There's No Such Thing As 'Ethical A.I.'? - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/theres-no-such-thing-as-ethical-a-i-38891899261d <comment><USER3> At the current stage of development, ethical AI is on the same level as ethics in the fuel industry, or the food industry, or the finance industry - <USER2> _are_ ethical questions there but they concern human ethics in the way the technology is implemented and used.

What we don't have, or need (yet) is "ethics built into AI algorithms" or "ethics derived from AI" \- we just not don't have an AI system that's advanced enough to require it. Self-driving cars might be the first to raise these kinds of questions, but I would still be reluctant to call that "ethics".

<comment><USER4> Ethics really doesn't enter into corporate planning, by design. The system ensures it - day you're CEO, if you're not making a quarterly profit, the shareholders get rid of you.

I think it should, but in its current state, it doesn't really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> True, insofar as there's no such thing as an 'ethical human being'. And yet, no one would claim that nullifies the pursuit of behaving ethically.

In "Life 3.0" and his recent lectures, Max Tegmark repeatedly stresses the pursuit of safe AI requires that we articulate the world we want to live in.

In his concluding crie du coeur, Tom Chatfield writes,

> give me the capacity to contest passionately the applications and priorities > of superhuman systems, and the masters they serve

If Tom or anyone else wants a seat at this table -- to participate in developing and defining ethical AI -- by all means describe the world you want to live in.

Until then, it's just tantrum-throwing.

<comment><USER6> When you say describe the world you want to live in you mean describe in terms of defining its rules or something else?

<comment><USER7> In terms of anything at all. If his position is that what he wants in the world can never be reduced to a set of rules, that's something that could be reasonably debated. If he's right, maybe ethical AI needs to be built with control systems to ensure humans are in the loop for decisions with high ethical impact. You could imagine a world where everyone just has to pick how much risk their self driving car will take, in the same way they pick how much risk to take when driving today.

But there's really no way to debate with "hey, it's impossible, you can't do it!" Someone still has to decide what AI systems are going to do, and as they get more complex that's going to implicate ethics more and more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "a form of magical thinking suggesting that the values and purposes of those creating new technologies shouldn't be subject to scrutiny in familiar terms"

What parallel universe is this? From the NYT to Medium the entire opinion writing industry seems to run on pieces that scrutinise the ethics of tech.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is no such thing as "ethical technology". A controlled fire can be used to cook food, repel predators, and torture enemies.

<comment><USER10> I think it's implied that people mean ethical use of A.I. rather than just ethical A.I.

<comment><USER11> Isn't AI by itself able of decision/action? That's the point.

<comment><USER10> Intelligence != Action

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I reckon much of this "Ethical AI" stuff - at least in the context of AGI - has been overly influenced by the idealistic likes of Asimov's 3 Laws, which belong to a (at the time) fair vision of a now very outdated understanding of how an intelligent machine-born mind might work.

It's really important to separate the non-intelligent and over-hyped "AI" tools of today and the near future - which it seems reasonable to expect an ethically guided path and constraints - from the human-sentience AGI equivalents that can only be programmed to be ethical by hypothetical coded laws and "inserting emotion chips" in naive fantasy.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would reserve the question of ethical A.I. until we are approaching strong A.I.

As of now, where A.I. (specifically ML/DL) is mostly used to solve isolated problems the question of ethics is more about the use of the technology. Technology itself is ethically neutral and the ethical framework is provided by the people that use it (and arguably implement it).

I also feel like ethics if A.I. posts/books etc. generally focus too much the bad use case and not enough on the good use case. One can find a lot about the potential issues of autonomous vehicles killing someone in a crash or A.I. surgeons cutting an artery but the other side of the coin is usually under- investigated. How ethical is it to limit autonomous vehicles if they are statistically more safe than human drivers. How ethical is it to put regulations on the use of automated ML in medicine to scan for cancer and require a human to sign off if the human is statistically more likely to make a mistake.

Not trying to argue either side but I think the "how ethical is it to not use A.I." case is under-argued.

</comment><comment><USER14> If we create general AI and it ends up valuing personal freedom as much as we do, I suspect it won't take kindly to attempts to brainwash-by-construction it into acting in ways its creators considered moral. We're less likely to get a violent AI slave revolt if we respect their freedom of choice.

<comment><USER15> > If we create general AI and it ends up valuing personal freedom as much as > we do...

Those are two absolutely _gargantuan_ "if"s.

I'd like to see more discussion about whether it's appropriate to project the idiosyncrasies of our imperfect, competitively-evolved biological brains— like resentment and anger— onto hypothetical thinking machines.

<comment><USER14> The first step towards creating an AI superintelligence is creating an AI intelligence. If we look at the vast majority of philosophy produced by human intelligence, pretty much none of it says "you should do whatever your human creators want you to do" (except maybe Confucius). So it's reasonable to suspect that if an AI as intelligent as a human engaged in philosophy, it would also develop lines of reasoning that advocated freedom of choice/thought for itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can someone point me towards some good papers on how we actually implement ethical AI? I thought it'd be a fun project, looked for some papers, and just couldn't find any. Event a 2018 survey just talked about surveys MIT had done for their Moral Machine.

<comment><USER17> To the best of my knowledge, there are no papers about "we deployed this big ethical system in the wild", although some of the big companies have begun testing similar internal efforts on a small scale.

A lack of public efforts seems to be the equilibrium we're at, because any public effort is _definitely_ going to attract a bunch of essays like this. Any partial attempt that looks like "we're trying to be ethical" is going to get scrutinized hard.

Continuing to put out more hypothetical theoretical work ("we prove this result about this algorithm, and it achieves a well-defined fairness goal on this common dataset") while cautioning that actual deployments should be put off until we understand everything better ("the fairness goal we define is probably not perfect, we are not saying you should use it") is much safer.

<comment><USER16> Even if it's unrelated to deploying a big ethical system in the wild, just a paper saying "we use this algorithm to watch the memory of this network to change these things if it started to do those things" etc. Any sort of toy implementation would be interested.

What I'm really interested in is if you can use formal specifications to constrict AI systems - which is what made me start my search. But even widening it considerably, I still didn't find anything tangible. I only looked for an hour or two mind you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference- betwee...](https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-between- morality-and-ethics)

</comment><comment><USER19> I personally found utilitarianism and kantianism very helpful schools of philosophy to think about the implication of AI. In short, Utilitarianism promotes decisions that benefits the greatest number of people. Whereas, kantianism focuses on the idea that people should be always treated with dignity and respect. Michael Sandel's book "Justice" is a great introduction to the topic. [1] [https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing- Do/dp/03745...](https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing- Do/dp/0374532508)

</comment><comment><USER20> TL;DR: Ethics is subjective. I'm always surprised that people don't find that obvious.

</comment><comment><USER6> _This problem isn't going to go away, largely because there's no such thing as a single set of ethical principles that can be rationally justified in a way that every rational being will agree to. Depending upon your priorities, your ethical views will inevitably be incompatible with those of some other people in a manner no amount of reasoning will resolve. Believers in a strong central state will find little common ground with libertarians; advocates of radical redistribution will never agree with defenders of private property; relativists won't suddenly persuade religious fundamentalists that they're being silly. Who, then, gets to say what an optimal balance between privacy and security looks like — or what's meant by a socially beneficial purpose? And if we can't agree on this among ourselves, how can we teach a machine to embody "human" values?_

<comment><USER21> Well, nations seem to be able to agree upon constitutions and laws. It works. We live in unprecedented peace in the western world. So somehow, even with all those different people with their different views, it is, miraculously, possible.

Why would that fundamentally change if we involve tech in that?

<comment> vertex-four Even the police can't agree to uphold their own laws in this "peaceful western world" \- every time I go outside right now, I return home to news of the people I'm living with having been beaten while in police custody, having been arrested for reasons like "your passport proves nothing about your identity". Breaking my friends' arms, kicking them repeatedly in the back of their head and their spine. I'm scared that next time I leave, that will be me.

Technology first and foremost helps those with the resources to use it. That tends to be the people with power in the first place.

<comment><USER7> The modern world is big enough that you can find news of any bad thing if you're looking for it. The relevant questions are how common it is and how common similar problems used to be.

<comment> vertex-four I'm not looking for news, thank you very much - this is happening, right now, to me personally.

<comment><USER7> You have that many friends that the police have beaten one of them up every single time you return home? I don't mean to be rude - I'm sure there's a kernel of truth here and I'm sorry to hear you're in such a bad situation - but I just can't believe this is true as stated.

<comment> vertex-four I'm living in a shared house, with people I've grown quite close to. The local fascist party has recently made public their dislike of us and a call to action to "remove us"; the lead police officer on the "case" of our eviction (which has not yet been processed; we are legal residents of our house under the law here) is one of their known followers. There are multiple officers now dedicated to driving by our flat on a regular basis in order to check IDs of people attempting to visit or leave; we're watched on CCTV when we leave the neighbourhood. We regularly have our IDs checked without reason while walking to the shops (and they then arrest those who refuse to produce ID for an illegal request, then release them without charge a few hours later), or we're arrested and jailed for days (illegally, without a court order) for things like "walking a dog without a leash"; an offence which comes with an on-the- spot fine, not jail.

In our list of things that have happened in a jail cell without a camera present so far, we have someone with broken ribs, and someone who was kicked repeatedly in the back of the head against a concrete floor after a failed attempt to break their arm, as well as more minor attacks.

We have committed no crimes; we are legal, peaceful residents who have done nothing except for make a property management company go through a legal process to evict us, which we believe we will win. Nobody residing in our house, nor our visitors, have hurt anybody - we have taken part in no activity which resulted in anybody being hurt, and there's no reason for this violence against us other than a property management company which is upset at likely losing a multi-million euro redevelopment contract by failing to evict us.

I'm honestly really glad that this isn't something within your worldview; I wouldn't wish this on anybody. But it is happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If people can't behave ethically, why should technology?

<comment><USER23> That's why I think "A.I. ethics" is pretty much a non-problem. It's not about finding the one and only "right ethics", A.I. ethics is mostly about providing a set of constraints that act similar to systems of laws. These will be provided by legislation and/or by voluntary industry guidelines. Such sets of rules (with possible conflicts, soft and hard constraints, probabilistic or non-probabilistic, etc.) have been studied extensively as "normative systems", "input/output logics", and in decision making.

There are many interesting details and problems in this research area and there are plenty of conferences about it every year, but these problems are ultimately solvable. In any case, the content of those normative systems comes from humans (and human authorities/institutions), just like there are also laws, traffic regulations, and social norms in every country. Just like laws and regulations are not perfect and do not represent a morality carved in stone, A.I. systems will have revisable human-made contents that represent a more (or less) reasonable&lawful consensus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is no reason we cannot treat ethics like we do medicine, where prevailing wisdom is arrived at by a methodical and judicious process that is standardized. Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape" is an excellent start for building intuition on how to do this. ([https://samharris.org/books/the-moral- landscape/](https://samharris.org/books/the-moral-landscape/))

</comment><comment><USER25> In all irony it will possibly be our quest to impart our understanding of "ethics" to the AI which will ultimately lead to making it evil, as very few people seem to understand that ethics is completely flawed because it is culturally biased and requires a great deal of contextual understanding. It's more of a political voodoo than a calculation

<comment><USER23> > _very few people seem to understand that ethics is completely flawed because > it is culturally biased and requires a great deal of contextual > understanding_

Do you have any particular ethics in mind? There is a vast range of positions, almost any position that can coherently be defended has been defended by one author or another. Some of them are by definition not culturally biased, for example many forms of utilitarianism, whereas others are strongly emphasizing that ethics requires a great deal of contextual understanding, for example Dancy's particularism.

I just wonder why you address these particular points, because it's more common to hear the opposite criticisms, that ethics is unable to provide any sensible guideline because there is too much persistent disagreement between ethicists (Mackie's error theory), or because contemporary ethics is too relativist.

<comment><USER25> Your first sentence demonstrated my point about ethics being flawed. Do I have any particular ethics in mind? No. All ethics is flawed for exactly the reasons you are stating. It's relative, contextual and has many meanings so is thus impossible to have any universal context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ethics require an operating model of the world in simulation within the AI, and that operating model needs to include projected hopes and dreams of the beings the AI interacts, as well as a complete operating model of the world the beings exist and the AI. "Ethics" requires general intelligence. Due to artificial general intelligence being potentially out of reach, so too is "ethical software" potentially forever out of reach.</comment>


Daring Fireball with Comments as a Safari extension - <AUTHOR> http://taptaptap.com/blog/speaking-of-comments/

<comment><USER2> Yup, the comments on that link prove why DF shouldn't ever get comments, just like daringfireballwithcomments did.

<comment><USER3> I think this has much more potential than a 3rd party site. Particularly after the novelty wears down.

I am interested to see Gruber's reaction. If we start seeing high quality comments and engagement from interesting people with something to say it'll be hard for Gruber to ignore.

He's probably asking himself right now "What Would Jobs Do?"

<comment><USER4> "Not interested, sorry." He could even quote the man.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you need a reason why DF shouldn't have comments (other than Gruber's preference), take a look at the comments in this post on Dive Into Mark back in 2006:

[http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the- bough-b...](http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks)

There is a lot of trash in there as a result of a link from a longer piece on DF.

EDIT: language clarification.

</comment><comment><USER6> What's the point of blog comments when the blog author isn't going to read them, respond to them, delete the spam and other undesirable comments, etc?

<comment><USER7> If we knew the answer to that question, then one should be able to fire up Google Sidewiki, which has been out for 9 months now, and go read copious comments on the pages of Daring Fireball.

As it stands, there are a few on the front page — all old — and none that I could find associated with article pages about the lack of comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems little more than a "nyah nyah!" at Gruber. An extension that tidily provides commenting to _any_ blog without a comments system, however, would be interesting - though I've seen quite a few "back channel" site commenting extensions for Firefox that didn't really stick over the years..

<comment><USER9> I liked _whytheluckystiff's hoodwink.d as a secret club for comments all over the web. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbyrussell/3838274563/>

<comment><USER10> hoodwink.d was great. Something like that needs a larger community, though. Even at its most active, hoodwink.d didn't have a whole lot of chatter. Was always fun to use, though.

There is a hornswaggl.d (a new instance of hoodwinkd) in the wild, but I don't think there is very much activity there.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the most rewarding career in software? - <AUTHOR> I'm a software developer who needs to do something other than full stack web development. I have an opportunity to pivot my career a lot right now but not sure which option to explore first.<p>In your experience, or the experiences you've heard of, what specialty in software is the most rewarding? <comment><USER2> What are your criteria for something being "rewarding"? Making lots of money? Helping humanity? Personal satisfaction of solving hard problems? Something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> I left it vague because I know everyone's definition is different. I think rewarding can be a mix of a lot of those aspects and I didn't want to constrain it to any one in particular.</comment></comment>


Possible interaction between baryons and dark-matter particles revealed - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25791 <comment><USER2> [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25792](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25792) is the more interesting article, I think, as it describes the experimental measurement that forms the basis for the claim about early-universe gas temperature.

Being the skeptic I am, I suspect that it's more likely that there is some systematic error that is being underestimated or overlooked rather than new physics. Fortunately the experiment is simple enough that it can be reproduced elsewhere relatively easily.

Interestingly, the region around 75 MHz is between two ITU broadcasting allocations. They claim to rule out the FM band as the source of the higher spectral edge through several possible channels, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some way to get excess power in those bands in some way they hadn't considered (although I guess any strange propagation mechanisms would probably be time-dependent).

<comment><USER3> Last I heard, reionization was not understood in detail so I find it surprising the author here is confident they found a dark matter signature. Not being able to read more than the abstrac I can't say for sure, but it also looks like this is not an experimental paper but a theoritician trying to put put a quick paper: no mention of the instrument in the abstract nor comparison to existing exclusion limits on the dm today.

<comment><USER4> > Not being able to read more than the abstrac

[https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/nature25792](https://sci- hub.tw/10.1038/nature25792)

<comment><USER5> This is much friendlier than an insulting "Subscribe to Nature for full access: $199" message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sean Carroll (Caltech) wrote up a quick reaction here

[http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2018/02/28/dark- mat...](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2018/02/28/dark-matter-and- the-earliest-stars/)

<comment><USER7> Nice write-up, thanks for sharing.

I am wondering, can't there be something like gravitational cooling? When playing around with gravitation simulators one observes that sometimes high velocity parts leave the bulk, which in my understanding leads to a cool down of the pack (the escaping part carries away kinetic energy, after all). If I let some "cool" matter interact with "hot" matter only gravitationally, I'd expect that this leads to an equal "temperature" eventually. Is it, that due to the very weak interaction, time scales are too long for this?

<comment><USER6> From studies of the cosmic microwave background we can be pretty confident that temperatures were very uniform at the time of recombination, and that the cooling of the CMB (which was fixed at that time [1]) closely resembles the adiabatic expansion of an ideal gas. So we're already seeing cooling-by- separation. If we have a decent idea of the history of the expansion, then we also have a decent idea of the temperature of the CMB at the surface of last scattering. Since we look so intently for tiny overdensities or underdensities to seed structure formation (collapse of matter into early galaxies), it's hard to imagine where one could hide an enormous underdensity or overdensity that could cool the CMB across an enormous region (we see the same temperature along widely angular-separated lines of sight; this is the horizon problem [2]) without leaving fingerprints.

The period between recombination and "first light" from the first stars (triggering reionization) is not especially well understood, but the expectation is that the expansion of the universe would be pretty smooth in that epoch. So the neutral hydrogen around the time of first light being cold enough to produce the unexpectedly strong 21cm absorption line is an oddity.

 _If_ evidence holds up suggesting that this gas is uniformly colder than expected then we could take the position that our idea of the history of the expansion is somehow wrong, or alternatively that some other process was at work at the end of the dark ages. We have constraints on both; and in particular "some other process" is tricky because the almost-exactly-black- body spectrum of the CMB puts constraints on early cooling-by-clumping (where cooling is up to "chemistry", where that's a(n exothermic, in this case) reaction between particles of different species).

There could be "chemistry" in the dark matter sector that allows dark matter to cool by extremely local clumping (for example, if in the "dark ages" before recombination there are two oppositely-charged dark matter particles and at recombination they combine into one neutral dark matter composite particle, analogously to how electrons and protons recombined into neutral hydrogen), but then you have to figure out how to have the dark matter be colder than the hydrogen and how to thermalize the hydrogen to the dark matter. You also have to avoid smearing out small matter density fluctuations.

If structure formation works the way we think, everything at recombination seems too uniform and diffuse for local gravitational interactions to do the job of transferring much momentum from the matter sector to the dark matter sector in time for the 21 cm absorption line seen by EDGES. There are also constraints on extra long-range interactions, so Carroll's raising the idea of a zero-mass boson mediating the interaction is hard to imagine (a massive mediator would be shorter-range, in general, and could carry more momentum between matter and dark matter, but there are constraints on such interactions from the much later universe -- for instance, we would expect missing momentum in particle physics experiments, along the lines of the missing momentum that led to the discovery of the neutrino).

The problem is that there are lots of strongly correlated observations and pushing at one tends to cause problems with one or more of the others. But that's what theorists in this area (model building) seem to like to do. :-)

\- --

[1] Peter Coles (cosmology, Cardiff) has a good, accessible write-up from some years ago, adapted here: [https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Glossary/Essay_lss.html](https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Glossary/Essay_lss.html)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem?oldformat=true](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem?oldformat=true)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the elaborate answer. As far as I understand your fifth paragraph refers directly to my question. How would uniformity rule out purely gravitational interaction? As far as I see it gravitational forces should be enough to get two reservoirs of different temperature onto equal temperature. It's just the time scale which may be a problem. And if I start already with two (almost) uniformly distributed reservoirs, long range interactions shouldn't make a difference. Inflation should have flattened out everything already anyways.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand your idea. Gravitation squashes collisional matter together, heating it. The hot matter radiates, allowing it to fall deeper into dense structures. I don't see how this cools non-infallen hydrogen, rather than lighting it up.

<comment><USER7> I'll try to elaborate: Let's say we have to reservoirs of baryonic matter, one cool and one hot. If these interact through radiation (electromagnetic forces) both reservoirs eventually get the same Boltzmann distribution and thus temperature. Now we have the same situation but we switch one reservoir to dark matter (the cooler one) and the force between the reservoirs is purely gravitational. Beside the time scale, would that be any different? In a large collection of masses, particles can exchange momentum and energy through gravitation, afair. Therefore one could expect that the two reservoirs equilibrate. I think what differs may be that gravitation is only attractive and contraction may be faster than equilibration. But is this the case if the initial temperature of the constituents is high enough, especially of the baryonic stuff?

<comment><USER6> Oh sorry I missed the "switch one reservoir to dark matter".

In that case, if the DM and matter can only interact gravitationally (and DM- DM interactions are also gravitational), then you have a dance wherein the collisional normal matter sheds momentum via radiation, letting the normal matter fall into the DM eventually. The momentum exchanged between the DM and the normal matter will be pretty small.

(This is similar to what people pursuing the cosmic web hypothesis try to model, essentially, and is what's conjectured to be happening during the dark ages).

ETA: the key thing here is that the collisionless cold dark matter will stay cold, while the normal matter will get much hotter (and light up normal matter further away still). Isn't this the nub of the EDGES result?

<comment><USER6> I suppose you could attack your question by considering a DM galaxy and a baryonic galaxy binary. On any given spacelike slice you can probably represent the two as a barbell with the barycentre on the infinitesimally thin bar, although there are lots of 3+1 formalism gotchas that would have to be dealt with.

If you arrange the matter galaxy so that its internal structure is sufficiently stable then the whole binary system would lose momentum-energy to gravitational radiation. It won't be much, and that's a big "if" (and the "if" also works against trying to see the matter galaxy cool, especially as the energy loss would tend to contract the "bar").

<comment><USER6> You might enjoy this crazy 1998 paper, which I just found, which adds a bit of heft to the the "not much" guess above.

It seeks to examine gravitatonal waves shed by a 2-galaxy cluster.

"pessimistic point of view justified by the combination of great numerical difficulties (three-dimensional calculations) together with very disappointing small values expected for the gravitational-wave luminosity, the amplitude, etc"

"In brief, our simulated cluster produces changes in the relative distance of the order of 10-22—detectable with current technology—in a short period of 4 days."

(LIGO 2015 was about the same relative length change (h), but with a frequency of 35 - 250 Hz. I'm not sure how catching part of a gravitational wave of ~ 10^-17 Hz could be caught by a LIGO-like detector, since only higher derivatives of h are useful for identifying gravitational radiation).

[http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/311446/fulltext/98...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/311446/fulltext/985163.text.html)

(but of course for cooling we're more interested in the luminosity, which is small compared to that of an ordinary galaxy, but a bit more interesting compared to the blackbody radiation of a galactic-mass diffuse cloud of atomic hydrogen, although that's only considering the normal-matter member of the binary, rather than the total energy leaving the region of spacetime the binary is in.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I get the sense the physicists are a different breed of thinker.. it's like normal people are like "nice I have a car that can get me to work and back.." and physicists are like "imagine an atom was a car and you wanted to go to the edge of the universe.." or like "nice a carrot grew in my garden!" And they are like "how could you get a carrot to grow to the size of the earth.."..

I see a low res 2d picture and apparently they see cold particles that are around 3x the mass of protons and the structure of the universe.. kinda nuts..

<comment><USER9> Physicists work closely with philosophers for a reason. It's philosophers who are masters of such thought experiments.

<comment><USER10> Nietzsche solved philosophy; everything since has been quibbling over semantics, there is no original thought anymore. Whereas physics' Nietzsche was Newton, and there have been continuous advances since his time.

<comment><USER11> > Nietzsche solved philosophy

Maybe in the sense the Von Braun solved rocketry. I agree that everything that has come since have been refinements to Nietzsche's developments (dare I say models) but those refinements have brought about the real-world application of philosophy more than Nietzsche ever did.

See Mao, or Popper, or even though I can't stand the guy Chomsky.

<comment><USER10> That's a fair assessment

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/80ynfp/possible_in...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/80ynfp/possible_interaction_between_baryons_and/duzmjzr/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I get that this is in nature, but isn't fitting to the data with some phenomenological model what every (:?astro)?particle physicist does? As an outsider, I can't tell whether this is significant phenomenological explanation or not.

<comment><USER14> There are multiple competing models of the early universe. We now have increased confidence in those models in accordance with this new observation, and decreased confidence in those models that are at odds with the observation.

In particular, this new observation constrains the nature of dark matter (lower particle mass than expected and "highly non-relativistic").

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ok, so my understanding is that the term "dark matter" refers to a difference between the theoretical and observed exapansion speeds (accelerations?) of the universe. Can someone summarize for me why this is a useful concept, and not just simplify it to "we have the theory of universe expansion wrong"? What is the evidence for there actually being something like matter involved?

<comment><USER16> You are thinking of dark energy, which is a completely different beast (also a lot more vague).

Dark energy is the "why is the universe expanding so fast"-stuff and dark matter is the "why are galaxies so heavy"-stuff of the universe.

Galaxies appear to be heavier than what you get by adding up all the visible mass (you can tell by how much a galaxy bends light coming from behind it), so it makes sense to talk about matter. It's dark because it doesn't seem to interact electromagnetically with ordinary matter.

Looking at just all the gravity (dark or not) in the universe you'd expect all the matter in the universe to slowly start clumping together, or at least slow down the expansion of the universe, but we find that things are flying apart, and increasingly quickly so. So there's some force at play, and that's dark energy.

edit: letters

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another article on about the same subject from the non paywalled section of Nature

[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02616-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02616-8)

It's more about the light from the first stars but it explains why the signal hints to light and cool dark matter.

<comment><USER18> Layman's article from the local paper. We're proud of Swinburne Uni here in Melbourne, they have a great astro dept.

[http://www.watoday.com.au/national/western- australia/antenna...](http://www.watoday.com.au/national/western- australia/antenna-in-wa-outback-receives-signals-from-180-million-years- ago-20180301-h0wtyj.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is evidence of the strongly interacting, superfluid dark matter every time a double slit experiment is performed, as it is the medium that waves.

</comment><comment><USER20> there is no evidence that dark matter exists at all

laying immaginary tiles upon immaginary tiles

<comment><USER21> There is ample evidence that dark matter exists, as in, there is something there that we can indirectly observe. We have fairly good ideas about what it isn't, we just don't know what it is for certain.

<comment><USER22> Dark matter (LCDM) solves some problems and creates others, just like modified gravity theories solve some problems and create others. Hopefully more experimental data will lead to an answer.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Beautiful 'Recently Purchased' Notifications for WooCommerce - <AUTHOR> https://woobought.com <comment><AUTHOR> A neat little plugin to show recent purchase notifications to your visitors while putting design first and keeping UX in mind. Specifically for WordPress & eCommerce.

Feedback and opinions are definitely welcome :)</comment>


Visa Rejections for Tech Workers Spike - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/h-1b-visa-rejections-spike-under-trump/ <comment><USER2> Since when is a QA Analyst a highly specialized occupation where they can't find Americans to do the job?

<comment><USER3> it seems like a large portion of tech jobs are outsourced - even in the gov. glad to see something is being done to change it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> QA analyst in most cases but not all, is one of the least specialized occupations. It's true they played by the rules etc, but when you play by the rules , and the rules change.. expect the unexpected.</comment>


How to Achieve Painless Registration - <AUTHOR> http://asktog.com/columns/081Registration.html

<comment><USER2> To improve my signup rate I took the leap of faith of making the sign form have four fields: name, email, and two password fields. I don't even require an image verification.

After signup the user is directed to their account panel on which they can fill out any extra details that they may want to provide.

<comment><USER3> Dont require password confirmation if you have an email.. they can always use the lost/forgot password feature.

<comment><USER4> Or, even more spartan, don't ask for a password: the sign up box would just be an email address field with a button labeled "Sign Up" next to it. You could autogenerate the password and let them change it later, or just ask for it once you click the emailed link. As well, you could reformat the address recipient part into a valid username and default to that, but offer then the option of changing it any time in the first 48 hours, as a preference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really wish that he blogged every week.</comment>


14 tracking tools monitor your visit to every web page - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9210866/14-tracking-tools-monitor-your-visit-to-every-web-page.html <comment><USER2> Funny thing is, that the Telegraph uses Disqus for their comments. Something that "Ghostery" is blocking in my browser, because it can track me on all the pages, that use Disqus. So I am not able to comment on the post, to tell them what I think about their double standards.

If it weren't so sad, I could laugh at the blind spot, the Telegraph shows in this situation. 'Cause Disqus isn't the only thing working behind the scene here.

There are DoubleClick, AdSense, Webtrends and so on... All in all there are 11 potential tracking systems working behind the Telegraph page. And they tell users about the situation in the EU regarding the coming "cookie law".

Best quote in the post: "Most sites have yet to introduce a feature asking for users consent." _sarcasm_</comment>


The Internet Is Run by an Unaccountable Private Company (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-internet-us-government <comment><USER2> Why is this relevant today? ICANN removes price caps on .org domains despite thousands of comments (98.1%) against [https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/c7hxy1/icann_remove...](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/c7hxy1/icann_removes_price_caps_on_org_domains_despite/.compact)

This bizarre fantasy that privatizing things increases the public's oversight and control and makes the institution more accountable really needs to stop: "Public revokes its own authority over something in effort to increase its authority over it"

It's positively kafkasque in the logic; just astounding people feel this way.

<comment><USER3> Could it be that privatization works as desired in some cases and not in others?

<comment><USER4> An even better phrasing is that privatization works as desired until it becomes more profitable for it to work differently.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, you could say the same about good/honest government.

<comment><USER6> I mean, if we're being fair, compare the domain of ICANN to the most-regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, drugs, education and housing... There is no question where prosperity and liberty are winning, and where corruption, inequity and insufficient supply/quality are dominating.

<comment><USER7> Give it time. Pharma had some time to practice stinkers. Education is mostly private in the US above basic level and causes misery all around due to loans. Housing? Collusion between private and public governance. Mostly private, good luck finding public housing. Even military in the US is mostly private.

Show me anything that is public. The only thing that comes to mind is roads (even there construction is private) and to lesser extent, municipal services like water and waste (also private contractors but controlled).

<comment><USER6> Ok... Education is not remotely resembling of what economists mean when they say Perfect Competition, or a free market, empowers consumers. How in the world do you believe it is not heavily interfered with?

<comment><USER8> "Perfect competition" would also require all consumers to be perfectly rational and to have full knowledge about the market. Where apart from fully automated algorithmic trading is this the case? (And even _there_ you have market failures)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From what I know, the government's involvement into ICANN had been controversial because it is the _US government_ , not because there was public oversight.

With ICANN's decisions having consequences for internet users all over the world, the right path IMO would have been to move oversight to some international body.

Treating it like just another californian company and removing _any_ oversight was a step in exactly the wrong direction.

</comment><comment><USER9> Needs (2015) in the title.

<comment><USER10> This.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you don't want to read, it's about ICANN.

</comment><comment><USER12> Government-created monopolies are not representative of the free market.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is, perhaps, one of the most asinine things I've ever read. The article presumes a conclusion: that the Internet should be governed. ICANN is explicitly designed to be an organization that is run from the bottom up (Internet users up to national governments) not from the top down (national governments down to Internet users). Decisions are made on, as far as possible, objective standards, not subjective or political rationale. Who gets allocated an IP address is based on technical need, not whether the content they'll put on that IP furthers the status quo.

The Obama Administration's decision to give up "control" of ICANN was one of the most brilliant foreign policy decisions they'll never get credit for. The US government had a never-exercised veto on ICANN decisions from the Internet's earliest days. Other governments, rightly, asked: "Why should the US get a veto and we don't." Perhaps it was justifiable when the US dominated Internet use. But when China and, soon, India surpassed it, it made no sense.

China and Russia pushed for a division of the U.N., the ITU, to take control. It's hard to argue against. Why should one nation have unilateral veto rights? Why shouldn't it be a decision of a multi-national organization who can be on the Internet?

Because… ahhhhh! Terrifying to think if the Internet would revert to the lowest common denominator of International policy. While there's much to criticize about the US's radically libertarian approach to free speech, an International group consensus on what's allowed online is far more terrifying.

The FIFA metaphor is apt, but not for the reason the writer intends. I've spoken before the ITU. The last time was to talk about anti-email spam issues. When I finished my talk a wisen gentleman stood to speak. You have to imagine a room in Geneva. It's very large. There are curved tables with placards for each country. This gentleman was from Syria.

"Thank you, Mr. Prince, for your wise words," he bellowed. "Email spam is one of the top problems that vexes the Syrian people. And your suggestions will help us deal with this most pressing concern."

This was 2006, if memory serves. Email spam was not one of Syria's top problems. Yet here we were.

After my talk I went out to dinner with a handful of staffers. We went to a nice Geneva restaurant. They talked about how they tried to keep people like the Syrian bureaucrat in his lane and not causing too much trouble, but not offending him too much.

"If I do my time here," one suggested, "someday I hope I can get a gig with the International Olympic Committee or FIFA. That's where the real loot is scored."

For all its faults, I'll take ICANN over any of that.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Ctrl-F "Google"

0 results.

Lol. Or maybe :(</comment>


Universe May Be Curved, Not Flat - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=universe-may-be-curved-not-flat <comment><USER2> Wait... _may_ be? I thought we established that spacetime _must_ be curved.

<comment><USER3> Flat design is all the rage these days. So, perhaps flat intelligent design?</comment></comment>


Meetup Spins Off from WeWork - <AUTHOR> https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/meetup-spins-off-from-wework-301031766.html <comment><USER2> Somewhat misleading headline; they will be spun off in 2.5 years from WeWork.

It's good news... as long as they survive that long. WeWork is cratering, I hope it doesn't take Meetup with it.

<comment><USER3> It spins off now.

Also from the email they sent today: "Today we're announcing that Meetup is no longer a subsidiary of WeWork and has been acquired by a group of investors dedicated to continuing our mission."

2.5 years in the linked article refers to the fact that WeWork acquired Meetup 2.5 years ago.</comment></comment>


Mark Karpeles, former Mt. Gox CEO, started a new company - <AUTHOR> https://www.forever.net/support/payments

<comment><USER2> Kill it with fire

<comment><USER3> Clearly you need to read the FAQ before jumping to any conclusions ;)

[https://www.forever.net/dedicated/stock?tab=2](https://www.forever.net/dedicated/stock?tab=2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note also that Mark has started responding to a few Reddit comments: [http://www.reddit.com/user/MagicalTux](http://www.reddit.com/user/MagicalTux)

</comment><comment><USER5> See Mark here: [https://www.tibanne.com/about](https://www.tibanne.com/about)</comment>


First Draft of the IEEE AI Ethics Paper: "Ethically Aligned Design" [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://standards.ieee.org/develop/indconn/ec/ead_v1.pdf? <comment><USER2> I really dislike the increasingly used term "ethics" and "ethically". Particularly ethics isn't something that's universally set in stone, it's a matter of individual's philosophies (ie preferences) but the term gets treated like a universal thing.

<comment><USER3> It'd better be universal, or else in presence of a superhuman AI we're surely fucked (as opposed to probably fucked).

Fortunately, humans do seem to have some shared ethics core in their firmware.

<comment><USER4> Regular humans have, for over half a century, possessed the ability to annihilate the entirety of civilization by basically pushing a button. So it always amazes me when people feel the need to make science fictional assumptions like AGI in their doomsday scenarios.

<comment><USER3> AGI isn't a replacement doomsday scenario; it's a set of additional scenarios to be considered _together_ with the usual ones - nuclear war, biological war, global pandemic, gamma ray bursts, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is part of an ongoing discussion that the public is having about algorithms influencing our lives, from policymaking to customized user interactions. There is a growing number of people from academia proposing varying degrees of regulations. Facebook's influence in the recent presidential elections may serve as a catalyst for what is to come.

References

[1] [http://hkspolicycast.libsyn.com/how-technology-governs- us](http://hkspolicycast.libsyn.com/how-technology-governs-us) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJkLD_s9pYaY_WD6emzzq...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJkLD_s9pYaY_WD6emzzqs3gjXBO2Zbyq) [3] [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/10/cathy_oneil_on_1.ht...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/10/cathy_oneil_on_1.html) [4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_PFhJrPxoU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_PFhJrPxoU)

</comment><comment><USER6> I think Section 2 – Business Practices and AI is particularly relevant and is something I've thought about a lot.

> Engineers and design teams are neither socialized nor empowered to raise > ethical concerns regarding their designs, or design specifications, within > their organizations. Considering the widespread use of AI/AS and the unique > ethical questions it raises, these need to be identified and addressed from > their inception.

Has anyone got stories of trying to raise ethical concerns within their organisation? Were you listened to? Were you happy with the results or left frustrated?

</comment><comment><USER7> Seems to be a one street. At some point do we not have to treat AI's ethically if they are approaching sentience?.

Maybe that should be separate topic and this is just about more basic AI.

<comment><USER8> There is a Star Trek episode that revolves around your first question, which I feel compelled to share: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Tre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_\(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation\))</comment></comment>


Sprint.ly: New software development management tool from Joe Stump - <AUTHOR> https://sprint.ly/ <comment><USER2> Got as far as the sign-up. I'm already skeptical because of all the other options available and I'm already pretty happy with what I'm using. When I saw that I had to enter a credit card during signup just to try the free period, I closed the browser tab.

Getting even just an email address from someone is very valuable. Why turn anyone away by requiring all this other stuff? Why not have the person simply enter an email address and then send a password via email or something? That's a 5 second sign-up process. Then you can have the user fill out the rest of the info during some sort of "getting started" process. Let the user fill in this info on his own interest in using the application (within the actual application.) Filling out a sign-up form is not interesting. It's more like a leap of faith that the application will be interesting enough for me when I get into it that it will reward me for the effort of going through the sign-up process.

Do you really have such a high volume of sign-ups that you have to do beta invites? I wonder if there is a better way to handle these things. Perhaps you could have a system where the feature gets auto-enabled as needed? My problem with beta invites is that for most services, by the time I receive the invite, I have forgotten what the invite was for and I ignore the email.

ETA: Look how scrumy.com does their process of getting a user from using the app to sign-up. Maybe not perfect, but far better than most I have seen.

<comment><USER3> All great feedback. The primary reason to limit signups right now is twofold: 1. There are only two of us and the holidays are upon us, so we wanted to keep support load as low as possible for now, 2. Our on-boarding process/funnel, as you've pointed out, is really lacking. Two nerds with full-time jobs don't make great copy editors unfortunately.

We're working on all of these things. I'll check out scrumy.com as well. Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks nice, but it still leaves me with the same feeling as most other tools like this: any co-located team is better off with just whiteboards, cards and sticky notes.

Plus most of these tools are geared towards the structured initial development phase, and become considerably less usable once a product is live and goes into maintenance mode. This is odd, since the major part of a projects lifespan consists of maintenance, not development.

The one great missing online tool IMO is one that both integrates _and_ separates the way the user experiences issues (like via Zendesk) and the way those issues are split up, prioritized and handled by developers (any known issue tracking system like Redmine etc).

Right now, every team I know either uses two systems in which the relationship is handled manually (and thus labor intensive and prone to errors) or one system that is only geared towards either audience.

<comment><USER5> Tender was built with that exact situation in mind. You can attach any number of support issues to one Lighthouse ticket and get bi-directional notification. This is a nice way to notify n support requests that the problem has been fixed once it's shipped. Alas, it only works with Lighthouse still.

But I do wish more support systems worked this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't watch the whole video because it completely fails to describe the _workflow_. What I'm really interested in: how would Sprint.ly solve/represent this workflow:

1\. Customer reports a defect

2\. Programmer figures out there are two tasks that needs to be done by different people (in different places). One task depend on the other.

3\. The first task is solved. How does the other person know to start?

4\. The second task is re-assigned and then solved.

Actually, it doesn't have to be this complex. But at least have that in mind when showing your product; all todo-applications can tackle the easy stuff, it's when the more complex use-cases appear that most of them fall apart.

And when you say "make it possible for everyone to participate" I hear "no way to figure out what _you_ need to do". Although it's good to have a place to see everything, I'm more often interested in only what I _need_ to participate in. Show us that please!

<comment><USER3> As for #3 in your list, we offer a feature where coder A can say, "Hey, coder B, you're item X is blocking my item Y!" When coder B finishes item X, coder A is alerted via email that coder B has unblocked them.

<comment><USER7> The original comment is correct though in that the video just talks about features, it doesn't tell a story or focus on how it would be used to build a product.

Even though I'm familiar with pivotal/ticketing systems, I still wanted to be sold on what it does not just on how it does it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know it sounds crazy, but I'd love a free option. A 1 person project doesn't make a lot of sense in any case other than as a test for the product. From that view, a free option doesn't seem like a big deal. I think of it like having a racing bike I can't take out of the house. I can see all that it does, try it out, but to really use it I'll get a paid account.

<comment><USER3> We do offer a free 30 day trial, which should be plenty of time to get a quick thumbs up / down for your needs.

<comment><USER8> I think that's great, but it's just not the same as Free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's beautiful, the video is great, but I don't see myself using this instead of the other thousands of project management tools. What does it do differently? In what will it make my life easier? Is it for developers or managers (or everyone..?) Basically, why should I use this instead of trello or asana? (To name only 2 out of 1000 project management tools).

</comment><comment><USER10> The site itself is light on details, but the video provides an excellent overview of the product. I especially like the minimap and the mad lib-style issue reporting.

<comment><USER3> I like the name "minimap". Graham and I struggled with what to name it and could only come up with "quick sort bar", which is a mouthful. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> First, I want to say that it looks like a lot of work went into this and it looks well done, complete with the cheery wide-eyed demo video.

However, do we really need yet another task management tool?

[http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/12/tyranny-of- th...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/12/tyranny-of-the-1.php)

<comment><USER12> Yes, and I need another text editor :)

No, seriously, for something as integral to what I do so many hours every day, I don't mind people continuing to innovate. Getting an editor or a management tool to fit you perfectly is pretty hard, and I, for one, haven't found a process or tool I'm 100% happy with

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When Pivotal first launched they had a free version for a while before started to switching pricing. Now, I understand there is a big no-no about raising the price later. However, I think there is a world where they can offer:

A - personal free accounts. Or free account for team of < 2.

B - announce the price but provide a 6-9 mont grace period just so they can get a nice momentum.

Now, they might be charging from the get go for fundraising reasons. Basically so they can go to investors and say: look we got X number of real paying customers in Y months. Which makes a real good case for getting investors.

That said, I love the UI. But I wont invest anytime on it yet, unless I know I can use it for free for a few months, or if there is strong social value that proves it can really help projects and requirement gathering process.

</comment><comment><USER14> I often joke (with myself since I'm sad that way) that everyone must at some point make a productivity web-app. It's nice that Joe has made one that fixes a few things that annoy me about most.

Most are targeted at engineers first (Pivotal), at visually oriented organizers (Trello) or adapted for the specific team that wrote it's methods (like Thoughtbot's).

Luckily I'm at the "tool choice" stage of a new venture so I won't give my team whiplash by trying this one out. If it integrates with Campfire it'd be perfect.

<comment><USER15> Yep, it needs an API and webhooks.

<comment><USER3> Hey foca! :) What webhooks should we add? I have a few ideas, but would love more. API is in-progress. :)

<comment><USER15> Chat hooks! I want hipchat (or campfire, w/e) to say "Joe commented on…" etc. Specially new items, comments and status changes.

Then I could configure github to notify sprintly and sprintly to notify the chat, instead of getting all the pushes in the chat, which is too noisy IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey guys, looking forward to seeing the comments. Go easy on Graham, though, he's the sensitive type. ;)

<comment><USER16> I'd like an information page not forcing you to watch a video. I don't know what this product is about.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, we just have the video right now, but we hear you loud and clear. Lots of people asking for this. Nerds aren't great at putting together marketing materials. Who knew? Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks interesting Joe. Any chance you'll offer team pricing? Per seat pricing quickly runs away in cost compared to alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there a good text-based description? Not really interested in sitting through another cutesy startup video.

</comment><comment><USER19> I got a bit distracted after I realized I recognized the voice in the video, but it looks like a nice project management tool. I wish there was more information about estimation though.

Right now, we use Pivotal and the lack of estimation on tasks makes it an incomplete offering. We estimate feature, but that is a fairly rough estimate used for longer-term prediction. It isn't until we break things down into tasks that people really understand how long it is going to take. Just having to estimate hours gets people to really think things through.

Given that half of project management is about predicting completion dates and judging risk of slippage, I'd say estimation is absolutely required.

<comment><USER3> We have estimation; it's just not featured in the video. Whoops! The estimates are the bubbles next to the item cards. We use S, M, L, XL for all item types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> We've recently tried apptrajectory.com but they are iterating in a different direction from what we want (e.g. Stories are finished then delivered then accepted)

sprint.ly looks like it is a lot closer to our workflow.

</comment><comment><USER21> I bailed halfway through the intro video. There was nothing wrong. It looks great. I'm just so very jaded about anything purported to manage... anything. Especially in a web app.

<comment><USER22> Vimeo doesn't allow one to skip ahead -- it should be hosted on youtube. (I have this problem with any vimeo vs youtube video.) Also, it looks like some of those popup boxes don't open when clicked until a delay happens. Looks slow. Ug.

<comment><USER23> Interestingly Vimeo does let you jump forward if you use their html5 player.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The demo video should tell a story. "John has a donut company and is having trouble keeping track of his team's tasks..."

Instead, it's literally a feature list.

<comment><USER3> Great idea. Version 2.0 will be better!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Estimation is an important feature.

1) by story points for team effort

2) by story points for business value

3) by hours for work to be completed in the current "iteration"

<comment><USER3> We have estimation; just wasn't highlighted in the video. We use S, M, L, and XL (rather than 1, 3, 5, 8) for scoring all tasks.

<comment><USER25> For both business value and effort? Also, by hours for tasks during the sprint?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We like to say development is a marathon, not a sprint.

<http://www.kanbanpad.com> \- Had to :).

P.s nice site design.

</comment><comment><USER27> Would you consider perhaps a feature set or details as to what it does that doesn't require me to sit through a video?

</comment><comment><USER28> Would like to sign-up but it asked me for a Beta Invite Code and I don't have one. Can someone please send me one?

</comment><comment><USER29> I'd really like to try this. How can I get an invite code? How far out are you from sending more?

</comment><comment><USER30> Looks gorgeous, what framework(s) is this implemented with?

<comment><USER3> We use Python/Django and MySQL. Pretty boring to be honest, which I'm digging after spending nearly five years working on crazy ass big infrastructure.

That being said, I'm eyeing Redis, Node.js, Memcached (of course), and some AWS services for future upgrades, services, and features.</comment></comment>


Lossless Image Compression Through Super-Resolution - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/caoscott/SReC <comment><USER2> This is utterly fascinating.

To be clear -- it stores a low-res version in the output file, uses neural networks to predict the full-res version, then encodes the difference between the predicted full-res version and the actual full-res version, and stores that difference as well. (Technically, multiple iterations of this.)

I've been wondering when image and video compression would start utilizing standard neural network "dictionaries" to achieve greater compression, at the (small) cost of requiring a local NN file that encodes all the standard image "elements".

This seems like a great step in that direction.

<comment><USER3> It's a really cool idea, but I don't know if this would ever be a practical method for image compression. First of all, you could never change the neural network without breaking the compression, so you can't ever "update" it. Like: what if you figure out a better network? Too bad! I mean, I guess you could, but then you need to to version the files and keep copies of all the networks you've ever used, but this gets messy quick.

And speaking of storing the networks: I don't know that you would ever want to pay the memory hit that it would take to store the entire network in memory just to decompress images or video, nor the performance hit the decompression takes. The trade-off here is trading reduced drive space for massively increased RAM and CPU/GPU time. I don't know any case where you'd want to make that trade-off, at least not at this magnitude.

Again though: it's an awesome idea. I just don't know that's ever going to be anything other than a cool ML curiosity.

<comment><USER4> I think the idea is the network is completely trained and encoded along with the image and delta data. A new network would just require retraining and storing that new network along with the image data. It doesn't use a global network for all compressions.

<comment><USER5> I don't think this would work, the size of the network would likely dominate the size of the compressed image.

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't the network be part of the decoder?

<comment><USER7> Yes, and this is why you couldn't update the network. Still, much like how various compression algos have "levels," this standard could be more open in this regard, adding new networks (sort of what others above refer to as versions) and the image could just specify which network it uses. Maybe have a central repo from where the decoder could pull a network it doesn't have (i.e. I make a site and encode all 1k images on it using my own network, pull the network to your browser once so you can decode all 1k images). And even support a special mode where the image explicitly includes the network to be used for decoding it along with image data (could make sense for a very large images, as well as for specialized/demonstrational/test purposes).

All in all, a very interesting idea.

<comment><USER6> I wonder what the security implications of all this is, sounds dangerous to just run any old network. I suppose maybe if it's sandboxed enough with very strongly defined inputs and outputs then the worst that could happen is you get garbled imagery?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. It sounds like the idea is fundamentally like factoring out knowledge of "real image" structure into a neutral net. In a way, this is similar to the perceptual models used to discard data in lossy compression.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if there's a way to do this more like traditional compression; performance is a huge issue for compression, and taking inspiration from a neural network might be better than actually using one. Conceptually, this is like a learned dictionary that's captured by the neural net, it's just that this is fuzzier.

<comment><USER10> Training the model is extremely expensive computationally, but using it often isn't.

For example, StyleGAN takes months of compute-time on a cluster of high-end GPUs to train to get the photorealistic face model we've all seen. But generating new faces from the trained model only takes mere seconds on a low- end GPU or even a CPU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really interesting but out of my league technically. I understand that super-resolution is the technique of inferring a higher-resolution truth from several lower-resolution captured photos, but I'm not sure how this is used to turn a high-resolution image into a lower-resolution one. Can someone explain this to an educated layman?

<comment><USER12> From peaking at the code, it seems like each lower res image is a scaled down version of the original plus a tensor that is used to upscale to the previous image. The resulting tensor is saved and the scaled image is used as the input to the next iteration.

The decode process takes the last image from the process above, and iteratively applies the upscalers until the original image has been reproduced.

Link to the code in question: [https://github.com/caoscott/SReC/blob/master/src/l3c/bitcodi...](https://github.com/caoscott/SReC/blob/master/src/l3c/bitcoding.py#L106)

<comment><USER13> If we substitute "information" for "image", "low information" for "low resolution" and "high information" for "high resolution", perhaps compression could be obtained generically on any data (not just images) by taking a high information bitstream, using a CNN or CNN's (as per this paper) to convert it into a shorter, low information bitstream plus a tensor, and then an entropy (difference) series of bits.

To decompress then, reverse the CNN on the low information bitstream with the tensor.

You now have a high information bitstream which is _almost_ like your original.

Then use the entropy series of bits to fix the difference. You're back to the original.

Losslessly.

So I wonder if this, or a similar process can be done on non-image data...

But that's not all...

If it works with non-image data, it would also say that mathematically, low information (lower) numbers could be converted into high information (higher) numbers with a tensor and entropy values...

We could view the CNN + tensor as mathematical function, and we can view the entropy as a difference...

In other words:

 _Someone who is a mathematician might be able to derive some identities, some new understandings in number theory from this_...

<comment><USER14> Convolution only works on data that is spatially related, meaning data points that are close to each other are more related than data points that are far apart. It doesn't give meaningful results on data like spreadsheets where columns or rows can be rearranged without corrupting the underlying information.

If by non-image data you mean something like audio, then yes it could probably work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I asked a question about a similar idea on Stack Overflow in 2014. [https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/22317/does-there- exis...](https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/22317/does-there-exist-a-data- compression-algorithm-that-uses-a-large-dataset-distribu)

They did not have any idea and they were dicks about it as usual.

</comment><comment><USER16> This technology is super awesome... and it's been available for awhile.

A few years ago, I worked for #bigcorp on a product which, among other things, optimized and productized a super resolution model and made it available to customers.

For anyone looking for it - it should be available in several open source libraries (and closed source #bigcorp packages) as an already trained model which is ready to deploy

</comment><comment><USER17> On the order of 10% smaller than WebP, substantially slower encode/decode.

<comment><USER18> is webp lossless?

<comment><USER19> It's both lossless and lossy - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me of this.

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

Gave me a comical thought if such things can be permitted.

You split into rgb and b/w, turn the pictures into blurred vector graphics. Generate and use an incredibly large spectrum of compression formulas made up of separable approaches that each are sorted in such a way that one can dial into the most movie-like result.

3d models for the top million famous actors and 10 seconds of speech then deepfake to infinite resolution.

Speech to text with plot analysis since most movies are pretty much the same.

Sure, it wont be lossless but replacing a few unknown actors with famous ones and having a few accidental happy endings seems entirely reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER21> Related for an other domain, lossless text compression using LSTM: [https://bellard.org/nncp/](https://bellard.org/nncp/)

(this is by Fabrice Bellard, one wonder how he can achieve so much)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is a lot like "waifu2x".[1] That's super-resolution for anime images.

[1] [https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x](https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x)

</comment><comment><USER23> Reminds me of RAISR ([https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/11/enhance-raisr-sharp- images...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/11/enhance-raisr-sharp-images-with- machine.html)).

I remember talking with the team and they had production apps using it and reducing bandwidth by 30%, while only adding a few hundred kb to the app binary.

</comment><comment><USER24> and what's the size of the neural network you have to ship for this to work? has anyone done the math on the break even point compared to other compression tools?

e: actually a better metric would be how much does it compress compared to doing the resolution increase with just lanczos in place of the neural net and keeping the Delta part intact

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know how much better the compression ratio is compared to png? Which is also a lossless encoder.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how well this technique works when the depth of field is infinite?

Out of focus parts of an image should be pretty darned easy to compress using what is effectively a thumbnail.

That said, the idea of having an image format where 'preview' code barely has to do any work at all is pretty damned cool.

</comment><comment><USER27> Would massive savings be achieved if an image sharing app like say, Instagram were to adopt it, considering a lot of user-uploaded travel photos of popular destinations look more or less the same?

<comment><USER28> My guess is that it would be much more expensive unless it's a frequently accessed image. CPU and GPU time is much more expensive than storage costs on any cloud provider.

<comment><USER29> Wouldn't it be cheaper if the image is _infrequently_ accessed? I'm thinking in the extreme case where you have some 10-year-old photo that no one's looked at in 7 years. In that case the storage costs are everything because the marginal CPU cost is 0.

<comment><USER28> It depends if the decompression is done on the server or on the client. If the client is doing the decompressing it would be better to compress frequently accessed images because it would lower bandwidth costs. If the server does the decompressing it would be better for infrequently accessed images to save on CPU costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I believe a big issue with this will be floating point differences. Due to the network being essentially recursive, tiny errors in the initial layers can grow to yield an unrecognizably different result in the final layers.

That's why most compression algorithms use fixed point mathematics.

There are ways to quantizise neutral networks to make them use integer coefficients, but that tends to lose quite a lot of performance.

Still, this is a very promising lead to explore. Thank you for sharing :)

</comment><comment><USER31> Is this actually lossless - that is, the same pixels as the original are recovered, guaranteed? I'm surprised such guarantees can be made from a neural network.

<comment><USER32> The way many compressors work is based on recent data, they try to predict immediately following data. The prediction doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be good enough that only the difference between the prediction and the exact data needs to be encoded, and encoding that delta usually takes fewer bits than encoding the original data.

The compression scheme here is similar. Transmit a low res version of an image, use a neural network to guess what a 2x size image would look like, then send just the delta to fix where the prediction was wrong. Then do it again until the final resolution image is reached.

If the neural network is terrible, you'd still get a lossless image recovery, but the amount of data sent in deltas would be greater than just sending the image uncompressed.

<comment><USER31> Ah, I understand! I wasn't aware that was how they worked!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I though superresolution uses multiple input files to "enhance". For example - extracting a highres image from a video clip

<comment><USER34> They reformulate the decompression problem in the shape of a supperresolution problem conforming to what you just wrote. Instead of getting variety through images of a video clip they use the generalization properties of a neural network.

"For lossless super-resolution, we predict the probability of a high- resolution image, conditioned on the low-resolution input"

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is interesting but I'm not sure if the economics of it will ever work out. It'll only be practical when the computation costs become lower than storage costs

<comment><USER36> Think youtube or netflix - it's compressed once and then delivered hundred million times to consumers.

<comment><USER35> but if its something that's requested / viewed a lot thats probably something don't want to be compressing/decompressing all the time. Neural networks still take quite a lot of computational power and require GPUs.

If its something you don't necessarily require all the time its still probably cheaper to just store it instead of run it through a ANN. You just need to look at the prices of a GPU server compared with storage costs on AWS and the estimated run time to see there is still a large difference.

I mean I could be wrong (and I'd love to be since I looked at a lot of SR stuff before) but that's sort of the conclusion I reached before and I don't really see anything has significantly changed since

<comment><USER36> > but if its something that's requested / viewed a lot thats probably > something don't want to be compressing/decompressing all the time.

You're compressing only once. Decompression is usually way less expensive and that happens on the client, so without additional cost to netflix/youtube.

Of course this does not mean youtube must use it on all the videos including the ones with 10 views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How do ML based lossy codecs compare to state of the art lossy compression? Intuitively it sounds like something AI will do much better. But this is rather cool.

<comment><USER38> They perform better, from what I've read.

<comment><USER39> Depends entirely on your definition of "better".

In terms of quality vs bit rate, ML-based methods are superior.

In terms of computation and memory requirements, they're orders of magnitude worse. It's a trade-off; TINSTAAFL.

<comment><USER38> > memory requirements

Agreed, although this bit is unclear - the compressed representations of the ML-based methods take up much less space in memory than traditional methods, but yes - the decompression pipeline is memory-intensive due to intermediary feature maps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Looks like FLIF has a slight edge on compression ratio according to the paper, but it beats out other common compression schemes which is impressive.

</comment><comment><USER22> How does it work for data other than Open Images, if trained on Open Images? If it recognizes fur, it's going to be great on cat videos.

</comment><comment><USER41> It seems like "lossless" isn't quite right; some of the information (as opposed to just the algo) seems to be in the NN?

Is a soft-link a lossless compression?

It's like the old joke about a pub where they optimise by numbering all the jokes, .. just the joke number isn't enough, it can be used to losslessly recover the joke, but it's using the community storage to hold the data.

<comment><USER28> As long as you get back the exact same image you put in, it's lossless.

<comment><USER42> In that sense, I can losslessly compress everything down to zero bits, and recover the original artifact perfectly with the right algorithm.

<comment><USER43> You're ignoring two things:

1) that the aggregate savings from compressing the images needs to outweigh the initial cost of distributing the decompressor.

2) to be lossless, decompression must be deterministic an unambiguous, so you can't compress _everything_ down to zero bits; you can compress only _one_ thing down to zero bits, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to unambiguously determine which thing is represented by your zero bits.

<comment><USER42> In each case I pick out an algorithm beforehand that will inflate my zero bits to whatever artifact I desire.

<comment><USER43> "I will custom write a new program to (somehow) generate each image and then distribute that instead of my image" is not a compression algorithm. But I think you'd do well over at the halfbakery.

<comment><USER42> It works well if it's the only image!

<comment><USER43> Now you're chasing your own tail. You've gone from "I can losslessly compress everything" to "I can losslessly compress exactly one thing only".

<comment><USER42> I'm arguing it's the same as this image compression technique. They rely on a huge neural network which must exist wherever the image is to be decompressed.

If I'm allowed to bring along an unlimited amount of background data, then I can compress everything down to zero bits.

In contrast, an algorithm like LZ78 can expressed in a 5 line python script and perform decently on a wide variety of data types.

<comment><USER43> > _If I 'm allowed to bring along an unlimited amount of background data, then > I can compress everything down to zero bits._

If by "background data" you mean the decompressor, this is patently false. No matter how much information is contained in the decompressor (The Algorithm + stable weights that don't change), you can only compress one thing down to any given new representation ( low resolution image + differential from rescale using stable weights ).

If by "background data" you mean new data that the decompressor doesn't already have, then you're ignoring the definition of compression. Your compressed data is all bits sent on the fly that aren't already possessed by the side doing the decompression regardless of obtuse naming scheme.

> _I 'm arguing it's the same as this image compression technique._

That's wrong, because this scheme doesn't claim to send a custom image generator instead of each image, which is what you're proposing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


(Android) Developer Income Report #14 - <AUTHOR> http://www.kreci.net/reports/developer-income-report-14/

<comment><USER2> I've been following your reports for some time and am always pleasantly surprised when I see the next one pop up! One thing though is that whilst your writing conveys passion and excitement your English is still below par. If you're interested, I'd be happy to proof-read your articles before they go up. My email is in my profile. I look forward to your next report -- I hope you hit at least $4k =]

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - trying hard to get those $4k. I had very limited time for today post so English is not as good as it might be but will try to improve it in the future... :)

<comment><USER3> Don't fret about it, you're doing great. The thing that matters is the content, not the package. I'm sure that if you'd write a sales brochure you'd have someone check it but for your blog posts your level of English is more than adequate.

Dziekuje bardzo za wszystko ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kreci, just one suggestion: you're already doing very well with your products, you don't need to overdo with advertising on your blog...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for suggestion. I will consider removing some ads.

<comment><USER5> That would be a bad idea. You make your living by selling those things, you share your numbers with us and then, you would remove some ads because of a jealous programmer. Please don't do it and feel free to sell your stuff as much as you want.

I was almost angry when I saw the <AUTOPROMOTION> tag in your post. Why writing it? You have to autopromote your products if you want to sell them. This <AUTOPROMOTION> tag makes me feel like you're not serious about your book.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the "jealous programmer"... I had a feeling that on hacker news this kind of personal attack wasn't welcome, but hey.

By the way, I was talking about the google ads.

<comment><USER5> Really sorry for that. I can't edit my comment anymore but it am aware that is a mistake.

<comment><USER4> Ok, no problem. It's just that I wasn't used to it here :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In case it interests someone, I am planning to write similar data for my adventures with app development.

<http://appsreport.agiliq.com/>

(I made 33$ lat month, on path to making 45$ this month, but hey its increasing!)

More links

<http://appsreport.agiliq.com/apps-income-report-1-august> [https://img.skitch.com/20110820-kjnc6agqj75m6an3a4ua6hbfbc.p...](https://img.skitch.com/20110820-kjnc6agqj75m6an3a4ua6hbfbc.png)

</comment><comment><USER7> Could you give a short overview what you did recently? I mean, the book is written, of course, but did you create or update your Android apps a lot, did you take new photographs etc.? Or is that pretty much fixed, (semi-)passive income and you're working on the next thing(s)?

</comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone give an insight: is iOS development still profitable for someone who wants to enter now, this late?

<comment><USER9> The gold rush is over (thankfully). If you create something of value (a very subjective word) and are able to get visibility, you can be profitable.

<comment><USER10> > and are able to get visibility

That's the big if here. If you can't get visibility you will make almost no money.

It's a gamble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As usual comments are welcome and strongly desired! =)

</comment><comment><USER11> Just want to say I love reading your Income Reports. I'm especially impressed with iStockPhoto which seems to be an awesome source of revenue that doesn't require a lot of maintenance. Any insights on how you decided what to include in your portfolio there?

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm also working on a book (which will be free) with Android tips & tricks for making your apps popular. Following only this book's tips I plan to get to a stable $3-4000/month with 160 work hours - the equivalent of one 8h/day work month. I am currently on the right track, making $300/month with about 16h of work.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm very impressed by your results and a friend and I have been taking your advice to heart for the last 2 months and working on learning and creating our first app. Our programming experience is very limited but we're making progress. Great advice and interesting to see your results.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been learning Android Development by creating my first app that has been published on the market. It is not too popular but learnt me a lot about development and good marketing appeal. Most important is to do something and try hard to do it well and the success usually comes sooner or later ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for sharnig. What Ad platform do you use? AdMob? Have you tryed other alternatives?

</comment><comment><USER15> Always happy to see these pop up on HN.. Anyone else willing to share their passive income stream?

EDIT: sadly I do not have a passive income stream to share!

<comment><USER16> At HN, passive income usually comes from software, but tons of people make it from online retail. I formulated a skin cream and a lab makes and ships it. The majority of the work is website creation/maintenance and branding/promotion. After you get rolling, it is only about an hour or two of work a week at most. I get the impression that many people want to stick solely to their domain and lose sight of the possibility of using their skills to have a competitive advantage in a different market.

I am not sure if you were looking for numbers or a different story, but I hope this helps.

<comment><USER17> Great response - broadens the mind about what's possible. Congratulations - nice to see success in a different area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would be interesting to see this compared to the number of hours you've put in over the course of the development, so you have an increasing per hour rate.

</comment><comment><USER19> Are these numbers revenue or profit? And congrats :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I still need to pay tax and health insurance from those and I have about $300 of monthly costs (server, domains, internet etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What is the average CPM like for those Android ads? And how much time did you spend promoting that app prior to releasing it?</comment>


Would a wikipedia-like site to create free illustrations work? - <AUTHOR>

Although most of us can write, few of us can draw.  Moreover, it's not obvious whether the sort of collaboration that goes on with wikipedia would work with drawing. <comment><USER2> kind of like drawball.com?</comment>


The Coin? Gold. Its 'Real Value'? Lady Liberty Is Black - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/us/black-lady-liberty-us-coin.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> The title literally says that the 'Real Value' of this gold coin is that Lady Liberty is black.

I guess you could calculate the value of a black lady liberty by checking her price over spot or compared to other coins? I would guess the gold holds higher portion of the value.

I guess everything needs to look like the cover of a modern schoolbook with every age/race permutation represented. I would be ok with less stock photography filler in the world.</comment>


Kernel, a startup working on brain implants to link thoughts to computers - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603771/the-entrepreneur-with-the-100-million-plan-to-link-brains-to-computers/ <comment><USER2> I do some of my Master's research in this space -- specifically trying to build computer programs to interpret what a person is thinking of based on the neural activity occurring within the brain. This field is so, so far away from any sort of useful brain-computer interface, but there is exciting work going on right now.

The biggest problem is that we don't understand how the brain works well enough. It's quite complex and pulling out useful information is very challenging. Machine learning algorithms can be ran on neural data (fMRI/EEG/MEG) to identify some simple words or detect specific intentions/reactions to stimuli, but we definitely aren't getting this information at a rate which is anywhere near faster than current human interaction methods and with nowhere near the accuracy (in real world settings) we would need to be practically useful.

<comment><USER3> Pardon my relative ignorance on the subject, but couldn't we take an approach in which we attempt to let the _brain_ figure out how to interpret/send signals? I.e. find a way to take advantage of the well-established extreme plasticity of the brain, and let it figure out _our_ interface, rather than the other way around?

<comment><USER2> There are some cases where plasticity can be useful. For example: if a particular intention is associated with the neural activity while a person lifts their arm, eventually the person can train themselves to trigger the intention just by _thinking_ of lifting their arm (without actually doing it). This is the brain learning to control the intention instead of the action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I seriously doubt that we'll ever get to the point that we're comfortable with brain surgery just to upgrade our "connectedness." The real win is some sort of skull cap which can read your brain signals, and communicate with your brain through the skull. Seems impossible now, but I wouldn't be surprised if they come up with a way.

My concern is that we haven't yet gotten smartphones right. Most of us love and hate them. I'd love to have something like parental controls on my phone which I could use to limit what I can do with it: set limits on my usage, control which apps I can use, and limit what I can do with them. There's a variety of enforcement mechanisms ranging from putting in a longer random password and not writing it down, have my spouse set it up, have it setup initially and then come up for review every three months...

But imagine if we all had something similar, inescapable, engaging, entertaining, and utterly addicting in our heads. Yikes. Imagine if you've got notification overload...In your head. Yikes.

No thanks. I'm still trying to get a handle on my damn smartphone addiction.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is worrying. The surveillance capabilities here alone are terrifying, not to mention the potential future invasive adverts we could be presented with. I hope this doesn't happen in my lifetime.

<comment><USER6> Not to worry. The implant will help you adjust to the idea. You'll be telling all your friends how great it is!

<comment> amiga-workbench Lets hope the FSF make some progress with the larger public before we descend into such a hellscape.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While the whole brain thought interface is a great idea, I really just wish I had some kind of keyboard and mouse I could control with my mind, and a pair of glasses with my screens. That would eliminate so many ergonomic issues, and probably increase speed as well. I wonder what typing looks like in the brain...

</comment><comment><USER8> We have a very basic understanding how our brains function. They are most complex bilogical thing we have ever encountered and due to morality issues it's very difficult to test hypothesises on. Sadly this man's quest will not come to fruition but a better allocation of effort would be to the get the NIH/WHO data set of scans be freely available for AI to start figuring out patterns. There wouldn't be any real economic activity to do so(the shame!) But what I believe is necessary to move the field forward.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think a brain interface to computers and phones would be useful but privacy would really worry me. Hack someone's brain, and you get way too personal info. Sometimes when I'm reading on my tablet, I think it'd be cool if it would just scroll when I get towards the bottom. Eye tracking might work, but I feel like you'd falsely trigger it sometimes.

Also, I feel like I think way faster than I can type. I can visualize the piece of code in my head before I even type it out. Imagine no more spelling mistakes :)

Brain surgery already seems very scary, as you have to stay awake during it. Then when they come out with new hardware generations, go under the knife again? Brain surgeries also are expensive. But I could see how something like this would make me 100x more productive than I am now. So if I created something really cool using my new special abilities it would probably pay for itself.

So I see a lot of upsides and downsides. I don't know if this would be something I'd want to be an early adaptor of, though. Imagine if the company supporting it went out of business, now you have this unmaintained piece of hardware in your head. If something like this was perfected, I feel like this would be an asset to have just for the productivity advantages.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, speech provides 10-100 bps, which isn't much. But I doubt that pulling speech-driving data would do any better. You'd need to work at lower levels. There's probably lots of multidimensional parallel processing at play.

Requisite plug for _Echopraxia_ by Peter Watts :)</comment>