Ex-Googler Elliot Schrage to manage Facebook developer platform - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/11/facebooks-executive-musical-chairs-ex-googler-elliot-schrage-to-manage-its-developer-platform/ <comment><USER2> Wow. I've heard that people are a bit more despondent at FB. This could certainly explain why. Their high valuation has attracted politicians. I'm not sure if Schrage did anything special at Google -- he landed into a PR job for one the most beloved brands on the planet -- and then he jumped ship for FB.

They say this was part of what killed Netscape.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know any communities or blogs focused on B2B/Enterprise startups? - <AUTHOR>

Most of the news I see are about consumer startups, but recently I've become more interested in enterprise startups. Are there any communities that are focused on enterprise/B2B?<p>Note: I'm using enterprise as a catchall term to refer to startups that sell to businesses, not restricted to huge companies. <comment><USER2> I have recently started working on such a blog. Plan to post about important news and reviews on B2B products and services : [http://www.bizappsbuzz.com](http://www.bizappsbuzz.com)

Kindly let me know your suggestions how I can make this interesting enough, to make you want to subscribe the blog.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been recommended David Skok's blog [1] a few times which is exactly focused on SaaS. Haven't had the chance to go through it yet, so I can't personally recommend.

[1] [http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/](http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/)</comment>


Overstock begins trading its shares on the Bitcoin blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/12/overstock-com-issues-stock-via-bitcoin-blockchain/ <comment><USER2> The title appears to be exaggerated.

According to the article, Overstock is performing all the transactions in their own private system, with hashes periodically posted to the actual Bitcoin blockchain for transparency purposes, and regular proofs of state.

The added transparency IS enabled by the Bitcoin blockchain, and this is commendable, but the units issued by Overstock do not appear to be actually circulating on the Bitcoin blockchain itself.

It's an important distinction. We're working on this problem at my own company (Stash).</comment>


Open source is not a job killer - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/228371/why-free-software-not-job-killer

<comment><USER2> "Because FLOSS enables much of this software as a service (SaaS), then it becomes the root cause of the reduction in jobs."

Rather than hiring more developers to create the SaaS, a business now is able to just get free OSS and hire less developers (and less experienced developers).

How is this not putting developers out of a job?</comment>


Thoughts on a DDOS attack - <AUTHOR> http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2014/02/10/thoughts-on-a-dos-attack/

<comment><USER2> So there is a way to stop 'dumb' DDOS attacks at the firewall level with a few cute rules:

Forward all traffic with the syn TCP flag into a filter that is set to limit the number of connections based on your service. We currently have our set to 500/sec with a burst limit of 5 on a box that generates about 2-5Mbs of traffic/sec. Add everything with said flag to that pool and drop everything that goes over the limit.

It's effective against really dumb DDOS attacks (think LOIC) and it's simple to roll out. The limiting factor will be your router, but it'd take some pretty serious power to bring our $600 dollar router to it's knees. We fired 3 instances of LOIC at it and it barely showed up.</comment>


You can't play Bach on Facebook because Sony says they own his compositions - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2018/09/05/mozart-bach-sorta-mach.html <comment><USER2> It seems to me that the content identification works as advertised: it's the metadata that is missing essential information due to inadequate process.

If Youtube knew that the author is Bach and not Sony it would know not to flag the soundtracks featuring Bach songs.

However, the problem is that at some point Sony lied to Youtube and claimed ownership of these songs even though they are in public domain. So there should be reviews or penalty for flagging copyright on someone else's works.

Sony could claim they have copyright on the very Bach recording they uploaded themselves but if content id system can't differentiate between Sony's Bach and anyone's Bach, then for practical purposes there probably aren't much basis for the recording to be eligible for a copyright by Sony.

<comment><USER3> Huh? If Youtube's black box AI can't tell the difference between recordings by Glenn Gould and Murray Perahia they should be equivalent in the eyes of copyright law?

<comment><USER4> Yes! If you can't tell a difference between a true Mickey Mouse and its (slightly different) clone, and yet the other is not allowed by law due to being not sufficiently different work, then I would say the guys who just aren't sufficiently different from Bach should not be subject of copyright.

The truth is, copyright on interpretation is about the same category as copyright on a work of a plumber in my apartment. I understand that's how some people make money, though, so it's painful to change.

<comment><USER5> OK. We need to back up here as there are some conclusions being rendered that don't quite hold up.

For music, there is _more than one_ copyright. There is the copyright on the original composition. There is the copyright on the modification of the original composition (for example to use modern notation, etc). There is the copyright on the recording.

Sony has a copyright on some recordings of Bach music. They may also have a copyright on modifications of the original compositions, but I don't know if they do or not. They do not hold a copyright on the original composition, because that is in the public domain.

It is difficult to record classical music without infringing copyright because the modern printed scores are all modified. You can use the original scores, but they are actually very difficult to understand and are akin to a different language. In fact, as far as I can tell this is the reasoning behind allowing a copyright on the modern scores -- they are essentially translations (and translations of creative works are allowed new copyrights).

There are _some_ scores that are both modern and in the public domain. Kimiko Ishizaka has been doing some good work on this front with her "Open Source Bach" series (and you can even get unmixed versions of her recordings under a CC license!!!). However, initiatives on this front are few and far between (consider throwing some money her way as she is worth supporting).

If you have a score for which you have a license to record (or which is in the public domain), then you can make a recording of it. It doesn't matter one bit if it sounds like a recording of a Sony recording. However, it is quite difficult to find such scores and often performers do not know enough about copyright law when they start doing their own performances for Youtube.

<comment><USER6> Non-musician here. Is it possible to create modern scores from the originals? I can engrave using Lilypond or Frescobaldi for choral music to make it print cleaner and super crisp. Is it that hard? Please explain...

<comment><USER5> Yes you can, and I believe Kimiko Ishizaka is using Musescore. I am not a musician either, but my understanding is that very old scores are hard to read. I don't know if the notation is different or if there is some other problem. It may even be that it's just hard to get your hands on a copy of the old scores that are not under copyright. This blog post describes one of the problems: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/293573191/open- goldberg...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/293573191/open-goldberg- variations-setting-bach-free/posts/71151)

I was trying to find some links describing the difficulties of transcribing old scores, but unfortunately my google-fu is not up to the task. Bottom line, I don't know how difficult it is, but my understanding is that it isn't trivial.

Apparently IMSLP has nearly 500K scores, though: [https://imslp.org/](https://imslp.org/)

<comment><USER7> I've got some experience playing from the original published editions of various pieces. If you want a visual feel for the differences go have a look at IMSLP's scans of period notation against modern editions their contributors have prepared (many of which aren't the pinnacle of modern music engraving, but are still way, way easier to read).

There are a number of reasons for why it's preferable to play from a modern edition if you're a modern musician. While we can of course learn to handle the older notation, we're battling with two different factors - firstly, the printing technology (or handwriting, if we're playing from copies of the composer's autograph score). As one might expect, music printing in the 17th century was nowhere near as clear or easy to read as modern editions can be, because of technical limitations coupled with various ideas they just hadn't had yet. And you get some features, like beamed quavers, which show up in handwritten music before the printers could do them. I'm pretty sure most of the originally printed music was intended to be studied and memorised rather than played at full speed from notation as we expect a modern orchestra to do. Musicians employed in ensembles at various courts around Europe would have been expected to do this, but they would've had handwritten music possibly prepared by the composer themselves (who would also be working for the court) for that occasion. And of course they would have been familiar with the musical handwriting conventions of their era.

But really the thing that gets you is that written musical language has evolved over the centuries. So if you go back and try to play from a facsimile of an original edition you're likely to run into all sorts of fun things, such as:

\- music from before the invention of bar lines has no bar lines, and it's amazing how hard it is to learn to play without them these days

\- accidentals didn't used to mean that it applied for the rest of the bar, as it does today, partly because they were invented before bar lines were invented

\- accidental symbols themselves aren't the same as they once were

\- the convention for notating key signatures has changed

\- the convention for notating time signatures has changed

\- because ledger lines are hard to write by hand neatly, and hard to print as well, there was a much greater diversity of clefs to allow parts to fit more comfortably within the five line stave. Modern musicians are used to playing from one or maybe two clefs on their instrument of choice. Some baroque concert programmes probably took their musicians through three or four of them on the same part between pieces or movements. To read these you need to understand what clefs actually indicate and be able to unmoor your brain from the fixed idea of what the bottom line of the stave represents.

\- ornamentation marks have changed, and composers made their own up anyway

\- performance conventions have changed (although modern editions generally don't go too far in putting those conventions into the notation because they're way too messy to notate even today, some of them do talk about them in the preface material)

\- a lot of music from the time is full of mistakes, which can often be identified by comparing multiple sources of the same piece

A modern editor preparing a new edition of an old work will be rewriting the notation to modern conventions, adding bar lines, reworking key signatures, changing the clefs, fixing mistakes, adding explicit markers for what would have been implicitly understood accidentals in some styles, maybe changing ornamentation marking to something more readily understood by a modern musician... it's a big job.

Which is why the copyright in performance of these editions is defended by their publishers, because someone had to pay for all of that. If you want a copyright-free recording you have to go back to the originals yourself, as well as finding willing musicians and engineers to record it.

And after all that work... the layman, and the lay-algorithm, probably won't be able to tell them apart anyway.

<comment><USER8> The expense is the reason publishers defend copyright. Technically, what matters for copyright is not the total cost of effort, but the creative work involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Constructions like this are living proof that maybe the system we've decided to implement isn't as smart as we thought it was. Humans have a knack for thinking they can control things they don't actually understand -- and we end up with contradictions like this situation. I'll leave these here:

> I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But > laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human > mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries > are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the > change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with > the times.

\-- Jefferson

> That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it > is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new > Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its > powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their > Safety and Happiness.

\-- Declaration of Independence

<comment><USER10> I tend to agree with Elon Musk's idea that every law should come with an expiry date. So that there is debate before it is renewed.

<comment><USER11> >every law should come with an expiry date. So that there is debate before it is renewed.

[anti]dovetails with the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and the fears that the important established precedents (Roe, Brown, etc) will come up for debate/overturn soon once he(or similar guy) gets the position.

Btw, Constitution is a law too. Should it have an expiry date too?

<comment><USER12> > _Btw, Constitution is a law too. Should it have an expiry date too?_

Not necessarily. A constitution is a foundational law, a set of principles by which the nation is to be governed. Those principles are not expected to change very often, so no expiry date is needed. The detailed implementation of these principles, however, could - and probably should - be done with an expiry date.

<comment><USER13> Ideally, yes. But some constitutions end up being dumping grounds for laws where the amendment process was considered preferable to that of statutes (e.g. if a constitutional amendment requires approval by popular vote and therefore can't be repealed by legislators alone). The Alabama constitution is infamously over 40 times the length of the US constitution and contains 900+ amendments.

<comment><USER12> Didn't realize that _individual states_ have their own constitutions! TIL, I guess. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> HN Title and article title are wrong. It was Facebook, not YouTube.

Source: [https://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist/status/103696020877651968...](https://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist/status/1036960208776519680)

<comment><USER15> Ok, we've s/YouTube/Facebook/'d the title above. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Headline seems demonstrably untrue [0]. Better framing should be, "contentID incorrectly identifies YouTube sample as being part of a totally legally copyrighted recording of a Bach work". (Bracketing for now the rightness or copyright at all, I suppose)

0: [https://youtu.be/ddbxFi3-UO4](https://youtu.be/ddbxFi3-UO4)

<comment><USER17> And it's Facebook, not Youtube contentID

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Been there. I was, and still am, surspised that we allow for automatic algorithms to do copyright claims. non-free algorithms deciding about the faith of real people sounds like the stuff from dystopian scifi novels, but that is what we already allow to happen in real world.

</comment><comment><USER19> You dont have to use Youtube to host things though. Youtube is not the Internet. We should go back to decentralizing things again.

<comment><USER20> it does feel to me you do mostly have to use YouTube. I can afford to host video if it becomes remotely popular.

<comment><USER21> Yes, it costs money to give things away for free. Now you can have YouTube do it, and play by their rules which help them keep costs low... or you can do it yourself.

Personally, I would put up a snippet, the serve a torrent. If it gets popular, its popularity will support it. Otherwise, I can support my hobby with a seed box for 15 a month.

<comment><USER22> It may even be possible to use P2P video serving directly from a web page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is simply due to an over zealous copyright detection algorithm.

That being said does any remember Napster and the good old days? Makes me feel old and yearn for a more innocent time.

<comment><USER24> Is there any penalty for being overzealous regarding the protection of your copyrights? I understand that individuals could litigate, but I would assume that to be a long winded process.

<comment><USER25> Filing a DMCA takedown notice for stuff you do not own copyright for is perjury. (Filing one that ignores fair use considerations does not fall under that category, though).

Youtube's Content ID system is not related to DMCA takedowns, though, so there is no legal repercussions to making fallacious claims outside to violating whatever terms of service the system has.

<comment><USER26> Almost perjury. There's a good faith clause, so if someone believes in good faith that their magic black box AI correctly identifies their IP and never issues incorrect takedowns, it's not perjury.

<comment><USER27> If only a judge would rule that such faith in the magic black box is no longer 'good' once it has made, say, 3 mistakes. At that point the user of the AI should understand that it isn't perfect and be obligated to manually check all future results.

<comment><USER28> You don't understand the purpose of these systems if you believe accuracy is that important. They're designed to pacify copyright owners, to prevent lawsuits against the platform and keep licensed content on the platform... the heavy-handedness and opaqueness are intentional, as is the bias towards false positives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There are two types of copyright at work here:

1\. The music (score)

2\. The recording of a performance of the music

For old music nr.1 has expired. But nr.2 can still be copyrighted.

The question is: how does Facebook know the performance is under copyright by Sony? I guess they don't..

<comment><USER30> That's a hard problem to solve. So every content-id system out there hacks around that - by not solving it, and merely pretending that whoever claims the rights first actually has them. Convenient for the platform and whoever has deeper pockets for lawsuits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> On the other hand YT is full of various Peppa Pig videos (inverted colors, mirror images and all kinds of other weird transformations). YouTube's algorithm apparently can't detect such copyright violations. And the really annoying part is that these videos often rank higher than the original ones.

<comment><USER32> but are the copyright violations then, there has been significant alteration done to the original work.

<comment><USER33> I would assume the characters themselves are copyrighted.

<comment><USER32> I guess trademarked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have to wonder - isn't the response to this kind of ridiculousness to simply not post on YouTube, for example: [http://allofbach.com/en/](http://allofbach.com/en/) ? Yes it's not going to get you the audience YouTube might, but if their platform isn't serving legitimate artists then what good is it anyway?

<comment><USER35> > I have to wonder - isn't the response to this kind of ridiculousness to > simply not post on YouTube

Apparently not. From the article:

 _In one week, the European Parliament will vote on a proposal to force all online services to implement Content ID-style censorship, but not just for videos -- for audio, text, stills, code, everything._

<comment><USER36> Well, then. We need online services that can't be coerced.

<comment><USER37> [https://datproject.org/](https://datproject.org/)

[https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-spec/](https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-spec/)

[https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)

I wonder if these might help.

<comment><USER36> Cool, thanks :)

Bittorrent with streaming interface actually works pretty well.

Edit: Re Dat, this is interesting, and promising: [https://blog.datproject.org/2017/12/10/dont- ship/](https://blog.datproject.org/2017/12/10/dont-ship/)

<comment><USER37> Nice find, they seem true to their ideals based on that article.

This is also interesting, cool demo of streaming video browser to browser:

[https://webtorrent.io/](https://webtorrent.io/)

<comment><USER36> That's cool. But I generally block WebRTC, as a privacy threat. But maybe it'd be OK, in a dedicated VM.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h At some level, isn't webtorrent a privacy issue? You're broadcasting, "Hey, I'm viewing $FOO! Anyone wanna give me pieces of it?"

<comment><USER36> That's part of it. And more generally with WebRTC, peers know whatever you're doing together. And that's an issue with all P2P stuff that doesn't use overlay networks to proxy connections.

So what I should have said was that it's OK in a VM that reaches the Internet through a nested VPN chain, or whatever, so your ISP-assigned IP address isn't trivially discoverable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'd like to see a debate on whether copyright itself is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER39> The last time I reviewed copyright law, fraudulently claiming ownership of someone else's work is a very big deal. This is something that can be handled with a class action lawsuit.

</comment><comment><USER40> What is the smallest text fragment that can be copyrighted?

<comment><USER17> That's an empirical question, not theoretical, so it's "has been", not "can be". Interesting question. Like the Bust Beaver function, apparently unknown.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/copyright-trademark-titles- wo...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/copyright-trademark-titles-words-short- phrases-joshua-g-graubart)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Recent related discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884215](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884215)

</comment><comment><USER42> So their network generalizes well - Good! But they use it to identify recordings - Bad. Stupid humans.

</comment><comment><USER43> I had better not let Sony know that I play Bach in my home without their kind permission.

</comment><comment><USER44> The government keeps introducing new laws all the time. The system is becoming bloated and exceedingly restrictive. Maybe they should focus on removing old laws.

Or at least focus on adding more laws to restrict the rights of corporations instead of people.</comment>


Study finds dopamine, biological clock link to snacking, overeating and obesity - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200103111717.htm <comment><USER2> There's a documentary (free on Amazon Prime) called "Fasting" that touches on this same hypothesis. Basically, our bodies are wired to eat late morning to early evening. Calories consumed outside of those hours are much more likely to turn into fat.

Optimum eating window is somewhere around 11AM or noon for most people to 6PM at the latest. When people reduce their eating window, without counting calories or doing anything else, they often lose weight. This is gaining popularity as "intermittent fasting."

I definitely recommend the movie if you want to learn more--it kept me engaged the entire time. I've also done 2 cycles of ProLon (mentioned in the movie and has significant scientific backing) to boost my own immune system, so I'm a believer in fasting as a health benefit.

<comment><USER3> What exactly is ProLon? Is it just moving your feeding window to 11am-6pm?

I searched on Google but the first few links offer no insight except the impression I might have to pay money to learn more.

<comment><USER4> Its the commercialization of this:

A Periodic Diet that Mimics Fasting Promotes Multi-System Regeneration, Enhanced Cognitive Performance, and Healthspan

[https://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)...](https://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131\(15\)00224-7)

You can do it yourself without any kind of kit, if you count calories. I've done it 7 times so far. Due for another one soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just to clarify the title a little "biological clock" in this circumstance isn't about lifespan, it is about your body's natural desire to eat (specifically _when_ to eat).

They found, in mice, that high-calorie diets at meals resulted in eating more often between meals. From the article:

> Güler's team found that mice fed a diet comparable to a wild diet in > calories and fats maintained normal eating and exercise schedules and proper > weight. But mice fed high-calorie diets laden with fats and sugars began > "snacking" at all hours and became obese.

I'd wonder though if they're re-measuring the gut bacteria phenomenon that has previously been observed. Essentially your gut bacteria can encourage you to eat certain foods, if you eat too much of one kind of food you over-bread that specific bacteria (and suppress others) resulting in a "waterfall" over desire for the food that bacteria need.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/4441009a](https://www.nature.com/articles/4441009a)

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03698...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0369811407002210)

</comment><comment><USER6> It is great to see this kind of studies being done, as they are against the best interests of big food companies who usually don't care about the public health.

This phenomenon is already known in many circles but is still being rejected regularly by some people as not being backed by sufficient scientific data. Well here is some data. Hope to see more of it.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, starvation was a much more pressing problem than obesity for most of human history, so cheap and efficient delivery of calories is a pretty monumental achievement of industrialized agriculture.

To paraphrase Harvey Dent, the big food companies have stuck around long enough to see themselves become the villains.

<comment><USER6> > To be fair, starvation was a much more pressing problem than obesity for > most of human history, so cheap and efficient delivery of calories is a > pretty monumental achievement of industrialized agriculture.

I have to agree that this really is a monumental achievement.

Calorie-dense food is no longer scarce but in abundance. We are not hearing much about starvations at least in the "developed world".

But on the flip side many people now have some kind of metabolic disease. Nearly everybody in my family is suffering from at least one metabolic disease mainly caused by a compromised sugar metabolism which in turn is caused by processed foods. And this is really causing a great suffering.

So the solution to the original problem begot a new kind of problem. Is the new problem better than the original one? Debatable.

Now we can support a much larger population much more easily (which is just what we need). But a population that is a lot less healthy than the previous generations. Quality is in decline.

Anyway it's still "progress", and yeah, a monumental one. If only they knew where to stop. They never do...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Funny, the same thing happens to my cats if I leave dry food out for them versus feeding them wet food at morning and night.

<comment><USER9> What happens, in which case do they eat more?

<comment><USER8> They get fat from eating the always available dry food. Wet food is way better for them, high moisture and protein, dry food is typically the equivalent of the junk food.

<comment><USER9> I'm glad I asked. With my dog, it's the opposite. He binges wet food. Dry food I leave a bowl full at all times. He eats when he's hungry, no binging.

Thought - cats typically need higher quality food than dogs, dogs are much more opportunistic. (And more similar to us in that respect, I guess.)

<comment><USER8> That makes sense to me, my dog will eat until full, sometimes if she manages to find some scraps she won't finish her dry food (we give her 3/4 cup day and night).

Curious about the dog binging on wet food, how much are you making available?

<comment><USER9> Rarely, it's a novelty and he loves it. But he gets an upset stomach, so I've gone back to (best quality I could find, no grain etc) dry food.

I think for him, wet dog food and "found" human food are equally delicious. He likes the dry food too whenever I switch flavor, but tires of it over the weeks the bag lasts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who has recently starting dealing with a somewhat significant weight problem, I would like to disagree with the premise a little bit.

I have put on quite a lot of weight recently as a result of two simple things: one, I am older. This probably is not a big part of it.

Two, I just stopped exercising for a few months. Meaning, I have not even been doing my daily walks.

I don't often eat snacks or really large meals. Sometimes only one meal in a day. But since I often don't move around _at all_ except for minimal tasks, and have spent a lot of time sitting at the computer, I have been putting on weight rapidly.

So yeah, my New Years resolution is to go back to walking every day.

</comment><comment><USER11> In mice

<comment><USER12> There's a twitter account for that [https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice/status/121489166821166694...](https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice/status/1214891668211666944)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that's what I was riffing off</comment></comment></comment>


New discovery could change the way we look for alien life - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/new-discovery-could-change-way-we-look-alien-life-ncna827921 <comment><USER2> I'm confused. There are plants called air plants that exist entirely from chemicals in air. See: www.bhg.com/gardening/houseplants/care/grow-air-plants/ How are these bacteria different?</comment>


Flood Gates Open – Wadi Dayqah Dam – Oman - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SilBWMgCu7w <comment><USER2> The sheer volume and force of water here is awe-inspiring.

I'm surprised that people can mill about at the bottom of the dam. If not forbidden for their own safety, it's typically prohibited for (ostensibly) the dam's security.</comment>


Show HN: Deep Learning Web GUI to Design, Visualise, Train and Share Models - <AUTHOR> http://hn.aifiddle.io <comment><AUTHOR> The plan is to eventually open source this project. If anyone is interested in helping out, please let me know.</comment>


Every single story on the HN homepage - <AUTHOR> http://cristianstrat.com/post/11091719449/every-single-story-on-the-hacker-news-homepage <comment><USER2> Today is a sad day. A great man died, and we should honor that. This may sound cold hearted, but I come to Hacker News to read interesting discussions about tech and startups, not to see 30 articles about the same issue. Several articles discussing the event would be perfectly fine, but this has become absurd.

<comment><USER3> I'm inclined to agree.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the death of someone like Steve Jobs taking up room on the front page of HackerNews. Look at the the current top 5 stories:

Steve Jobs has passed away. (apple.com): 2393 points, 282 comments

Apple RIP Logo design (jmak.tumblr.com): 265 points, 16 comments

Steve Jobs has died (marketwatch.com): 776 points, 59 comments

The Steve Jobs I Knew (allthingsd.com): 343 points, 8 comments

President Obama on Steve Jobs (whitehouse.gov): 361 points, 38 comments

Completely reasonable. Such attention for someone who was important to the tech industry as he was is precisely what I'd expect from a place like HN. A bit high on the points : comments ratio, but this isn't exactly a story that will lead to long drawn-out flame war (at least I'd hope not), so that too is understandable.

But it steadily declines from there: at the time of writing, the remaining 25 Jobs stories on the front page have 116 comments _combined_. If no one has anything interesting to say _about_ these stories, then it doesn't seem like a far-fetched interpretation that there's nothing interesting _in_ them, either, so why are they being upvoted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you really believe it's intentional? I think it reflects quite beautifully on the importance of the contributions Jobs made to technology and what an inspiring character he was.

Would you complain about flowers blocking the sidewalk? Just give it time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seriously, a dozen or so articles is one thing, but this is absurd. There is no need to flood _everything_ else off HN.

There are not even other posts in the new feed for me to read or vote up.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're on /classic, pg's "hubs" post is currently #28.

<comment><USER7> What... the...

How have I never heard or /classic 'til now? Thanks!

What's different about the ranking algo?

<comment><USER6> I'm not really sure but they idea was to try to turn back the clock a bit. I'm guessing it includes the upvoter account's age.

<comment><USER7> Appreciate it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is more a sad reflection on HN than sad news.

</comment><comment><USER9> He died 30 times.

My comment tastes aweful doesnt it? Just like 30 fucking posts on the same thing.</comment>


Ask HN: How does prgmr.com survive? - <AUTHOR>

How does prgmr.com survive with competition like digital ocean?<p>I ask because before DO was around it was prgmr, linode and slicehost who were the most reputable vps services.  Slicehost went away and linode was always more expensive. prgmr served a portion of the market for those who wanted more control at a fair price. But now with DO the prices have dropped. <comment><USER2> Low-end hosting is a stable cash-flow business. You buy/install/operate/manage the equipment and recover original investment + operational cost + few more percentage in return over the life of equipment typically 3 years. After 3 years you replace the old equipment with new shiny ones and repeat again.

But low-end hosting offers a good low-cost entry point for companies looking to enter IaaS/PaaS business like DO. Sooner or later DO will move upward in IaaS/PaaS vacating the low end hosting. Personally, I don't see DO catering to low-end for more than 3 years when the need for equipment replacement will come up to stay competitive.

The competition has to survive couple of years by managing the expenses, managing customer churn, and extracting some additional life out of equipment. Once DO equipment ages, the competition can install new equipment investment and beat up DO on aging equipment and speed and feeds. It is very important in this business to not replace your equipment at the same time as your competition because value prop is always speed and feed at reasonable cost.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think there have always been people who run hosting services on a shoestring.

It's pretty easy to do if you are (1) doing everything yourself (meaning not paying people who know less than you and don't work as hard as you) and (2) you don't think about capital investments the way a 'real' business does.

(Some people, with $X in their pocket, will spend it on servers and so long as the cash flow stays positive after that they aren't going to be concerned about getting what they 'deserve' for their investment.)

I was the "technical cofounder" for Brazil's #1 chat service back around 2000, and the nontechnical guy was always finding the cheap hosting service of the week. (We were always hosting in the U.S. because this was cheaper and it would have been hard for the Brazillians to stop us from running a competitor to the state phone company)

We got some incredible deals, maybe 50% or 1/3 the price of "normal" web hosting, but there were some times when we had the move the site in a hurry, even once restore it from backup.

</comment><comment><USER4> Better customer support than DO? Maybe some customers just like dealing with Luke, a fellow HN member?

</comment><comment><USER5> Less money spent on employees and marketing would be my guess.

<comment><USER6> Yep. I'm pretty sure they didn't hire a webdesigner.</comment></comment>


FBI Hack news on Hackernews is Fake - <AUTHOR>

The news (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677527) currently on top in HN is a fake one. It was an old FBI hack by CyberZeist that happened in June 2012. Here's the real news url:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/CyberZeist-Claims-to-Have-Gained-Access-to-Hundreds-of-Federal-Accounts-276384.shtml
And here's the original url of the hack details:
http://leakster.net/leaks/fbimail
It seems someone simply copy-pasted the old stuff to make it look like a new hack by THA, (or may be they themselves did it for publicity?).
EDIT: Good news, the fake post is dead now. FTR http://pastebin.com/BjZMZV63 <comment><USER2> I cannot stand for this and hereby demand the FBI to be hacked for real.

<comment><AUTHOR> It did get hacked, but a couple of months ago.

<comment><USER2> I had sex a couple of months ago, but that's not very satisfactory today.

<comment><USER3> I had pie a couple of months ago. I still want pie.

<comment><USER4> American pie?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait, is it fake or is it real but old and repackaged?

Why did you make this a self post instead of a comment?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its "Fake" in the context of the original post's claims.

And FYI I did post a comment at-first but hardly anyone noticed it (that includes you too).. probably because the original post already had over a 90 comments and people didn't bother to go through all of them.

And I could already find some online websites and tech news blogs starting to pick this news up from here and spread it on the internet. This kind of news spreads so virally! So I made a post out of it so that people notice it. And they did. Mission accomplished :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I mean, it's happened before once: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ></comment>


Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/?single_page=true <comment><USER4> There's a lot of misunderstanding about self-driving. Mostly because nobody is publishing much.

If you want to do it right, you start with geometry. The first step is capturing range imagery and grinding it down to a 3D model of the world. This tells you where you physically can go. That's where we were at the DARPA Grand Challenge over a decade ago.

Then comes moving object popout. What out there isn't a stationary obstacle? That comes from processing multiple frames and range rate data from radars. Moving objects have to be tracked.

Only then does object recognition come into play. Moving objects should be classified if possible, and fixed objects of special interest (signs, barricades, etc.) identified. Not all objects will be identified, but that's OK. If it can't be identified and it's moving, you have to assume the worst case - it's vulnerable and it doesn't follow the road rules. This will force a slowdown and careful maneuvering around the unknown object. (See Chris Urmson's SXSW video of their vehicle encountering someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom.)

Predicting the behavior of moving objects is a big part of handling heavy traffic. That's what Google is working hard on now.

Machine learning is a part of this, but not the whole thing. You can't really trust machine learning; it's a statistical method and sometimes it will be totally wrong. You can trust geometry.

If you want to do it wrong, you start out with lane keeping and smart cruise control, tack on recognition of common objects, throw in some machine learning and hope for the best. This produced the Tesla self-crashing car, noted for running into unusual obstacles which partially block the lane and for trusting lane markings way too much. Look closely at the videos from Tesla and Cruise, slowing them down to real time. They speed them up so you can't easily see how bad the object recognition is.

<comment><USER5> > If you want to do it wrong, you start out with lane keeping...recognition of > common objects...some machine learning....hope for the best

Thank you! Can I ask why the self-driving car programs like the 3-semester Udacity one deliberately focus on going about it the wrong way ? Why spend 1 whole semester on lane detection using trivia like OpenCV, 1 whole semester on object classification using CNNs with Keras, spending so much time on combining lidar & radar data using Kalman filters for moving object tracking .... surely all of these are peripheral issues and the wrong way to go about the business. Then why ? Is it all one big clueless scam ?

To be fair, I am enjoying the course very much as a student. But it's becoming clear from talking to colleagues in the autonomous car industry that what is being taught is not the real deal. This isn't what happens in production, so to speak.

<comment><USER6> Isn't the practical reality that any course like that will address the theory and essentially deal with more or less toy problems? It would be hard to get into cutting edge research in an online course.

I'm not sure learning about natural language processing or image classification would be all that different--although those problems are arguably better understood and more bounded.

Even a site reliability engineering course isn't really going to give you deep insights into what, say, Google does on a day-to-day basis.

<comment><USER7> >Even a site reliability engineering course isn't really going to give you deep insights into what, say, Google does on a day-to-day basis.

I think this really gets to the core of the issue. There aren't many courses that will accurately reflect the actual state of the art in any field. Sometimes, graduate courses with a small scope and a relevant professor taught in person can partially address the state of the art, but an online course about "how to self driving car" is not that.

<comment><USER8> Lectures, tech talks, blogs, random experts in relevant subreddits, but yes, an online course is not going to give more than the fundamentals and some advanced, but already well understood examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Really well-written and engaging article. It seems the main point of an article like this from Google's perspective is gaining the public's trust. I'm sure most people are worried about the edge-cases that are so hard to run into in the real world, but are so important to get right. This is Google saying "we may not see that edge-case exactly, but we know when it could happen and simulate the situation a million times to make sure we get it right if we ever see it again."

<comment><USER10> I occassionally come across construction that is marked in an unusual way - <USER2> 65 miles an hour when the speed limit is 75. Also, when they are changing freeways and restriping them (leaving the original old faded lanes and before new lines go up) sometimes it's confusing to me and the traffic is flowing at 80 miles an hour, IIRC this was happening on 880 for a while about 10 years back.

If the AI is confused by a roundabout as described I wonder how they handle that or if this is something that only fools me because I am only using visual sensors.

<comment><USER9> Aren't those examples in which it'd be fine for it to be confused? That confusion shouldn't lead to any dangerous situations, just a different speed than other cars.

It would also be interesting to know whether Waymo factors in other cars' behavior. If everyone is going 80 while the speed limit is 65, will it factor that in and go 80 or keep with the speed limit?

<comment><USER11> >>> If everyone is going 80 while the speed limit is 65, will it factor that in and go 80 or keep with the speed limit?

No, that's illegal to drive over the speed limit.

<comment><USER12> Google's driverless cars designed to exceed speed limit

See: [http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28851996](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28851996)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now this is doing it right. That's how car companies do it. Big test tracks, and years of test track time, plus simulation and test rigs.

As the article points out, Google has far more autonomous driving miles than everybody else put together. They're on the hard cases, too; not just driving on freeways.

<comment><USER13> Do they have anything that works in rain/snow?

<comment><USER14> Snow is challenging because the lane markers are obscured by the snow -- human drivers guess at where the lanes should be, or remember where the lanes were yesterday.

Tesla being able to record sensor/map data from human drivers driving through snow will help them mitigate this. On the other hand, electric batteries have less range in cold whether, so I imagine that in the near term electric cars will be less popular in snowy markets versus, say, California.

<comment><USER15> While I take the point cold weather affects range. Norway, Sweden, Finland and many other cold climates have very high electric car usage. Mostly due to the subsidies, but it appears range isn't a major concern there.

[https://cleantechnica.com/2017/06/23/tesla-electric-cars- con...](https://cleantechnica.com/2017/06/23/tesla-electric-cars-conquered- norway/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm disappointed the article wasn't a bit more skeptical of some of the claims. Certainly the simulation-based testing is a good thing, but stats about how many billions of simulated miles have been driven can create a self- reinforcing delusion if everyone involved isn't careful to remember that the simulations can only work with well-known and expected situations. It sounds like Waymo realizes this and is building a huge library of scenarios to evaluate, but one million simulated miles are not worth a hundred real miles in terms of confidence in the system, and that is not the message this article portrays.

Overall this article does give hints though that autonomous vehicles are truly much further away than anyone wants to admit. The story about being flummoxed by multilane roundabouts is depressing. If they didn't know such things existed then they were incredibly sloppy in their data gathering. If they truly thought scaling from a simple roundabout to a multilane one would be trivial then their staff don't have the right mindset for this problem space.

Also note that all the testing is happening in flat, desert landscapes where there are no weather or lighting challenges. Their pictured model residential street only has stubs of driveways. No houses, no trees. I'm sure they know these are gaps but I worry they underestimate the challenges of adapting to entirely different driving environments. Especially when machine learning is involved and you're simulating 99% of your mileage...

Looking forward to checking back in 2040 though.

<comment><USER12> "One million simulated miles are not worth a hundred real miles in terms of confidence in the system"

I'm wondering why you say that? Wouldn't the more relevant factor be the type of miles, regardless of whether they are simulated or real? For example, 1 mile of simulated "Interesting Scenarios" (Duck on Street, Bicyclist going wrong way, pedestrian running onto road) is likely worth 100,000 miles of normal Freeway driving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > But Peng also presented the position of the traditional automakers. He said > that they are trying to do something fundamentally different. Instead of > aiming for the full autonomy moon shot, they are trying to add driver- > assistance technologies, "make a little money," and then step forward toward > full autonomy. It's not fair to compare Waymo, which has the resources and > corporate freedom to put a $70,000 laser range finder on top of a car, with > an automaker like Chevy that might see $40,000 as its price ceiling for > mass-market adoption.

> "GM, Ford, Toyota, and others are saying 'Let me reduce the number of > crashes and fatalities and increase safety for the mass market.' Their > target is totally different," Peng said. "We need to think about the > millions of vehicles, not just a few thousand."

I wonder if an easier task to reduce fatalities is to target impaired driving and develop a detection mechanism that tries to identify whether the driver is impaired. It seems like an easier and more localized problem than building a fully autonomous vehicle.

<comment><USER18> Who's going to buy a car that might tell them they can't drive?

<comment><USER19> Someone who saves a huge amount on their car insurance because they own such a vehicle (and therefore should never be subjecting the insurance company to claims caused by their impaired driving) I assume?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks like this is the location of the test facility they talk about... [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-120.5747932,237m...](https://email@example.com,-120.5747932,237m/data=!3m1!1e3) Interesting choice of name for their Expressway...

EDIT: Apple maps has up to date satellite imagery [https://maps.apple.com/?q=37.3718,-120.5749&t=k](https://maps.apple.com/?q=37.3718,-120.5749&t=k)

<comment><USER21> Curious - does anyone know why the Apple maps redirect to Google maps? I'm on Chrome.

<comment><USER22> [https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/22/mapsception/](https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/22/mapsception/)

Apparently it's been doing this for years, and in different platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I found this to be especially interesting "She spent countless hours going up and down 101 and 280, the highways that lead between San Francisco and Mountain View. Like the rest of the drivers, she came to develop a feel for how the cars performed on the open road. And this came to be seen as an important kind of knowledge within the self-driving program. They developed an intuition about what might be hard for the cars. "Doing some testing on newer software and having a bit of tenure on the team, I began to think about ways that we could potentially challenge the system," she tells me."

</comment><comment><USER24> Clearly the progress being made in the area of self-driving cars is undeniable. Seeing the articles and discussions crop up on a daily basis are making me wonder if we are headed for an AI Winter scenario in this area within the next decade or if this is the real deal and we will see self- driving cars at dealerships within 20 years.

This is so far from being my area of expertise. Just one observer's thoughts/questions. Insane how far we have come so quickly, at any rate.

<comment><USER25> I don't disagree that AI is over-hyped. However, I think the research environment is not as likely to dry up this time.

That is because much of the machine learning research is coming from industry, particularly the mega-corps. And for extremely important disruptive events such as AI, they are willing to drop $$ into collecting a stable of research scientists to not fall behind in this space. So while the AI winter was driven by a drop in academic and government spending on research, I think our present situation is far less likely to result in a similar drying up.

Start ups could get hit, however.

<comment><USER26> Agreed. As a Google engineer, I think a lot of our AI efforts are "safe" (as in we'll keep investing in them for a long time) because they're already providing substantial business value. For example,

\- TTS and speech synthesis have lots of uses in Android (phones, Wear, Auto, etc.)

\- Object recognition is very useful for photo search

\- Face recognition is also useful for photo search (if you tag people in Google Photos)

\- Neural machine translation provides better translation accuracy (for languages which we have enough training data for)

It's possible Google will cut back on some more speculative ML research efforts, but certainly not those four, I would think.

<comment><USER27> I doubt Google will cut back any time soon, but as a former Google engineer, I find this an entertaining definition of business value ;)

How much money does Google Photos make? Last time I used it, there were no ads in it.

Isn't speech recognition nearly at human levels of comprehension, at least for US English and outside of highly technical jargon? Speech patterns change slowly, so would Android continue to make money if investment in speech R&D were cut back? My guess is yes, it'd be fine.

Does Google Translate make money in some specific, measurable way? I don't mean "well it's neat to have translation links in web search", I mean, would people cut back on the commercial queries that are Google's main source of income if Translate quality stopped improving? I doubt it.

Much of their products are like this. They're products but they aren't businesses. It's very easy to lose sight of the basics of business when inside the Google bubble. The things you mention are not providing business value in the conventional sense of the term because they aren't yielding independent profits. So they're all vulnerable.

That said, vulnerable to what? I think Google is at risk of losing a lot of trust around web search and political and informational search more generally, but commercial queries are probably pretty much impregnable.

<comment><USER28> > How much money does Google Photos make? Last time I used it, there were no > ads in it.

Google Photos is, in a sense, a big ad with prominent calls to action for selling storage space.

> Isn't speech recognition nearly at human levels of comprehension, at least > for US English and outside of highly technical jargon?

Recognition, maybe (though I think no). Applying recognized text to get the desired outcome, not even close.

> Does Google Translate make money in some specific, measurable way?

It powers a paid API, so, yes, it makes money in a specific, direct, measurable way.

<comment><USER27> But selling disk storage is a very marginal business and few people take huge numbers of photos they value enough to pay for storage of (vs sticking them on Facebook or Instagram which compresses the hell out of them but does it for free). I really doubt this is a significant business for Google.

<comment><USER29> But this will only compound, no? If people keep using it, the switching "cost" (cognitive/time) increases exponentially and people will near the storage limits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Self driving cars is based on machine learning which is basically processing massive amounts of past data. This is great for routine situations and it seems Waymo is making good progress covering most of these. However the key weakness is the lack of true intelligence. When anything unusual or unexpected happens, the best it can do is simply safely shutdown and wait for a human to intervene. And the car can't really analyze and understand its environment because that requires intelligence.

It seems a best of both worlds solution would be a new type of job: Data gathering driver. It would be basically like the Google Streetview cars, but with much more sensors and input from the driver. These drivers would be assigned neighborhoods to drive through and note anything unusual or noteworthy. Stop sign is down because of last night's storm? Driver notes this and now all Waymo cars know. Street closed due to construction? All Waymo cars will avoid that street. This type of data requires intelligence to analyze and understand and it would be fed into the Waymo system for all self driving cars to benefit from it. There could be millions of self driving cars and a few thousands of these drivers feeding daily updated data to the system. You could even increase the frequency of the drivers depending on weather conditions. Maybe if there's a storm, the drivers keep driving in a loop hourly instead of once daily.

<comment><USER31> There arent that many novel scenarios on the road. Sure, Google can't program around the possibility of an airplane falling down on you, but how often does that happen?

It doesn't have to be perfect. Just very good and improving. Some time ago google shared a gif of a wheelchair chasing a duck in the middle of the road. The car didn't understand it, so it just stopped. Good enough for me.

Obviously, they have a lot of work ahead of them, but don't be so pessimistic. Most people drive shitty (myself included), we aren't impossible to improve upon.

<comment><USER32> Novel scenarios might not be common compared with miles of traffic-following drudgery, but even really bad human drivers deal with novel scenarios on the road more often than they have accidents.

Stopping might be a sensible safety protocol in some situations, but it isn't in others (not to mention the situations where the car may stop too late because it doesn't actually recognise that a novel scenario is _about_ to occur).

So if you want Level 5 driving, and not just a very impressive demo which is safe provided a human watches it attentively enough to take emergency measures and is able to override it when it decides it can't process a situation well enough to proceed, you need the AI to be pretty damn close to perfect in its judgement of how to react to a huge number of edge cases.

<comment><USER33> Except self driving cars are paying full attention all the time and can react significantly faster. This causes the difference in stopping distance to be dramatic. Remember, humans are basically going to do the same thing for the first 0.25 seconds in any emergency situation and that's the best case.

So, self driving cars can simply be very cautious without seeming to.

<comment><USER32> I agree that self driving cars' response time can _sometimes_ compensate for lack of general intelligence to anticipate a visible roadside activity developing into a hazard or non-routine situations in which another driver might cut into their lane. But lightning reflexes aren't going to eliminate situations in which buggy, late or nonexistent responses to things an AI hasn't been trained to deal with endanger other road users, especially when said other road users don't have lightning reflexes themselves.

<comment><USER33> Can you give an actual example? Because, not being able to identify something is not necessarily an issue as long as the car notices something is there and it should not hit it.

EX: I am sure the car had no idea what this was: [https://youtu.be/Uj- rK8V-rik?t=26m11s](https://youtu.be/Uj-rK8V-rik?t=26m11s) but as long as it can tell it's bigger than a bread box and so it should not to hit it that's enough.

<comment><USER32> The obvious problem scenario is when unpredictable evasive action puts an autonomous vehicle into the path of other drivers (with human response times). That's when very sharp responses to an uncategorised "obstacle" that's actually a drifting plastic bag or a reflection cause more problems than they solve.

Similarly, instantaneous harsh braking might help an AI save the small child it didn't anticipate might chase the football that flew past moments earlier, but a human capable of grasping that footballs are associated with pedestrians making rash decisions might have braked early and gently enough to not get bumped by the car behind. (If they didn't, they might find their late reaction blamed for the accident and possibly even get prosecuted for driving without due care and attention).

The UK requires every learner driver to sit an exam consisting of identifying CGI "developing hazards" where they're scored on ability to rapidly identify _stuff that might happen_ before they're allowed to do the full driving test. I'm sure a key focus of the teams the article discusses is teaching AI similar cases like gently slowing in the event of a football-shaped object moving near the road (which is likely far from the most difficult or obscure novelty to teach an AI to handle) but the problem space of novelties humans handle by understanding what things might be and how/if they are likely to move isn't small or one there's good reason to believe plays to AI's strengths

(Meta: not sure why you're being downvoted, your contribution seems constructive and on topic to me)

<comment><USER33> A bag* or child running into a street is not an usual event, also a car is not going to 'evade' into another car. Rare events are the things people don't see across multiple human lifetimes not just something you don't see every month.

Which IMO is what's missing from the debate, unusual events are in terms of ~10+ million miles of training data before these things are in production. They are clearly out there, but I doubt people are going to react well to say someone falling from an overpass onto the road very well either. So, it's that narrow band of really odd but something a person would respond correctly to that's the 'problem'.

PS: Of course the bag might relate to a bug which are likely. But, IMO that's a completely different topic.

<comment><USER32> > A bag* or child running into a street is not an usual event, also a car is > not going to 'evade' into another car

Opting to drive around a (stationary, visible from a distance) bag in an unpredictable manner is literally how Waymo's first "at fault" accident occurred...

The point is that a human has a concept of a "ball" linked to the concept of "children play football" and an understanding that if one sees the former, one should be prepared for the latter to bursts onto the road from behind the partially-obscured roadside. Appropriate action probably involves easing off the accelerator and lightly tapping the brake _so the car behind gets a hint that you might have to stop suddenly_ on if a child emerges from behind a bush. An autonomous car which fails to anticipate even though it's lightning fast at slamming the brakes on is going to get rear ended a lot more.

The neural network of a self driving car might be able to classify small coloured spheres in the vicinity of the roadway as balls, and the AI will certainly have been taught the concept of a human-shaped obstacle moving across the roadway being a "need to stop" situation, but is unlikely to "learn" the association between the two through a few tens of million miles of regular driving, because only a very small proportion of "need to stop" events involve balls (and only a very small number of sightings of spheres moving in the vicinity of the roadway result in "need to stop" events). Of course, you can hard code a machine to respond to ball-shaped objects moving near roads by slowing down and you can construct a huge number of artificial test scenarios involving balls to teach the AI the association between balls and small children, but either of these options involves engineers envisaging the low frequency hazard and teaching it enough permutations of the sensory input for that hazard for it to be able to anticipate it (and there's a balance to be struck, because nobody wants a paranoid AI which drives through the city braking every time it sees something its neural network identifies as a pedestrian or the front of a parked car protruding from a driveway) Suffice to say, we take for granted our ability to know how to react to things like children chasing balls, staggering 4am drunks, tiny puddles the car in front just drove through versus a raging torrents of water through the usually safely navigable ford, sandbags versus shopping bags, vehicles laden down with loads which look like things which are not vehicles, and people frantically gesturing to stop.

<comment><USER34> > Opting to drive around a (stationary, visible from a distance) bag in an > unpredictable manner is literally how Waymo's first "at fault" accident > occurred...

There wasn't anything unpredictable about the behavior of Google SDC. From the official statement: [https://www.engadget.com/2016/02/29/google-self-driving- car-...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/02/29/google-self-driving-car- accident/)

"Our car had detected the approaching bus, but predicted that it would yield to us because we were ahead of it.

Our test driver, who had been watching the bus in the mirror, also expected the bus to slow or stop. And we can imagine the bus driver assumed we were going to stay put. Unfortunately, all these assumptions led us to the same spot in the lane at the same time. This type of misunderstanding happens between human drivers on the road every day."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Recently, Waymo and Lyft launched a self-driving vehicle partnership [0]. With Trump nomination of Derek Kan (Lyft General Manager in Southern California) to serve as Under Secretary of Transportation for Policy [1], would it ease Waymo path towards autonomous car supremacy?

[0] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-waymo- collaboration-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-waymo- collaboration-idUSKCN18B02L)

[1] [https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2017/04/06/presi...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2017/04/06/president-donald-j-trump-announces-intent-nominate-derek- kan-department)

</comment><comment><USER36> Unless I didn't understand correctly, on the animated image of the car turning, which included a wireframe representation of the scene, as well as the cameras: [https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/W...](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/WaymoMovieGIF/a7325709f.gif)

The generated geometry doesn't seem to include the Bike that quickly passes behind the car at the intersection ...

<comment><USER37> The bike is the red box that crosses the intersection. It doesn't pass behind the car, but by its side. The white wireframe box that "detaches" from the Waymo car is where the cameras are (so what the car actually did). I assume the Waymo car that doesn't stop in the animation is what it should have done instead.

<comment><USER38> More specifically, the article indicates that the car that doesn't stop is what the software - after changes to fix the original problem - would do now if it encountered the same situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > for an average of once every 890 miles, or 0.80 disengagements per 1,000 > miles.

Isn't that 1.12~ per 1000mi?

<comment><USER40> Wow, and I must think we're looking to squeeze ~3 more orders of magnitude or more of the reliability before going full driverless ~(1m miles/disengagement)

<comment><USER41> is there a specific reason you think that, or is a million just a sufficiently impressive-sounding number?

<comment><USER42> Motor vehicles are interestingly less fatal than our intuition suggests: "only" 11.3 deaths per billion vehicle-miles. [1]

To my surprise, railroad travel is more fatal at 29.0 deaths per billion miles traveled. [2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#Traffic_safety_by_mode_by_traveled_distance)

[2] [http://www.caranddriver.com/features/safety-in-numbers- chart...](http://www.caranddriver.com/features/safety-in-numbers-charting- traffic-safety-and-fatality-data)

<comment><USER43> Does that mean trains are more dangerous than cars? It seems that way, I just wonder if I'm missing something.

<comment><USER44> Looking at the BTS statistics:

[https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...](https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_02_01.html_mfd)

you can see that 95% of railroad fatalities are classified as either "Trespassers" or "Highway–rail grade crossing". In both of those cases it seems likely that the victims are generally not actually passengers on the train, but rather are people doing something obviously dangerous near railroad tracks.

(Also the denominator wasn't clear for the quoted statistic: is it per passenger-mile, or per vehicle-mile? In any case here is a sensible denominator: [https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...](https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_40.html.))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Interesting stuff. I wonder to what extent Google and Tesla could benefit from sharing each others datasets, Tesla has far more real world data than Google at this point in time but Google has the better virtual environment to test in.

<comment><USER46> Not all data is equal. Waymo test vehicled likely record a bunch of data from all the sensors and can download them all at the end of the data.

Tesla just enabled in the last few months the option for people to upload data to them. Determining which data to upload is its own problem as well.

<comment><USER45> [https://qz.com/694520/tesla-has-780-million-miles-of- driving...](https://qz.com/694520/tesla-has-780-million-miles-of-driving-data- and-adds-another-million-every-10-hours/)

Tesla has an enormous amount of data at their disposal. The recent change concerned video footage from the onboard cameras.

<comment><USER47> And not much lidar data, right? I don't work on this, but I imagine the quality of the data set makes a big difference.

From what I've learned, lidar and radar are typically used for object detection (i.e., avoiding other cars; perhaps augmented with camera data), while cameras are used for things like lane detection and traffic sign detection. If Tesla is trying to solve the same hard problems as everyone else, using weaker equipment, I wouldn't bet on them having a lot of success.

Also, kind of the point of this article is that Waymo has a test area where they can get real data along with the ground truth. That seems much more valuable than unlabeled/random data.

<comment><USER48> Tesla has decided to use only radar (+ cameras), so none of their vehicles have/are planned to have lidar at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The fact that Waymo revealed their "secret" tools for advancing this crucial technology implies that either:

1) They believe no one can quite catch up before they can launch the technology. Since they know several competitors have huge resources and brilliant people, it means they are quite close to launch.

2) These tools have become open secret within the industry, so no harm is done to their competitive position by revealing it to the public, only good PR to be gained perhaps to attract more bright engineers.

I suspect 2) is more likely since several key players have moved around so much in the past couple of years. Relatively high-level knowledge about how autonomous vehicles are being developed at Waymo might have become well-known within the industry by now.

<comment><USER49> No doubt it's number 2, I've seen quite a few articles about other self driving efforts and the general sentiment I've seen on HN is "Cruise looks like they're far ahead" and "What about Waymo? Did they fall behind?" This seems like Waymo PR is showing off some secrets to re-assert their technical strength.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Great to see such progress made by Waymo and Co. But as the Murphy's law says, if something might break, it will eventually break. With possibly millions of self driving cars and trillions of unique situations, its inevitable that someone will get hurt. So my question is: what kind of progress is being made to draft a legal framework for situation in which I rode my bike in bike lane and for whatever reason self-driving vehicle struck me. Who do I go after in regards to my pilling up medical expenses? Do I sue driver? The car company? The company who delivered self-driving hardware? The software manufacturer? I get that self-driving cars comes with incredible advantages: less crashes (hopefully), no drink drivers, etc. But a legal framework for such automobiles should be in works as we speak.

Edited: of course Murphy's law; thanks for pointing it out!

<comment><USER51> Globally, the death toll on roads is about 1 million per year. If autonomous vehicles make a significant cut in that number, people will start to see human drivers as the more-difficult liability issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> That's pretty fucking cool.

</comment><comment><USER52> Machine Learning for Self-Driving Cars. High-level Development Process for Autonomous Vehicles. [https://www.slideshare.net/jwiegelmann/machine-learning- for-...](https://www.slideshare.net/jwiegelmann/machine-learning-for- selfdriving-cars)

</comment><comment><USER53> Recently got turned down for a job here, now I'm remarkably glad I did - <USER3> is an incredibly difficult problem to tackle, and they need absolutely brilliant people to achieve success.

I wish them the best of luck in their continued progress! I'll stick to easier stuff :)

</comment><comment><USER54> Waymo should just get training data in India.

<comment><USER55> I'm having a nightmarish vision of a fleet of self driving cars trained to ceaselessly honk and drive on the sidewalks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Can they simulate a hurricane?

<comment><USER45> They don't have to simulate one, merely reliably detect one and then refuse to drive. One of the most important lessons drilled into new drivers is that the best way to avoid accidents is to know when _not_ to drive, self driving cars should not be an exception to that rule. If you are going to attempt to drive in hurricane you are essentially committing suicide, your best cause of action is to find a safe place to weather the storm. And if you _really_ want to drive a self driving car might give you the option to override the safeties but those should only be used in actual emergencies, not just to putter around in really bad and possibly dangerous weather.

The same goes for dense fog, flooding and other situations where normal driving is no longer possible and/or responsible.

<comment><USER38> And Waymo has already said that its cars will safely pull over when the weather gets too rough.

<comment><USER56> So during each winter storm, the roads will be lined with cars full of people freezing to death (literally) because their cars decided they can't drive home. And people trying to walk (in the roadway) to shelter, which isn't much safer.

<comment><USER57> Most cars can stay warm for several days just running the engine at idle. Assuming you get enough fresh air (not always a given in a snow storm that can block air vents) stopping and just running the engine for heat is safe unless your fuel tank is low - which it shouldn't be.

<comment><USER45> Electric cars can't.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LimeWire Crushed in RIAA Infringement Suit - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/limewire-crushed/

<comment><USER2> It's all part of a natural cycle.

New media companies are being sued by old media companies because the old media companies bought the laws that made what the new media companies are doing illegal ...

just like how the old media companies were sued by older companies like Kodak who paid to have the laws make the recording industry illegal...

When companies like LimeWire or BitTorrent become multi-Billion dollar corporations, they will pay to have copyright law rewritten in such a way to prevent the next generation of competitors.

See, it's a cycle.

<comment><USER3> Gandhi was right. You just have to survive the "then they fight you" part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone explain why the CEO was held 'personally liable'?[1] Whenever companies behave like (at best) like dipshits, I've only ever seen 'the corporation is a person' and hence liable. Why single out the CEO personally in this one? Is this at the judge's discretion?

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/major- copyri...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/major-copyright- defeat-tastes-sour-for-limewire.ars)

</comment><comment><USER5> Im not sure I understand how LimeWire is liable, sure they offer the software, but the infringement is done by their users and not the company themselves

<comment><USER6> If you know that your users are infringing copyrights, as Limewire surely does, and you facilitate that copyright infringement, as Limewire arguably does by providing P2P software principally to copyright infringers (as does seems empirically to be the case), and your product has little other purpose outside of copyright infringement (unlike, say, BitTorrent by itself), and you receive direct financial benefit from the actions of infringers, as Limewire does by charging ~$35 for their software, then you are exposed to a bunch of different vectors for indirect copyright infringement.

This is not a particularly complicated legal area, except to the extent that it necessarily skirts a bunch of grey areas in copyright law.

<comment><USER7> _" your product has little other purpose outside of copyright infringement"_

That's the killer right there. LimeWire needed to show a fair use of its product, and failed to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is like holding Boeing liable for 9/11.

<comment><USER9> except boeing doesn't encourage terrorists to hop aboard.

<comment><USER8> But Boeing was negligent in not making the plane refuse to fly itself into a skyscraper.

<comment><USER10> I'm thinking this might be more like head shops. They sell water pipes that are surely used almost exclusively for illegal activities but _can_ be used for non-illegal activities (i.e. smoking tobacco). I don't recall the head shops being asked to produce an actual example of a person smoking tobacco through one of their water pipes, how does this differ exactly?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


If You Can Manage a Waffle House, You Can Manage Anything - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-can-manage-a-waffle-house-you-can-manage-anything-11572667205?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I was a waiter on the night shift in a Baton Rouge Waffle House.

Adored my time there, learned a lot and made enough money to pursue my dream career.

Among them: \- You can be an asshole but as long as you follow protocol things will run smoothly. Had lots of arguments with cooks about whatever was happening, but if you stand in the right spot and call the orders correctly, and mark the plate the right way, your food came out when it was suppose to, the way it was suppose to.

\- When it comes to increasing tips, Charm beats good service. At 2 am, all the drunk people enjoy chaos and jokes more than getting their orders correct.

\- the person who decides when your food is served holds 100% of the power. If you're going to be belligerent, you're gonna wait to eat. If you're gonna irritate the cooks, you're gonna lose tips cause your food comes up last.

\- security is only there for the appearance of safety. If a group of drunkards starts a brawl, the one hired hand isn't going to stop them. Call the cops, clear out as many breakables and weapons as you can, and get the onlookers to stand back is the most you can do.

\- Getting yelled isn't as bad as you think it is. You can still operate in chaos if you follow your routine

\- number one way to increase tips is volume, and the number one way to increase volume to your section is to wipe the table whenever they're coming through the door.

<comment><USER3> Explain wiping the table? Are you fooling people into thinking the place is busier than it is?

<comment><USER4> I assume the effect is that a group of diners walks in, thinks "ah let's get the clean table!", and wanders over to your section.

<comment><USER5> I would think it probably also subconsciously signals that someone is ready to serve that table quickly and getting you your food faster, as opposed to an equally clean table across the room with no staff near it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article states that a manager at Waffle House starts out at "only" $45K. Most Waffle Houses are in the south. You can do ok making 45K a year.

Yes there were cases of racism at Waffle House and I think they addressed them pretty well on a corporate level. I'm Black and live in a _very_ White part of town. I walk into some Waffle House's playing country music in the juke box, with pickup trucks plastered with MAGA stickers and have always been treated well. I have found none of the stereo types to be true.

<comment><USER7> $45k is nice, but for a manager doing a job so hard that this article says they can "manage anything", it seems like they're woefully underpaid. With their skills, they should be able to command a lot more pay somewhere else.

If all of this is true, I'd expect to see more WH managers move to higher paying jobs and WH have a harder time finding qualified managers, meaning they'd be forced to pay more.

Apparently the article claims they could get $117k, which is a _lot_ different. Even with some hefty exaggeration, that would mean they are indeed woefully underpaid.

<comment><USER8> Waffle House managers, in my experience, are heavily sourced internally. (Or at least used to be)

This ensures you have a pipeline of new managers when someone moves on, as well as benefiting from far more experience than hiring externally.

Furthermore, while there may be higher paying jobs in a nearby city, there certainly aren't in the same area.

There are Waffle Houses at the intersection of two state highways. Which is to say, places where they're the _only_ business there.

<comment><USER9> Coming from someone who spent years in hospitality this is 100% the right answer. I've since moved onto technology gigs but it's very common to prove yourself in a much lower tiered position and move on.

Start at McDonald's, move to Panera and receive a nice Quality of life bump, then move onto something even more stable and rewarding like Trader Joe's or Costco.

The other side of this is those that are very capable but very deficient in other areas, they started working at Waffle House since they don't fit into normal society as one would think of it and happen to land there. Since the barrier to break into these jobs is nonexistent they do find a "home" and lack the ability to ever grow or move on, for better or worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One quick way my wife and I use to judge any kind of restaurant or hotel is by watching the manager. We've consistently noticed in places where the manager is doing their job in addition to the day to day work, the place has great service and provides quality. We find often at the places we like best, high end or hole in the wall, the manager or owner is serving people, or cooking or generally getting things done.

The converse is also true. At places we get bad service, or bad food the manager is normally in one place bossing the troops.

<comment><USER11> In my experience Waffle houses don't always have a managed. Sometimes late at night they only have a cook and one waiter.

A good manager should be able to fill in on any position, expo, cook, hostess, or helping waitstaff. The problem is they could get stuck at peak hours helping in the back and not seen very much.

<comment><USER6> There is no hidden "back" at the Waffle House. You would see the manager cooking or washing dishes right in front of you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An interesting fact is that disaster relief agencies use how quickly waffle house is back up and running as an indicator for how badly hit a region has been by some natural disaster (hurricane, flood etc) because their disaster preparedness is so good.

Some details here [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1168860400319946752.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1168860400319946752.html) and elsewhere.

They clearly take planning seriously.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love eating at Waffle House and an always humbled by how hard the employees seem to work under what appears to be absolute chaos, but my order always comes quick and the cooking occurs right in front of you, so you can see everything is clean. It's crazy how there is a person who reads off the ticket and multiple cooks who immediately respond (all-star, bacon, drop hash brown covered, scrambled, waffle)

<comment><USER8> Hint: Look for the single, colored "order calling" tile on the other side of the counter, and how the upcoming order plates are set

There's a wicked smart method to the chaos.

<comment><USER5> The marking system is ingenious as well:

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/nickgray/378694469](https://www.flickr.com/photos/nickgray/378694469)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It is a dream of mine to go to a Waffle House, ever since that Anthony Bourdain episode -- the food looked delicious.

<comment><USER15> Can confirm that if you do, follow his script. Get the patty melt and a pecan waffle and you'll be happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Waffle House used to offer all Georgia Tech graduates a manager position. Not sure if they still do but they certainly did from the 70s until the 2000s.

</comment><comment><USER16> In-n-Out is another chain I know of that is privately owned, and I wonder how many similarities there off. Off-hand, I imagine not as much. I bet the chain is small enough that their 'support networks' are much denser. But in the other hand, whenever I've been able to identify a 'manager-type' at In-n-Out, they always seem to be as involved as everyone else.

<comment><USER17> Store manager pay at In N Out is pretty high as well.

<comment><USER18> In N Out is based out of California, so the Manager pay is pretty good, even for Southern California.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Since she graduated from Harvard LAST YEAR... [emphasis added]

Pardon my skepticism, but a person with less than one year in the professional workforce can't be the standard of measure undergirding the claim "if you can manage a Waffle House, you can manage anything."

Was there more substance in the paywalled section that I missed?

<comment><USER20> Nope. It dropped her entirely after the first couple paragraphs and just talked about Waffle House.

And three jobs in a year does seem a little high, even for tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What is the current workaround to read for WSJ articles please? The Web button above isn't working.

<comment><USER22> Pay them...?

<comment><USER21> What is this madness :-)

But point taken...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I request a paywall workaround. Both previous known workarounds - Private mode and clicking through from Google - no longer work.

<comment><USER15> Searching for the URL on facebook and clicking through from there should still work (if you have facebook)</comment></comment>


14 Megapixel Image of the Moon by Bartosz Wojczyński - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/lL42zTS.jpg

<comment><AUTHOR> Further details on how he made this photograph here.

[http://petapixel.com/2015/05/04/this-high-res-moon-photo- was...](http://petapixel.com/2015/05/04/this-high-res-moon-photo-was-made-by- a-self-taught-astrophotographer/)</comment>


Beyond Social: Read/Write in The Era of Internet of Things - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/beyond_social_web_internet_of_things.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 <comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

If I was an entrepreneur or developer, I wouldn't be thinking about social anymore. I'd be thinking: How can I use all of this data and build on top of it?</comment>