OS X El Capitan GM Candidate available - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/osx/download/ <comment><USER2> Just a reminder: installing this will enable System Integrity Protection (aka rootless, prevents even root from modifying system files), but it can be disabled by rebooting into recovery mode and selecting Utilities -> Security Configuration.

Edit: Actually, some webpage says that the method was changed in a later beta. Let me actually do the update and see how it works now...

<comment><USER3> Here's what you have to do now: [http://i.imgur.com/L1pCBxG.png](http://i.imgur.com/L1pCBxG.png) and then [http://i.imgur.com/UKMhB1n.png](http://i.imgur.com/UKMhB1n.png)

[http://discuss.binaryage.com/t/totalspaces2-status-under- os-...](http://discuss.binaryage.com/t/totalspaces2-status-under- os-x-10-11-el-capitan/3828)

<comment><USER4> And that bash 3.2 is one of the reasons I want to turn off rootless so I can install modern bash 4.3 in /bin/bash, so that scripts that have #/bin/bash continue to work unmodified.

Apple will most likely never update their bash to GPL 3.0 bash 4 or later.

<comment><USER5> You can set your shell per user in /etc/passwd (or similar, can't remember the name)

<comment><USER4> It's easy to change your default shell, but if you got a shell script that explicitly specifies #!/bin/sh (and they all do) then /bin/sh will be invoked, regardless what your default shell is. So your options are to modify every script file to invoke your default shell (usually #!/usr/local/bin/sh ) or to install your default shell in /bin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone find a secret command line 'default' setting to change how Mission Control / Spaces works so it shows the previews without having to go to the top of the screen?

<comment><USER7> I hate this change too, but I believe this was done to improve the frame rates. 10.11 finally has smooth Mission control animations on a retina display, even when a lot of apps are up and running, which is great.

I don't see any other reason why they would hide this from showing up by default.

<comment><USER8> If you use you display in some Scaled mode it could be the culprit of low framerate as it then runs at something like 3k by 2k resolution which is then downscaled to your selection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anybody else cringe when clicking on os update announcements wondering what the heck they are going to break in the next release? Are they going to add DRM? Telemetry? Remove Key features? Make disk encryption less secure? Make it harder to install non-appstore apps? It just feels like technology is going backwards with each new release of os software.

<comment><USER10> There cannot possibly enough friction between an end-user and the video player they just downloaded from a porn site. There is absolutely no reason for every piece of software you run to have access to your entire filesystem except that we didn't know better 30 years ago.

As long as there's a sensible override system that lets users make informed decisions about trust, I can't wait for OSX to converge on the iOS sandboxing model

FWIW, FileVault has been getting better, and recent versions have come with other security fixes like defeating Thunderbolt DMA attacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To anyone trying to install the GM while running a OS X dev build: [https://neosmart.net/blog/2015/upgrade-to-os-x-el-capitan- gm...](https://neosmart.net/blog/2015/upgrade-to-os-x-el-capitan-gm-from-a- dev-seed/)

You'll need the whole 6 GiB download, there's (currently) no delta upgrade available. It also doesn't seem there will be, based off of the note from Apple (see link).

<comment><USER12> ya i just went from 5-> GM, which worked out for me because stupid 6 update always failed to install.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those wondering about `rootless`, it is implemented as an extended attribute on files/directories.

$ xattr /usr

com.apple.FinderInfo

com.apple.rootless

Running `sudo rm -rf /usr` fails.

$ sudo rm -rf /usr

rm: /usr: Operation not permitted

Here is a list of all of the `rootless` files and directories on my system. It appears to be mostly kext files, and Apple applications.

[https://gist.github.com/bobbyburden/4ce5c42044e5a9967b25](https://gist.github.com/bobbyburden/4ce5c42044e5a9967b25)

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure that rootless is a good thing. I've seen Macs bricked by seemingly harmless operations like changing important permission settings, or by damaged installer packages.

Locking the system down will make it a bit harder to shoot yourself in the foot. Besides the obvious advantage of reducing the attack surface of vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER4> That won't brick your OS X installation. Just boot from external drive and fix the permissions. It's not really that hard, and there is even a recovery partition exactly for problems like that.

<comment><USER14> Yep, the recovery partition is also a pretty great feature. But it's even better if you never need it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some questions for testers:

\- Does homebrew still work?

\- Does this fix the mdnsresponder stuff if you had WiFi probs with Yosemite? I've heard they removed mdnsresponder in recent Yosemite updates but I still haven't got WiFi working as reliably as 10.9.

\- Is it true there's no more OpenSSL binary out of the box?

<comment><USER16> If the upgrade process from 10.9 to 10.10 regarding homebrew is the same I'd disable and remove homebrew before upgrading. It made the upgrade process come to a complete crawl.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've looking at [https://www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan- preview/](https://www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan-preview/), and I can't see one thing that looks interesting to me. Is there anything exciting, for a developer type, that they are excluding?

<comment><USER18> Most important change for me: speed. The performance improvements in El Capitan are absolutely amazing compared to the disaster Yosemite is.

<comment><USER19> This sounds absolutely great, hope it's the same for me (haven't tried El Capitan yet)! On a rMBP with integrated graphics, moving from Mavericks to Yosemite made everything noticeably more sluggish, and everytime I happened to use Mavericks after that, I was struck by how responsive it was.

<comment><USER20> I have stayed on Mavericks for this reason. I likely will move to El Capitan, but I'll wait until the release and see what people say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> matthew-wegner As an FYI, Apple typically releases multiple GM candidates before a final OS X release. (I think it was three each for Yosemite and Mavericks, although it's surprisingly hard to find a comprehensive list of builds).

<comment><USER21> If memory serves GMs are normally a one and done thing. It may be buggy and inadvisable (wait for 10.x.1), but the GM normally ships more or less unchanged.

<comment><USER22> Historically GM's were pretty rock solid. Not anymore. Apple is now like everyone else -- release early/often.

<comment><USER23> More an effect than a cause. When it was hard to convince people to update, and an automatically-updating OS was scary, and pipes were too small to download big patches, then you had to get it right the first time. Nowadays, as long as the OS works well-enough out of the box to suck down the newest point release, all is well from the end-user's perspective. Except maybe there's some weird out-of-box bugs until they've let their computer sit around for a few hours and restarted it once.

<comment><USER20> That sounds like an excuse.

I think the goal should always be to ship as bug free as possible. Having the mindset that you can push bug fixes later is just pure laziness.

<comment><USER23> There are other things than laziness that push the scale toward shipping bugs. In Apple's case, there's the fact that they only have so many OS engineers, and those engineers _have_ to ship new code with each release, to, for example, create drivers and expose APIs to enable software to take advantage of new hardware features. Bugs are strictly less important to solve than making sure that everything shown in the keynote—every feature that sells the new computers each year—actually works on release.

The real problem is the yearly release cadence. Apple's hardware pipeline is maybe _too_ good—it's not giving the software engineers enough time to polish the software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> User focused question: will this seamlessly upgrade to the release stream when installed?

<comment><USER25> I believe in the past, it was not the case. I remember once I downloaded the GM and a day later there was a new one. I went to software update and there were no pending changes. I had to wipe/start over.

<comment><USER26> With the 10.9 first GM you couldn't update to the second GM, but updating to 10.9.1 worked fine.

<comment><USER24> How can you be certain that the result was identical?

<comment><USER27> Because science. Also deltas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Did anyone else here have this issue with Dropbox & Finder in Yosemite where newly added files in Dropbox show up in terminal, but not in Finder. And to force finder to refresh, you need to use a workaround like creating a temporary folder and deleting it? [1]

If you did, then do you still see this issue in El Capitan? I may be willing to upgrade to the GM if this issues gets resolved.

[1] [https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en- us/community/posts/201166...](https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en- us/community/posts/201166919-New-files-don-t-show-up-in-Finder-MacOS- Yosemite-)

</comment><comment><USER29> Can anyone comment if the GM fixes the battery problems Beta 1 had? I was on the first beta awhile back, and my 2012 rMBP got about an hour battery life (I usually get closer to ~3-4) and was always hot to the touch.

The same thing happened to me with Mavericks, so I chalked it up to Apple not optimizing the early betas for battery life.

<comment><USER30> I'm on DP 8 on a 2015 rMP, Sitting reading documents and playing music in iTunes without doing too much I get around 11 hours battery life, with moderate use of git, sublime text 3 and some Firefox (Nightly) I get between 5-7 hours depending on how much I use Firefox which is the main battery killer.

<comment><USER29> Excellent! I guess now is the time for me to finally make the move over to El Capitan, since your usage seems pretty similar to mine. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Am I the only one whose Mail.app chose to re-download every message in GMail and mark it unread?

<comment><USER32> Nope, same here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just upgraded. Too early to say, but so far everything works except Little Snitch.

<comment><USER30> Install the nightly build, it works :)

<comment><USER34> Does it work with System Integrity IForgetTheName turned on?

I've been trying to keep tabs on what does/doesn't break w/ that addition (totalspaces/totalfinder appear to be having a rough time, for instance), trying to hunt the Little Snitch forums now

<comment><USER30> Yes, it works on stock El Cap

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does it appear as an App Store update to anyone running the latest dev build?

I redeemed my copy but it indicated I should update from the Updates page rather than downloading the full package, however the updates page is empty.

<comment><USER36> It's listed as "OS X El Capitan GM Candidate" under the Purchases tab. Full 6 GB download like the final release will be for users coming from Yosemite, rather than an incremental update on top of the beta.

Unless I'm missing something, anyway.

<comment><USER30> It shows up there as 'Downloaded' for me, but it hasn't actually downloaded anything. [http://i.imgur.com/dumxAMQ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/dumxAMQ.jpg)

<comment><USER37> Me too MrMondo :<

Did you manage to get round this & force the install?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> PSA: Do not upgrade to El Capitan if you use Outlook 2011. It's completely broken right now with no fix that I can find.

However, on the plus side, they have upgraded openssh to have ed25519 support. Yay.

</comment><comment><USER39> Hi, Im new to macs and OS X so can anyone please tell me, whether the El capitan GM will wipe out my mac if Im running El Capitan beta? Or is it safe like any other beta udate?

<comment><USER40> Whilst there's always a hypothetical risk, the installer should simply overlay the GM on top - you'll keep all your settings, documents, and other data, with only the OS being updated, just as with any other update.

The installer does recommend having a fresh Time Machine backup available. Just kick one off manually and let that complete, then proceed with the update, so if anything should go awry, you can recover from it easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> GM Candidate, what does it mean?

Is this a new beta version or final?

<comment><USER42> Golden master candidate, which means that, barring the discovery of a horrendous bug, this will be what ships. So, known bugs, however impactful, will not stop the release.

Shipping a second or third GM candidate is not unheard of. See for example [http://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/09/third-yosemite-golden- ma...](http://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/09/third-yosemite-golden-master- candidate/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Anyone know if it's possible to disable Intel turboboost or having the same "Power Options" like Windows has for years?

</comment><comment><USER44> Anyone know if the Heroku Toolbelt issues still exist?

<comment><USER45> the toolbelt should be working under el capitan

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> What's the difference between OS X El Capitan Beta and Candidate? Do we get other perks that other won't when the final Version is out?

<comment><USER47> The perk of a beta is getting to try it first. The purpose of a beta is for Apple to get test-users that are willing to provide feedback that they can use to perfect the official release of the final version. The final version is the only one that is going to have all the 'perks'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> *Edit: Fixed my issue trying to get the latest download, I had to clear the software update catalogue as so: `sudo softwareupdate –clear-catalog`

Still waiting for Apple to approve my new developer account, A direct link to the download would be appreciated.

I have been running the developer and public beta's since they were released, right from beta 1 I found it more stable and 'faster' than Yosemite which my team has had endless problems with beach balls, crashes etc... We were thinking that Apple had given up on OS-X and were almost entirely focusing on iOS development but with our experiences running and developing on El Capitan I truly believe we were wrong - it reminds me of how fast and reliable OS-X 3-4 years ago much to my (our) relief.

<comment><USER36> App Store > Purchases tab > OS X El Capitan GM Candidate > Download

<comment><USER30> As I said: "Still waiting for Apple to approve my new developer account, A direct link to the download would be appreciated."

Generally once a GM has been released and a download is available the .dmg installer is available if not from Apple's website, from application download or update cache after installing it from the app store.

<comment><USER36> OS X beta doesn't require a developer account, you can enroll in the Apple Beta Software Program with any Apple ID. I don't have a developer account and got beta access very quickly.

[https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/welcome](https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/welcome)

<comment><USER30> Hey thanks for the link, I didn't realise it was available for the Public as well as the Developer betas, I managed to get it to download by clearing the software update catalog as so: `sudo softwareupdate –clear-catalog`

<comment><USER36> You're welcome!

iOS 9 beta is devs only, so I'm stuck waiting for that one. El Cap has been very stable for me though!

<comment><USER48> iOS 9 has a public beta too, it's different from the dev betas though and has no GM.

<comment><USER36> Just looked again and found it a few minutes ago! Beta is installing.

Along with Xcode 7, which you would think would be on the Apple Beta Software Program page, but isn't.

<comment><USER49> Xcode betas are now made publicly available. I don't think you even need an Apple ID anymore.

<comment><USER36> Yeah, I found that too. I was just thinking "now that I stopped being a dumbass and found that the iOS beta right there, I bet the Xcode betas are in the same place." Nope!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple's all-new iCloud for Windows app, now available in the Microsoft Store - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/06/11/apples-all-new-icloud-for-windows-app-now-available-in-the-microsoft-store/#PZXjypcj2zrrYcxi.97 <comment><USER2> Dear Apple: _please_ make an iMessage client for Windows/Linux/web users. I find it really inconvenient that, unlike other iCloud services, I can't get to my iMessages from my other devices.

<comment><USER3> Would that be a spam vector, though?

<comment><USER4> Maybe. But I think if it required an iMessage account with an authenticated iPhone, it wouldn't be much of a problem.

Still not a perfect solution, but AFAIK, it's also possible to pass iMessage authentication with a hackintosh. So the same spam vector is technically still open, albeit with a bit more work.

<comment><USER5> > Possible to pass iMessage authentication with a hackintosh

Hackintosh user here, you can get iMessage working but it takes some effort. You have to choose a serial number that seems plausible to Apple given other information, and then also hope you get a bit lucky.

I really don't think this would be a useful outlet for a spammer trying to set up iMessage accounts en messe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like I'll be ending my dropbox subscription then. I only use like 18gb on dropbox so the $0.99 / month for 50gb iCloud plan is perfect for me.

<comment><USER7> Well, Jobs warned Dropbox years ago that they aren't a product they are a feature.

[https://www.cultofmac.com/124556/dropbox-refused-nine- digit-...](https://www.cultofmac.com/124556/dropbox-refused-nine-digit-offer- from-steve-jobs-and-apple-report/)

I can pay $100 a year for Office 365 which includes all of the Office apps and 6TB of storage or pay the same price for just Dropbox.

And like you said, I'm fine with 50GB of storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I keep holding my breath for a linux client, but so far no dice.

<comment><USER9> I did a ghetto solution that syncs my iCloud Drive to my linux box:

1- Install SyncThing on both your Mac and Linux box.

2- Point Mac client to ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs

3- Optional, for extra privacy run your own discovery/relay server.

4- Enjoy iCloud Drive on Linux.

You could push it much further by running the native app in a Windows VM and sync more than just your files.

<comment><USER10> > Point Mac client to ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs

I forgot where I saw this (a tweet?) but iCloud Drive may have moved in Catalina. It should only be a matter of pointing SyncThing to the new location, but it's something to be aware of to keep your solution working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who would have thought that Apple would be releasing software for Windows in the Windows Store that from the looks of it is pretty good - better than iTunes? Also, who would have thought that the announcement would be on the official windows blog?

<comment><USER11> I'm wondering what my 17-year-old self would have thought...

May you live in interesting times.

<comment><USER12> Apple still jests a little at Microsoft with the photo at the top of [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204301](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204301) (a really chunky old Windows machine next to a nice new iPhone and iPad). Still, a step in the right direction for both parties.

<comment><USER13> Maybe, but most people buy windows laptops that look like that - or worse. The cool good-looking laptops are usually more expensive while not really doing anything extra that the customer would want.

<comment><USER14> You mean laptops that can be serviced without a heat gun? Where's the problem?

<comment><USER13> I don't think that is a factor the general consumer can even dream up. People rather 'consume' a laptop and then throw it away after a few years. It's why there are so many low-end models sold and why so many manufacturers make them (usually based on the same blueprint from the CPU manufacturer + laptop design from the likes of Compal or Foxconn, nobody wants to waste money on designing those internally).

At the same time, the use case where manual 'servicing' of a laptop was more relevant has mostly passed. This came about because of post-imaging-once lifecycle management in the business sectors (which isn't universal just yet...) combined with the cattle vs. pets approach when it comes to business laptops. A lot of personal use has moved to mobile devices and clouds, making the laptop less and less of a special thing to be preserved.

To me, this all is a bit sad and wasteful, if we were to make it easier to swap out modules while keeping the form factor, that would be a good thing. But that costs money, and unless the mass market sees a use in it, they are not going to pay for it.

<comment><USER7> During the spinning hard drive -> SSD transition, a lot of old laptops had their lifetimes increased by replacing the hard drives. I don't see an easy increase like that in the future. True, you can't replace the battery yourself and you have to pay the markup to getting it replaced and you have to max out the RAM from day one, but RAM prices have been relatively stable for years. It wasn't like back in the day when RAM prices fluctuated by 30-50%.

<comment><USER13> Makes sense. I have to say I haven't had the need to upgrade any laptop for the last few years. Probably since 2015 or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can someone with experience using iCloud for family photo management pitch me on it? My devices are two iPhones, one MacBook, a Windows 10 laptop, and two occasionally-used digital cameras. So I feel like this might be a good fit, but it's also a problem a lot of companies have tried to crack and failed at. I'm a little nervous about vendor lock-in, for example not having a good story for a future Android phone, but potentially willing to pay that price if the cost and features are otherwise right.

If you use and like iCloud for photo management between multiple people, how is it?

<comment><USER16> I'd tried to make iCloud work in a shared setup and gave up after several libraries decided to corrupt themselves.

PhotoStructure is designed exactly with this sort of heterogenous family setup in mind.

My wife uses a Chromebook and MBP, I'm on Ubuntu, Windows and macOS, we have a NAS, and we can mount the library directly with CIFS/samba/AFS/NFS, or use the PhotoStructure web interface that's hosted by any of the computers that are running.

Photos and videos get to the NAS via SyncThing or Resilio Sync. Duplicate and downsampled files (like via Google photos) are handled gracefully by PhotoStructure's sync process.

Most importantly, I retain control of my own files.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of PhotoStructure, and I'm eager to get user feedback during the closed beta. More info on my HN profile.

<comment><USER17> Just signed up and so excited. I need a solution so badly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Excellent, I like that both platforms are working together doing the right thing for consumers.

A little off topic, but I also wish that GCP, Azure, and AWS would cooperate by having a few data centers collocated with very low bandwidth costs to make multi-cloud easier and cheaper. That would really put the consumer first.

And as long as I am wishing for things that probably won't happen: I wish Apple would support custom email domains for a low cost (perhaps a few dollars a month).

</comment><comment><USER19> This shouldn't be a surprise. If you want to be a services company, you need to be where the users are. And any place you are not, you limit your users.

<comment><USER20> I wonder if this means iMessage will be coming to Android and other mobile OS?

<comment><USER21> Doubtful, Apple seems to want to keep iMessage as an iOS/MacOS exclusive as part of their moat to bring people into the full ecosystem.

iCloud was accessible through the web browser before this app was available.

<comment><USER22> The "app" (aka iCloud Control Panel) was available at iCloud launch, that is alongside the web apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The iCloud for Windows app has been around for _years_ : the earliest I can find an article on it is 2014. [https://www.pcworld.com/article/2686017/apple- releases-iclou...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/2686017/apple-releases- icloud-drive-for-windows-pcs.html)

This is likely an update for deeper compatibility.

<comment><USER24> By "all-new" it means that this is a major rewrite, not that there has never been any support for Windows. I might just switch back to iCloud--I am about to get a Mac mini and it would greatly increase convenience with my iPhone, but I still need a decent client for my Windows laptop.

It must be using a brand-new API, because I just installed v1903 and I still had to install an update to be able to install it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Even better than dealing with the Microsoft Store is to download it directly from Apple's servers: [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204283](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283)

<comment><USER26> I'm curious about the upgrade path for folks who have been using the existing iCloud for Windows. Is the Microsoft Store version somehow different than the version Apple offers on their site? What's involved with moving to the newer version?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hope they also can fix the Your Phone app also working with iOS, not just Android.

<comment><USER28> That is more of a platform limitation from my understanding, sort of like complaining that the x button to close the window is not on the left in this app.

<comment><USER29> Not just a platform limitation; an _intentional_ one. The API surface that Your Phone takes advantage of on Android, has no equivalent on iOS, because those particular APIs would essentially be used by 1. sync frameworks like Your Phone; 2. spyware; and nothing else. (That's what happens on Android!) And, in Apple's opinion, allowing #1 isn't really worth allowing #2.

<comment><USER28> Intentional or not, it is just a platform limitation. If Apple really cared, it isn't impossible to have user verify what an app is requesting should be granted. Infact, Apple caught up with Android on having App permissions.

Google's implementation isn't perfect, but they're not the role model for privacy anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This iCloud app doesn't look new, unless I'm missing something, it just appears to be available in the Microsoft Store now?

<comment><USER7> iCloud Drive looks like it takes better advantage of MS's syncing APIs and lets you download files on demand more like every other modern equivalent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think this may have been part of a deal where Microsoft agreed to put Office on the Apple store...

</comment><comment><USER32> I wasn't totally paying attention to the last WWDC news:

Is this part of a bigger strategy? Will there also be an Andriod version of Photos?

I can't find anything and am not holding my breath, but it would be so compelling for many scenarios. As an apple fanboy I frequently am using third- party apps to share photos with relatives and colleagues who aren't on the platform.

<comment><USER33> I would say its definitely part of a bigger strategy. Simply put, now that Apple is focused on being a Services company over a Hardware company, it doesn't make financial sense to limit its availability to only Apple device users.

I don't doubt for a second that they will make the services behave in a way to drive users towards adopting their hardware too - such as gating certain functionalities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I love that my iOS devices backup to iCloud.

I really wish iCloud would support macOS (Time Machine) too.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this just because win32 apps are not hostable in the MS Store?

</comment><comment><USER35> This joins OneDrive in offering onDemand files as standard. While Dropbox and Google Drive keep them behind paywalls.</comment>


Will wasm defeat adblockers? - <AUTHOR> If web assembly can render angrybots i dont see why it cant render the nyt...and i think it would be hard to adblock such a setup. <comment><USER2> a wasm client still has to do HTTP requests to fetch ads. These can be blocked at the network level.</comment>


KiwiDocs  – The open-source documentation system - <AUTHOR> https://kiwidocs.js.org <comment><USER2> I just looked at the documentation, which is "Powered by KiwiDocs" and it´s extremely slow, a few seconds "Loading"</comment>


Coinbase Support on Hacked Accounts - <AUTHOR> So last night at 9:30 I got an email saying my 2FA was changed, I used SMS. Stupid, I know, I had set up GA but it was still defaulting to the SMS. Anyway, whilst freaking out for a few hrs, I tried to log in and saw the phone number had changed for 2FA. Not long after that, I got another email from Coinbase saying the original email was sent in error.
Now, I am still locked out of my account with no way to tell if it is actually hacked. I have sent emails to Coinbase Support with title of hacked account with literal 0 response.
For a company that wants to value themselves at a billion dollars, not having real support, especially not having even a phone number is ridiculous.
Coinbase promotes themselves as being the way for the common man to get into BTC, I have been involved in the BTC/Cryptocurrency world for a while and so far, from my recent experience coinbase is the not the best entry point for anyone, let alone the common man. <comment><USER2> Can you msg me at andhoang18 [at] gmail.com? Coinbase employee, might be able to help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, sent you a note. Any help would be very much appreciated. The support team keeps telling me to just create a new account.

<comment><USER2> Thnx, will DM.</comment></comment></comment>


A Common Derivation for Markov Chain Monte Carlo Algorithms [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.01985 <comment><USER3> Oh, I'd actually found this approach searching a while back.

It frames all Markov Chain Monte Carlo as a variation of slice sample. I like it because it makes the process fairly simple but I have tried to implement it yet.

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

<comment><USER4> Another way to look at this: slice sampling is analogous to taking the Lebesgue integral rather than the Riemann integral (we sum small horizontal strips rather than vertical bars).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting seeing how a community codifies the nomenclature and the formalization of the various things that it has stolen/borrowed/reinvented from other communities.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a very simple example of what MCMC does and how it can be useful:

\- Let's say I offer to play a game with you, where you take an unbiased coin, flip it a thousand times, then we take the number of heads (H) and subtract it from the number of tails (T), and I pay you $|(H-T)|. So if there are 520 heads and 480 tails, I'll owe you $40, but if it were reversed, you'd owe me nothing. How much would you be willing to pay to play this game with me, i.e. what's the expected value of this game?

\- One simple approach would be to simulate the entire game many times to estimate the payoff, which is 'vanilla' Monte Carlo simulation. We can do it like this:

      import random
      def flip():
        # 1 or -1
        return random.randint(0, 1) * 2 - <USER2>

      numDraws = 1000
      numFlips = 1000
      totalPayoff = 0;
      for i in range(numDraws):
        totalPayoff += abs(sum(flip() for _ in range(numFlips)))

      print('$' + str(round(totalPayoff / numDraws, 2))) # around $24

The more simulations we run, the more accurate our result will be, but we need to run a full thousand flips for every attempt, so the time complexity is O(flips * tries). What if the game had 10k or 100k flips instead of 1k?

This is the problem that MCMC solves: finding an efficient way to draw more samples of a process, where each independent draw is hard to calculate. For this problem, note that:

1\. If you start with a set of 1000 coins that are randomly initialized, and you just keep picking up at random and flipping it from its current configuration, after you flip it enough times, the equilibrium distribution of the result will match the expected distribution of the coins after 1000 flips in our original game.

2\. This means if you just keep randomly picking up a coin and flipping it, then recording the payoff that _you would have gotten_ had that been the thousandth flip, once you average all those payoffs, you'll also have an estimate of payoff.

In code:

      numSteps = 1000 * 30
      numFlips = 1000
      totalPayoff = 0;

      # initialize our coins
      coins = [0] * numFlips
      for i in range(numFlips):
        coins[i] = flip() # 1 or -1

      currentTotal = sum(coins)
      totalPayoff = 0;
      for i in range(numSteps):
        coinToFlip = random.randrange(numFlips)
        coins[coinToFlip] *= -1
        currentTotal += 2 if (coins[coinToFlip] is 1) else -2
        totalPayoff += abs(currentTotal)

      print('$' + str(round(totalPayoff / numSteps, 2))) # Also ~$24

Now we've gotten the time complexity down to O(numSteps), regardless of the number of coins that we're flipping. Now the question is: how does O(steps) relate to O(numTries * numFlips)? It turns out with a bit of math, that we can show that for a similar amount of accuracy, steps ~ tries * sqrt(flips), so here we save a sqrt(numFlips) factor (one can also find tighter bounds). For very long games, this can be a substantial speed improvement.

This is the essence of MCMC: when it's expensive to take independent draws of a space, we can instead take a random walk around _once_ instance of the space and still get a reasonable answer. A lot of the details of MCMC revolve around 1) how do I walk around the space and 2) how many steps must I take so I know the answer is reasonable?

* For this toy problem, there is actually a simple closed-form solution for the probability so there's no need to simulate, but for more complicated processes numerical simulation is often the best option available for getting a number

<comment><USER6> > This is the essence of MCMC: when it's expensive to take independent draws > of a space, we can instead ...

I disagree. The essence of MCMC is that it's a clever MC scheme that defeats the curse of dimensionality by using an adaptive importance sampling method. In this method, you use information from the current sample to help draw a better new sample, or at least not a much worse one. This way, even if you start form a place far away from the region of interest, you end up in that region; the trade-off is that the samples are obviously not independent anymore. In very high dimensional spaces the region of interest is always very tiny compared to the vastness of the space (that's the "curse of dimensionality"), so even when it's very cheap to draw samples, you would be hopeless without an importance sampling scheme.

<comment><USER4> > by using an adaptive importance sampling method

Although not all MCMC schemes actually do this, e.g. naive Gibbs (re)sampling just sweeps through the domain spaces iteratively.

You're right though MCMC enables you to do this relatively easily. Still requires some work if to get this right, especially if your integrand has multiple 'spikes'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was posted on here 2 years ago but didn't get any comments.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286521)

</comment><comment><USER8> Incomprehensible LaTeX soup IMO. What value does this paper afford one of us "hackers"? It would take me weeks to digest this to only find it was a bunch of bullshit talking in circles over exceptionally pedantic topics that have no real world applications.

<comment><USER9> For many researchers MCMC is described in very specific terms very differently in many places. This paper offers a single view of how to understand the idea and how you can use it to derive specializations for your field. Of course if you have no interest in mathematics, just move on. Nothing about being a good hacker means being abrupt and unwilling to dive deep in the necessary tools for a job. I for one am glad to see a paper like this and know I can start from here to build my own sampler for a complex system for which there is otherwise no software to efficiently sample. The hacker spirit is curious and open minded, but moves fast. If it's not a tool for you that doesn't mean it can't help thousands of others gain real insight into a difficult subject.</comment></comment>


The Importance of Saying "Oops" - <AUTHOR> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/the-importance-.html

<comment><USER2> Great article. A good % of the things I regret are situations where I wasted time/energy defending something I knew to be wrong, simply to hide the fact that I was wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not all progress must come from mistakes. He seems to equate the two. Big changes do not necessarily come from fixing big mistakes. They can come from recognizing new opportunities as well.

<comment><USER4> indeed. though opportunities often come from mistakes or negligence of others.</comment></comment>


VirginTech: Ignore Chat messages link with heysan.com - <AUTHOR> http://virgintech.blogspot.com/2008/11/ignore-chat-messages-link-with.html <comment><AUTHOR> "Person-I-know has uploaded your photo. Click on the link <http://i.heysan.com/YEyw4Sy4> to see it!"

Say it ain't so Heysans.

<comment><USER2> heres another one saying that a friend wants to battle you on heysan. lol battle you???

[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_c0e2zFuzsT0/SRmwOubakEI/AAAAAAAAAF...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_c0e2zFuzsT0/SRmwOubakEI/AAAAAAAAAFw/JZnmUuiR5RA/s1600-h/heysan_chat.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> kaspersky internet security blocking heysan.com: <http://www.pix89.com/images/44pxiihgu16vahufvqop.jpg>

Mozilla blocking heysan gtalk log in: <http://i36.tinypic.com/2iuccgg.png>

</comment><comment><USER3> "This messages are because of vulnerability in Heysan.com."

<comment><AUTHOR> Vulnerabilities don't advertise the infected app. They advertise penis enlargement pills. Why would some user who discovered a Heysan vulnerability use it to trick people into using Heysan?

I'm hoping this article is just inaccurate, or outright fallacious. Or Heysan really does let people upload photos of their friends or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yah this is because of vulnerability in their website, its a web messenger website just like meebo, but this vulnerable can cause serious problem to major website Im user like Google and yahoo!!</comment>


BBM's appearance of being a closed, private network is an illusion - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/08/as-a-species-we-are.html <comment><USER2> Subject is interesting enough, but the article is very light on substance. Not upvoted.</comment>


WSJ Responds to Safehouse Security and Anonymity - <AUTHOR> http://www.dowjones.com/pressroom/presskits/safehouse.asp

<comment><USER2> Given who we're talking about here (WSJ, thus New Corp), there's nothing they could possibly say that would make me trust their statement that sources are safe and anonymous. I mean, how many times did Fox News call WikiLeaks a terrorist organization? And now this conglomerate wants its own WikiLeaks? It simply doesn't add up. They cannot and should not be trusted.

<comment><USER3> You don't trust them. Either the technology _you_ are using is anonymous or it is not. It shouldn't matter who is on the other end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Because there is no way to predict the breadth of information that might be submitted through SafeHouse, the terms of use reserve certain rights in order to provide flexibility to react to extraordinary circumstances. But as always, our number one priority is protecting our sources."

Define: certain rights Define: flexibility Define: extraordinary circumstances

This is less of a response and more of a reiteration. It completely belies the intended purpose of SafeHouse. No leaker with half a brain would leak something _worth leaking_ to this as long as that clause exists, period.

</comment><comment><USER5> they stated it absolutely honestly and clear :

"we are committed to protecting them [sources] to the fullest extent possible under the law."

i.e. when the law come and say "give them to me", they would give. Though i don't think it is that relevant as that seems to be just a nice Honeypot.

</comment><comment><USER6> We built Spottiness also to uncover fraud, abuse, and other wrongdoing. In Spottiness, anonymity is not an option: it is required. The site is new and hasn't taken off yet, but we are optimistic about its possible impact.

</comment><comment><USER7> Leaking things to Murdoch?

Hell no!

PS: I think it's pretty clear who will be "leaking" things there: Lobbyists and PR firms who want to further insulate their wholly aware paymasters from accountability.

</comment><comment><USER8> They spelled "breath" wrong... /grammarnazi</comment>


Ask HN: How can I make sure no one will steal my work on Github? - <AUTHOR>

I've finally decided I need to publish some of my past projects on Github to show off my work to potential employers. But how can I make sure that no one else will steal it and claim it as their own work?<p>I'm going to add a license to it, I just haven't looked into the right one, but if I make it a public repository on Github then how can I prevent someone from copy-pasting the code and claiming they wrote it? <comment><USER2> GitHub is a source for Open Source, be sure to protect your creation with an appropriate Open Source licence such as GPL, LGPL, Apache, MIT or CC. If someone claims your product as his own, you have the licence to back your work.

Just be sure you don't have client sensitive information or anything that might break a NDA

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're worried about someone "stealing" your code, then GitHub might not be the right place for you.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can't, but you can show prior work. When you put something on Github it gets timestamped.</comment>


ISS crew successfully capture SpaceX Dragon Capsule (06:56 EST) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html#hn <comment><USER2> Sadly, there was one mission casualty as a result of the "deconstructed" engine:

"Unfortunately, the engine malfunction placed the Falcon 9 upper stage in a slightly different approach to the International Space Station. That new approach caused the stage to violate a set of conditions known as a "safety gate"; there was no way the satellite could ascend to its intended 350km x 750km orbit without crossing the ISS orbit, and no time to check to make sure that no collision would occur. The second stage's flight control software automatically cancelled its second burn, leaving the satellite in a much lower (203km x 323km) orbit than intended. Engineers from Orbcomm and Sierra Nevada Corporation, the manufacturer, are deciding what can be done, and both SpaceX and Orbcomm are being noticeably cagey about their press releases."[1]

That said, it's impressive that they were able to make the proper adjustments and still complete the main objective. I wonder if they can bring the satellite back down, or if the fuels[2] used in the satellite prevent its return.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/spacex-dragon- capsule...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/spacex-dragon-capsule- docks-with-space-station/) [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine#Hazards>

<comment><USER3> > I wonder if they can bring the satellite back down, or if the fuels[2] used > in the satellite prevent its return.

They can't but not because of the fuels. It's because the Dragon capsule is the only part of the whole launch stack that can re-enter intact, and it's a payload to the rocket. Ther Orbcomm sat is also a payload, but a secondary one. They both get put into their correct orbits (in theory) by the disposable Falcon Upper Stage. There's no way for that Falcon Upper stage to bring anything back, it is just allowed to burn up after it's been used.

<comment><USER2> You're right - I had forgotten that only the small nose cone portion of the dragon is capable of re-entry, and only has 10 M³ space available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> OH yeah! I successfully got my girls ready and off to school on time this morning. I'd like to see the ISS crew pull that off!

<comment><USER5> Imagine how much easier that would be if you had a robotic arm.

<comment><USER6> "Better get ready quickly girls, or else it's ... _the arm_..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The scale and precision of this maneuver is mind-boggling. Anyone want to try for themselves, I can recommend the amazing Kerbal Space Program (0).

I just yesterday watched episode #38 (1) of kurtjmac's Let's Play where he attempts an orbital rendezvous and barely manages to get the spacecrafts within 700 meters of each other before they drift off again.

(0) <http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/>

(1) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOTMHEAP050&list=EL4fj56n...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOTMHEAP050&list=EL4fj56nWTSV8&index=38&feature=plpp_video)

</comment><comment><USER8> Watching it live. This is great news for the private space industry! Looking forward to my retirement on the Moon in 50 yrs.

<comment><USER9> I'm looking forward to starting a whaling company on the moon.

<comment><USER10> I think a moisture farm would be more profitable.

<comment><USER11> Do you speak Bocce?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Smooth as butter and ahead of schedule. And all while losing an engine on the way up. So far they're setting a pretty damned good example.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> NASA TV screencap: <http://imgur.com/LKrBd>

</comment><comment><USER13> EDT not EST

</comment><comment><USER14> The SpaceX webcast has a great video of the whole process, as well as some good stills:

<http://www.spacex.com/webcast/>

Watching the video gave me a massive appreciation for what these guys are able to do. I work on a software project where we have trouble getting our builds to pass reliably, so I can't imagine what kind of teamwork and high caliber people it takes to pull something like this off :)

</comment><comment><USER15> 2012 has been an awesome year. UK based here so the Olympics were a high point (despite beforehand being fairly against the "waste" of money - i was wrong).

This is seriously cool.

I keep mixing up Eben Moglen and Elon Musk, am i alone?</comment>


The plane that can fly backwards - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150415-the-plane-that-can-fly-backwards <comment><USER3> There was an An-2 giving air tours at the Luftfahrtmuseum Finowfurt, where the last two Chaos Communication Camps were held. (Unfortunately the Camp will have to move to another location this year.)

I took one of those tours in 2007 and it was a pretty different experience from other planes in terms of the extreme maneuverability. What I most remember is that the pilot didn't really bother to approach the runway. Instead, he just flew toward the airport. When we got to the airport, he just sort of hung a quick left onto the runway and landed. It felt almost like taking a turn in a car!

As the An-2's stall speed is considerably slower than freeway traffic, we might actually have been going at about the speed of a car at that point.

<comment><USER4> > As the An-2's stall speed is considerably slower than freeway traffic, we > might actually have been going at about the speed of a car at that point.

Depending where you live, other planes have stall speeds considerably slower than freeway traffic (a Cessna has a stall speed of 50mph/80kmh), the An2 is in the range of _urban speed limits_ (the article and wikipedia both quote pilots reporting full control at 30mph/50kmh airspeed).

Interestingly, it doesn't even trade maximum speed for being unstallable.

<comment><USER5> _> Interestingly, it doesn't even trade maximum speed for being unstallable._

Depends on how you interpret it. The bi-plane design _does_ impose quite a drag at higher speeds. There has been research into making the design faster, so far, that meant getting rid of the lower wings.

On the other hand, the designer never intended her to go fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I flew a Cessna 152 "backwards" during my checkride. Any airplane can fly backwards relative to the ground given sufficient wind. What is impressive about the An-2 is its super-slow stall speed (the minimum airspeed necessary for flight).

From Wikipedia: "The An-2 indeed has no stall speed quoted in the operating handbook. Pilots of the An-2 say one can fly the aircraft in full control at 30 mph (as a contrast, a modern Cessna four-seater light aircraft has a stall speed of around 50 mph)."

</comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't really "fly backwards". Well, it does, but not like you would think. It can get to some pretty low speed without stalling, so you can position it in such a way that the wind will push you backward.

Edit: Seagulls do this too!

<comment><USER8> Yep, the forward airspeed needed to generate lift is relative to the aircraft, not to the ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The AN-2 is the Ak-47 of airplanes: extremely durable, well designed, heavily mass produced and found all over the world.

They are also dirt cheap to buy ($20 - 30K) but they burn A LOT of fuel.

I'd always day-dreamed about getting one but I can't imagine it's practical.

<comment><USER5> _> They are also dirt cheap to buy ($20 - 30K) but they burn A LOT of fuel._

She does. However, given a well-maintained engine, and 10 to 12 passengers, cars are _easily_ rivaled, and given favourable conditions, even undercut. We did the math, briefly said, the plane has a higher cruise speed, and can fly in a straight line between destination, etc. pp.

 _> I'd always day-dreamed about getting one but I can't imagine it's practical._

Well...I co-own one with some other crazy blokes. While a 3.5-ton dry mass can't be put into the bike rack in front of your house, it hardly affects your daily life. I.e. she's next-to-none more inconvenient than owning a small Cessna or the like.

Edit: Judging from your user name, there's a different story though. From what I've heard, the U.S./FAA doesn't really like this soviet plane, and you've got some artificial prohibitive rules on it (compared to Europe).

<comment><USER10> Basically, you can own and fly one, but can't do anything commercial, even sky diving ops or banner towing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another aircraft with similar capabilities to the An-2 is the Helio Courier ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helio_Courier](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helio_Courier)).

I was with a friend who was flying his Helio to Orange County Airport (b4 it was named John Wayne Airport). On approach, tower asked for a slow flight demo. He obliged, and flew at 33KIAS, ~25 feet altitude along most of the runway (the shorter one), then touched down about 50 feet from the last taxiway, exiting there with a nice short field landing demo. It felt truly bizarre to fly that slowly in a fixed wing aircraft.

</comment><comment><USER12> Everything can fly in all directions, including backwards, if you pick the right frame of reference (duh!). Misleading title, it's still frontal air current that keeps the plane in the air.

<comment><USER13> I hated the title, but not too many posters here seem to be bothered by it.

Either the BBC editor is woefully ignorant of the difference between airspeed and ground speed, or he deliberately chose a clickbait title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For a plane that can truly (albeit briefly) fly backwards, checkout the Sukhoi-30. It is a Russian fighter jet with truly vectored exhaust - <USER2> F-22, but 2 axes vs. 1 axis. Here is a video of it doing loops and Cobra maneuvers:

[https://youtu.be/ujenrmoeALE?t=84](https://youtu.be/ujenrmoeALE?t=84)

<comment><USER15> What are the advantages of such maneuverability? I can't believe they're trying to dodge missiles... Is it for aerial combat purposes?

<comment><USER16> Modern missiles cannot be dodged. It's mostly just a way to show off the plane's agility. It could just barely be useful for shooting at a target behind you, but you sacrifice a lot of energy moving your aircraft like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I recall reading something about WWI fighter pilots who could _actually_ fly backwards (as opposed to "forwards into a headwind"). Apparently, with the right plane and a really really good pilot, it was possible to throw it into something like a bootlegger turn, spinning 180 degrees around the Z-axis and cruising backwards for a second or two to fire on an unsuspecting pursuer, before quickly slewing back around to resume normal flight. IIRC, Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, was known for the maneuver.

<comment><USER18> I think you're mixing up a couple ideas here. It sounds like you're thinking of Pugachev's Cobra, which is a maneuver that can be performed by supermanouverable aircraft.

In terms of maneuvers that could be performed in a WWI aircraft, I suspect it's either a hammerhead turn or a flat spin. In a hammerhead turn you climb vertically until the aircraft stalls, then use the rudder to yaw the aircraft to a vertical dive. Like an upside down u-shape. In a flat spin you do a power-on stall and yaw the aircraft in the same direction that your prop is torquing you.

Either of those maneuvers would be pretty risky - while you're stalled out you'd be a sitting duck.

<comment><USER17> I saw a documentary animation that involved the plane yawing 180 degrees and very briefly proceeding tail-first while firing back the way it had come. It specifically involved WWI aircraft, and IIRC emphasized that it was only practical with their low speeds. I can't find it now, though, so I can't vouch for the source or expand on any details I may have missed.

It was definitely presented as nearly impossible to do, in any case. I vaguely recall that it required a plane with a very short wingspan (e.g. a triplane), but I could be imagining that bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of the short takeoff short landing competitions I heard about a few years ago.

[http://www.wired.com/2011/05/video-young-pilot-prepares- for-...](http://www.wired.com/2011/05/video-young-pilot-prepares-for-stol- competitionvideo-young-pilot-prepares-for-stol-competition/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I used to have a Piper Colt parked at San Carlos (CA) that had a 50kt stall. Occasionally I'd go out to the ocean on a windy day, catch the 60-70kt winds over the ocean cliffs, and fly backwards. :) It was a fun way to freak out passengers.

</comment><comment><USER5> For those of you located in Switzerland; you can "hitch" a ride at [http://an2.ch](http://an2.ch) – though you must become a club member or ride as a guest of another member (This is required by swiss law for non-commercial flights). Another possibility is to show up at airshows; where tours may be, and are given to the visitors for a modest fee.

It's quite an impressive experience, especially while starting, when the audio of the power plant's huge displacement is felt by your stomach.

</comment><comment><USER21> My grandfather liked to tell the story of when he flew a Luscombe 8A backwards by pointing the nose into a headwind that was too strong for the plane's tiny 65hp engine to overcome.

</comment><comment><USER22> As the article says, this plane was developed for the Soviet Forestry Ministry and is still used by their smokejumping units. [1] Smokejumpers are firefighters who parachute into remote areas to fight forest fires.

[1] [http://environment.nationalgeographic.com.au/environment/nat...](http://environment.nationalgeographic.com.au/environment/natural- disasters/russian-smokejumpers/)

</comment><comment><USER23> You can also fly an Aeronca Chief backwards. Ask me how I know.

Fun fact, when landing with two people you can open both doors simultaneously as air brakes. Stops real fast.

<comment><USER24> > Ask me how I know

OK, so how do you know? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It feels suspiciously like there's some life lesson to be had here. Something about tacking to the winds of fate or similar blather.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've almost done this in a Taylorcraft. It is fun as long as you can get back to your airport. It also probably wansn't the safest/smartest time to go for a joyride, but the wind was right down the runway.

</comment><comment><USER27> I saw an F-22 fly backwards, I'm sure it was much more impressive!</comment>


Mike Belshe adds CurveCP to Chromium's proto sandbox - <AUTHOR> http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/curvecp/README?revision=85753&view=markup

<comment><USER2> It's unfortunate that the toolkit that this is based on, NaCl (<http://nacl.cace-project.eu/>) shares an acronym with another prominent Chrome feature, Native Client (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client>)</comment>


Ask HN: I'm looking for a mentor - <AUTHOR>

Software engineer. SaaS owner.<p>email@example.com <comment><USER2> You should probably include more details, i.e. your background, what sort of mentorship you're looking for, etc. Hard to imagine someone reaching out to you with so little info.

</comment><comment><USER3> Given the demonstrated amount of effort toward the mentor mentee relationship despite the huge potential for connecting with a great mentor through HN, it may be awhile.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4>
      Why don't you say much?
      Brogrammers love weird hobbies
      Share your #swag with us!</comment>


Rate my startup: MarksMenus.com - <AUTHOR>

MarksMenus is "IMDb for restaurant menus".
We got tired of enduring out-of-date info, pdf downloads, blurry scans or long flash intros just to find a restaurant's menu.
Our goal is to create a reliable, comprehensive database of restaurant menus that allows for easy search and discovery of great places to eat.
We do this by allowing anyone (regular users or the restaurants themselves) to create and curate menu content.
We also enable the foodies in an area to recommend restaurants and dishes to make it super easy for others to quickly find something good.
Please check it out and let me know what you think. I'm linking you to our Memphis site (our company location), because that has the most interesting content at the moment.
http://marksmenus.com/cities/memphis <comment><USER2> Here are my thoughts on the domain (online menus and restaurant stuff). I am by no means an expert, and probably am not even typical.

I personally don't have trouble finding menus online, and I'm OK with opening a PDF to do it, just as long as finding that PDF doesn't take time (eg: if google returns a result for "mizu sushi 11211" that looks like it'll have a menu, I'm happy). In other words, it's much more a priority of finding _any_ menu for the place in question than it is finding the best looking one. Especially if I'm hungry.

There are a couple of factors that determine which result I click on. Normally these things occur on a subconscious "blink-like" level, but I'll try to communicate them. Based on the Google results, I try to "feel out" which result is best. I'll avoid the restaurants own menu if the google snippet makes me think "there's probably flash" or "this website is going to suck". So, you may have an advantage there, if you can provide better looking search results than the restaurants themselves.

Probably the only other thing that would cause me to click on one search result over the other (since I can't easily judge the quality that the menus will be), is if one of them promised me user generated photos of the menu items as well. I'm not aware of any sites that currently do this. But, like I said before, I am by no means on expert on this topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback -- many thanks.

"... user generated photos of the menu items as well. I'm not aware of any sites that currently do this"

We do! User submitted content has been relatively slow, but we have an iPhone app and allow users to upload photos that way, as well as through the website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the look of the actual menu pages, though I was overwhelmed a bit by the front page. And I really like the ratings of individual dishes.

Since user generated content is going to be the limiting factor, have you considered integrating something like the Yelp API onto your ratings/review section?

<http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/phone_api>

Might give you a bit more content at the restaurant level, "5 recommendations: 2 onsite, 3 offsite" though I've heard in the case of Yelp they have severe API restrictions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestion -- I haven't seriously looked into integrating the Yelp API yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you allow custom layouts by restaurant? (Basically, I would like the layout of the menu to be similair to my restaurant menu. My special sauces are listed in a box in the middle. They are an additional $2.)

If I have 6 menu items that can have multiple $2 additions, how can I display that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our current implementation allows for multiple price points per dish (e.g., "cup: $1.99", "1/2 bowl: $3.99" "bowl: $4.99").

We will soon be releasing an upgrade to our menu editor that also allows for "add-on" options per dish (e.g., "add shrimp: $1.99") and category-level pricing (e.g., "build-your-own burrito: small: $4.99 / lg: $6.99")

If your dish doesn't need _both_ price points and add-on options, you can achieve that in our current menu editor using the multiple price points structure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool stuff. I've toyed with the idea of trying to integrate menus into my app (iowacityaccess.com) and found it to be just too much content to handle. You should allow embeddable menus, both so restaurants can easily add a menu to their website and so I can :)

<comment><AUTHOR> In fact, we do offer embeddable menus. We currently reserve that for paying restaurants but I'd be happy to talk about providing content for you.

scott -at- marksmenus.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does it handle a restaurant with mutliple locations (if I own a chain of 5 restaurants, etc)?

Do I have to create a new menu for each physical restaurant location?

What if I have a smaller selection at one of my 5 locations?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a potential weakness of our current implementation.

Because we are aiming at independently-owned restaurants, we have kept each entry separate. This means you do have to create a new menu for each location. We have plans to allow for menu-sharing for multiple locations, but I do want to keep the focus away from "chains". Defining exactly what constitutes a chain can be a gray area, though.

<comment><USER6> Maybe an intermediate solution would be a copy/clone option . . .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can you mark items as vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, etc.?

This could be a big win for a niche.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed we can. The problem is motivating our audience to crowdsource the data entry for this.</comment></comment>


Not MS-DOS... but almost  - <AUTHOR> http://behindtheclock.timmyontime.com/post/90006799/textual-interface-not-ms-dos-but-almost

<comment><USER2> Yeah, to me the fact that you can write stuff like "Hello, my name is Jerry and I'm 28 years old. I'd like to create a project. Could you do it for me Timmy?" is only useful to attract new users. Like you say in your conclusion, once they lose their fear of having to "learn commands", they become more comfortable and eventually they will try to use the product in the most efficient way possible (e.g. by using shortcuts).

</comment><comment><USER3> Decades of research has shown that the way to make a computer application approachable is to make sure that the user can VISUALLY infer possible usage patterns. It's like having a map in front of you of where you are in the app and where you might go next. The best way that we know of to do this is with a GUI. There's a reason why GUIs won, kids.</comment>


Parrot Detained for Yelling 'Police' to Warn Its Owners About a Drug Raid - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb8ewy/a-parrot-got-detained-for-yelling-police-to-warn-its-owners-about-a-drug-raid-vgtrn <comment><USER2> > _The cops brought the parrot back to the station, but so far, the bird is > keeping his beak shut around police. A vet named Alexandre Clark told a > local Brazilian journalist that police have been unable to get him to repeat > the warnings he shrieked out during the raid—or squawk anything at all._

Sounds like the bird is flexing its rights. (I assume Brazil, like America, respects the right to remain silent)

<comment><USER3> > so they turned him over to a nearby zoo

The bird remained silent, but was still jailed. Where's Glenn Greenwald on this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Apparently, the cops got tired of trying to wring some salient information > from the uncooperative bird, so they turned him over to a nearby zoo, where > he'll presumably get to do normal bird shit and not have to spend his days > cawing about drug busts anymore. We respect your loyalty, though, buddy. > Enjoy your new and better life away from the drug trade.

I don't know why, but I like it when lighter news articles use a tongue in cheek writing style where you know the author is amused about what they are writing.

<comment><USER5> I was really hoping for something about him not being a canary since he didn't "sing".

<comment><USER6> Good point, a missed opportunity!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Acting as 'lookout' is only quasi-illigal, but it raises an interesting question: if a human trains an animal to do something illegal, does blame fall on the animal or the human?

For example, many pit bulls who attack or maim people these days get put down by animal control. If a court could prove that an animal had been trained/conditioned (by a proven guilty defendant) to commit the offending act, would said animal still be facing death?

<comment><USER8> > For example, many pit bulls who attack or maim people these days get put > down by animal control. If a court could prove that an animal had been > trained/conditioned (by a proven guilty defendant) to commit the offending > act, would said animal still be facing death?

Yes, putting down a dangerous animal isn't a criminal punishment premised on the animal's culpability (as a matter of law, animals lack the capacity for culpability), but a protective measure equivalent to condemning and demolishing a dangerous building.

<comment><USER9> "as a matter of law, animals lack the capacity for culpability" Apparently it was not always thus in European jurisprudence. This podcast episode tells more:

[https://www.futilitycloset.com/2014/10/27/podcast- episode-31...](https://www.futilitycloset.com/2014/10/27/podcast- episode-31-pigs-on-trial/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seperating birds bonded to people is very cruel. This creature was socialized in a very strange fashion and can not bond to other birds even of the same kind.

<comment><USER11> I agree with you, but what's the real alternative? The zoo seems like the best thing, given that putting it in jail with its owner is probably unworkable.

<comment><USER10> Rebond it to a similar behaved person?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is the parrot being charged with, exactly? It is not _illegal_ to warn someone that police are nearby, much as I'm sure they would like it to be.

<comment><USER13> While you are technically correct, in this particular case, the warning was to aid someone in committing a crime. And aiding someone in committing a crime is illegal in itself.

<comment><USER14> Indeed. Driving a getaway car is a crime, even if arguably, you claimed you just picked up your friend outside a bank to drive him home. And perhaps he paid you for your trouble.

Though arguably, it's the intent there that matters, not the act. (If your friend called you for a ride home from a bank and you didn't know he robbed it, it wouldn't be a crime to do so.) Was the parrot aware it was aiding a criminal act?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm sure the police will get that bird to sing what it knows.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of the bit in Twin Peaks when the cops take in a Parrot that witnessed a crime. Someone murders the Parrot to stop it from talking.

<comment><USER11> There's a much worse version of this in an episode of Black Mirror.</comment></comment>


Tesla Model S driver crashes into a van while on Autopilot [video] - <AUTHOR> http://electrek.co/2016/05/26/tesla-model-s-crash-autopilot-video/ <comment><USER2> This was posted much earlier today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778726)

The comments on that thread reveal this is a known bug from Tesla.

<comment><AUTHOR> my mistake.. sorry for the dupe

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This was bound to happen. Tesla's "cruise control" is not as advanced, and seemingly not sufficiently tested to autonomously trust it. And they state it that way, yet people start trusting the car which is the human thing to do. As stated by the guy involved in the accident: "when the car slows down correctly 1000 times, you trust it to do it the next time to. My bad.."

Tesla is definitely driving a risky course here. As soon as there is a fatality or serious accident anywhere involving Tesla or another self-driving car, this will be mainstream news and likely lead to draconian laws. I wouldn't be surprised if self-driving cars would need to acquire a "self- driving license" or the like, similar to how cars need to adhere to emission standards.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if Tesla will ever make a business case for operating their own insurance company and settling autopilot cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm excited about autonomous self-driving cars because I believe they have the potential to improve safety. I'm terrified by the tesla auto pilot features. We can repeat until the cows come home, that the driver should be vigilant at all times, but that just not how humans behave.

I don't want to live in a world where drivers inattention is masked by the mostly working automations, because I think that is safety net negative.

<comment><USER6> I want to live in a world where driving in the /routine/ areas is 100% automated, so that I don't have to worry about slowdowns, gawker-blocks, and merging insanity.

It won't /really/ get there until every car that's allowed on to the freeway is self-driving... actually it probably won't get there for a long time.

Maybe the left 2-3 lanes (leaving at least the right-most lane open for 'slower and not-networked' traffic) should be automated and speed unlimited. Yes, the last point there is a crucial selling point for passengers.

Buy the car / upgrade your car to go in the FAST lanes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting what the driver said, that he trusted the car after he'd seen the system stop 1,000 times. Self-driving systems put humans on lazy mode, where our guard is down that's why they should be fully capable. These systems should be thoroughly tested in real conditions before being released. It's incredibly irresponsible of Tesla to allow this ACKNOWLEGEDLY inadequate system to work in high speeds.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that the video of the crash has since been made private.</comment>


Over 54,000 scanned Australian driver's licences found in open cloud storage - <AUTHOR> https://www.itnews.com.au/news/over-54000-scanned-nsw-drivers-licences-found-in-open-cloud-storage-552544 <comment><USER2> Australia has strict KYC and AML laws that means many financial institutions and fintech businesses will request drivers licences and passports as a part of user registration. This may well be common all over the world but I've had to upload a photo of my drivers licence to one service or another twice in the last month.

<comment><USER3> Some bars also take a photo of your driving license, I found that very weird but didnt say anything because I didnt want to cause any fuss going with a group.

<comment><USER4> This happens at a lot of places in Las Vegas, too. I don't give any business to places I can't prove my age, walk in, and pay with cash without a record being made of my whereabouts.

The real issue I find is that your data is being handed off immediately by the bar to a third party provider, with whom you have no business relationship. The moment you hand over your ID, the bar is uploading it, and now the data is entirely out of your control. They could publish your home address (if you're foolish enough to have the location where you sleep on your ID card, which is effectively public record) and you'd have no recourse whatsoever against them when people show up at your house, or at your hotel while on holiday (because the hotel bar published/leaked a name+location+timestamp).

At the least, it's a major privacy violation; at the most it's a physical safety issue.

Make a fuss. That shit's absolutely over the line. Take the whole group somewhere else.

<comment><USER5> From my POV as a former bouncer turned software developer, causing a fuss (assuming you mean in the moment) isn't the right move.

If you blow up and start yelling at the bouncer (who will get fired if he doesn't scan your ID), you're taking it out on someone who can't change the policy, and you're going to sully the entire evening for the rest of your group. Contact management, absolutely, but causing a fuss at the scene is less than effective.

And there is a flipside to the physical safety issue - there were two stabbings (and countless other attacks) in the club I worked at, and we were able to positively ID the attackers within ~30 minutes of the incident, which led to their arrest hours later.

<comment><USER4> Violating the privacy of 100% of patrons, putting them ALL at risk, to be able to catch the small percentage of violent people is not an acceptable trade- off, whether the group is 100 people or all of society. This is why we have the presumption of innocence and the 4th amendment. Private businesses can act otherwise, but they're douchebags if they do so.

Showing ID doesn't make anyone safer; indeed your bar violated everyone's privacy and on multiple occasions someone STILL got stabbed. Worst of all options. It makes everyone less safe.

Privacy is a basic right.

Don't give a single dime to organizations that act otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are hundreds if not thousands of servers open to the internet that contains CT/CET/MRI/X-ray scans (PACS servers or DICOM)

I accidently found some of them, you can download 'sensitive' patient data, illness/disease information specifically labelled and categorized waiting for you to collect.

Some of those also include family-tree information, random ID scans (driver's license, national IDs etc), and contract scans (hand-signed versions)

I found those back in 2017, even though notified respective hospitals and institutions, they're still open. Given WFH/remote-working practices are more common now, probably there are more.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it weird that all the licences were from New South Wales and there's no other compromised buckets for the other states?

<comment><USER8> Not really. I can imagine many scenarios where only NSW licenses would be collected. It doesn't say that it's a breach of part of a national system?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In most US states they are also public - you can query traffic citations from many court houses and get full person details and drivers licenses, address, dob,and more. It's really quite wild how many public data sets are out there with your data.</comment>


Tired of hotlinkers? - <AUTHOR> http://montaraventures.com/blog/2008/05/09/hotlinking-redux/

<comment><USER2> Why be pissy about hotlinking, look at it as an advertising opportunity.

Someone hotlinking your photo is letting you put your ad in their context. You can use the [PT] flag to hand stuff off to a proxy that will composite a hot pink URL over the image and make it memorable. Hotlinker gets images, you get ad impressions everybody happy...</comment>


Faster than light travel, since the year 2000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/patents/US6025810

<comment><USER2> ridiculous ! ..

check this out too..... <http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US6368227>

</comment><comment><USER3> This one is more like subspace radio than FTL travel.</comment>


Volvo is reportedly scaling back its self-driving car experiment - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/14/16776466/volvo-drive-me-self-driving-car-sweden-delay <comment><USER3> I don't understand this approach to get level 5 automation right away. It's too wide a scope to implement. Why don't we start with an experimental inter- city highway where cars could run with full automation?

You drive up to the highway, and then relax until you need to get off - <USER2> like a great start to me. You can equip that highway with a boat load of sensors and transmitters to understand these fancy brainy machines. After a few years, build more such highways with the lessons learnt from the experiments.

<comment><USER4> By and large, there's no particular reason to think purpose-built highway infrastructure is needed for autonomous vehicles. Maybe to alert for construction zones but we're pretty close to having autonomy on limited access, well-mapped highways today.

The problem is that, while this would be a really nice car feature (and probably great for safety), it does nothing for the people who don't want to own a car and just want a car and computer driver at their beck and call. Unfortunately for these folks, the autonomous highway driving is relatively near-term while door-to-door autonomy is probably decades away.

<comment><USER5>
       it does nothing for the people who don't want to own a car and just want a car and computer driver at their beck and call.

Classic disruption (not in the sense that it is often used) would be to start with a niche so limited that it doesn't seem useful to almost anyone, and then expand from that use case.

If you could make a Tesla owner's commute from SF to Sand Hill Road a much better experience (via autonomous-only toll road), I'd say that's one hell of a start.

<comment><USER6> This process to build such a highway in california is beyond even the considerable means of Elon Musk - just the land acquisition and environmental review costs are staggering.

<comment><USER7> Thus the Boring Company was born.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > And in some areas, we are finding that there were more issues to dig into > and solve than we expected,"

Who could've thunk it?! The people who think we're going to have _real_ Level 5 autonomous driving in 2 years (not the "we're bullshitting you with Level 5, but it's really more like Level 3.5" kind) are insane.

There's no way we're going to simulate every single condition a car could encounter anywhere on Earth and get the cars to do the "right thing" 100% of the time by 2019-2020.

I'll be impressed if they even deliver Level 4 (working perfectly only on some types of roads) by 2020. But I think even then car makers will "encounter the unexpected".

It's going to take many years to test these things. And no car makers seem to even mention how they're going to address all the security issues self-driving cars will have.

<comment><USER9> _There 's no way we're going to simulate every single condition a car could encounter anywhere on Earth and get the cars to do the "right thing" 100% of the time by 2019-2020._

I like how you added "by 2019-2020", as if doing the right thing 100% of the time was ever possible - let alone the goal. Of course, it isn't - Level 5 is just as good as a human. And extremely rare situation won't be handled well by a human either.

<comment><USER10> Problem is that self-driving company would get blamed for accidents for _all_ of its cars. So imagine if you had 100,000 cars going around and you got sued for accident on every one of them. This aggregation of blame is core issue which otherwise gets distributed among millions of human drivers. This invariably requires that self-driving car must be many many magnitudes better than regular humans.

Even if companies figure out way to not get sued, its only matter of time until some very serious tragedy happens such as pregnant woman wearing same dress as color of sky crossing the road getting killed or car running in to school kids. Then there are obvious malicious usage such as modifying car sensors to fool self-driving system and purposely run in to people (cars as weapon scenario). One such thing and it could likely be the trigger for large public outcry, heavy regulations and finally game over for self-driving cars.

I think it might be more desirable to approach self-driving cars in more evolutionary fashion. We can start with self-driving only in less than 25 miles/hr scenarios such as heavy traffic OR sunny days on highways. Then we can start equiping our road networks with dedicated self-driving lanes, supportive beacons on roads and so on. Then gradually move towards make all lanes self-driving.

<comment><USER9> Isn't that exactly what Volvo was doing, though? The self-driving system would only be available on certain pre-selected freeways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like to drive around thinking about what it is like to be a driving (human) computer. Every time I touch the brake because I see a kid standing a few feet from the curb and a small dog on the other side of the street is running, I wonder when an electronic computer will understand that the child might dart across the street after the dog.

Of course, I've learned these things from growing up human, but only one computer needs to conquer a driving challenge, maybe driving on a snow hidden road (watch out for barely noticeable ditches on the sides of the road), and then all self-driving cars can do it. It will be interesting to see how long it will take to achieve level 5.

<comment><USER12> The computer has 360 vision. It should be easy for it to see the child and notice it jumping onto the road.

The situation is super dangerous with human drivers anyway. Children are too small to be noticed and they don't hesitate to jump in front of cars.

<comment><USER13> 360 vision doesn't change physics, and even the best vision system doesn't help you when a child darts ten feet in front of your car.

If you don't _anticipate_ the possible movement, you will be too slow. I have very little faith that we are anywhere near systems that can handle this kind of situational awareness, because it requires classification systems and object models of the world that modern AI has yet to reproduce.

The average level of human intelligence is a lot higher than most casual observers realize.

<comment><USER14> Waymo models "dynamic objects" and predicts what they are going to do. There's some diagrams of it in this report (page 9):

[https://waymo.com/safetyreport/](https://waymo.com/safetyreport/)

I would guess that they already identify and track pedestrians better than the average human driver (mostly because I expect they do it at greater distance). Whether they model kids standing by the curb better is hard to say.

<comment><USER13> A marketing document does not convince me. But even if I take this at face value, they're talking about estimating future movements based on current trajectory, which is fine and good, but not the scenario raised by the OP.

If I see a child standing near the side of the road, I use more than the velocity and trajectory of the child to estimate future behavior: I look at the direction the child is facing, the overall situation (e.g. is the child playing a game?), what the child is paying attention to, and so on. A child waiting at a bus stop is a dramatically different scenario than a child looking across the street at a puppy. A short adult standing on the side of the road is dramatically different than a child.

This is a hard problem involving multiple levels of recognition and inference. I have little faith that it is solved. My suspicion is that the "engineering solution" is used (i.e. slow down when a human-probable object is near the road). That might work, but will lead to a car thar drives like a paranoid senior citizen with bad eyesight.

I have a suspicion that we're going to look back in a decade and realize that most of these problems are fundamentally intractable, and that the best any system can do is react via human-encoded heuristics. If so, the path to full autonomy will be an asymptotic one; it will not happen quickly, but through decades of gradual refinement, with lots of fatalities along the way.

<comment><USER14> "human-encoded heuristics" contradicts intractable.

I think that the always-sensible speed choices of the automated system will result in a much larger reduction in pedestrian fatalities than any increase from the lack of subtle inference you are concerned with.

<comment><USER13> If you think heuristic contradicts "intractable" You don't understand the meaning of the word.

Intractable problems can be solved sometimes, just not reliably or in bounded time. If we get to the point where self-driving cars depend on human-encoded rules for reaction, we'll simply be trading one set of messy heuristic behaviors (people) for another (robots with bad sensors and limited domain awareness).

Will the automated systems be "better" with enough time and investment? Perhaps. But dreams of a fatality-free automobile future will remain science fiction.

<comment><USER12> The heuristic is quite simple. Drive slower when there are children around, to leave enough time to brake if something unpredictable happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can someone point out what are the major issues for self-driving cars? What are the main things stopping GM/Volvo/Google from deploying a fleet of cars?

<comment><USER16> The process of autonomy, at every time instant, may be broken down into the following: 1) sensor observation, 2) perception, 3) intent modeling, 4) path planning, 5) control action. 1) Sensor observation is the collection of video, radar, Lidar etc. data. 2) Perception is the interpretation of that sensor data into a meaningful representation of the 3D environment, both static and dynamic, tasks like object detection, localization, tracking, semantic understanding (think of it like computing a physics enginge for the world). 3) Intent modeling is the prediction of what the moving objects might do in the future (e.g. is that car just drifting a bit, or it is about to merge into my lane?) 4) Given the outcome of 2) and 3), path planning is answering the question of where should I plan to drive the car through my estimation of the environment and how it might change? 5) Control is the execution of the planned path, by manipulating the steering wheel, gas and brake etc.

Of the different aspects of autonomy, perception and intent modeling are the unsolved pieces, with the other aspects being relatively well understood. The quality of your sensors (resolution, dynamic range, depth range for Lidar/radar etc) affect the difficulty of the perception task, as does computational power, but even with perfect sensors and high compute the problem is difficult (recognizing the difference between a rock and a crumpled piece of paper requires algorithmic processing of sensor data). The difficulty of perception is best illustrated by pointing to the field of computer vision, which is essentially focused on solving that problem. What seems easy to a human is quite hard for a computer, but really it's only easy at the conscious level, while in fact 70% of the human brain is dedicated to solving the vision problem at any given time.

All the steps after perception rely crucially on it. If perception were perfectly solved, intent modeling is also a difficult problem, but it is relatively easier than perception, as it involves reasoning in a lower dimensional state-action space, albeit with partial information. To make a comparison, intent modeling for diving in urban environments is perhaps harder than beating humans at Go, and may be as hard as beating humans at poker.

If perception and intent modeling are solved, the execution of path planning and control is relatively well understood.

To summarize, the main issues are perception and intent modeling, and these are fundamentally difficult AI problems. So the main thing holding back GM/Volvo/Google is algorithms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't this how most experiments are supposed to work? You start with a broad assumption and work towards it. Then you find issues and start scaling things down to focus on some finer issues.

In the meantime, business executives and media work hand-in-hand to try and hype everything and promising stuff which cannot be delivered in a short amount of time.

<comment><USER18> The thing is Volvo's experiments haven't been going as well as others.

In the race to build a functional autonomous vehicle some companies are getting it done, and others, in spite of big promises, several years of effort, and scaled, well capitalized operations have very little to show for their efforts.

Everybody still has a lot of work to do, but the operations that can, at the very least, demonstrate as proof of concept their cars handling just a few miles of of uninterrupted driving in dynamic environments have cleared the biggest hurdle. Following that big hurdle is the validation process, which is tens of thousands of smaller hurdles stretching out as far as the eye can see, but so long as they've cleared the first, biggest hurdles, you can be reasonably confident they'll get to a minimum viable product eventually so long as they keep at it.

I have confidence in Waymo, GM, and Zoox. With everyone else it's either too soon to tell, or I don't have enough information, or they're sucking:

[https://youtu.be/jClxcSBNwcw](https://youtu.be/jClxcSBNwcw)

<comment><USER19> I think you are on the right track here. I know some of the people hired by Volvo cars to work on this, and I am not aware of them recruiting top ML researchers to work on this and I suspect they are just not good enough people there. Waymo, on the other hand, will probably get it done, and done really well.

<comment><USER20> That's because Volvo's AV software position is a joint venture w/ Autoliv called Zenuity. [https://www.zenuity.com](https://www.zenuity.com)

So if you're looking for CV/ML people working on the perception part of the stack, look there.

FWIW, I work in this field now and I have fairly low confidence in the non-ML parts of the software stack across the industry. There's a lot more to this problem than well manicured computer-vision demos, and Volvo is a lot less cavalier about loss of human life than almost anyone else, so it's fairly heartening to see them realign around realistic expectations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And how about those 24 000 cars that Uber were going to buy from Volvo[1]? Not one mention of that in the article.

[1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/20/uber- volv...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/20/uber-volvo-suv- self-driving-future-business-ride-hailing-lyft-waymo)

<comment><USER22> Unrelated. Uber's plan is to buy standard Volvo XC90 SUVs and add their own self-driving implements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is the Koolaid finally running out?

<comment><USER24> looks like it will run out in 5-10 years

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's a great move. Why waste money racing GM/Tesla when you can wait for the hardware to become a commodity?

<comment><USER26> "The early bird may get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> over-promise under-deliver

measure once cut twice</comment>


Trump tax bill Sec 3801 – Stock options become taxable upon vest - <AUTHOR> According to the recently proposed tax overhaul, Section 3801, stock options would be taxable immediately upon vesting.
The bill is extremely copy/paste unfriendly, but the full text is here: https://www.scribd.com/document/363309136/Republican-Tax-Bill#download&from_embed
The relevant section starts on page 295.

  16 (a) IN GENERAL.—Any compensation which is de-
  17 ferred under a nonqualified deferred compensation plan
  18 shall be includible in the gross income of the person who
  19 performed the services to which such compensation relates
  20 when there is no substantial risk of forfeiture of the
  rights
  21 of such person to such compensation.
 ... and ...

  24 The term 'nonqualified deferred compensation
  25 plan' shall include any plan that provides—
  1 ''(i) a right to compensation based on
  2 the value of, or appreciation in value of, a
  3 specified number of equity units of the
  4 service recipient, whether paid in cash or
  5 equity, or
  6 ''(ii) stock appreciation rights or stock
  7 options.
 Can anyone who understands legalese shed some light on exactly what that will mean for those of us with stock option-based compensation? <comment><USER2> Well Kieth Rabois thinks it does

[https://twitter.com/rabois/status/926130750444814336?ref_src...](https://twitter.com/rabois/status/926130750444814336?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fd-23636655082619089073.ampproject.net%2F1508896929494%2Fframe.html)

So does CNBC

[https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/11/02/gop-tax-reform-bill- help...](https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/11/02/gop-tax-reform-bill- helpsemployee-stock-optoins.html)

Looks like you can defer the taxes from exercised options until there is liquidity or 7 years pass.

<comment><AUTHOR> They're both referring to the removal of AMT. It sure seems to me like this section overrides any benefits to startup employees with regard to AMT, and then makes the situation a whole lot worse to boot.

<comment><USER2> I don't think I follow what you're saying, or more directly I think you are wrong.

Can you provide any evidence to back up your claim and show me where I'm wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love for you to explain why you think I'm wrong.

I linked to the tax bill itself, which says it will tax stock options upon vest.

You linked to a tweet that just says, without any proof, that the tax bill will remove taxes on stock options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This refers to non-qualified stock options. Most tech employees have qualified (incentive) stock options.</comment>


Bumper Falls Off Brand New Tesla Model 3 After 30 Minutes and Some Rain - <AUTHOR> https://jalopnik.com/bumper-falls-off-brand-new-tesla-model-3-after-30-minut-1828306917 <comment><USER2> _A Tesla spokesperson said the company is looking into the matter here, and that this "is not how we build our cars."_

At least two customers might argue that apparently this is _exactly_ how you build your cars.

</comment><comment><USER3> >Keeping your bumper cover on in pretty much all weather is a very, very solved problem in the automotive industry.

It seems to be the situation that where Elon Musk is concerned, nothing is considered to be a "Solved problem", at least until he reinvents the wheel</comment>