Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is "not even close" - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/04/toyotas-research-institute-head-says-full-autonomous-driving-is-not-even-close/ <comment><USER2> I've been saying this for a while. The problem is that people are mostly familiar with the rate of overcoming traditional technical challenges (e.g., making your current computer/phone more compact, improving graphics quality, making cameras and screens with more pixels, etc.). What people don't realize is that full autonomous driving will require more than just faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will require the refinement of innovations that probably haven't even been invented/researched yet.

I can't help but think about speech recognition 20 years ago. Many of the hot software packages claimed something like 96% accuracy, and that sounded great on paper. People thought intelligent voice-computer interfaces were just around the corner, yet here we are in 2017, and Siri/Alexa/Cortana are barely becoming usable (but still frustratingly lacking in many situations).

<comment><USER3> Intercontinental planes are mostly autonomous. Trains are autonomous. Massive mine dump trucks are fully autonomous. These things are in use today and has been for almost a decade. They need not be perfect to be useful, they only need to be better than the average human driver.

Toyota is way behind in the game. What do you expect them to say about the competition?

<comment><USER4> Planes are a good argument for the opposite.

Do you ever wonder why there are two pilots on every commercial airliner? It's not because airlines like paying so many more pilots- notice how fast flight engineer/navigator positions disappeared as flight management technology and GPS made them unnecessary. But still two pilots are there on every commercial flight, why?

Simple answer: the airline industry has learned, through a lot of lessons in blood over decades, that even with automation you really need a pilot who is always ready to intervene _right this second_ , not in three minutes after they've mentally caught up to what the situations is. And in order to provide that sort of guarantee over many hours, you need two pilots, so they can switch off responsibility. That's because commercial airliners on cruise, way above any animals, terrain, etc. still have situations where immediate human intervention is safety critical. (And when pilot minds fall behind the power curve the result is things like AF447, so it seems like the industry is right about the importance of this human monitoring and intervention.)

So if this well studied, easier externals problem requires someone on ready for immediate intervention at all times, how quickly do you think that a much harder problem like driving is going to get solved sufficient to allow human free driving?

<comment><USER5> Because you reference AF447; Autopilot systems also added additional sensors (satellite assisted speed) for the system to have redundancies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Toyota got into autonomous driving late. Then they hired Gil Pratt from MIT. Pratt used to run the MIT Leg Lab, which Raibert ran before Boston Dynamics, but Pratt didn't do much there.

It's clear that autonomous driving can be made to work, because Google/Waymo is doing it. It's hard and expensive and it takes a lot of sensors. It also takes extensive testing. Waymo drives 25,000 autonomous miles a week. Volvo has level 3 working on some freeways in Sweden; their 100 users are not required to watch the road while in auto mode.

There are other startups trying to do it. There's the "fake it til you make it" crowd - Otto and Cruise. (Otto's highly publicized Budweiser truck delivery demo was on a nearly deserted freeway surrounded by chase cars.) There's the "it's just a small matter of software" Tesla approach. There's the "throw machine learning at vision and hope" crowd, some small startups. That's what you get if you take the Udacity course and start coding. 43 companies have California DMV licenses for autonomous vehicle testing.

Toyota has been making some bad business decisions lately. They don't make battery electric cars. (They're fixing that, but won't be shipping until 2022.[1]) Instead, they've been pushing cars that run on hydrogen. Toyota sells the Mirai in California, and has a few hydrogen stations so it can be refueled. They sell about a hundred cars a month.[2]

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toyota-electric-cars- idUS...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toyota-electric-cars- idUSKBN1AA035) [2] [http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/toyota/toyota- mira...](http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/toyota/toyota-mirai/)

<comment><USER7> Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is indeed number one by many measures. I guess you think experience and a track record of phenomenal success is a disadvantage. I could agree with you in some contexts, but not this one. The autonomous car hype is the emperor's new clothes, and Toyota is not your average industrial behemoth. Those guys literally wrote the playbook on nimble manufacturing.

<comment><USER8> Toyota presumably treats reliability differently.

When Toyota talks about "full autonomous driving", they really mean _fully_ autonomous in a safe and predictable manner. When Uber or Tesla says the same, the implication is that a "good enough" level will be good enough - and _that_ level can be achieved much sooner than whatever Toyota is talking about.

<comment><USER9> [http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota- unintende...](http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended- acceleration-and-big-bowl-"spaghetti"-code)

They might do better with hardware than software ...

<comment><USER10> Counterpoint from Malcolm Gladwell: [http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame- game](http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game)

The argument he puts forth is that pedal error on the drivers part is an explanation for the unintended acceleration.

<comment><USER11> I listened to that episode, and sort of regret it. I've heard these arguments, and they still aren't convincing. Have you read the article on their spaghetti code?

To be clear, I believe that most cases of unintended acceleration are caused by pedal confusion/floormats. Just because that's true of most accidents, that does not mean it's true of all of them.

Maybe it's because I work in the embedded space, but I've seen code written as indicated and terrible code like that is not reliable. It might work 99.999% of the time, but given 100,000 units, and a problem might occur every couple weeks. There is nothing magical about automotive software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. They are different issues I have gathered but essentially shouldn't trains be dead simple but to this day at least the trains(not metras though) often have someone to stop the train in case of emergencies. Planes are more complex but have lower crash ratings and less obstacles but can't stop and still have 2 plus pilots.

<comment><USER13> If we had autonomous planes it wouldn't significantly reduce cost or increase usage. But there is a lot of investment in autonomous drones.

Planes also have a very high safety bar to begin with, which cars do not.

Same thing about trains, there's very little value in doing so, and resistance in the form of unions in some locations. Some trains are fully automated though, here's an article with some more info: [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj75z/why- dont-w...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj75z/why-dont-we-have- driverless-trains-yet)

Frankly having some dude from Toyota, who don't seem to be very invested in this space, tell me he doesn't think it's going to work isn't very convincing. Chris Urmson saying it might take up to 30 years is far more convincing: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/self...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon- for-some-in-decades-for-others)

But that's 30 years for the entire planet, not until it works at all. WayMo is already letting people ride their cars in Phoenix - presumably one of the places with good weather and easy roads, so I think metro-level deployment in the next 4 years seems about right.

[EDIT]: And on the topic of trains. The MTA in NYC can't even seem to handle basic technical projects, like upgrading signaling infrastructure, or just extending a rail line a few miles without spending billions of dollars, so there's probably a decent chance that some of these are not automated due to sheer incompetence.

<comment><USER14> With software, it's always easy to make something appear to work. All the corner cases make something take 10-100x longer than the functional prototype.

This became painfully obvious with the article floating around where a car misread a stop sign with a small amount of marking as a 45MPH speed limit sign. It's pretty clear that if a car is mistaking a red sign for a white sign, we have a very long time to go before the car can safely drive itself without a human observer to intervene when needed.

When it comes to automated driving, we need to keep our optimism in check and know that it can take decades before we have safe robotic taxis. They may become legal in countries with lower bars for safety before they are legal in the US.

The big problem, I think, will be when the drunks get into accidents because they will turn on autonomous driving, and don't get pulled over. Instead, they won't be sober enough to observe and intervene when the car screws up.

<comment><USER15> > _a car misread a stop sign with a small amount of marking as a 45MPH speed > limit sign_

That's what happens when the sign were made for humans. They should start putting QR codes under traffic signs, with the human sign as a fall back or as a second point of reference.

<comment><USER16> How can you verify at a glance that the QR Code associated with a human- readable sign is correct?

<comment><USER15> I said this in my comment: "...with the human sign as a fall back or as a second point of reference."

You wouldn't remove human sign identification from the algorithm, you just supplement it with the small QR code under the sign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It speaks to the trends of the day that an article which says something patently obvious to people in the tech field is considered news.

This reality seems like it may pose a problem though, as some people's business models and valuations depend on this article being wrong.

The thing is, we don't need full level 5 to get useful stuff out of this line of tech development. But in terms of the futurist vision of driverless cars everywhere, fleets of cars replacing private ownership, etc -- hard to see that happening. If the tech takes more than 10 years to develop, it's very likely something else will develop in the meantime which will essentially invalidate all of those earlier visions, as the world will have gone in a different direction in the meantime.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. I park in a very small space in a busy city. While backing out I must monitor the street, pedestrians, and the cars parked to the front, back, and side of me.

Just this week, I missed one of those variables and cost myself $500 in damage. This is something a backup camera and automated system can and already does easily help with, and is a major efficacy leap. Small steps like this can really add up.

What I would like to see next is a system that alerts the driver when the light in front of them turns green. I feel like I lose 5-10 minutes a week sitting behind people who are checking their phones unaware the light has changed.

<comment><USER19> > What I would like to see next is a system that alerts the driver when the > light in front of them turns green. I feel like I lose 5-10 minutes a week > sitting behind people who are checking their phones unaware the light has > changed.

I wish I could upvote this idea straight into the car manufacturers inboxes. Nothing more frustrating than having to sit through multiple light cycles cause the dipshit in front of you is taking a nap, conveniently waking up with enough time to get themselves through the light but not any of the people behind them.

<comment><USER20> You have one. It's called eyeballs and a horn.

<comment><USER19> It works really well when it's the person right in front of you, because you can see that they aren't paying attention. Put a few cars between you and them, and all of a sudden you don't really know the reason they aren't moving and there is a significant delay before you can infer that they aren't paying attention. It would be so much better for their own car to recognize that they are in la la land and remind them asap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe I'm ignorant (very likely) but I've never understood the difference between full autonomous driving and a fully intelligent AI.

If a car can drive in any environment and react to any circumstances surely said AI could also do anything else, no?

EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone. Though, to clarify, when I think of "full autonomous" driving, I'm thinking of a car that can go from A to B regardless of the context. Meaning, if some of it is offroad it'll handle that, if there's traffic that'll be handled. If there's something wrong with itself, aka the car, it'll be introspective and call for assistance, sending its location, etc. Not just following marks on a road and pulling over and giving up if it can't get there.

Also, I do not think a "fully intelligent AI" can necessarily solve any problem, but is capable of learning such that it could. I the purposes of a discussion I'd equate it to maybe a 5 year old.

<comment><USER22> Can you imagine writing a computer program than can drive a car in a video game, but not provide relationship advice to two freshly married people, or think of a fair and just and enforceable law to reduce discrimination at the workplace?

Driving is quite a bit short of "same intelligence as humans"

<comment><USER23> what if there are 2 obstacles that the car can't brake fast enough to avoid so it has to decide which to hit. one is a person pushing a baby in a baby carriage, the other is a person pushing someone a wheelchair

<comment><USER24> The exact same thing that happens now: someone dies, usually selected arbitrarily based upon the driver's selfish desire to minimize harm to themselves. Because that situation doesn't allow enough time to make anything except instinctual choices.

The driver is found at fault for that death if they were not driving legally. Otherwise, and very often times regardless, the whole thing is written off as a tragic accident (millions happen every year, just in the USA), and the insurance people do their thing.

Ethical dilemmas are a non-problem for self-driving cars.

<comment><USER25> Millions???

You are off by two orders of magnitude. It was 35,000 two years ago.

Still a lot of people, but not millions.

Put in context, it's around one death per 100 million miles driven.

<comment><USER24> Sorry, I mixed up the global and national numbers.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd not come across the different levels of autonomous driving before.

0 No Driving Automation

1 Driver Assistance

2 Partial Driving Automation

3 Conditional Driving Automation

4 High Driving Automation

5 Full Driving Automation

From [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Levels_of_dri...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Levels_of_driving_automation)

<comment><USER27> [https://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf](https://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf) fills out the descriptions a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The crux here is not really about semi-automation for highway driving in personal cars, but about companies that can only hope to live up to their investors' hype if they get rid of human costs, like Uber. And the idea that the capabilities of a car-for-hire could be fully automated to the point of removing any human from the service is utterly ridiculous to anyone who has ever seriously considered what that problem entails. Navigating a vehicle from point X to point Y via chaotic and ever-changing city streets and highways is the _easy_ half of that problem.

<comment><USER29> Well, have you ever seriously considered what that problem entails? What's the _hard_ part of that problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It is quite a logical thing though. 90% full autonomous driving is not. And the first 90% of autonomous driving could very well be within reach of our software capabilities at the moment (or maybe 80%, but it will not change the discussion much).

You can only release it when you reach 100%, and if that last fraction takes the next 50 years then we really are not even close.

</comment><comment><USER31> The Roman Rule: The one who says it can't be done shouldn't interrupt the one doing it.

I agree that it's harder than, say, Musk or Waymo's teams want to admit. But it also seems to me like Toyota has a bit of sour grapes, everyone around them is doing interesting, useful things, and Toyota is stuck at lane departure and adaptive cruise control and blind spot detection, all of which work pretty well for them.

<comment><USER32> To be honest, Toyota's cars and the systems in them feel rock solid. I don't get the same confidence from, say, Tesla. Have a look at YouTube videos of Tesla's cars doing scary stuff like trying to drive into the median suddenly. It's nowhere near ready for public use. If they were selling the same number of cars as Toyota, there'd be a lot more accidents happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Completely agree with this. It will be ridiculously difficult to get to Level 5 automation in cars. It's decades away, not years. Ironically though, part of the reason it's so difficult is that during the transition the roads will still be populated with human-driven cars. If we passed laws to the effect that "as of date X, no human-driven vehicles or pedestrians will be allowed on roads in the set {Y}", we could get to Level 5 _much_ faster.

<comment><USER34> > It will be ridiculously difficult to get to Level 5 automation in cars. It's > decades away, not years.

One could make the convincing argument that Waymo's vehicles are already at Level 5; where they probably struggle (I have no examples or data on this) is probably in inclement conditions (rain, snow, fog, etc). That said, even in such conditions, they probably perform much better than a human driver.

For instance, most human drivers in such conditions - even when they struggle to see the road clearly - continue to drive anyhow, mostly blind, instead of doing the right thing and pulling off to the side of the road and waiting, which I bet is a behavior that Waymo's vehicle performs when it struggles beyond a certain level.

In other words, Waymo's vehicle is likely better at determining when NOT to drive, and acting on that determination, instead of being stubborn and irrational in the face of evidence to the contrary.

<comment><USER33> I agree. The other day I was driving on the highway and ahead of me was a pulled-over pickup and tons of personal belongings strewn all over the road. Obviously the stuff had blown out of the truck. The driver was on foot, dodging cars while trying to retrieve his cargo. I was able to slow down and thread my way through the junk while avoiding hitting him -- or making myself a target for the cars behind me -- but what would an automated system have done? Probably its best choice would have been to pull over and stop because it didn't know what the heck was going on or how to deal with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> People have a habit of thinking linearly, however technology builds on top of technology (leading to exponential improvements).

Half way through the Genome project, they had only mapped out 1% of the genome. A lot of people in that field and working on that project were thinking the same thing - "not even close". But the next 7 years, they completed the next 99%. This is the power of exponential progress.

The only thing that is going to halt this progress is to hit physical limits _and_ not find a new way of doing things to get around the physical limits. New technology opens new possibilities.

<comment><USER36> Technological curves tend to look exponential at first, then logarithmic. We went from first manned flight to first supersonic manned flight in just 44 years. _Seventy years later_ we still don't have supersonic commercial flights. In the energy sector, the thermal efficiency of coal plants improved dramatically from 1880 to 1950, then pretty much hasn't improved at all since then. The number of years someone can expect to survive after qualifying for Social Security at age 65 has gone up only about five years since the age was first set to 65 back in 1935.

<comment><USER30> > Seventy years later we still don't have supersonic commercial flights.

Worse still, we have already had _and_ lost them.

And the age for qualifying for social security is going up faster than longevity in plenty of countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is a migration problem. A network of only self driving cars is effectively a more complex train without tracks. This does not require an AI, just a very reliable and coordinated state machine. A mixed set of AI and human drivers is much more complex. There is a possible future where towns, countries , certain highways, etc adapt to the needs/demands of humans such that the vehicles and rules of the road combined create the desired environment for autonomous vehicles to thrive. Everyone assumes technology will adapt to us, but history shows that humans do just as much if not more adapting (see: suburbs/highways, industrial revolution, tech addiction, tinder, uber, etc). In many cases this is powerful humans leveraging tech to bend the will and change lives of the masses. Not saying this or good or bad. Just saying... Futurists are generally wrong and overly optimistic (and/or just really good marketers).

</comment><comment><USER38> "We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in."

\- Palm's CEO Ed Colligan on the persistent rumors that Apple will be introducing a Apple phone in the near future (2006)

</comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone have concrete evidence on an over-under date for something commercial, e.g., availability of self-driving (or at least a self-delivering) taxi? The most specific hint at a number I've seen recently was in the neighborhood of 2022, which comes from a recent Morgan Stanley report on Waymo: "The analysts believe Waymo can get to an operating profit by 2022 and reach 8% margins by 2030."

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2017/06/12/self- driv...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2017/06/12/self-driving-cars- could-add-140-billion-in-alphabet-shareholder-value/#3579d5c4c318)

<comment><USER40> There is actually no reason to predict this to be years away except for like just future shock or something. Which is the big thing holding it back is just general disbelief.

Waymo is actually testing for real in Arizona with selected people from the public.

Yes, they include an employee in the car to monitor or take over if necessary. But from the numbers I saw they reported to the DMV like a year ago, with Waymo's cars that happens surprisingly little. [https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b-b119-91319c27788f/GoogleAutoWaymo_disengage_report_2016.pdf?MOD=AJPERES) Like very, very little. 635,868 miles and 124 reportable disengages. As of last year. Significantly improved now. In the rare case of a problem they can send a human to help.

If they had legal clearance or a waiver or something, they could TODAY just take some routes and times that had little traffic and not include the test/backup employee. Again, the number of times they report the driver needs to take over now is minuscule. They could then start charging for the rides. Then that would be a commercial deployment.

For them to make that widely available, at first for selected low traffic areas and times to reduce the risk of any incident or needing to send a human driver, is just a matter of scaling up their fleet and the legal issues.

Tesla is pushing very hard to the point of being unsafe to get their autopilot to actually work in as many circumstances as possible. They literally have been selling self-driving cars. The cars are collecting massive amounts of real-world data. They have hired many genius AI experts. Unless there are too many crashes or the company goes down in flames (which is possible considering how aggressively they are testing and releasing software even with issues), they will push to decrease the amount of driving the human has to do down to close to 0 as soon as is possible. Musk will try as hard as he can to get 75% to 100% there before the end of the year, because that is literally what he has promised. By the end of next year his actual conservative expectation is to be more than 80%.

As far as operating profit who knows, but there is no way that we will be waiting until 2022 for this to be deployed, at least in somewhat limited routes and times.

<comment><USER39> > there is no way that we will be waiting until 2022 for this to be deployed

How sure would you say you are? Want to put some money on that?

<comment><USER40> Before 2022? Yes, I should take that wager.

The tricky part about a wager is that it gives people a strong incentive to reinterpret events to their advantage, and its tough to define this in an objective way. Even if it is defined objectively there is ambiguity in language and again they may not realize they disagree on what they are wagering about.

But maybe in a few days when I get paid again I could make a wager if there was some agreement on what we were wagering. I have a feeling that once that got pinned down you wouldn't want to continue the wager.

2021 is four years from now. Do you really think that, in the next four years, this early rider program [https://waymo.com/apply/](https://waymo.com/apply/) won't progress to allowing rides without the supervisor employee present on some rides? Once they have that working on a regular basis, should we not assume they will start charging for rides? They could actually do that now for certain routes and times if they had the government sign off on it. So it is feasible (although unlikely) that you could lose the bet tomorrow.

There are several other advanced self-driving vehicle programs out there including Cruise, Uber, etc. They are also using the LIDAR technology and detailed maps etc. Audi has announced they will have a 'level 4' self pilot mode for freeways in 2020-2021 [https://media.audiusa.com/models/piloted- driving](https://media.audiusa.com/models/piloted-driving) They announced that in 2017 (or maybe 2016) because they have been partnering with nVidia and saw nVidia actually demonstrated deep neural network autonomous driving. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmVWLr0X1Sk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmVWLr0X1Sk)

GM, Ford, Honda, Tesla have all made announcements that they plan to deploy self driving vehicles on or before 2021. [https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/04/self-driving-car- timeline...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/04/self-driving-car-timeline- for-11-top-automakers/)

<comment><USER39> You seem to have a more liberal interpretation of "somewhat limited" than I do.

I have ascribed a 45% chance to this statement, and last year bet $500 against it taking place:

"By July 2023, a self-driving car can be reliably hailed by a member of the general public in at least 10 North American cities. At least 8 cities must be outside the San Fransisco Bay Area. The car must available on at least 50% of days, i.e., not confined to very narrow weather or traffic situations. No back-up human may be physically present to take over in an emergency."

[http://blog.jessriedel.com/2016/04/](http://blog.jessriedel.com/2016/04/)

Would you bet on that happening by July 2022? I would take on another $500.

<comment><USER40> 50% of days in any city means it can handle Minnesota snow and ice.

As you have stated it, implying the car can go anywhere at any time (no constraints on routes mentioned) and is available in most major cities, that's very speculative that it would be deployed to that degree.

It will be deployed within a few years although with some reasonable constraints and it will be extremely useful even with those constraints.

Edit: Actually, looking at that statement again, some of what I read as implied is actually just ambiguous. I would make the bet if I could correct the ambiguous parts to be more realistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> the hype around it is fun, but the reality is that autonomous driving is harder than anything we've done before as a species and we have a bunch of the best minds working on it already (as the article notes).

rockets and electric cars are really cool, but those have largely been engineering challenges. autonomous vehicles are in the basic scientific research stage. i can't imagine we'll see true autonomous vehicles within the next 20 years.

i say this not to discourage the efforts to build this wonderful technology, but only to temper expectations, so that we avoid implausible conclusions like "uber will save itself by replacing its fleet with autonomous cars in the next 5 years".

<comment><USER34> > autonomous vehicles are in the basic scientific research stage.

Autonomous vehicles have been virtually out of the "basic scientific research stage" ever since Darpa's Grand Challenge in 2005 and 2007.

While there is still a ton of research being done, most of it has been focused on refining existing solutions, or applying existing solutions into new problem spaces. For the most part, we know what is needed both in hardware and software to gain Level 5 capability, and for the most part we have working examples of all those functions.

What is left is refinement.

I also believe that Tesla is on the right path by using cameras for it's main sensor input (augmented by radar, and probably some LIDAR too). We already know that our road system can be navigated visually - it's inherently designed for this. In theory, radar and LIDAR shouldn't be needed at all, but just as they are useful augmentations for humans (in those areas that they are used - such as proximity detection on some vehicles), so they are also useful for self-driving systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Level 5 is way out there. But at least from a technological standpoint, if Waymo isn't already at a minimum viable product for L4 commercial deployment, they're pretty damn close. Deploying 600 vehicles is a huge financial commitment, they wouldn't be doing it if they felt their self driving car project would remain in the science experiment phase for another decade. They were ready to roll in 2015 with their Koala cars, driving slowly on Mountainview roads, but were derailed by regulations.

</comment><comment><USER43> Seems like the curse of the 80/20 rule. Cars that can drive themselves, monitor their surroundings using cameras, react to unpredictable moving obstacles etc are pretty impressive. That's the 80%. The other 20% is about things like bad weather (especially snow, which can completely cover road markings and signs) and "no win" situations. It's not hard to see a close- enough-to-perfect system taking the other 80% of the time.

</comment><comment><USER44> This will probably have a chilling effect on VCs investing in this space. Maybe not White Walker chilling but it can't be seen as enthusiasm coming from the world's largest car manufacturer. I worked for a router company and our likely exit scenario Cisco leaned ever so slightly in the other direction and the VCs pulled our funding. Poof.

</comment><comment><USER45> Pratt says, "Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine"

Now imagine an autonomous car that had an accident rate one fifth the rate of human drivers. Would society really decide not to allow such a car on the road?

</comment><comment><USER46> I will start paying attention to self-driving hype when they make cars that can drive themselves in Alaskan snowstorm. Until then it's just California- only decoy for companies that make their money on shit smart people don't want to work on.

</comment><comment><USER46> First step should be a car with driver assistance so sophisticated, a human driver can't crash it. Seems like a much more tractable problem, and one I personally would pay quite a bit of money for in a few years, when my son is old enough to drive.

<comment><USER47> Probably more efficient to just have another kid.

<comment><USER46> For you maybe. Redundancy in my case comes at a price: kids are about $300k+ a pop nowadays between ages 0 and 18, assuming upper middle class lifestyle. More if you pay for college. That being the case, I'd be willing to pay double the price for a car that verifiably makes it darn near impossible for the driver to kill himself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I have to wonder what motivates him to admit this, surely hyping his technology is a formula for attracting funding, right? Why admit your job has such a long-time until return?

<comment><USER32> Probably because Toyota doesn't need to attract funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Something that I think is sometimes missed is that the insurance companies along with major freight haulers may drive this more than the public at large. Self driving systems don't have to be perfect; they just have to be better than humans, and that may be attainable sooner than the naysayers imagine. We're still north of 30k auto deaths per year in the U.S. alone - I'd bet money that if you waved a magic wand and replaced every car on the road today with an autopilot Tesla, traffic deaths would fall off a cliff.

</comment><comment><USER50> > unveiled a new concept car, the Concept-i

Man sure would be cool if any concept car ever presented were actually released. They do look fancy and futuristic.

<comment><USER34> > Man sure would be cool if any concept car ever presented were actually > released.

Not many are, but some are occasionally. I personally own one of the few existing Isuzu VehiCROSS vehicles. It started out as a concept car in the 1990s, then went into production virtually unchanged (only a tad under 6000 were ever made).

<comment><USER51> I saw one of those earlier this year in the Austin area. It was distinctive for sure. There aren't very many 2 door hatches and SUVs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's from January. Could the title reflect that?

</comment><comment><USER53> SDC's could be very disruptive to the the traditional automotive business model of selling a personal car to each adult who needs transport. Autonomous hire cars mean cheaper transport for users and and potentially a much smaller market for new cars. While we have traditional manufacturers on both sides of the fence, I'm more inclined to believe companies like Ford who are running towards an autonomous future despite the effect it will have on the way they do business.

<comment><USER34> While I don't have any example articles, I do know there have been a few written on the reality that millennials and the following generation are much less likely to own their own vehicle or to even drive. This has been attributed to a number of various factors (a large portion being attributed to those generations widespread and intense usage of various social media platforms).

So manufacturers are already feeling the pinch, so to speak.

While (as you put it) "autonomous hire cars" will make the market for new car sales (and car ownership in general) smaller, I don't think it will completely go away, for a couple of reasons.

First off, such form of "public transportation" is still subject to "the drunk person who pukes in the seat" syndrome. You will quickly get vehicles on the road that are virtually rolling trash cans, and when you encounter one, you'll have to make the choice to either use it anyhow, or send it back and wait for another to come (potentially making you late to whatever it is you are doing).

Secondly, a service of "hire out your personal car" might become something; kinda like driving for uber, but not actually driving. Make money with your car when you aren't using it. Of course, you could also find your car trashed in the process (I'm sure AirBnB suffers from a similar problem).

Ford and other companies are just likely hedging their bets, plus whatever tech they do develop can also bring them a tidy sum by licensing it forward, or selling it off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Just 10 years before, achieving better than human performance on image recognition task was not even close.

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm sure he's right, but then why is everyone joining the race now? Wouldn't it be way less expensive to wait until at least some of the problems are solved?

Also, it sure seems like level 5 autonomous driving is just a few steps short of general AI, which is still lightyears away.

<comment><USER28> People are jumping in because they get attention and money for doing so (and because lots of non-experts who tend to be the money-distributors believe the hype) including government grants. The real threat is not that the hype will waste private investors' money (although it is) but that it will draw government funds away from transit projects that would be a far better investment.

<comment><USER56> >> _draw government funds away from transit projects that would be a far better investment._

Not just government funds, but also car maker funds. I honestly don't understand why all the research in automated driving doesn't focus on making better versions of the driver assists we already have first, instead of shooting for full autonomy, which I honestly believe to be a pipe dream.

Of course many of the advances in researching autonomous driving will trickle down to safety systems for 'normal' cars, so that's a good thing. I just feel like everyone is approaching the problem from the wrong direction, wasting a lot of R&D effort that could have produced much better results much sooner if car companies would start from what we already have and incrementally improve it. You can blame car companies for being slow to adopt many things that could benefit all of us (such as electric drivetrains), but you can hardly deny car safety has already improved tremendously in a relatively short timespan. Whether they were forced by regulation or because they thought making safer cars would be more profitable doesn't really matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> It is closer than it was 50 years ago! The way I see it, I need it working in 30 years. I'm confident it will be here by then.

</comment><comment><USER58> What's the opposite of FUD? That's what's driving the hype.

<comment><USER17> If FUD = fear, uncertainty, and doubt, then the opposite would be Joy, Certainty, and Credulousness. (JCC doesn't roll off of the tongue though)

Sounds about right. The same stuff market bubbles are made of!

<comment><USER59> Hope, inevitability, belief. HIB

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> (FYI this article is 6 months old)

</comment><comment><USER61> Elon Musk begs to differ..

<comment><USER59> But apparently, his engineers don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Encouraging.

</comment><comment><USER63> Humans are never going to live on Mars either, but at this point these things are matter of religious conviction for techies.

</comment><comment><USER64> Now all the poor journalists get egg on their faces, as the driverless future is revealed as hype.

</comment><comment><USER65> I've always had a hunch (and mind you, I have no proof of this, I'm just talking here) that the software required for a level 5 self driving car is, on some mathematical level, equivalent to the software needed to pass the Turing Test (w/out hacking the rules). In other words, if we have the capacity to do one of those things, we will have the capacity to do the other (in much the same way that seemingly unrelated problems in theoretical CS are actually restatements of the same problem). It's probably BS, but it's an interesting idea that I can't quite seem to shake.

<comment><USER34> So are you saying Waymo's cars are capable of passing the Turing Test? Because they are arguably at level 5 capability.

I highly doubt it, though.

The thing is, while I believe they are already at this level, their technology is obviously not perfect. It never will be. Perfection in any space of technology is just not possible, because perfection is not possible in the physical world for anything. Perfection is a mathematical abstract at best.

Instead, what we can hope to achieve is "better than human drivers", and Waymo's vehicles have certainly achieved that, imho. They have logged more miles with their self-driving vehicle technology than most people will drive any single car of their own, with an accident rate far below that of the average human driver.

For the accidents they have had, most of them were when the car was in manual mode, and for the rest, they were low-speed incidents. None of them, that occurred while in self-driving mode (that I am aware of) caused any injury or death to any occupant of the vehicle.

I'll leave this comment with this video, to show what was capable of autonomous vehicles in what now seems like the distant past (and I honestly know it wasn't, but time sure flies with this tech):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_piO849uRdI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_piO849uRdI)

Note that this was in 2010, using the tech in Stanford's Junior car (tech that would eventually lead to Google's and later Waymo's vehicles), and far from perfect; I can guarantee you that the systems used are much more advanced and better at control today.

<comment><USER65> Waymo's self driving tech is definitely not anywhere near level 5 capability (if that were true, they'd rule the world right now and we'd all be using their tech). From Waymo's Wikipedia article:

>As of 28 August 2014, according to Computer World Google's self-driving cars were in fact unable to use about 99% of US roads.[57] As of the same date, the latest prototype had not been tested in heavy rain or snow due to safety concerns.[58] Because the cars rely primarily on pre-programmed route data, they do not obey temporary traffic lights and, in some situations, revert to a slower "extra cautious" mode in complex unmapped intersections. The vehicle has difficulty identifying when objects, such as trash and light debris, are harmless, causing the vehicle to veer unnecessarily. Additionally, the lidar technology cannot spot some potholes or discern when humans, such as a police officer, are signaling the car to stop.[59] Google projects plan on having these issues fixed by 2020.[60]

It's really not better than human drivers, and I don't know where this myth comes from.

<comment><USER40> You know 2014 was three years ago right?

<comment><USER65> The point is that they're not at level 5 capability yet, and won't be for another 3 years at least (by their deadline, 2020).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I think Toyota exists in a different dimension than the rest of us. Toyota is so convinced that the future of cars is hydrogen that their electric car efforts boil down to a four man team. Dinosaurs! As for self driving tech wasn't there a successful multi manufacturer trans Europe truck convoy last year? Self-driving tech is already at work at mines. Decades? Really, Toyota.

<comment><USER67> We'll, are you so sure that solving hydrogen delivery and storage is ultimately harder than making safe and cheap batteries for practical cars with an autonomy over 600km?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Alternate title: Toyota executive frantically tries to convince people to keep buying non-automated cars to protect Toyota's revenue stream while other companies say automated cars are imminent [January 2017].

California is on the verge of approving new regulations that allow automated cars on public roads with no humans in the vehicle, and as soon as that happens, things are going to move faster than the people who believe 10-years- late Toyota think.</comment>


7-inch Amazon Tablet launches in October, 10-inch Version in Q1 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.i4u.com/47619/7-inch-amazon-tablet-launches-october-10-inch-amazon-tablet-q1-2012

<comment><USER2> "I just hope Amazon is able to give their Android tablet a clean and modern design. I still think that the Amazon Kindle is one of the most ugly gadgets on the market, despite its mega success."

First the Windows Explorer and now this. Design is not minimalism. For something that is not touch-based, the Kindle is actually a very clean and modern device appearance-wise. And it also has great design. A good design is one that is easy to use for a given context, something the Kindle gets right most of the time. If Windows Explorer can get my mother to stop asking how to copy mp3 files from one folder to another than their redesign is a good one as well.

Looking good is only a small part of designing something actually.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. This is the exact same sentence that was bothering me. The kindle would be nerve-wrecking if i had to slide for every new page view. I hope that they don't strip the new kindle of its physical keys.

People don't get usability but they get how to impress others. That's why people think it's an improvement if typing on a phones takes thrice the time. It looks cooler. That's why people like driving those new mini coopers, that look cool from the outside but are just a mess in usability.

<comment><USER4> Re: usability -- Getting OT, but my wife and I are aiming to get a used Mini not because they look cool, but because they're small and fuel efficient. We've driven the Smart car, it's transmission is borderline scary. I would never pay the price a new one costs, but used prices are very reasonable. We have a Dodge Magnum, which is extremely usable, but not so duel efficient, and the size makes it harder to find parking for. Sometimes we need to get somewhere in the city where public transit and taxis don't really make sense. A Mini proves extremely usable in that case.

(Okay, so there is also something kind of humorous about having one car named Magnum and another named Mini)

<comment><USER5> My Mini is surprisingly fuel efficient (40+ MPG on the highway), small on the outside, big on the inside, and fun to drive. But as woodpanel said, the Mini is indeed a usability mess inside. Pretty much every switch, button, and knob is a WTF. For a good example, be sure to ask the salesman for a demo of the Mini's satellite radio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazon's 7-inch will be its answer to the Nook Color, and will probably hit the same price point. It should be no more expensive than $250 and maybe as low as $199. Amazon might even use ads to reach the low point. It will be slightly faster and a more fully fledged Android device. Amazon is probably betting this is the device that will sell through the roof.

Amazon's 10-inch will be more like the Kindle DX than an iPad killer. It will just be available for users with very specific use cases and sales expectations will be low. It should be priced between $400 and $500, double whatever the 7-inch costs. Amazon can't have high hopes going up against the iPad after seeing the bloodbath of 2011, but there's not a lot it can do about it either. At the very least it will make the smaller tablet look like a better bargain by putting it next to a much higher priced alternative, which I suspect is the role the Kindle DX plays more than anything else.

<comment><USER7> This is not a bad position to be in. Another HN comment said it best: Amazon is the one company who can afford to sell products at a loss, since they can potentially recuperate on content sales.

I'll also agree with the Amazon "Kindle Color DX" theory you put forward here. They'll cross-subsidize entry tablet costs with a higher-end model.

Aside: does Apple do the same with the iPad? I imagine they don't make a lot on 16GB models; instead, I assume they make lots of money by up-selling $4-8 in flash memory for $100 per module.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Everyone keeps framing this as a competitor to the iPad, but it's going after a market that is not currently buying tablets at all. People who can't afford an iPad or don't want one at the current price:features ratio. If this means anything for the iPad, it's that it may expand the android tablet market enough to attract app developers, making it more sensible to produce an android tablet with high quality expensive hardware in the future, when the app eco system is more mature.

</comment><comment><USER9> From the same article - this is all nonsense.

      The details about the Amazon Tablet(s) are still very vague.
      Amazon is doing a great job so far to keep everything secret.
      It is assumed that Amazon will use Android, but not even that is sure.
      Rumored screen sizes range from 7 over 9 to 10.1-inches.

And the real article the nonsense is based on

<http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20110831PD211.html>

</comment><comment><USER10> "We have seen reports that one of the major weapons Amazon wants to use against the iPad is price."

Finally someone gets that this might be a good idea.

<comment><USER11> Except it's not a good idea. It's never been about price. Otherwise Apple would've never succeeded with the iPhone. There are tons of cheaper smartphone options out there yet people are still flocking to the iPhone. Consumers today are trending towards quality and usability, even if it costs them slightly more.

<comment><USER12> Nonsense. Of course it's partly about price. If it weren't about price then why doesn't Apple just raise their prices by a factor of 10 and really make a killing? Why did the Touchpad that had just totally flopped become a hot item when sold at a 80% discount?

Really price is just one way to differentiate a product from others in the same niche. Features, specs, manufacturing quality, app ecosystem, design, brand, usability, etc. are others. Those tons of low-end cheap smartphones are at least as critical to Android becoming the most popular smartphone platform as the ones that instead compete with the iPhone by better specs.

Right now Honeycomb tablets aren't all that good at positively differentiating themselves from the iPad in any useful way. Maybe some people desperately need some particular Android feature that can't be added to iOS in any way, or really dislike Apple. Not really a solid foundation... The closest exception is probably the Eee Transformer.

The real question is whether some other manufacturer really _can_ lower the price enough to really make it a differentiating factor.

<comment><USER13> There's no margin in touchpads if you want to undercut Apple, but I bet Amazon doesn't care. They want eyeballs. Amazon is really good at datamining, and they already have your credit card details. If you interact with any channel they control, they _will_ find a way to shake you down.

HP and the rest don't have that advantage - they need to make money off the touchpads, and Apple can undercut them by controlling the App store and locking down supplies.

<comment><USER14> "There's no margin in touchpads if you want to undercut Apple, but I bet Amazon doesn't care. They want eyeballs."

The same goes for Google-rola. Should be an interesting next couple of years for the tablet business in terms of seeing how low these non-Apple players are willing to go on hardware price in an attempt to prop up their real moneymakers (content, ads).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have 30-40 eBooks (mostly PDF) which aren't very suitable for a Kindle because they're mostly photographic books and/or programming with nicely highlighted text. I'm hoping Amazon have realised that eBooks are not restricted to B&W text and are producing a device to serve that market.

<comment><USER16> I am so scared that this mythical new tablet will use a glossy screen, just like almost every other color tablet out there.

I say soft prayers at night that Amazon will build on the readability of the Kindle's screen and make their new device have that same soft matte finish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let's hope they're right on the much lower price. There's a lot of places I'd like a little web tablet that I just can't risk my $500 iPad.

It sure would be a disappointment if it's just another tablet that costs the same as an ipad but that's not nearly as good.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure why so many of these speculation articles don't mention the NOOK Color, which is a 7" Android-based tablet primarily concerned with reading with a secondary focus on media, that has a specialized Android app market. Price: $250. There's your target. The story with a 10" will be different, but it sounds like that's a question for next year.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. I played with a Nook Color a couple weeks ago and was impressed. If I could figure out a reason to add yet another piece of portable electronic junk to my collection (alongside a Nexus One, a Dell netbook dualbooting Linux or Mac OS X, a laptop, a Kindle, a DS, and probably other crud I can't remember now), it's what I'd buy. It's cheap enough to nearly be an impulse purchase, it seemed fast enough and powerful enough for what I'd want to use it for (though the netbook with a keyboard works better, since writing is mostly what I imagine I'd want to use it for), and it was cute and fun to play with.

So, yeah, there's already a low price point competitor to the iPad, though it's not being marketed as such. B&N may be making a mistake in not pushing it harder as a full-featured tablet...but maybe they know its limitations better than I do. At that price point, it almost certainly is similarly specced to a very low end Android phone, so probably can't actually run a lot of bigger apps effectively.

<comment><USER20> B&N isn't making a mistake in not pushing it as a tablet...because it's not a tablet. It's an e-reader that just happens to have a little web browser and app store mechanism in it. B&N is selling these at a loss (or at least breakeven) hoping for the makeup in book sales. They can't be running around telling everyone that it's great as a web tablet and ignore the book thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Can a 7-inch tablet mess with the iPad?

annnd, this is what is wrong with blogs, media, news sources today.

leave the damn makers alone. if every tablet has to be compared to iPad all the time, where is the place for innovation or simply "being different"?. why can't they come with something on their own?

</comment><comment><USER22> I do hope they'll still continue their Kindle line though.

<comment><USER23> Presumably this is going to be called the "Kindle Tab" or something like that, they've built up great brand loyalty to Kindle. I don't think they're going to discontinue a product that sells as well as the Kindle and nails a specific use-case the way it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Source: <http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20110831PD211.html>

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd love a 7-10" tablet that had an e-ink screen on one side and an lcd on the other.</comment>


Show HN: Respond - an open source CMS to help you build responsive sites  - <AUTHOR> http://respondcms.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been working on Respond for awhile now and finally tracked down enough bugs to show it off a bit. I would love to hear your feedback.</comment>


Quicksort: Caveat Implementor - <AUTHOR> http://zufallstee.blogspot.de/2012/04/quicksort-caveat-implementor.html

<comment><USER2> _The most popular kind of PRNG is the linear congruential generator._

Really? I was under the impression that we were all using the Mersenne twister these days.

<comment><USER3> Not only is LCG the most popular, it is +by far+ the most popular. rand() and Java.util.Random are both LCG. And it can be spectacularly bad. See <http://www.alife.co.uk/nonrandom/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _it's an easy exercise to show that the worst case runtime is the same as the average case_

That should probably say the average case is the same as the best case.</comment>


The Incredible Shrinking Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://jonescape.com/tisos/#/ <comment><USER2> Extremely annoying to view. Please show the entire slides at once, or at least have an option for this.

If it is important to show them one part at a time, please indicate how many steps there are on this slide, so that I can press next quickly to skip the "animation" without risking skipping to the next slide.

Can't comment on the content as I was too annoyed with the UX to read past a few slides.

<comment><USER3> For the future viewer, the introduction stops at [http://jonescape.com/tisos/#/26](http://jonescape.com/tisos/#/26), then you get the important names and links (up until ~50)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't say I disagree about the format of the slides. Subsequent sharing wasn't really a primary consideration; it was only intended as a tool to assist me in my presentation. I will see if I can convert it to something a little more standalone-consumable. Of course, it will still be missing the extemporaneous talk that was intended to be the actual presentation, so it will still surely be somewhat lacking.

Thanks for the critique!

</comment><comment><USER5> I would argue that _" It works on my box"_ is actually a benefit in some cases, since it exposes the fact that the code doesn't work on all machines and should be altered or changed to fix that. If all of the people in the development team have exactly the same hardware, OS, programs, etc. then that problem could still be present, but because it isn't found it could leak to production code.

If each individual's computing environment has diverged, then there is at least more of a chance of finding such problems before they get to production code.

<comment><USER4> An example of the kind of divergence I'm speaking of would be varying jdk or libraries versions; where there is no expectation that all these deviations would be supported. These concerns are encapsulated in the container.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunately I got frustrated with the presentation and gave up before figuring out the point. Seems to be a something about an ocaml kernel with containers on top.

<comment><USER7> It's about unikernels, where a small kernel, a single application and a limited set of service (ideally just what the application itself needs) are compiled to a single consolidated binary running on a barebones virtualisation host (e.g. Xen).

The most well-known one does seem to be MirageOS[0], an OCaml unikernel. See [http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628) for a paper on Mirage, though the broad strokes would be applicable to any unikernel (and a list thereof is provided in Table 2).

If you followed Thomas Leonard's entries on porting 0install to OCaml, he subsequently posted a few entries on playing with mirage[1]

[0] [https://mirage.io](https://mirage.io)

[1] [http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/07/28/my-first- unikernel/](http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/07/28/my-first-unikernel/) with discussions[2][3]

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8109485](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8109485)

[3] [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2c1soi/my_firs...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2c1soi/my_first_unikernel_created_in_ocaml_and_mirage/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Doesnt work on mobile?(at least no luck for me).

</comment><comment><USER9> ATM machine... cmon man.

For everyone else, start here and your annoyance level will drop CONSIDERABLY, and you won't miss anything: [http://jonescape.com/tisos/#/9](http://jonescape.com/tisos/#/9)

</comment><comment><USER10> Relevant wiki page for those who are finding it difficult to follow the slides: [http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Unikernels](http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Unikernels)</comment>


Functional Testing of PCBs with Google's OpenHTF - <AUTHOR> https://jokersys.com/2018/08/24/joker-tv-hardware-functional-testing-with-openhtf/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Functional Testing of PCBs is always used as a final manufacturing step. Functional testing provides making a decision to go or not to go on finished PCBs. Manual functional testing of one Joker TV assembled PCB takes about 5 minutes. I have decided to automate this process with open-source hardware testing framework (OpenHTF). PCB functional testing time is shrunk to 1 minute. This is 5 times less than manual functional testing and less error prone (no human factor)."</comment>


Google Rolling Out "SearchWiki"? Move Results Up, Hide Them Or Suggest Your Own - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/google-rolling-out-searchwiki-move-results-up-hide-them-or-suggest-your-own-15292.php <comment><USER2> Hopefully they can solve the fraudulent vote up problem... seems like even high profile sites like digg still have people selling mass vote-ups

<comment><USER3> BH guys are starting to chomp at the bit...

[http://seoblackhat.com/2008/10/28/google-promote-remove- butt...](http://seoblackhat.com/2008/10/28/google-promote-remove-button/)</comment></comment>


An Open Letter to Recruiters - <AUTHOR> http://talent.linkedin.com/blog/index.php/2013/10/an-open-letter-to-recruiters#! <comment><USER2> As a counterpoint to this article, there are the dozens of recruiters that have examined my resume with my extensive embedded systems and database experience and have used their analytical skill to determine that I am a perfect fit for a marketing person for a car dealership. Or, which happens more often than not, that I will leave my current senior position to take a contract position for half the pay and four positions down the ladders at the company at which I already work. Sorry, but not impressed by most.</comment>


Twitter Ordered To Hand Over WikiLeaks Supporters' Account Information - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/01/06/twitter-ordered-to-hand-over-wikileaks-supporters-account-information/?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

<comment><USER2> I wonder if these types of legally-enforced privacy intrusions will bring about a new design goal for web-app builders: making retrieval of this information impossible for the service provider.

It's one thing for Twitter to promise not to give your information to government entities until asked, but it's a whole other thing to engineer their application so it's impossible to comply with such a request.

<comment><USER3> It already has, to a small extent. Two services I can think of which already aim to provide this guarantee: Firefox Sync [1] and Tarsnap [2].

[1] [http://docs.services.mozilla.com/sync/overview.html#cryptogr...](http://docs.services.mozilla.com/sync/overview.html#cryptography)

[2] <http://www.tarsnap.com/crypto.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I still do not understand on what grounds this is legally possible. Wikileaks was not convicted or even accused of any crime.

<comment><USER5> Have any Wikileaks supporters been accused of any crimes?

In the meatspace, if a suspected or known criminal was always hanging out in a certain small corporate office with only a few people then they might wiretap the whole building, even though the other workers are not necessarily involved.

From there they might be able to subpeona the personnel records for that small group of employees even though neither the corporation nor the "extracurricular" group those workers are involved with are even charged with any wrongdoing, based just on the personal wrongdoing of one of those workers and that one's association with the others in his building.

That doesn't mean there's no shenanigans going on here (I haven't looked at the article yet) but Wikileaks being formally accused of a crime is not compulsory to getting individual subpeonas in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The language used in this story is awful. If I had never heard of the group Wikileaks, I would assume they were a known criminal organisation. "having ties to..." "allegedly support the group..." replace Wikileaks with Al- Qaeda/Mafia/IRA and you get an everyday story about a bad group of people not a non-profit org who assist whistle-blowers. Fascinating how such everyday phrases can colour your perception, to such a degree.

</comment><comment><USER7> What happens if Twitter refuses? It's probably going to take a tech giant like this, Google, etc. to stand up to the United States government. I just can't see Twitter getting their domains seized or their servers confiscated or anything extreme like that. It would be a huge story and I can't imagine that drawing attention to something so unconstitutional (IANAL, but it's gotta be, right?) is what the government wants.

<comment><USER8> Twitter won't refuse, and if they did, their servers _would_ get seized and the information _would_ get taken from those servers by force. As much as it might sometimes work to our advantage, processes like this do not typically consider how things look in the press. If they did, we wouldn't see as many horrific stories like this in the press as we currently do.

<comment><USER9> Couldn't Twitter do it anyway, allow them to take the info by force, let them reinstate their servers, and then sue the Government for damages?

<comment><USER8> > Couldn't Twitter do it anyway, allow them to take the info by force, let > them reinstate their servers, and then sue the Government for damages?

Good luck with that. The government would simply argue that Twitter could easily have avoided the damages by cooperating ("you brought this on yourself").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In this case, I can't imagine the Twitter details include much more than email and ip addresses. What I'd be worried about is what happens afterwards, when they order Google and Microsoft to hand over your emails and chat logs.

<comment><USER9> Call me crazy, but I don't think the US Government should have access to such private information of foreign citizens, even if it's hosted in US. At the very least, it should be their own national Governments that should be able to request for it, and only if their own laws allow it.

This will only promote anti-Americanism, as people will try to stay away from American services. Who knows how far they will they take this. If I "support" #OccupyWallStreet on Twitter, does that mean that one day they might come after me, too? I really can't be sure either way these days, which means I can't treat things like these too lightly.

<comment><AUTHOR> The story is actually about the european courts granting the U.S. authority to request information on their citizen. While I don't expect the U.S. courts will put up much of a roadblock (they rarely do), The DoJ will still have to go through the U.S. process to get the desired information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> come on, Appelbaum knows better than to ever have exchanged anything of value over an unencrypted medium not under his control. i woul dbe very suprised if they produced anything useful from twitter's records.

if they are able to see get his bank account or CC info, and then subpoena further records from his banks (which would be very f'd up indeed), then they may get something more. but that may be a steep mountain to climb under no hard evidence present.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wait, twitter has billing info on its users?

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://dot-bit.org>

</comment><comment><USER14> More reason to use Tor and .onion domains!

Oh wait. The only thing in onionspace right now are child porn sites and drug dealers. Nevermind.

<comment><USER15> People _have_ been using tor service webservers to release material as Anonymous.

<comment><USER14> Yes, it can be used for regular political activism, and sometimes is.

But the "four horsemen of infocalypse" are all there, ridiculously easy to find, but at the same time impossible to trace, and form a biggest part of onionspace.

It can be also taken as a proof of true Tor anonymity, though; the sites are all there, and the only thing law enforcement can do is to try to break the security of the sites and sneak for some info THERE.</comment></comment></comment>


Q: Why Is the Facebook App So Large? A: iOS Can't Handle Facebook Scale - <AUTHOR> http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/129756254607/q-why-is-the-facebook-app-so-large-a-ios-cant <comment><USER2> If you read the presentation, it's more like,

>A: Facebook app has such different priorities than other developers, that Apple's development ecosystem has 'unreasonable' expectations and assumptions.

Facebook wants to be (and seems to like being) a "clowntown" (as the author puts it) where anyone and everyone can write up a duplicate library to anything and ship it. Any and all code will ship, it just can't make the app dip below 60fps. To meet those strange goals, they 'hacked' together their own GUIKit (at least three of them, actually), their own IDE, their own animation kit, their own debugger, etc. A general theme seemed to be that this was done in order to get everything off the main thread and onto background threads. By only depositing the very smallest amount of work onto the main thread from a gigantic soup of background threads you could keep the app snappy without needing to prune any code.

Seems to me to be a silly way to differentiate one's self.

<comment><USER3> I was going to read your comment but I felt like I had a better way to do it so I just wrote my own. I think it's better but I didn't do any benchmarks because I have to ship it now. Oh well, onto my next comment.

\-- Facebook dev

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is like being proud of doing a shit so large it clogs the toilet. You shouldn't be proud of this.

<comment><USER5> Stay classy.

<comment><USER6> I thought it was brilliantly apt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, At least that is a start, I have been shouting and even parking for an answer as to why some of the Apps are huge. May be next time i should ask that on Reddit to finally get an response.

To be honest performance wise Facebook app is great. Butter smooth, but there is no reason a 20MB App cant be butter smooth either. Feedly App, is only 18MB.

And it seems large app isn't just Facebook, twitter is 60MB. QQ is 130MB, or We Chat, etc..... Many apps seems to be be way bloated.

So are we implying all these apps are over engineered?

</comment><comment><USER8> You can take a look at one of the possible reasons in a short piece I wrote about Facebook Paper, and especially screenshots :-)

[http://www.koszek.com/blog/2015/09/08/copyright-screen-of- fa...](http://www.koszek.com/blog/2015/09/08/copyright-screen-of-facebook- paper/)

</comment><comment><USER9> That's silly.

I work on a multitude of apps that have _huge_ customer bases. Obviously no where near Facebook but, definitely a couple million users. The largest app has maybe 200K lines of code? And we are always able to find sections of the app to refactor or find dead code to cut.

<comment><USER10> No offense but a couple million users doesn't mean you're playing the same game as someone significantly bigger than you.

I've worked for places that average 2-4 million users/per day 40+ million a day, they're an order of magnitudes different in every single way

<comment><USER11> I understand why the backend is different between such user bases, but shouldn't the complexity of the app be a function of features, not number of users?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence The PDF is no longer available.

<comment><USER12> [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5463eca4e4b09c644a61f...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5463eca4e4b09c644a61f99a/t/55fa801ae4b008853e3de038/1442480154751/SimonWhitaker.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's an idiotic reason. Obviously they over-engineered their iOS app.

<comment><USER14> From having used the Facebook iOS app for the last four years or so, I assumed that they had taken the agile methodology to the extreme. They keep adding more and more features to the app until it's unusable, and every now and then throw the whole thing away and start from scratch.

Granted, I've had an iPhone 4 the whole time, so the experience has gotten worse and worse as time's gone on. But there's definitely been performance booms and busts throughout that time, with the performance getting a lot better whenever they release a version that's been completely redesigned.

<comment><USER14> Also, the app can get _very_ kludgy at times. When you come across a rarely used feature, you'll often find you get the mobile site in a web view (which has a noticeably different interface) instead of an in-app implementation. Polls in Groups are the last one I remember coming across.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Shots fired.

<comment><USER16> lol</comment></comment>


The small-minded vision of the technology elite - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/the-small-minde.html

<comment><USER2> Why is Seth Godin's stream of consciousness posted here so frequently? What he writes is not coherent, not noteworthy in any way and is below the level of an average _comment_ on HN.

<comment><USER3> In the middle of _All Marketers are Liars_ , Seth plays a little trick on his readers (paraphrased):

"I'll let you in on a little secret. I didn't really write this book. I paid a ghostwriter to do it while I took a vacation to Tahiti. Then my publisher slapped my name on the front so it would sell more copies.

"...Just kidding. But you reacted differently to this book, didn't you, knowing that I didn't write it. You thought you were getting one of Seth Godin's books, but instead, you got one by an anonymous ghostwriter. It changes the story you tell yourself about why you bought the book, and that changes how you think about your purchase.

"That's the power of marketing."

Anyone remember Alanis Morrisette's song _Ironic_? It wasn't ironic at all - everything she sang about was just bad luck. But that was the meta-irony: she'd written a song called _Ironic_ that wasn't irony at all.

I think a lot of Seth Godin's writing is the same way. The "product" is crap. But it's exceptionally well-marketed crap, so people spread it around anyway. The message is in the medium, not the message itself. Look at it as meta- writing.

I see that in _a lot_ of his writing. This article was a barely coherent stream-of-consciousness. And yet here it is on the front page of Hacker News. You commented on it. I commented on it. I may've ascribed meaning to it that wasn't even there in the first place. But _that's the point_. He got people talking.

Same goes for his FastCompany article that's currently #1 on Hacker News. He took a risk, just as he advised people to do. He spoke on topics that he's not competent in, with a perspective that's just different enough from mainstream views to get people talking. And it worked - his article is #1 here. People talk about it. It got published in a major magazine.

Look at what Seth _does_ , not what he _says_. What he says is almost always pure drivel. But it's pure drivel that works.

<comment><USER4> Psh. I think Alanis just wrote a bad song and used the meta line to excuse herself.

I think you shouldn't excuse drivel just because it works. What happened to doing things well for the sake of doing them well? Just because Seth is good at what he does, just because Scoble and Arrington are good at arousing attention, doesn't mean we should look to them for inspiration.

<comment><USER3> But he is doing things well for the sake of doing them well. He's a marketer; he markets well. Look at him as a practitioner, not a commentator, and do as he does, not as he says.

<comment><USER4> See, I don't think marketing counts as doing something unless you're doing it in tandem with a great product. Marketing is a secondary talent: if you market just to market then I consider you a waste. So it's fine when companies like Apple and Geico have excellent commercials, because their commercials do a good job of pointing out that they are the best. When you market better than you design, there's a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seth's blog seems to always make it pretty high on HN. Am I alone in wondering why? They usually have great titles, but are seriously lacking in content. I'm not complaining necessarily, but I admit I don't get it. Can someone explain?

<comment><USER6> I just posted the article he references, and it is better...but he's still a marketing guy and I have to think that perspective is often going to ring hollow with technologists.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305741>

<comment><USER7> I don't think this a marketing vs technology culture clash.

Seth just writes some very good stuff and a lot of stream of consciousness stuff. The later has a tiny shiny idea at its core, that's wrapped in a tone of crap.

Perhaps technology demands more precision when expressing ideas, but still we often see the same style from tech writers.

And that's just it, bad style. Not a culture clash between the great kingdoms of marketing and technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is one of Seth's most poorly written posts, which is why I think most people aren't getting it. It touches a nerve with me though, as it's taken me a long time to learn what he's saying.

 _When an engineer has a proven ability to ship stuff, to keep things humming and not crashing, it's easy to fall into the trap of rejecting anything that hasn't demonstrated that it can work, that hasn't proven itself in the market._

What he's really saying is that it's the status quo to argue against (reject) ideas and technologies that are radical - simply because "engineers" are trained to produce things that "work." Until proven (which takes time), radical ideas and changes are extremely experimental, by definition, and likely to cause friction. This does not make them unwise, however.

The key point, in my mind, is that even if EVERY highly educated person in your field told you that your idea is stupid, wrong, and will never work, you shouldn't believe them blindly. James Dyson didn't, and now he's a billionaire. SOMETIMES (but _very_ rarely) everyone else is wrong when you are right.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like a reply to our previous rant on his Firefox thoughts. Also, reminds me <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/business/30know.html>.

On the other hand, it is easy to say "oh, you have curse of knowledge and that's why you do not appreciate my idea" even if one has good arguments.

What is interesting that even so bright idea, as the curse of knowledge, worded by Seth Godin sounds so bad I'd assume it is wrong if not knew it before.

</comment><comment><USER10> And yet, it's the technologists that make new technology. So maybe the idea needs to refined to "competent technologists make incremental improvements; great technologists make revolutionary improvements."

Which we already knew. I agree with the people questioning why this guy always makes his way up HN. Honestly, I have a habit of automatically skipping his articles, but I fell for it this time because I was curious aobut how bad it was.

</comment><comment><USER11> What technology elite is he referring to? The Java people? People who, before Rails came out, never would have given Ruby the time of day?

Or is he referring to the ones who spend their spare time using Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, Factor, Prolog, Haskell and Erlang? They're small-minded and quick to reject anything the market hasn't accepted? Really?

Those two camps have very different attitudes towards new, unproven ideas.

</comment><comment><USER12> Over-promising title...Mr. Obvious can't explain, what the small-minded vision of _todays_ tech elite actually is, nor did he say how to expand it.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Take a look at the geek discussion boards and you'll see an endless list of sharp-tongued critics, each angling to shoot down one idea or another."

Untrue.

I do see some people making specious claims, and other people asking for support for those claims, but I also see a good deal of thoughtful discussion and excitement over new ideas.

Maybe Godin just sees what he wants to see?

</comment><comment><USER14> It makes sound financial sense for large companies to manage risk. Betting the (very large) farm on new hotness results mostly in unemployed farmers. At the same time I see quite a few startups pushing boundaries and making plenty of things which don't work quite right just yet.

</comment><comment><USER15> Arthur C. Clarke said it better, shorter, and more accurately:

 _"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."_

</comment><comment><USER16> great link within article, on _competence_ vs. the unknown: <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/31/sgodin.html>

_Competent people have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems. They solve a problem the same way, every time. That's what makes them reliable. That's what makes them competent._

</comment><comment><USER17> What I wonder is this - do I belong to that class of people who shoot down ideas because I am unable to see how great they are? How would I ever know?</comment>