Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning - <AUTHOR> https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaStar-Grandmaster-level-in-StarCraft-II-using-multi-agent-reinforcement-learning <comment><USER3> Honestly, the article needs to be replaced with [https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaStar-Grandmaster- leve...](https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaStar-Grandmaster-level-in- StarCraft-II-using-multi-agent-reinforcement-learning) which actually goes into some technical detail. Nature.com's article is purely for laypersons and, imo, not particularly useful for HN's crowd because of how little insight it gives.

It also provides the paper and an archive of all of the AI's matches for anybody who wants to take a closer look. These can be viewed with the free version of SC2 (afaik).

Further links:

[https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1724-z](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1724-z) (supplementary data available here in json form)

[https://rdcu.be/bVI7G](https://rdcu.be/bVI7G) (public paper)

[https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/alphastar- resource...](https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/alphastar-resources) (replays)

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtFBLTxDxWOSrWZ8krQt6...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtFBLTxDxWOSrWZ8krQt6eDNXTpG67Xpf) (list of older AlphaStar matches cast by an SC2 player)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l82wBa3UoZU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l82wBa3UoZU) (one of the newer matches cast by another player)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dpaunw/deepminds...](https://old.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dpaunw/deepminds_alphastar_ai_has_achieved/f5u9fx8/) (win/loss rates across all the played matches by race, includes apm)

<comment><USER4> This comment was originally posted on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21408024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21408024), but we've merged it into the earlier submission, which used the link you mentioned.

<comment><USER3> Neat, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a really interesting one to digest. As with previous announcements about AlphaStar, much of the feedback (here and elsewhere) is about the fundamental challenge of assessing human vs. machine in an RTS. These points are very valid - stepping back however, this still feels like a pretty incredible accomplishment.

I'm a gold league SC2 player, so maybe in the 30th-50th percentile. Three years ago, when DeepMind started this project (and after nearly two decades of research into SC/SC2) I could probably have beaten the best non-cheating AI. Now, after 3 years, this AI is playing at a Grandmaster level, under at least a reasonable approach to fairness. By comparison, according to the AlphaGo paper [1] the best Go AIs prior to AlphaGo were playing at a 6 Dan level, which looks to be somewhere in the 90-98th percentile [2].

The speed at which AlphaStar overtook previous AIs seems to me to be nearly unprecedented in AI research. This is like if the world's best chess AI had gone from losing high school tournaments to being competitive with Kasparov in less than 3 years. Valid criticisms aside, this feels like an incredible achievement.

[1] [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16961.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16961.pdf) [2] [https://senseis.xmp.net/?KGSRankHistogram](https://senseis.xmp.net/?KGSRankHistogram)

<comment><USER6> > This is like if the world's best chess AI had gone from losing high school > tournaments to being competitive with Kasparov in less than 3 years.

I don't think it's like that at all. On the high level, there is no "chess AI", "go AI", "image classification AI" and "dexterous manipulation AI". These are all sides of the same coin, that gets significantly better every year. Adding support for the new game or new "environment" to existing deep learning based backbone still requires a bit of engineering work and a few creative tricks to unlock the best possible performance, but the underlying fundamentals are already there and are getting better and better understood.

There is a reason why the progress in AI is so hard to measure. Anytime a next task is solved, there is a crowd saying it's not a "real AI" and that scientists are solving "toy problems". Both statements are totally true. But the underlying substance is that each of these toy problems is of increasing complexity and brings us closer and closer to solving the "real problems", which are mostly so undeniably complex that we couldn't attack them upfront. Still, the speed of progress in the field of AI research is staggering and it's hard to keep up with it even for professional researchers who spend all their waking hours working on these things.

6 years ago we were able to solve some Atari games from pixels. Today, that feels like a trivial exercise compared to modern techniques. With billions of dollars of investment pouring in and steady supply of fresh talent, it is very hard to predict what the pace of research will be in the coming years. It is entirely possible we'll encounter a wall we won't be able to overcome for a very long time. It is also possible that we won't, and in that case we're in for a very interesting next few decades.

<comment><USER7> > On the high level, there is no "chess AI", "go AI", "image classification > AI" and "dexterous manipulation AI". These are all sides of the same coin, > that gets significantly better every year.

On a practical level, this is not true. There are different algorithms, different architectures, different hyperparameters required for each of these problems, and often for each subdomain within each of these problems, and often for each specific _instance_ of these problems. It's difficult to draw any kind of holistic picture that combines all of the individual advances in each of these problem instances; _that 's_ why progress in AI is so hard to measure, and why a statement like "each of these toy problems...brings us closer and closer to solving the 'real problems'" is probably a bit too coarse-grained to be fair as well.

<comment><USER8> Are you writing this from last century?

Deepmind's best-in-class chess and Go AIs are the same code (AlphaZero) just given respectively rules and game state input for either chess or Go and then allowed to train on the target game.

One of the fun works in progress in this space is teaching AIs to play a suite of 80s video games. Getting quite good at several games where the idea is to go right and not die is pretty easy these days, but Deepmind's work can do a broader variety only coming badly unstuck on games where it's hard to discern your progress at all without some meta-knowledge.

<comment><USER7> I don't mean to imply AlphaZero is not impressive; it surely is. Nor do I mean to imply that any of these advances aren't impressive. I do mean to imply that "closed-world games with well-defined rules" is a relatively small subdomain of problems. And that BERT looks pretty different from AlphaZero.

<comment><USER8> The post you disputed pointed out that there aren't separate AIs needed for things like Go or Chess. Because there aren't (any more) the Deepmind work showed that you can just generalize to learn all games in this class the same way.

You claimed that "different architectures" are needed. Not true. And further you claimed this is true even for "each subdomain". This would have been a fair point in 1989. Traditional chess AIs approach the opening very differently for example, relying on fixed "books" of known good openings. But AlphaZero since it is a generalist doesn't do this, it plays every part of a match the same way.

Now you've gone from asserting that Chess and Go need separate AIs to claiming that since BERT and AlphaZero are different software it makes your point. Humans pretty clearly don't have a single structure that's doing all the work in both playing Go (AlphaZero) and understanding English (BERT) either - <USER2> that's a pretty bold bit of goalpost moving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Agents were capped at a max of 22 agent actions per 5 seconds, where one > agent action corresponds to a selection, an ability and a target unit or > point, which counts as up to 3 actions towards the in-game APM counter. > Moving the camera also counts as an agent action, despite not being counted > towards APM._

I'm happy to see that they've greatly improved the APM cap. During the earlier showmatch they had an extremely naive cap on the average APM during the whole game. Which meant that the AI could take it easy for most of the time and then during battle sequences hit peaks of 2000 APM. Also the previous cap was based on the in-game APM counter, which doesn't count some things like moving the camera, which is now addressed. The current state sounds a lot better.

However it seems still superhuman in mechanical non-strategy ways, e.g. a human can misclick (click too early/late when moving the mouse, or just miss the target with the cursor completely) or do accidental double clicks etc. These end up being very costly mistakes against a zero mechanical mistake AI. Which in turn means that the AI can win with an inferior strategy due to the extra gains it has via superior mechanical accuracy. In other words this artificial intelligence is still under significacnt artificial motor skills welfare, and thus even if it starts beating pro players we shouldn't be too quick to talk about how it's the intelligence part that got it the win.

All of that said, I'm liking the progress and am excited to see what they achieve with this next. Would love another showmatch against pro players.

<comment><USER10> Yes, those might have some impact, but it is clear that the progress is there, with this new APM cap and camera movement etc.

You can also see in replays that the AI often makes mechanical mistakes, missing spells, missing units, even ordering wrong units from outside the screen - so it surely seems that if it's win rate was conditioned in any strong way on its sheer mechanical ability, it would have learned to not make any such mistakes. Since the mistakes are clearly there - it seems that its power comes primarily from somewhere else, likely from the AI ability to choose the right actions, not from mechanical power of executing them perfectly.

Thus it is not likely that "this artificial intelligence is still under significacnt artificial motor skills welfare". They have consulted top players before they set this AI up, and if those details were important, they would have baked them into the limitations list already.

<comment><USER9> The mistakes it makes are due to bad decisions. There have been no claims by DeepMind that they have some sort of chaos engineering [1] going on where the AI decides one thing and then the output system actually does another thing.

Also I think you overestimate the AI/IT knowledge of these top players that they're consulting. I have great respect towards them, but they're not renaissance men [2] who both play 10 hours of StarCraft per day and also know the subtleties of how computers work, not to mention bleeding edge AI. You can watch the previous showmatch [3] to see how DeepMind people lack knowledge of StarCraft and how the pro players they're consulting lack understanding of the AI and both are learning new things live on air. Its obvious that their cooperation is bearing fruit as they spend more time talking to each other, as evidenced by the new APM limits. However I'm willing to bet that they would reach many more good conclusions if they just continue working together.

\--

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

[2] The problem with both parties (the pros & deepmind) is that they're so overspecialized. I'm nowhere near as good as them at their respective fields, but I am a professional programmer and diamond in StarCraft II. In addition I've built StarCraft II AI myself, although with different goals related to finding optimal strategies.

[3] [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/369062832](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/369062832)

<comment><USER11> >[2] The problem with both parties (the pros & deepmind) is that they're so overspecialized. I'm nowhere near as good as them at their respective fields, but I am a professional programmer and diamond in StarCraft II. In addition I've built StarCraft II AI myself, although with different goals related to finding optimal strategies.

So many things wrong with this comment.

You're nowhere near a professional StarCraft player if you're in Diamond league (I play casually and I'm on high plat, bordering Diamond), and Oriol Vinyals, the lead research scientist behind this project, is one of the most renowned scientists in the field _and_ used to play StarCraft at a professional level. They also said that other employees at DeepMind are at Masters level, and helped test the AlphaStar.

<comment><USER9> You quoted me saying that I'm not as good as them and then you say that my statement is wrong because I'm not as good as them. We seem to be in agreement. Maybe you misread? Anyway that was just a footnote to point towards my generalist nature, because I think that's a fundamental reason why I immediately see these things while for them it takes time to realize. Also to be even more fair towards them, my generalist knowledge around computer controlled gaming goes way beyond StarCraft II as I've written bots for many different games.

My main argument revolves around APM. Oriol Vinyals might be great, but I've also seen him make a statement on video in 2019 [1] how restricting the AI based on average APM during the whole game is reasonable. He has blindspots that someone like me can immediately spot.

\--

[1] [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/369062832](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/369062832)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has anyone read the actual paper ? This summary really makes it look like "mission accomplished", but this was much much more interesting than that. We saw AI do "obviously stupid things", and we also saw them improve a lot in the middle of the trial, as many youtubers showed.

AI was also much more interesting when playing the protoss race, and really felt like it was responding to the opponents actions, and the other races not so much.

But most surprising is that it didn't make any "breathtaking" moves or actions, as opposed to AlphaGO. Actually not a single game made pro player realize something new about the game. Which is really embarassing, because it suggests that the AI just was able to correctly reproduce existing strategies and build orders, that it probably "learned" from existing pro games in the training sample.

I was really hoping for a more interesting report, honestly explaining the shortcomings of the technics used and giving hints for the obvious blunders. As well as a roadmap for a second round, this time aiming at beating the very top players.

<comment><USER13> IMO it's a testament to how games like SC are collectively and thoroughly "solved" by the community, and how the games aren't that complex after all. I never followed SC or SC2, but my observation of the pro scene and competitive ladder for Warcraft 3 was that cookie cutter strats dominated. Pro players were typically those who executed best, not those who innovated best.

Personally I felt disappointed by the fact that real-time strategy played a pretty minor role in RTS games. If you left the well-beaten path of cookie cutting and tried something new you invariably gave up a pretty obvious advantage to do so.

<comment><USER14> There is a lot of strategy in RTS's but alpha star doesn't need to exploit any of it because it can win on mechanics. It has perfect macro, and perfect micro, which allows it to beat players without having to learn strategies or tactics.

It's kind of like competing against a gorilla in boxing chess. Just because a gorilla is dominant doesn't mean boxing chess doesn't require chess skills, only that a gorilla doesn't need them.

<comment><USER15> Are you sure it has perfect micro? Can you even execute perfect micro on 30 actions per 5 seconds?

<comment><USER16> "Perfect" no, much better than any human yes. 30 actions per 5 seconds is 360 actions per minute. The very top players might have similar stats, but the similarities would end there. A lot of human actions are mindless spam clicking and those 300+ actions would contain several misclicks. The ai would never misclick. They can also do things like pull back every weakened unit before it died much more accurately than a human. A human knows to do these things but it has much less mechanical skill than the ai.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > After 50 games, however, DeepMind hit a snag. Some players had noticed that > three user accounts on the Battle.net gaming platform had played the exact > same number of StarCraft II games over a similar time frame — the three > accounts that AlphaStar was secretly using. When watching replays of these > matches, players noticed that the account owner was performing actions that > would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a human. In response, > DeepMind began using a number of tricks to keep the trial blind and stop > players spotting AlphaStar, such as switching accounts regularly.

So instead of fixing the unfairness... they tried to hide it?

<comment><USER18> These extremely difficult/impossible things didn't really give an advantage. For example, AlphaStar would sometimes click on an object at the border of the screen. For humans that would be almost impossible, because the screen would scroll when the mouse approaches the border.

Similarly, AlphaStar would not play with group hotkeys, but use a different technique. However, in none of the analyses, people noticed things that would give AlphaStar an unfair advantage.

<comment><USER19> > These extremely difficult/impossible things didn't really give an advantage.

One of the videos I watched compared APM (Actions Per Minute) with EPM (Effective actions Per Minute). AlphaStar always has them nearly identical, which would be (according to him) basically impossible for humans.

<comment><USER20> Of course it's impossible for humans. Humans are used to clicking multiple times to do an action. Some actions you want to take in the game are _very_ important, failure to do them correctly can mean a lost game, for example moving units in combat properly. This means that it's better to spam click that action a few times to make sure that the button press is registered properly, because it is possible for button presses to fail due to hardware, software, and most often a coordination error. This means that essentially every player has a much higher APM than EPM, but it's really EPM that counts. APM itself is mostly irrelevant.

<comment><USER21> Hmm, seems like it might be interesting to add a slight error rate for AI clicking and see how it handles it?

<comment><USER22> You only need excess dexterity than your opponent, and only for a couple seconds, to decisively win a match in SC2.

Error rates, EPM and APM are all red herrings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There has always been the issue of interface when playing videogames AI vs human. Either give the human a brain-computer interface or give the AI a mouse, keyboard, monitor, robot hands and a camera. Anything else seems inherently unfair.

<comment><USER24> They are testing the AI's ability to do tactics and strategy, not motor and visual tasks. It has built in delay and needs to move around the map to gather information just like a human, so it doesn't have any significant unfair advantages.

Edit: Note that the version they sent out to the ladder had significant larger delay, significant lower APM, and didn't get any information not visible on the screen unlike the first iteration.

<comment><USER25> However the computer can macro while in a fight which is something people can't dI. We would miss the fight and lose the game. It's not just a tactics game. Attention span and where your eyes are matter.

<comment><USER26> It's so bad that below master people shouldn't really be doing too much micro during a fight because they'll lose out on macro. Even in pro matches you see attention span issues and sometimes avoidance of too much micro to win. Really good Micro is going to win you any battle.

<comment><USER25> I'm in diamond 2 and I definitely micro in battles. The difference between platinum 1 and diamond 3 is largely macro but it very soon becomes micro as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HqwCrDBdTE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HqwCrDBdTE)

Here is a video of someone finding out that he played against alphastar. (He won)

</comment><comment><USER28> I see a lot of comments downplaying this achievement, saying it's not impressive or it won't be impressive until X condition is met.

I welcome skepticism and criticism for this sort of thing, and think most of it that I've seen here is well founded. But I would like to take a second to explain why I think this, and really all the progress in this area, is actually a really impressive achievement to me.

Let me try and frame this from the computers perspective. Let's assume a resolution of 1024x780. I'm not sure what size frames they actually feed their agent but it's not that important to the discussion, the point is it's a big image, and according to the article this agent is learning from pixels. So, you the computer are given let's say 1024*780 = 798720 numbers to look at. You then choose a number between 0 and 798720 (or the crazy 10^26 number the article gives as the possible number of actions at each frame) as your action for that frame, and then you get another 798720 numbers to look at. After the round is over (on average 20 minutes, if you make a decision every frame that's 20x60x60 = 72000 rounds). You get one number telling you how well you did. You repeat the process and get a new number. It's higher this time! But what is the cause? was it that click you made on frame 22456? or maybe that unlikely move you made on frame 4567?

Obviously I'm oversimplifying here, and the numbers are probably wrong. but I still think what I've said gives the right idea for what kind of task we (as a society/community/whatever) have somehow gotten a computer to solve. Computers are DUMB, the fact that it's able to play this game at all, let alone at a high level, is still a minor miracle to me.

<comment><USER29> I think that downplaying the achievement is more like defensive mechanism which exists to protect illusion of human brain superiority.

<comment><USER30> Not at all. We've known machines are better than humans at machine-like tasks for hundreds of years. IMO responses like yours are defense mechanisms of AI researchers/enthusiasts who want to protect the illusion that they are creating things that do anything remotely resembling what the human brain does.

<comment><USER31> Kasparov comments on chess computers in an interview with Thierry Paunin on pages 4-5 of issue 55 of Jeux & Stratégie (published in 1989):

'Question: ... Two top grandmasters have gone down to chess computers: Portisch against "Leonardo" and Larsen against "Deep Thought". It is well known that you have strong views on this subject. Will a computer be world champion, one day ...?

Kasparov: Ridiculous! A machine will always remain a machine, that is to say a tool to help the player work and prepare. Never shall I be beaten by a machine! Never will a program be invented which surpasses human intelligence. And when I say intelligence, I also mean intuition and imagination. Can you see a machine writing a novel or poetry? Better still, can you imagine a machine conducting this interview instead of you? With me replying to its questions?'

<comment><USER30> The fact that Kasparov was obviously wrong about a computer's ability to solve a concrete optimization problem better than him says nothing of value whatsoever and essentially proves my original point. We already knew machines were better than humans at these kinds of tasks, but people (like Kasparov) who didn't understand what computers were capable of will make wrong statements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The title seems to contradict the subtitle:

> Google AI beats top human players at strategy game StarCraft II

vs

> DeepMind's AlphaStar beat all but the very best humans at the fast-paced > sci-fi video game.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, subtitle seems much better. My impression before reading was that it did beat the top players but reading the articles makes it clear it beats everyone BUT the top players...

Also, this part seems a bit weird from the article:

> The AI wasn't able to beat the best player in the world, as AIs have in > chess and Go, but DeepMind considers its benchmark met, and says it has > completed the StarCraft II challenge.

So they didn't manage to beat the best players but consider the challenge complete anyways? I thought the goal was to build something that could things better than humans.

<comment><USER32> They're framing it positively to distract from the fact they can't do it, the reality is they've spent millions of $ on compute and yet their agent is still terrible at strategy (and tactics sometimes too), they probably decided it's best to stop now before sinking even more money into it.

<comment><USER30> You're getting downvoted for tone probably, but I think you're right overall. They simply can't "win" this game in the same way they "won" Go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> king-rat Not being robust to strategies it hasn't seen before is a serious shortcoming in a real time strategy game. That also indicates an interesting flaw in how this model is trained - in the millions of games it plays against itself, how do you ensure that it tries every viable (and some inviable) strategies? Sure, it couldn't best Serral but I wonder how it would fare against Has, a player known for some pretty off the wall builds.

<comment><USER3> > Not being robust to strategies it hasn't seen before is a serious > shortcoming in a real time strategy game.

I'm not sure if you've actually played or followed competitive SC2. This is absolutely _normal_. Players will pull something completely unexpected out of a hat and win. The losing player will learn from it in future games. That's just how it goes. Unexpected strategies are really _hard_ to counter when you've never seen them before, and they're often employed to directly counter what you're doing right then and there. So you've been countered and dealt a devastating blow, which means figuring out how to come back from that can be hard to impossible. It's a thoroughly human failing in every way. I'd be more concerned if the AI wasn't able to learn to counter it in future matches.

<comment><USER32> I don't think you understood his point. A player doesn't __need __to have seen a strategy before to react correctly to it. Sometimes a player will pull something completely unexpected out of a hat and lose, because the other guy reacted correctly thanks to his game experience. If you watch any high GM player stream half the time his reaction to what his (worse) opponent is doing is "WTF is this?" as he then proceeds to crush it. Alphastar cannot do that.

<comment><USER3> I do understand his point. There are just as many examples of people being so overwhelmed by the new strategy that they don't know how to respond to it and lose. And then learn how to deal with it in later matches. Also, downvoting me for disagreeing is a dick move.

<comment><USER30> And yet, in Go, the AI adapted to any "weird strategy" and won regardless. The fact that AlphaStar can't is an obvious weakness.

<comment><USER34> I would say it's a weakness but I think it's shared by most players. A 'weird' go strategy isn't going to involve new kinds of pieces on the board or someone developing a win condition at a place on the board you can't see.

You can lose a Starcraft game easily if someone is doing something novel and you don't happen to scout the right place on the board soon enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> We need to create an open source organization to build these brains at home because: "Recomputing the AlphaGo Zero weights will take about 1700 years on commodity hardware."[1]

I see these huge AI brains creating a new class divide between people who have access to these new AI brains and those who don't. The mission of open source has always been to break down these barriers to empowerment with technology. Thus, this is a great area for open source innovation.

[1] [https://github.com/leela-zero/leela-zero](https://github.com/leela- zero/leela-zero)

<comment><USER36> AlphaGo Zero was extremely computation inefficient because in (IMO misguided) attempt to be "general", DeepMind avoided even slightly specializing training to Go. KataGo optimized training to Go, slightly, and obtained 100x speedup, and that was low hanging fruit.

<comment><USER35> 1700 years sped up 100x is still 17 years though. Even so, for the models that actually need it, Google and other people with huge GPU farms will have an enormous advantage over a single individual and only a large community can have any hope of challenging their ability to dominate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What would be interesting is to limit the AI processing speed to human capacity, which is something like 60 bits per second.

In all these AI v. Human games I see, it is really apples to oranges because the human consumes vastly less resources and compute cycles to perform at the same level as the AI. And when I say 'vast' I mean Vast. There is like a quintillion factor difference between the AI and the human.

There is no way the AI is even comparable to the human. To be comparable, we'd have to parallelize the game and lock millions of humans onto the game full time for millions of years.

At the end of the day, the AI is just a more sophisticated lookup table. There is as yet no analogous AI to human play.

<comment><USER38> It would be interesting to see if there are any meta reports on people doing research on the topic of resource constrained AI. Has anyone explored whether or not an AI can improve on its own algorithm while being heavily resource constrained?

Is the ability to use less resources a limit of our current hardware? Do we see the current hardware performance improvement trajectory being able to reduce the amount of resources an AI consumes to perform a task?

Are our algorithms simply not tuned well for using smaller resources? Could we build better algorithms around resource deficient environments?

<comment><USER37> Great questions. From what I can tell, AI is just as resource hungry as it ever was, if not more. The only difference is now we have more resources to throw at the traditional algorithms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > placing within the top 0.15% of the region's 90,000 players

> 61 wins out of 90 games against high-ranking players

This doesn't seem to be quite as commanding as it was in Go. Do we know what MMR it reached or if it consistently beat players like Serral?

<comment><USER40> It seems like it's only a matter of time though.

StarCraft II also has a rock-paper-scissors nature to it though, so you wouldn't expect even a perfect player to win 100% of the time. There are some strategies that are hard-counters to other strategies, and because of the imperfect information nature of the game, by the time you scout your opponent and see what they're doing, it may be too late to shift and deal with it.

<comment><USER10> > by the time you scout your opponent and see what they're doing, it may be > too late to shift and deal with it.

Unless you're Serral and your observers magically come out of nowhere and cover every single pixel of your base.

<comment><USER10> Like this is happens when you try to surprise Serral [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTMIh9wzDjo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTMIh9wzDjo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I won't agree until they beat South Korean players at Starcraft I.

<comment><USER42> They didn't even beat South Koreans at Starcraft 2 in the article

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Instead of playing the APM rate, maybe they can slow down the game for the human players? If you play at 0.25x or 0.5x, it will be harder for the AI to out micro. Couple of micro strategies used by the AI, like staying at a 7 range when enemy can fire at 6 range is still a big reason why they are so effective.

</comment><comment><USER44> I hope they don't stop here without doing a world champion challenge. It looks like they're still significantly below professional player strength.

<comment><USER36> They said they will stop here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> From the paper:

 _> Humans play StarCraftthrough a screen that displays only part of the map along with a high-level view of the entire map, to e.g. avoid information overload. The agent interacts with the game through a similar camera-like interface_

What exactly does that mean? Does it or does it not play by operating purely on image data human players would see on the screen?

How much of the system's interaction with game's interface is learned as opposed to hand-crafred and filtered through APIs?

It's amazing that most people here seem to think that system's ranking in a computer game are more important than its ability to learn from and interact with unstructured data.

<comment><USER46> Everything about AlphaStar is typed and discrete. It has perfect inputs because it uses an API (and does not read pixel data).

Human limitations that AlphaStar shares:

\- Data that requires the camera to see (e.g. enemy location, enemy HP)

\- Inability to examine/target cloaked units

Possibly unfair, super-human things AlphaStar has access to:

\- Instantaneous awareness of cloaked units

\- Knowledge of things humans need to infer/click (e.g. upgrades)

\- Global map awareness of unit positions (taking into account fog of war)

Definitely unfair:

\- Can select arbitrary collections of units, including outside of camera view

<comment><USER47> Do you know if it can target a particular unit from a clump of air units? If yes, then there is another "unfair" thing.

Also I wonder how their "camera-like interface" works with tactics like fly a building above units to make them harder to target.

<comment><USER46> Yeah. I think watching it split a line of Stalkers into two flanks that isn't done with a rectangular selection is crazy unfair.

I think you're saying does it suffer from occlusion during selection. Based on how APIs typically work, I would say no it does not. So yeah that's another thing humans can't do. AlphaStar could hypothetically stack units into a singular mass and it would be discretely untargetable by human players.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Link to all game replays: [https://deepmind.com/research/open- source/alphastar-resource...](https://deepmind.com/research/open- source/alphastar-resources)

</comment><comment><USER49> I know this is an endless discussion about fairness, but they handicapped it to have the capability in terms of EAPM of the worlds best player at peak. The result is that it could beat all but the top players. While the mechanics of not using hot keys was strange, I never saw it do anything the elite players couldn't do.

It is worth watching the match between alpha star and Serral who is current best player. Serral beats it like a walk in the park.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_BOp10v8kuM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_BOp10v8kuM)

</comment><comment><USER50> Having a hard time to parse what is the action space here.

The paper claims: AlphaStar's action space is defined as a set of functions with typed arguments

Looking at citation 7, it seems like they are structuring the action space as (First pick high level action)->(Pick argument 1 for action)->...->(Pick argument n for action). If this is the case, this seems to be "cheating" calling this AI as humans have completely picked out the actions. That is, the achievement here this: given what humans consider useful actions, AlphaStar can play at a grandmaster level.

The achievement here is mostly engineering in my opinion. One that extends far further than the 40ish people list on the paper. Probably an effort of over 1,000 people. From casually looking over the paper, there is nothing significantly different than AlphaZero or previous art. Again, the achievement here is listed under the infrastructure section of the paper.

In summary, this is a great step forward but now we need to start developing techniques to learn these action space hierarchies instead of throwing more power at increasingly difficult games.

<comment><USER36> It is extremely different from AlphaZero... In fact, they heavily rely on human knowledge, which is like opposite of AlphaZero. To quote the paper, "We found our use of human data to be critical in achieving good performance with reinforcement learning".

<comment><USER50> Ok, you're right. I should've said AlphaGo. But that in itself shows what I mean that this is almost a step backwards.

<comment><USER36> AlphaZero was miraculously good, almost to the point of straining credibility. AlphaGo and AlphaStar are more like normal advances. They are mostly engineering, although theoretical contributions are not trivial. (Using reinforcement learning for value network in case of AlphaGo, and multi-agent self-play setup in case of AlphaStar, since straight self-play doesn't work.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> There's a great video highlighting irregularities in AlphaStar MMR calculations and Blizzard matchmaking, notably, Alphastar, playing protoss, on average played with people 700 MMR below and victories for much weaker enemies gave unexpectedly huge boost to calculared MMR. When only matched with >6000MMR players, alphastar final had 6 win and 15 losses.

There is a problem with MMR calculation used for alphastar. More specific, there is matchmaking problem when alphastar did not get matched against equal- MMR and most of his protos games were against much lower-MMR players, skewing the data for MMR calculations.

The example given in video: you won 10 times against 5100, you lost against 7200. The calculated MMR would probably be around 6300. The problem is you wont be matched like this in real game. When matched mostly against the weaker enemies, MMR calculations have a lot of uncertainty.

The video, unfortunately in russian [https://youtu.be/mpAUufSzaUo?t=1323](https://youtu.be/mpAUufSzaUo?t=1323)

</comment><comment><USER52> So they added exploiter agents showing the AI what strats are on the meta. When the meta changes, will it still perform? Maybe im reading it wrong but seems much less impressive with the exploiter agents in the mix.

<comment><USER53> My understanding is that the exploiter agents are not based on the meta. My take is that the exploiter agents have a different goal than the main agent. While the main agent is trying to develop a strategy to win against as many opponents as possible, the exploiters are focused on finding new ways to beat just the main agent. It seems similar to the inspiration behind GANs

<comment><USER52> I think you are right, from the paper:

>During training we used three agent types that differ only in the distribution of opponents they train against, when they are snapshotted to create a new player, and the probability of resetting to the supervised parameters.

So exploiter agents aren't fed a specific strat, instead they discover the weak spots in the same way as the main agent tries to win. The GANs similarity is there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Love the work done into this, SC2 is such a 'human' game I'm impressed that it can be so successful but I'm wondering whether the model takes the raw graphical information or whether it takes some kind of full map representation. Some kind of machine representation might feel like cheating just a little as it's not quite competing on the same playing field as a human player.

<comment><USER36> It does not use raw graphical information, information is machine readable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> 1\. Create a realistic military combat game with AI that learns from thousands of players and builds on that knowledge across multiple games/matches.

2\. Load that AI into real-world Terminators.

<comment><USER56> Yes, this was exactly my reaction: this work seems to be depressingly applicable to real-world warmaking, yet we are only focused on the technical successes, and not on the systemic dangers that we are heedlessly creating.

Assuming that everyone looking at this work is a friend who will not turn it to military advantage is extraordinarily naive on our part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'm being lazy and don't want to dig, but does anyone know which of the AlphaStar networks (Protoss, Terran, Zerg) is best at beating the others?

<comment><USER36> They didn't publish cross-race self-play statistics, but AlphaStar's MMR is 6275 for Protoss, 6048 for Terran, and 5835 for Zerg. So it is best at Protoss, and then Terran and Zerg, in that order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I don't think folks realize how much of a game changer AlphaStar is. If it can do the same "job" those high level players, it can probably do any job that doesn't require lifting. It could be playing all the traffic lights in a city. It could manage a fleet of factory drones. It could coach humans engaged in sport or business. It could probably figure out spreadsheets. Drill down, and perhaps it can play with chemical synthesis and quantum theories, or drive a truck.

<comment><USER34> Or control a fleet of armed drones, more likely. I'd be surprised if darpa, etc aren't investigating applications like that right now.

<comment><USER59> Isn't it likely they have been doing that for decades?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> What do you guys think about having the ai communicate to a person and having them execute the moves?

<comment><USER61> Having played starcraft - the idea doesn't work. Starcraft happens to quickly, with too much precision, and too low a tolerance for latency to wait for a human to absorb understand and execute instructions.

Having programmed simple NNs the idea doesn't work. The amount of time you'd have to spend having humans execute instructions during training would be astronomical. They were training 16000 games simultaneously, for 44 days, most likely running at some multiple of how fast the game normally runs. Moreover you lose out on supervised learning, because we don't data sets of "the human told the other human to do this", we only have data sets (almost a million games large) of "the human did this".

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Time to do League of Legends next. I wonder how they would model teammates behavior?

</comment><comment><USER63> As impressive as this is, APM matters a lot in an RTS such as Starcraft and computers have a massive advantage here. I'd like to see them tackle an RTS like Civ where APM doesn't matter whatsoever, only decision making.

<comment><USER64> Interestingly, AlphaStar has very low APM compared to human players. This is because humans do a lot of insignificant actions when button mashing, whereas AlphaStar is extremely precise with its moves.

That's why when you compare APM graphs between Alpha and a human player, the human almost always ranks higher in actions-per-minute.

<comment><USER63> It's still a high APM game. Reducing redundant button presses still doesn't change the fact that APM is very significant and that being able to process information and act quickly is more important than pure strategy.

<comment><USER64> That's the difference between APM vs EPM in Starcraft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> yeah, but can it should political messages on a livecast?

</comment><comment><USER66> Replays are in replays.zip in supplementary data

<comment><USER67> Is there a link to that? A video of this would be interesting to watch.

<comment><USER68> [https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/alphastar- resource...](https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/alphastar-resources)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> But can it beat Serral?

<comment><USER69> Not at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Why they wouldn't solve more impactful problems rather than playing games?

<comment><USER71> Because that's all they're capable of doing with it. Games can be easily repeated, have clear outcomes. There's no need for nuanced thinking or actual problem-solving. Just approximate the current scenario against previously successful strategies and pursue that strategy.

A real challenge would be to invent a new game, have both a human and an "AI" read the rules for the first time, and then compete in their first game together. Would the "AI" be able to formulate a winning strategy without historical data? If not, then it's not "AI."

<comment><USER72> There is no deep learning without massive data. What do you expect? :D

<comment><USER71> I expect less hype and more substance. I don't think computers beating people at video games (or really, any games) is particularly novel at this point, nor do I think it qualifies as "AI".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I wonder which game is more complex, start-craft or DOTA

<comment><USER74> The complexity of DOTA comes, in large part, to teamwork.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> calculator beats top human at multiplication (1957)

AI is just a f.... calculator.

<comment><USER76> I learned how to use a calculator in Elementary school, that doesn't mean I knew how to solve calculus problems.

AI needs to know what to calculate. According to the article, at any step in the game, there are 10^26 possible actions to take. Good luck calculating which ones to try via brute force.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Starcraft is a relatively simple game (which is one of the main reasons for its enormous popularity), so seeing an AI do well at it is not particularly impressive.

I'd have been far more impressed had an AI beaten some of the best wargamers at a complex wargame, or had it beaten some of the best text-adventure game players at novel text adventure games neither of them had played before.

The former would be difficult because of the enormous search space that results from the large variety of units, possible actions, and board size in complex wargames, and the latter is from the creativity required to do well at unfamiliar text-adventure games (which are hugely varied and can't be boiled down to any simple set of rules).[1]

Text adventure games would present a further difficulty in that not only do they not have very many players compared to games like chess, go, or Starcraft, but their players aren't normally ranked relative to one another, and there's no enormous record of human-played games to draw on. Further, in text adventures sometimes there are clear winning conditions and sometimes not, and sometimes clear signs of progress and sometimes not. It's also hard to objectively rate a text adventure game's difficulty. Without these features researchers would have a much harder time training an AI to do well against humans.

Another game which I briefly thought about nominating as a challenge for AI's was Factorio, due to its enormous complexity. However, when I thought about it for a little while I realized that this was a game that computers would find it easy to beat humans because they'd do a much better and faster job at number crunching and optimizing. Factorio is really more of a game where a human almost tries to emulate a computer, much like programmers do when they're mentally evaluating or stepping through an algorithm or trying to optimize something.

Of course, seeing an AI beat humans at any of these games would still make the front page of HN, but most gamers (nevermind most non-gamers) who would probably just say "What?" ... and that's probably yet another reason for the reasearchers choosing Starcraft. It's relatively easy, low-hanging publicity fruit, where they could claim success and a relatively large number of people would kind of understand why it was an accomplishment.

[1] - Yes, I'm aware of the recent HN post about fuzzing done on the Z-machines, but by the author's own admission that fuzzer cheated by having access to the game's word dictionary, and it also cheated by having access to the game's internal state -- neither of which a human player would have access to. Also, many Z-machine games are ancient and relatively simple and straightforward compared to more modern games.

<comment><USER10> > Starcraft is a relatively simple game (which is one of the main reasons for > its enormous popularity)

In the most practicle uses of the word "simple", especially in this context (number of possible actions and search space and whatnot) your statement is just incorrect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Am I the only one that doesn't care about _software_ beating humans at video games?

I'm sure there's some sort of useful learning being done here by the people that created the _software_ that might some day help them create _software_ that can better predict what is needed for a specific application but to me it just feels like entities like OpenAI and Google researching this _predictive software_ are just wasting obscene amounts of money.

How about train the stuff on better typed OCR? Better handwriting OCR? This will have actual commercial application.

Why not make something for grading papers. English papers, math homework, etc? Start at a first grade level and as you train the _software_ up move on to higher levels of education. My fiance is a high school teacher, she currently only teaches math but previously has done math and English, she sits there grading papers off the clock while watching television in the evenings and on the weekends... MANY high school teachers are in this situation, think of how much free time could be reclaimed by training this instead of teaching software how to beat humans in video games!!!

This would even help teachers have more time during school hours to help struggling students, if you aren't trying to grade papers in class while students are doing work you free up time that you could actively be assisting one or more students. Instead, these "AI" researchers keep training software to be the best at video games... _facepalm_

Then take that and apply it to something like my job. I clear international freight through customs for a living, I look at paperwork all day and then have to determine what tariff number I should use for something (cell phone 8517120050, silver ring over 1.50 USD 7113115000) and classify every single line on an invoice by using familiarity with the tariff schedule/description(s) on the invoice/any other supporting documentation/customer profiles for customers that have paid to have product databases on file with us. My employer, we do thousands of these things a day and have to keep everything for several years (5 IIRC) in the evening CBP or any other OGA wants to see it during that time period.

So take that huge, pre-existing, data set like that, identify which shipments were classified correctly and which were not, and then let the _software_ have a stab at trying to do it with that better OCR you created.

Then, you know, actually get rid of (or drastically reduce) soul crushing, mind-numbing, highly repetitive digital paperwork jobs like mine.

</comment><comment><USER79> How soon is this put into the hands of battlefield commanders? Not presuming it's a bad thing, but I wonder when we'll hear the outcome of a battle was aided by this kind of intelligence.

<comment><USER80> I assume obtaining a decent-sized training dataset is gonna be a bloody business.

<comment><USER81> Isn't this trained via playing against itself? I don't think there's a dataset involved.

<comment><USER82> AlphaStar is first trained in a supervised way using the publicly available replays from SCII matches.

Even if you just consider self-play, I don't see how you would create a simulation that is realistic enough so that you could generalize afterwards to reality. RL today has an extremely hard time dealing with different distributions.

You can see the amount of work OpenAI [1] had to do to go from a virtual hand+rubik's cube to real ones, even though you can make a very accurate simulation much more easily.

[1] [https://openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks- cube/](https://openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks-cube/)

<comment><USER81> Ah, ok. I've read about OpenAI Five (it plays Dota 2); and as far as I understand it's fully trained with self-play.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Time Door – A time series analysis API - <AUTHOR> https://timedoor.io <comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this is currently #3 under Show HN.

We (a close friend and me) built this over the past 9 weeks in our free time. I want to say thanks to my friend for all the productive nights we spent together.

I have often experienced that I have time series data generating processes as part of a project and then have to set up project-specific time series analysis infrastructure. While I was working on another project where this was the case, I had the idea for Time Door.

We are currently working on responding to all the mails. Thanks to everyone who reached out and/or created a Time Door account.

</comment><comment><USER2> I wish there were more concrete examples on the home page of what can be accomplished with Time Door . Bonus points if there was some interactive demo where I could immediately play around with the library in some sandbox. Too many landing pages these days require sign up to understand what the product does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

Thanks for your feedback, very helpful. Interactive demo is on the road map. I have just added a tutorial on how to use our API with fast data streams (very early work in progress): [https://timedoor.io/tutorials/fast-data- streams](https://timedoor.io/tutorials/fast-data-streams)

All endpoints in the documentation provide request and response examples. So currently you could create an API key, copy an example request and use a REST client like Insomnia or Postman to play around with our API (which obviously is not ideal).

I will factor your feedback into our prioritization for the next features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I do a lot of time series analysis in the industrial sector and this is very interesting.

Second the request for demo and examples. Even the reoccurring problem would be really useful.

I'm certainly going to follow you guys as this is part of a larger problem I work with everyday.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Dave,

Thank you, that means a lot coming from someone with your experience.

Based on the feedback, the demo has a high priority for us, so we should have something in the next few days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks pretty neat at first glance - however, the pricing being "pay for how long your API calls take to execute" seems incredibly difficult to even guess at what a per month price would be. Simple, sure. Clear? I don't think so

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback, thanks! We will make the pricing more transparent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great idea and looks well executed!

There's also a good opportunity here for a theme/pun involving _API keys_ and the _Time Door_...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

We had named the custom authentication header 'X-Time-Door-Token' at first and then switched it to 'X-Time-Door-Key' :)

The name Time Door also has a cool pop-cultural reference, which can be found on our 404 page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Took a quick read. It's not clear how the time series model (e.g., ARIMA) is selected.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I agree that there is some information missing. We will extend the documentation in the coming days to fill in missing information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heads up that there's a typo: "Algortihmic variety"

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, just fixed it. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Do You Know What Lightning Really Looks Like? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/science/lightning-paintings-photographs.html <comment><USER2> Is the picture really accurate, though? I thought pictures like that had a relatively long exposure time, so while it's accurate for its exposure period, it's not really what a person would perceive in an instant which looks more like seeing the branches flash at different times in a sort of electrical dance. Obviously it's difficult to capture such motion in an image.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also: lightning is bright and fast. It's difficult to see the branches that aren't as bright as the brightest few.

<comment><USER4> Yes, it can simply point to the different capabilities of human vision vs. the photo camera. So this explanation from the article appears to be false:

"Their research points to how cultural legacies can distort our perceptions of natural phenomena, even those that we encounter with our own eyes."

If we don't actually see all the branches but need cameras, the painters did paint what they were able to see with their "own eyes."

Also what the first photographer wanted to disprove wasn't the number of branches:

[http://journalpanorama.org/capturing-joves-autograph-late- ni...](http://journalpanorama.org/capturing-joves-autograph-late-nineteenth- century-lightning-photography-and-electrical-agency/)

"According to Jennings' own personal narrative, he set out to photograph lightning in order to prove the inaccuracy of the "awkward angular zig-zag" populating artworks. In his scrapbook, he wrote, "To my eye [lightning] appeared with an infinite variety of outline; all of them graceful, none zig- zag.""

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And I wonder where did they source the 400 pictures of real lightnings from. There might be a selection effect so that only the most spectacular are published. In addition to what others already mentioned, that photographers constantly use several means (lenses, exposure, films) to enhance the pictures beyond what the human eye can perceive.</comment>


President Signs Law Protecting Your Right to Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/president-signs-law-protecting-right-review <comment><USER2> It should be noted that libel laws are still in effect. That means that companies can and will pressure authors to remove reviews through extortion - i.e. threat of a libel suit. Even if the threat is baseless, most people will remove reviews just to avoid a legal headache.

Believe me, I was threatened more than once, but I was way too busy to deal with a lawsuit. But, it still pisses me off.

As an aside, it's kind of f'd up that a company can even sue for libel. These were original common laws - i.e. person vs. person. Now, companies are 'people'. I am not a lawyer, so I don't understand the nuance. (which, btw, is also messed up: it's barely possible for non-specialists to understand the laws to which they're held accountable.) Rant Over.

<comment><USER3> I wish the state legislature would put a limit on the number of unsuccessful libel lawsuits a lawyer could file.

They file because they have the money to file, and some very bruised egos. I can't remember one they won.

In my state of California, a Plastic Surgeon managed to rack up over 70 bad Yelp reviews. She then tried to sue 12 of her former patients.

The judge threw the lawsuits/lawsuit out. Poof!

<comment><USER4> A limit on the number of lawsuits you can file is a limitation of your Constitutional right

<comment><USER5> While I agree, there should be repercussions. It's borderline harassment though to fire up frivolous cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's weird how some issues become partisan and others don't. I wonder what made both parties support this? Why can't that happen more often?

<comment><USER7> A major change was that the Congressional GOP opposed everything Obama tried to do until the last year, a scorched earth tactic to damage Obama regardless of the costs to the country and world. Then, in an effort to appear a little less obstructionist in an election year, they passed some bills.

But even then they set new norms for obstructionism; for example, they refused to vote on a Supreme Court nomination, something unprecedented in U.S. history, and refused to do anything about the sequester, again an unprecedented act. I'm pretty sure they refused to provide aid to Flint for their water crisis and or to provide funding for the Zika virus.

If it costs them nothing politically - and what were the consequences of their obstructionism mentioned above? - they will do it. The Democrats, who do little to confront and extract costs from the GOP, are effectively complicit IMHO.

EDIT: Some edits

<comment><USER8> Refusing to vote on a Supreme Court nomination is not only not unprecedented in U.S. history, its not even rare. A couple of W's nominations didn't go anywhere.

[http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/nominations/Nomin...](http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/nominations/Nominations.htm)

<comment><USER9> Let's go back to the 1880's. From your list nine supreme court justice nominations did not have votes. That may come across as a lot. But seven made it on to the supreme court with another nomination (John Roberts, Jr., Abe Fortas, John Harlan, Pierce Butler, William Hornblower, and Stanley Matthews). That leaves three: Merrick Garland, Harriet Miers, Homer Thornberry. Homer Thornberry withdrew his nomination. He was nominated to replace Abe Fortas when Fortas was nominated for Chief Justice. Abe Fortas was embroiled by a few scandals so withdrew his nomination which killed Thornberry's nomination. Harriet Miers was nominated by Bush but there was bipartisan opposition to her nomination and her nomination was withdrawn less than a month later. But even then senators had planned on holding nomination hearings. That leaves Merrick Garland. I'd say that one person since 1880 not having a chance for a vote or hearing is unprecedented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does this law negate DeWitt Clauses? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt)

</comment><comment><USER6> A vendor can still sue you (for libel I guess?). They just can't put prevent bad reviews with a contract?

<comment><USER11> Suing reviewers for libel seems like a losing proposition. Schemes like this rely on the remedy for bad reviews being cheap and easy. Libel suits are neither.

<comment><USER12> Sure suing is expensive, but threatening to sue is quite easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How about business's right to protect against fake reviews? Maybe thats already in the law?

<comment><USER4> Doesn't that just fall under libel?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> anyone knows if there is an EU-wide law protecting reviewers ?

<comment><USER15> Well, both the ECHR and CFREU protect freedom of expression, though I don't know if they are much use here, since it's not the government censoring you.

Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union:

> 1\. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall > include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and > ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.

> 2\. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.

([https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Charter_of_Fundamental_Rights...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Charter_of_Fundamental_Rights_of_the_European_Union#Article_11_.E2.80.93_Freedom_of_expression_and_information))

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights:

> 1\. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall > include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and > ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. > This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of > broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

> 2\. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and > responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, > restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a > democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial > integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the > protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or > rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in > confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the > judiciary.

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Con...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Convention_on_Human_Rights))</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recycling center – 3rd world country - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm a young software engineering, living in a third world country. I love my country, but it worries me that we have no recycling practices whatsoever - and I want to try to change that (as much as I can), but I don't know where to start ... I have zero knowledge about recycling and operating any kind of business.
- Should I pursue something like an MBA? Or maybe an specialized Engineering degree? - Are there any global institutions I can reach out for help/guidance? - Are there any stories of people that have done the same and succeed?
Thanks, and happy rest of the day <comment><USER2> Find the contact info of as many people as you can who operate recycling centers (in other countries as necessary). Call or email all of them to ask for an "informational interview" (basically, a chance to ask them questions about their business and their role, what the job is like, how they got there, how a recycling center works, etc).

If you contact 50 people, chances are one or two will get back to you. They'll know better than random software entrepreneurs what's involved in starting a recycling center and what your next steps might be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will try that</comment></comment>


This tweet is broken - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/zainamro/status/1286151259888726016 <comment> seventh-chord It seems so scary to ship software where you are not in full control over font rendering, because at that point you have suddenly have a million edge cases which you weren't forced to think about up front, but which can come back and bite you any time. Though I guess with everything running in web browsers it sort of has become the only way to go.

</comment><comment><USER2> A few days back I tried to tweet various empty characters [0], but the twitter frontend wouldn't let me.

Seems like this person found some new ones. Curious if they will ban them.

0: [https://emptycharacter.com/](https://emptycharacter.com/)</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way to put a short stint on a resume? - <AUTHOR> I recently left a DS job at a big tech company to join a very early startup that hasn't worked out. In general, I'm not having too much trouble getting into conversations with interesting companies through introductions (founders of the startup are being really helpful too), but there's a few places that I'm interested in and haven't been able to get an intro.
I spent less than 2 months at this startup (I knew it was risky), should I even list it on my resume?
I've left the big tech job as my most recent role on LinkedIn because it's been effective for generating inbound and the people I've talked to so far haven't had any issues with the above explanation. <comment><USER2> If it is less than the probationary period, I would not put it on my resume unless you learned ( _and_ can demonstrate) some incredible value that you gained in that short period of time.

No one is going to blink at a 2-month gap in between jobs.

<comment><USER3> It wasn't a probationary period, the startup is undergoing a major pivot and is down to just the founders.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, my mistake - I meant it as standard probationary period (i.e. 3-6 months). I used it as a unit of time, which admittedly wasn't clear.</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists discover 7 'Earthlike' planets orbiting a nearby star - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/22/scientists-discover-seven-earthlike-planets-orbiting-a-nearby-star/ <comment><USER2> These planets are all expected to be tidally locked, so this is a good place to leave a link to "eyeball planets".

[http://m.nautil.us/blog/forget-earth_likewell-first-find- ali...](http://m.nautil.us/blog/forget-earth_likewell-first-find-aliens-on- eyeball-planets)

</comment><comment><USER3> By now the click-bait effect of 'Earthlike' planets has probably worn off and everyone knows how to read those titles: Flickering of some distant stars hints at some rocks circulating those stars.

</comment><comment><USER4> Main discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707547)

</comment><comment><USER5> A few questions have been asked here and answered on Reddits AMA regarding the topic:

We're NASA scientists & exoplanet experts. Ask us anything about today's announcement of seven Earth-size planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1!

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5vkoyd/were_nasa_scie...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5vkoyd/were_nasa_scientists_exoplanet_experts_ask_us/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Just curious, maybe there is someone out there that can explain this: If there was an earth-like planet way out there, and if someone was on those planets looking back at us, what would they see? What do we look like from a billion light years away etc. ?

<comment><USER7> I can't quite answer this, though I can share an image that has always made me feel absolute awe. Google 'pale blue dot' \- that image was taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 from a distance of approximately 6 billion kilometres.

<comment><USER8> > from a distance of approximately 6 billion kilometres.

or 5 light-hours. Still absolute awe :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> earth SIZE planets.</comment>


Opera: please use bug detection, not browser detection - <AUTHOR> http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/a-browser-sniffing-warning-the-trouble/

<comment><USER2> In general, I agree. Unfortunately, detecting some bugs is either a lot of work or almost impossible -- you can't, for example, generate DOM events programatically, so bugs in event handling are very tricky to test for.

On the bright side, it is often possible to write your fix in a non-invasive way, or adjust your code to not depend on the buggy behaviour. (For example, some browsers will still fire a keypress event if you cancel the corresponding keydown event. My code editor[1] ended up checking again in the keypress handler for keys that should have been handled, and cancelling them again.)

[1] <http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror>

<comment><USER2> And just today, I had to fix a Firefox bug where the cursor in an editable document would be displayed in the wrong place. Note that this is purely visual -- it acted as if it were in a different place than it showed. Good luck detecting that. So yes... there we go again: /Gecko/.test(navigator.userAgent)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bloody hell, no one expects browser makers to actually fix bugs!

Respect to Opera for blogging about this.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Given the above analysis, we now understand the bug well enough to try to write some code to detect it._

This is exactly as it should be: the burden should be on the browser developers to investigate bugs and write the tests they want web developers to use in their workarounds.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone sick of Opera asking web developers to do stuff?

<comment><USER6> No, I actually like how transparent they are about bug fixing and communicating with developers.... Plus their rant makes sense....

<comment><USER2> Actually, my experience is different. This was a year ago, so maybe they've improved, but my detailed bug report was anwered with a dumb question that showed the person had hardly read it, and then when I asked whether they could let me know when a version without this bug was released (the issue was completely blocking Opera support in my system), I was completely ignored.

To their credit, they did eventually fix it.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple pulls ad blockers that install root certificates from App Store - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2015/10/08/apple-root-certificate-apps-removed/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how the implementations look currently.

you don't need to read traffic to strip out ads, but if they're doing it behind a client then they would.

I assumed an adblocker would be a custom browser with adblock built in.</comment>


Stakeholders likely to be disrupted by the changeover to self-driving vehicles - <AUTHOR> http://robohub.org/stakeholders-likely-to-be-disrupted-by-the-changeover-to-self-driving-vehicles/ <comment><USER2> I see fast food becoming even more common. If food is delivered cheaply or the car picks it up on the way to pick me up.</comment>


How to Fetch Market Data in Excel Like a Pro - <AUTHOR> https://www.zoomeranalytics.com/blog/how-to-fetch-market-data-in-excel-like-a-pro <comment><USER2> Does xlwings support RTD? One thing the BBG addin allows users to do is subscribe to live ticking market data.</comment>


Xcode Build Optimization – Exhaustive list of ways to speed up your Xcode build - <AUTHOR> https://blog.flexiple.com/xcode-build-optimization-a-definitive-guide/ <comment><USER2> This is Hacker News, not Hacker Noon.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Definitive Guide"..."Exhaustive"? Really? So why do I only find tips like changing from debug to release, or enabling 'Parallel build' which is enabled by default? And no mention of ccache? It's as simple as

        $ brew install ccache

Which will drop partial compile times from minutes to seconds.

I suggest people who are upvoting this actual look at the contents. I'm by no means an expert, but I found this "definitive guide" worthless. My guess is the author was learning how to use Xcode and these are his notes.

<comment><USER4> Presumably bots, like this other submission of op:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20361463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20361463)

<comment><USER5> Those comments are cringey. I never thought bots were really on HN...

<comment><USER6> Looks like OP's colleagues that made an account just to comment, not bots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be great if this list would include Buck or Bazel and their associated HTTP caches. For us we lowered our clean CI build times from 22 minutes to 4.5 minutes (1 million lines of Swift)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is something! TODO - research and write about Buck/ Bazel.

<comment><USER7> This is a decent sample project to start with: [https://github.com/airbnb/BuckSample](https://github.com/airbnb/BuckSample)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! This is helpful :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > If you're not doing a great deal of debugging, it is better to set this to > 'Optimize for Speed'. This will eventually reduce the build time as the > compiler will omit the steps of attaching values to the debugger thread.

I would expect this to _increase_ build times.

<comment><AUTHOR> It actually does reduce build time. Screenshots of the same for the sample project are shown just below.</comment></comment>


N-body Toy - <AUTHOR> http://resium.com/n-body-toy/

<comment><USER2> The encoding of kinetic energy in the colour of the particle trails is innovative.

Did you encounter the effect I call "lost" momentum that occurs around very close approaches when the time quantum is constant? It manifests by particles seeming to gain kinetic energy over time until they fly away. One way of minimising it is to switch to a more precise and accurate force calculation whenever the distance between two particles becomes less than $\epsilon$.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, since the particles are point-like we should expect the force between them to grow without bound if they are very near.

I find the calculation for small distances to be unpredictable, one easy way to test it is to place two particles with small gravity and a large attractive charge. Occasionally close passes cause explosive motion, while other times it hardly overcomes gravity.</comment></comment>


Rovio valued at $9B - eyes IPO - <AUTHOR> http://macdailynews.com/2012/05/07/angry-birds-maker-eyes-ipo-golden-egg/

<comment><USER2> OK I think I just understood something about "Valuation". It has nothing to do with the value the company brings to customers but it solely means the potential value (pay off) a company brings to investors.

That pay off occurs at IPO day and not a day later either.

This is probably obvious to everyone else, but it just dawned on me this way, right now.</comment>


Automated Pattern Libraries for Complex Web Design Projects - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/creative-nights/automated-pattern-libraries-d4c89a113a27#.bn0a5dyro <comment><AUTHOR> Working with startups as well as corporate in-house teams, we've developed a strategy to automate pattern libraries for even the most complex projects. While there are many tools available, a tool alone does not guarantee success. It also requires a cultural shift in design thinking. Curious to hear other people's experiences.</comment>


TempleOS creator Terry Davis is homeless and living in a van - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/7218gh/templeos_creator_is_now_homeless/ <comment><USER2> As far as I can tell, Terry Davis has been given multiple chances to get well. He chooses to be sick.

It's tragic, but you can only lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink. I've been on the side of trying to help a family member get better. It's impossible to help someone who doesn't want help. And it's one of the hardest things in the world to give up on someone who doesn't want help. You question your decision for the rest of your life. And sometimes you go back, and get reminded almost immediately you did make the right decision.

Also as far as I can tell, the only reason most people care about anything involving him is because of some stories about him being a "heroic" programmer. Not that they've had any realistic confirmation of that experience, because they almost certainly haven't tried any of his software. So there seems to be this perverse, backwards reasoning that "Terry says terrible things, but it's ok, he's sick, but he chose to be this way, but it's ok, he wrote his own OS".

It's terrible that anyone should have to live this way, even the worst people in the world. But I'm not terribly convinced that the concern I see expressed is anything other than asshole programmer worship. Take away, "he wrote his own OS", and I just have a really hard time imagining very many people giving two shakes.

<comment><USER3> I agree with your first sentence, but let's not forget the defective equipment that needs to be fixed or stabilized with medicine is the same equipment responsible for the decision to take it or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> TempleOS has no process isolation, so it's completely unaffected by Spectre and Meltdown. I'm starting to think there's a lot of wisdom in its design. Complexity of modern computer systems keeps increasing but the value I get from that complexity isn't increasing nearly as fast. Spectre and Meltdown are just recent examples of some of the cost of that complexity. Do we really need an OS too complex for any one person to completely understand?

<comment><USER5> That's like saying "I don't have any doors in my house, just open frames. So I'm not affected by the weaknesses in locks."

<comment><USER4> If lack of doors was standard, everybody would see the open frames, and culture would adapt to them. Weaknesses in computer security are much harder to spot. Spectre has been possible for decades without mainstream attention. It's this lack of understandability that I think is dangerous. Many people will assume systems are secure just because they don't see an obvious way to exploit them, and because the complexity has grown far beyond what will fit into a human brain there will undoubtedly be non-obvious flaws. Is weak security really better than no security? The "no security" model really means "socially enforced security", which is playing to human strengths. It's much easier to understand than figuring out the full consequences of speculative execution.

<comment><USER6> I might believe that stance if you can think of any human scenario where there is value and nobody tries to take advantage of it.

We can't have nice things/utipia as long as some people are evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want to draw attention to a schizophrenic person who needs help, maybe linking /r/Drama is the wrong way.

<comment><USER8> IMHO, this attitude is akin to "throwing the baby out with the bath water". I'm sure the readerships of HN & Reddit are not mutually exclusive.

Tomorrow, someone will object to linking a WSJ article as it's a conservative newspaper.

Then, somebody else will object against The Guardian for it being too left- leaning.

<comment><USER9> From the /r/drama sidebar:

"Do your part to keep our community healthy by blowing everything out of proportion and making literally everything as dramatic as possible."

I think it's fair to consider /r/drama an especially bad place to originate a story about someone who needs help.

<comment><USER8> That paragraph is prefaced by the definition of the word Drama.

If we want to avoid drama, we should stop sharing a significant number of recent events, e.g. the Meltdown and Spectre drama, launches, touchdowns and failures of SpaceX, a majority of anti-Google comments, etc.

<comment><USER7> What are you talking about? Do you grasp the basic difference between a security vulnerability and a mentally ill homeless person?

<comment><USER8> I understand your scepticism about my ability to grasp basic differences, considering that we have never met nor interacted before.

Hence, this clarification...

As per my understanding, there is plenty of Drama in the security vulnerability incident - Intel CEO selling a large chunk of stock after the company was informed of the vulnerability; the differing views on the actual performance impact of the patches, the discussions on whether it was a genuine oversight error or corporate greed that led to the situation in the first place, etc.

The reason I mentioned this along with the original article is simply because I was trying to clarify that there have always been dramatic posts/comments on HN.

Therefore, sharing an article from r/Drama sub-reddit didn't seem sacrilegious to me.

I apologise if I have offended your sensibilities...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The amount of dedication Terry shows for his project is beyond what you see anywhere else in the software dev space.

For anyone who hasn't, I recommend to watch his videos on TempleOS (there are a lot of hymn videos or ranting videos, you can ignore those), they are a genuinely interesting perspective into OS Development.

<comment><USER11> > The amount of dedication Terry shows for his project is beyond what you see > anywhere else in the software dev space.

I'd say Linus Torvalds shows at least the same amount of dedication to the linux kernel.

<comment><USER12> AFAIK, Tarn and Zach Adams also (Dwarf Fortress).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know he's perhaps not mentally stable, but after all. He has problems and he does some amazing things.

Perhaps consider donating on top of his page: [http://www.templeos.org/](http://www.templeos.org/) ( paypal).

<comment><USER14> Just donated 5$/month, will keep it up for a year at least. PayPal transactions take a bit of time to go through -- the hardest part was filling out the details :(

I really don't have the resources to arbitrarily afford charity, but fuck it -- I spend more money on coffee in a month and it's been too cold to wander around for a while here. It must feel really awful to some people who make 6 figure salaries to part with just a _little_ money to a person who is both talented and likely lived in agony all his life. Maybe _some_ people can start acting like the _ubermensch_ they pretend to be from their libertarian ideology.

<comment><USER15> I'd ask you to explain how all libertarians are Nazis but then I guess I'd be taking the bait.

<comment><USER14> You'd be taking the bait if you actually made a donation to Terry.

<comment><USER16> Plenty of people have made donations to Terry, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.

<comment><USER14> Well, I'm in a charitable mood today so I decided to run a fundraiser on a whim using nothing but my phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's actually quite worse than that. Terry is kind of going through a "teenager" phase it appears.

Apparently he left his parents house and started living in his car and his family went to visit him unannounced. There was some kind of altercation (probably his family trying to physically get him back) and the authorities were called because of a disturbance and he was charged with "Battery" in Las Vegas. He plead guilty to some minor charges. During the same time he's been seen with what some are describing a hooker.

Unfortunately he also has an ongoing fascination with some famous YouTuber and predators/trolls are taking advantage of him by posing as her to get him to send naked photos =(

The Terry Davis story gets crazier every day and I have a lot of sympathy for him. It upsets me to see the some areas of the Internet exploit him for the whole "CIA" thing.

EDIT - A new development he was arrested in Arizona on the 27th of December for property damage? Get well soon, Terry.

</comment><comment><USER12> In a recent HN thread fellow HNers were asking what is a real artist: this is it.

<comment><USER18> No, this what a real schizophrenic is. It's a terrible disease that should not be romanticized in any way.

<comment><USER19> There surely seems to be a correlation between great art and mental illness. Van Gogh, Rothko, Frida Kahlo... I guess it depends on your taste in art, though. I'd put Terry in this camp for sure.

<comment><USER20> Those were a few that were lucky enough to earn a living / have people take care of them; that's only a small percentage, the rest ends up homeless, dead, interned, jailed. Terry is headed that way too now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> He has a donate button on his homepage. I wonder if that brings in something? Anybody here who ever used a donate button on their website and can tell something about it?

How does one even receive 'donations'? Is that like getting paid? Do they have to create an invoice for tax reasons? How is it taxed?

It would be nice if there was a number, how much is donated per month. I can imagine donating something. Depending on how much cash flow there already is.

<comment><USER13> [http://www.templeos.org/](http://www.templeos.org/) on top of the page is a donate button :) ( not affliated or any way. I just feel bad for him)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wish there was a cure for his and his family's suffering. Irrespective of him being a genius, he deserves to receive the medical attention he needs.

</comment><comment><USER22> Putting aside all the "mental illness/nutjob" talks that everyone likes to focus on so much, I would just _wish_ that someone somehow would be able to connect with him and channel his genius (it is clear that he is quite good at what he does) into some project with a proper objective and guidance.

Bram Cohen has Asperger's and he could create BitTorrent which is widely used. I wonder if Terry Davis would create some game changer stuff as well if he had better support....

It is a sad situation.

<comment><USER23> I wish someone would connect with him and get him to accept some treatment. He's created great things, but it seems like his life is a struggle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've read through a lot of Terry's posts on 8chan and his rants that got him banned from a few websites. He's totally fucked but a genius. I've tried TempleOS. It made my brain hurt to look at it and it really wasn't intuitive in any way at all. I like the concept of the OS, a full OS where everything is in the same memory space. But, it's way too annoying to really play with anything in TempleOS.

<comment><USER25> Any OS from the era of cooperative multitasking should have much the same behavior, iirc.

Heck, even DOS with a few TSRs could come close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is incredibly sad. :(

I haven't got any money to help and I don't even know where I would put it to be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone have info about his current status? He has not updated his site since Dec 15.

As far as the van thing goes, he wasn't really homeless. He went to his parents house frequently and he could live there but chooses to live mostly in his van because he likes it.

</comment><comment><USER28> This was 3 months ago. Apparently he lives happy in his van.

<comment><USER29> Yes.No.

Schizos have the wanderlust, they try to discover new territories- but they end up socially self isolating- and to reduce the suffering - drugs.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is he sitting in his truck and working on his computer:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBGgi5Lqn0U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBGgi5Lqn0U)

</comment><comment><USER30> I have so much respect for that guy just looking at his achievement.

</comment><comment><USER31> Let's drop homeboy some cash (top of page): [http://www.templeos.org](http://www.templeos.org)

</comment><comment><USER32> ELI5 the story behind this?

<comment><USER33> He is a schizo autistic programmer who is convinced God told him to make an OS, so he is working on it constantly for 15 years, doing nothing else (it kind of resembles Noah's Ark). He used to livestream regularly on Youtube and became popular on technology boards on 4chan, 8chan etc., for his rants about God and "CIA niggers" and generally "being a living meme". Some people there genuinely like him and even bought him that drum set he wanted, but others (given *chans reputation) just liked to screw with him to induce more rants. But he is really suffering from mental illness and should got professional treatment.

<comment><USER34> And he also posts on HN, but last time I checked his account is shadow-banned.

<comment><USER35> He gets banned whenever he posts because his mental illness is taking over and he can't help but include slurs in his messages. Snowflake mods then usually either delete his posts (like on reddit), shadowban him or just ban his whole account. Which is really a shame because ignoring the slurs, his posts give you a lot of insights into his mind.

<comment><USER36> Mods have good reason to ban him if his comments are peppered with racial slurs: they are doing their fucking job. Mental illness is no excuse for racism. Calling the mods Snowflakes is going a little too far IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is the guy King Crimson was talking about.

<comment><USER38> Nothing he's got, he really needs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> When I googled I found more details here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/7218gh/templeos_crea...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/7218gh/templeos_creator_is_now_homeless/)

> Despite the mean spirited attention he gets, he does have a following of > people who seem to genuinly feel for him, and want to do nice things for > him. One thing his followers did which at least seemed well intentioned was > buying him a drum set. Terry likes to use drum sticks, but didn't have a > set, so a gofundme was set up and he was bought some drums.

> But shortly after receiving the drum set, Terry vanished off the interenet > for a couple weeks. Eventually, this note was posted on his website:

>> I got kicked-out of my parent's house. I got in a fight with my Dad, went to jail then mental hospital.

>> I'm adapting to being homeless. Hope to get a car to live in but no loan yet.

> At some point after posting this note, he was able to get a van, which he's > now living in.

<comment><USER40> It blows my mind that a mental ill person is ending up homeless like this. Society should take care of theses cases.

<comment><USER41> Unfortunately, he was born into a society that would prefer the mentally ill take care of themselves.

<comment><USER42> I can't lay that much blame on society. Have you tried to take care of a mentally ill person? It's common for them to make it extremely difficult. Schizophrenia often seems to cause its sufferers to be _absolutely certain_ they are not mentally ill at all. I've walked around for hours looking for a mentally ill woman to give her a care package, only to be attacked by her a few days afterward.

<comment><USER43> It really is sad. The only schizophrenic person I've interacted with was thankfully on medication and it seemed to help a lot. A very sweet elderly woman. I have spent a decent amount of time watching [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaUOTQQBc3EO5sVjVusMn8A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaUOTQQBc3EO5sVjVusMn8A)

She is a schizophrenic woman in Boston iirc. Watching her delusions and obsession with various objects is fascinating and heartbreaking. I really want to talk to her just to try to understand better. I think it is impossible simply because something is wrong inside her brain. I wouldn't be able to rationalize why traffic cones aren't some kind of grand conspiracy of the Patriarchy. I think she is homeless now, I hope she gets the help she desperately needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Who are the kiddies who keep stirring him up?

<comment><USER25> Say hello to the offspring of Anon...

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Depending on "truck" it can be pretty alright.

See : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UeVsHmKAFA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UeVsHmKAFA) (EV mod of VW kombi)

Make a kickstarter to fund his future green life.

ps: for some weird reason I expected him to look like anderson cooper..

<comment><USER46> If you have the money, time and experience to invest 7 months (in this particular case) into converting it, then yeah. I think you will find 90% of van/truck dwellers have a very different situation to that.

<comment><USER45> I'm sure this man can crack a bit of mechanics and power electronics, probably not harder than writing an OS, also I said people could help.

Now for the majority of people in such need, sure it's hard, and I wish we could turn their situation in a similar manner.

<comment><USER46> He appears to be living on a mattress in a family car (for the last 3 months). I think he's definitely in that "situation", with severe mental issues to boot.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Examples of company-internal capabilities to become available publicly? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for examples of former company-internal capabilities [medium business value but high quality] that later became available as services offered to external parties, thus increasing the company's business value. Amazon offered AWS... but what are other well-known examples?
Things like: Shell to provide _moving_ oil rig services for other petrochemical companies. A company to offer their own security guards providing safety at large sport events. Hotels to provide dry cleaning services to other (possibly competing) hotels and restaurants. A salary-processing dept. of a company to offer payrolling services to companies nearby. [All these are examples I just made up - but I hope the are more in real life.]
Anyway, any case in which a former internal service is turned into a revenue-generating external service, most likely being made possible by a high (technical) quality of that service. I guess it's a likely to be a new service that is orthogonal to the current activities in the company's business model.
Just like in Amazon's case: they offered their excellent infrastructure hosting capabilities to other organizations, in addition to using those just for their own e-commerce needs. <comment><AUTHOR> After asking the same question on LinkedIn, I guess we found another (but just one good one) example: Flexport. They started with gathering (and selling) knowledge about freight forwarding via a software platform: shipping lines, availability, prices.

Later, they started to use those capabilities to become a freight forwarder (shipper) themselves, actually transporting stuff (on behalf of customers) using the knowledge that they gathered for other purposes originally.

Read for example [https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/21/container-full-of- cash/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/21/container-full-of-cash/).</comment>


Snowden's "I had the authorities to wiretap anyone" wasn't a lie - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/snowdens-i-had-authorities-wiretap-anyone-wasnt-lie New revelations from Snowden leaks support the claim that anyone can be wiretapped and the NSA is everywhere <comment><USER2> Seems like it is the NSA who has been lying</comment>