different fields, in my opinion. Computer vision is really hard. Great work has been done in the last 5 years with tech like the Kinect, but there's certainly a long way to go. AI has made small steps with projects like IBM's Watson, but still seems to be in its infancy (and even that may be generous).

<comment><USER28> Is there a good term for a system that integrates both fields to achieve the goal of, say, matching human performance at visual scene understanding?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> To understand the picture the machine should reason like this.

First: Look for focus, detect zone in which eyes are looking. Result: The focus is on the man at the right since eyes are directed at him.

Second: Sentiment Analysis Whatever he is doing people find it funny.

People like to play jokes that make you experience strange things that you can't understand at the moment.

Hypothesis: The man B near the main character A is interacting with A. It seems that the foot of B is interacting with the machine M. So B interacts with M that interacts with A.

Generated question: What kind of interaction could be exerted by B on M to cause M get A confused?

Hypothesis: B's foot is making the machine to malfunction in such a way to give a false message to A.

Hypothesis: To make this image more noticeable the men are well known people or famous people.

Data: The more serious the role this people play at society the more funny is the image, since their behavior is more unexpected.

Reasoning like this the machine could get a plausible hypothesis of what is happening in the scene:

A famous man B that probably do a serious and responsible role in society is playing a trick on a man A by making a machine M to malfunction in such a way that it gives a false message or information to A. The malfunction is caused by putting the foot on the machine. To make it funnier, the main character can't see that, ...

Having a general context like this the machine could look for machines and people which could play such a role and give a heavier weight to those that make the joke a better one.

The next generation of machines could modify the image to make the joke better since it can understand perfectly the context and purpose of it.

</comment><comment><USER30> At the risk of stating the obvious, even if this were true and we were actually really far away from AI or good computer vision classification, Moore's law should take effect. For every order of magnitude of difficulty it is, by whatever measure, we should only need to wait a linear amount of time.

Also, notice that for this particular picture a lot of what the article is talking about doesn't matter:

      - Does it matter that they're in a hallway?
      - Does it matter there are mirrors?
      - Does it matter that one person is the president?

The main gag is having one person standing on a scale with the intent of making a weight measurement while the other is subverting that intent, presumably with the knowledge of bystanders. My bet is that this picture could be classified as funny, even correctly labelling the joke, if the picture was tagged and a classifier were run on a large database of other tagged pictures.

<comment><USER31> There's the explicit gag itself, and it's an old one, of stepping on a scale.

The real joke, however, is in fact that it is the president. It's more humorous because it shows the president as a real person. It's unexpected, and out of context of how we typically understand the holder of the office of the president of the united states should behave.

That's the main joke. So yes, the finer details are important. It's not just a funny picture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> There is no reason for a "computer" to do all that and if it could it would not - all that he talked about is about dealing with the limitations of our brains - our mind the machine would not care because it would not care about its limits - we are as a computer one big limited system constrained by the process that brought us into being - chance and natural selection. An ai is not constrained by this anymore than a dog is constrained from finding the same thing funny. humor is not a problem for us because we are part of the problem - we are a constantly derived huge word puzzle. an AI would not be that - AI would have a purpose.

</comment><comment><USER33> The article nicely illustrates the complexity present in a single image and I agree that we are far from automatically and fully understand images like this. I believe we would need to replicate the full brain to do that. But still, there are many interesting applications that are possible with state of the art computer vision. The question is whether state of the art is useful for industry, not whether the ultimate goal is close or far.

</comment><comment><USER34> Article is from a few years ago, missed existing AGI research at the time. Deep learning is now mainstream and awareness of AGI research that has been going on for years is slowly creeping into mainstream AI.

Anyway he mentioned what needs to be done at the very end of the article which is to emulate the embodied human development process, and there is quite a lot of progress in that area.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's not just vision.

<comment><USER36> I have no hesitation in arguing that our textual understanding is currently far worse.

E.g. modern deep-learning classifiers can get high 90s F1-score on identifying entities in images, but what's our capability for recognizing e.g. product entities being mentioned in Amazon reviews? Good luck getting even 70% F1-score. It's still incredibly awful.

And this is just talking about very basic entity recognition in realistic settings. Lets not even consider relation extraction, and more meaningful tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Presumably the author is familiar with the Google paper - [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.4555v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.4555v2.pdf) which should get the people, scale, and laughing bits out of the image. There are a remarkable number of technologies converging here.

</comment><comment><USER38> You know, there are some problems that are simply unsolvable. Star Trek-style teleportation, I'm inclined to think, will never happen.

I think "true" AI of the sort described in this article is, likewise a pipe dream. Not in a 100 million years of scientific effort could we create the hardware and software necessary to do this. If you think otherwise, that's because you have an enduring and overriding faith in the power of science to overcome all barriers and achieve all goals. But on what basis could you place that faith? Sure, science is generally good at solving problems and advancing technology, but there are some "technologies" that are simply not attainable: indeed, not even clearly definable.

I think that deep AI of this kind is one of those. We think we know what it would mean for a computer to think like a person. It's not so clear that we do. Given that we deeply don't understand how we ourselves not only think, but also feel, want, assess, moralize, and experience, we're unlikely to produce thinking machines.

"Ah, but the Power of Science, may it be praised forever!" you say. "Science will help us to understand how we understand!" Yeah, maybe, nah, I don't think so. Just look at the construction itself. It's loopy. "Understand how we understand"? I doubt it's possible for any instrument to ever really comprehend itself; in other words, for any thinker to ever think accurately about how it thinks.

We should keep AI research within the realm of observable, measurable, useful utilities. "Comprehension" of any kind... it's never going to happen.

There I've said it. Now roast me at the stake, O ye of great faith.

</comment><comment><USER39> The funny thing is, you could just as well think about the complexity of any kind of animal behavior. AI isn't not just very far from human intelligence, it is also very far from any kind of living intelligence.

<comment><USER40> Roundworm elegans has just 302 fully mapped nerve cells. A people are still trying to figure out how that small system works.

<comment><USER41> If you're interested you can join in! [http://www.openworm.org/](http://www.openworm.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> >I have a really cool idea for a mobile local social iPhone app.

I wonder if this was tongue in cheek since I thought people didn't start making fun of mo-lo-so until "Silicon Valley" aired: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps).

</comment><comment><USER43> The state of Computer Vision and AI: we are really, really far _away_

</comment><comment><USER44> Something related - the title is:

        The state of Computer Vision and AI:
        we are really, really far. (2012)

To me, that means we are really close to achieving it, because we are really, really far along the path. But reading the article immediately creates a cognitive dissonance - that can't be right, can it?

No, the author means "we are really, really _far away from our objective_ ," which is not the same thing at all.

Was this deliberate, or did the author, in his focus on the question of interpreting images, simply not notice that his text was ambiguous as well?

Or is it just me?

<comment><USER45> I think it's just you (from your username you're probably a native English speaker, still)

"we are far" to me means "we are distant (from the objective)"

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/far#Adverb](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/far#Adverb)

If it was "far ahead", or "we've come far" I'd agree with you

<comment><USER46> It's not just him. I'm a British English speaker and read it the same way. I read it as "We are far [along our course]". It came across as a bit of an odd phrase but I don't think it's really good English either way, it needs an object to be clear.

<comment><USER47> I'm from the US and I read it the same way, as a statement that we are far along our course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Oh, but Ray Kurzweil says we'll have an AI beating the turing test in 14 years, so I guess we're fine.

</comment><comment><USER49> I don't find the picture funny, even though I understand all the bullet points from looking at the picture.

Yes, the man is confused because he's being pranked by the president. It would be funny if I was there.

But looking at this photo? It's not funny to me.

I suppose I would rank this picture a lot higher than a picture of a skyscraper in the list of funniest pictures, but neither would be above the "laugh" threshold.

Does everyone else here find it funny?

<comment><USER50> You're missing the point entirely. You can explain why people might find it funny, that's the point.

<comment><USER49> Thanks...I thought it was slam-dunk laugh out loud funny for everyone except me and something was wrong with my sense of humour...</comment></comment></comment>


How can one visualize 4-dimensional space? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/How-can-one-visualize-4-dimensional-space?share=1 <comment><USER2> The classic answer I recall from a maths professor was "First visualise an n-dimensional space, then simplify to the 4-dimensional case."</comment>


TSA lays out plans to use facial recognition for domestic flights - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17979688/tsa-precheck-facial-recognition-airport-cbp-biometric-exit <comment><USER2> I wonder if the Chinese are using stories like this as examples of American government spying on its citizens...</comment>