What a Midwife Wishes People Knew About Her Job - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/05/719989630/what-a-midwife-wishes-people-knew-about-her-job <comment><USER2> Something I think people should be aware of is how the resurgence of midwifery in the Western world is a response to our increasing negligence in taking care of expectant and birthing mothers. In the United States, my sister giving birth today is almost twice as likely to die in childbirth as her mother was thirty years ago. A few months ago Ars Technica covered a study on the reasons why, and it boiled down almost entirely to doctors and nurses neglecting their patients or even straight-up ignoring them. [https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/why-do-so-many- moms-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/why-do-so-many-moms-die-and- suffer-in-the-us-stupid-negligence/)

I would absolutely urge anyone to hire a midwife to attend a hospital delivery. It's the only way to guarantee at least one professional in that room cares.

<comment><USER3> This might be true in the US but hardly in the entire "western world". Here in France you can give birth in a hospital without ever having a doctor intervening, only midwives, and it is not a new thing.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, same thing in Denmark. When my girlfriend gave birth, we had 3 midwives assisting. When she lost what they deemed to be too much blood, they called in a doctor to take a look. Everything was fine. If she hadn't passed some specified threshold for bloodloss, we would not have seen a doctor (or a nurse, come to think of it) at all throughout the birth. Only midwives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rich-tea > It's a matter of fairness. Riskier jobs should have higher salaries.

Interesting argument which I doubt anyone here agrees with. After all, that would mean builders, miners, street sweepers and the like would be paid the highest, midwives somewhere in the middle and us right at the bottom.

<comment><USER5> Not sure who 'us' is; HN readership is pretty diverse. I'm a scientist and earn roughly the same as a midwife in Australia.

Having said that, my first child nearly died during birth, and having a very good midwife who knew the signs, made all the right decisions, got the emergency doctors in at the right time - that service was utterly invaluable.

I'm all for the average midwife being paid somewhat more than me if it leads to more of these outcomes.

<comment><USER6> Maybe the term "riskier job" should include the risks to everyone involved.

<comment><USER7> In which case water treatment employees would be extremely well paid.

<comment><USER5> Struggling to see the equivalence here.

Midwifes have to make the correct decisions in a stressful situation in an extremely tight time period (seconds to minutes when it's the business end of things, so to speak), with limited information (no heartbeat readings at the end, can't see what's happening, just feel). Mother is screaming at the top of her lungs, partner has no idea what's going on (presuming not same sex). I seriously can't think of any job where the pressure is so intense for every single day of work, without exception. Maybe in triage, but that'd be about it.

A water treatment worker checks that various readings are within limits, and makes adjustments according to a set of standard operating procedures (presuming here, to be fair). I'd also presume there'd be a good number of check points during the journey of dam water to the final product in the pipes. There's no redundancy with midwifery that I can see.

<comment><USER7> The jobs are clearly very different but what we are discussing is doing direct compensation for the risk that third-party people are exposed to in the case of a failure. The theory is that by giving the operator higher pay you reduce the risk to third-parties, in which case water treatment failure is one of the top risks that can effect a very high number of people. A midwife that makes a erroneous decision kills one or two people, a erroneous decision in the water system of a city can kill and serious harm thousands if not hundreds of thousands. Similar is true for nuclear plants but those tend to be already well compensated.

If we ignore the risk aspect to third-party which parent and grand parent comment brought up, and instead focus on pressure, I can think of a few ones which might be worse than midwife and with lower pay. Highway road workers would be one. Having trucks going by in almost highway speed just meters next to you while you are focusing on the work is the kind of hell on earth that I would not want to expose myself to, and it doesn't even pay well.

Other high pressure jobs on the top of my head would be rescue swimmer, as the profession require careful psychoanalytical pressure testing to enter the training program. It also takes a special kind of person to work as a explosive chemist or at the bomb squad. I would also mention the military as an natural example of high pressure job. Each three has widely different degree of compensation compared to each other and even within the professions itself, and compared to midwifery it is all over the place.

There is no clean formula for X(Pressure) * Y(Third-party risk) = Z(Pay), and implementing one would change the compensation for a wast number of professions. I strongly doubt that midwifery would be the one that would see the biggest effect, but I would love to see a study exploring it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, 50/50 distribution between male/female on new midwifes, not exactly like the IT world in the west...

<comment><USER9> You make a tedious point that's not worth addressing, but it's important to point out that even in Midwiferey men get promoted faster than women, and get promoted higher than women.

In England in September 2016 in band 5 there were 2301 women midwives and 11 men midwives. At band 8c there are 11 women midwives and 2 male midwives.

That ratio at band 5 isn't maintained as you move up the bandings - as you increase money and management responsibility. We see more men and fewer women, despite the very much larger pool of women to chose from.

<comment><USER10> Men in your case is 2 people, you can't really use sample size to compare.

To be honest you'd have to be incredible to succeed as a male midwife as almost all expectant mothers will prefer a female midwife.

<comment><USER11> Hi Mr. "goes woof",

1\. Yes, you can. His comparison works.

2\. No, they usually don't have a choice.

<comment><USER12> In most countries you can ask for a different doctor/nurse/midwife.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Meeting of the Fern Society - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/01/13/a-meeting-of-the-fern-society/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the chapter on lichens from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. A short excerpt:

You might not think there would be that many people in the world prepared to devote lifetimes to the study of something so inescapably low key, but in fact moss people number in the hundreds and they feel very strongly about their subject. "Oh, yes," Ellis told me, "the meetings can get very lively at times."

I asked him for an example of controversy.

"Well, here's one inflicted on us by one of your countrymen," he said, smiling lightly, and opened a hefty reference work containing illustrations of mosses whose most notable characteristic to the uninstructed eye was their uncanny similarity one to another. "That," he said, tapping a moss, "used to be one genus, Drepanocladus. Now it's been reorganized into three: Drepanocladus, Wamstorfia, and Hamatacoulis."

"And did that lead to blows?" I asked perhaps a touch hopefully.

"Well, it made sense. It made perfect sense. But it meant a lot of reordering of collections and it put all the books out of date for a time, so there was a bit of, you know, grumbling."

<comment><USER3> Is this excerpt about mosses really in the chapter on lichens?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article seems to end with this passage:

> "Here, try this," Moran said, appearing by my side with a hand lens so that > I might look a little closer.

There's nothing after that, and no indication that there's another page, but it seems like an awfully abrupt ending. Is that really it?

<comment><USER5> I asked myself the same. Maybe it is a way to say: if you found the topic interesting, you should start studying it by yourself now!

You can also kind of imagine how they get into the minutiae of the particular fern now, and how they are different from others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I couldn't help but be reminded of The Royal Society for Putting Things On Top of Other Things: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f-kfRREA8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f-kfRREA8M)

</comment><comment><USER5> I immediately asked myself what would happen to the Society if lots of HN users appeared at the next meeting.</comment>


Apple blocks Facebook update that called out 30-percent App Store 'tax' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/28/21405140/apple-rejects-facebook-update-30-percent-cut <comment><USER2> I'm curious whether Apple's conduct here would be illegal in Australia—I suspect it might be, and believe it should be.

Credit card networks used to tell businesses "you're not allowed to itemise or pass this fee on to your customers"; at some point (maybe 10–15 years ago? Can't find a reference quickly) this was confirmed to be illegal in Australia: businesses are allowed to apply a surcharge to cover their transaction costs (and nothing more, though in practice I think many businesses just apply a flat rate like 1–2% which will be higher than their costs for some transactions), per [https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/prices-surcharges- receipts...](https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/prices-surcharges- receipts/credit-debit-prepaid-card-surcharges).

The relevant legislation only applies to certain payment methods, so it would probably not be directly applicable to Apple's 30% tax, though perhaps other legislation might protect your ability to at least itemise it (I don't know); but given that the payment are probably ultimately coming from such payment networks, I wonder whether Apple could become subject to this rule to at least some extent, so that e.g. they had to let you split out the card transaction fees from the rest of their 30% cut and itemise and charge it. (And the purpose of doing _that_ would be to begin pushing them to reduce their absurd 30% tax. Thinking of that, I wonder how many people have complained to ACCC about the 30% tax—it can't be zero—and why they haven't come down on Apple like a ton of bricks yet, because what they're doing is basically the same as what credit card networks did, only 20–50× as greedy and infinitely more anticompetitive since no alternative is permitted on Apple's platform, whereas credit cards had cash and cheques as alternatives.)

<comment><USER3> I agree that it's irrelevant information.

You can argue that maybe it's unfair to FB, but you know what's even more unfair? Consumers being caught in the middle of a fight between Apple and FB. Consumers being manipulated so big tech corp A can try and force a behavior change by big tech corp B by pissing off its customers.

At the end of the day it's a phone that you call people on. Let the people who have purchased that phone be.

<comment><USER4> It's not irrelevant because there might be other platforms where you can buy the same product cheaper. And the 30 percent cut information might be a good hint to look elsewhere. I guess that's why Apple fights this so viciously.

<comment><USER3> Apple isn't hiding how much the user needs to pay for a purchase, they can still make the determination that they need to go somewhere else.

This would be like Wal-mart putting up signs telling everyone they have to pay Visa fee's. It's irrelevant to the consumers, what they pay doesn't change.

<comment><USER5> _> This would be like Wal-mart putting up signs telling everyone they have to pay Visa fee's._

This actually happens in Australia. Because AmEx charges an extra 1.75% to businesses, stores display a warning at checkout that using an AmEx card will incur an extra fee of 1.75%.

Edit: Here's an example graphic from the Australian Government website, explaining that it's illegal for a business to charge more than what it costs them:

[https://www.accc.gov.au/sites/www.accc.gov.au/files/Surcharg...](https://www.accc.gov.au/sites/www.accc.gov.au/files/Surcharging%20infographic_1.png)

<comment><USER3> Apple isn't passing the extra fee onto the customer, neither is FB.

I understand your point, but it's not applicable here.

<comment><USER6> I think you're confused because Apple is acting as a payment processor (even though there is another one for the card) and as a marketplace.

<comment><USER3> Is your argument that apple is passing off the extra 30% fee to the consumer?

If not then what you just said is bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have no particular love for Facebook, but good for them.

It's one thing to charge a 30% app tax to sign up for "Jasper's Cooking Class" on an iOS device, but it's even worse to _ban_ disclosure of that tax. Forbidding that speech is certainly 1984-esque.

<comment><USER8> Easy-peasy.. just like when you go to the super market or a restaurant and the receipt has the analysis of the amount: $15 pizza, $15 salad, $3 soft drink, $10 VAT, $8 Apple's 30% fee (I didn't do the math, but you get the spirit).

They CANNOT force you to remove transparency and visibility of the line items. I understand that they want to hide the 30% cut and not being called out.

They can also split the receipt in three parts:

A) you purchased:

Pizza $15, Salad $15, Soft drink $3

B) Other fees:

Apple's 30% fee $10

C) Taxes:

VAT $3

Edit: it just hit me. Don't write that ONLY in the receipt. Write it up front, BEFORE a user completes the transaction. Total price of ticket $10. Analysis.. X, Y 30% Apple's fee, VAT.

<comment><USER9> This is exactly the issue. Apple blocks your app updates if you explicitly state the fee anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how this would interact with various consumer laws. In Australia, for example, there are standards that prevent ticket sellers for events from being deceptive about fees - adding costs beyond a reasonable amount required to provide the service, etc.

I'm not making any specific case, rather just feeling curious about how this impacts consumer rights and expectations. As a purchaser, I think it might be fair to know that $3 goes to apple when I buy a $10 cooking class using Facebook.

Edit: chrismorgan below posted a much more informative comment in this vein while I typed.

</comment><comment><USER11> Misuse of market power and unconscionable conduct that misleads the consumer are hard to prove, even in jurisdictions where they're flat-out unlawful and the consumer regulators have enforcement teeth, but it's almost as though Apple is actively trying to become a textbook example.

</comment><comment><USER12> I feel that the condition Apple puts on app devs to not indicate to customers in any way that 30% of their purchase is going to Apple is the most problematic. It shows that Apple knows their cut is too high, and customers won't stand for this rate if they knew what they were paying for. If they genuinely believe their service is worth 30%, they should be confident about it, let users understand the break up of their bill. Truly insane levels of monopoly on display here.

<comment><USER13> Is this in-place-of or on-top-of the credit card transaction fees?

A lot of in-app purchases are for less than $3. Doesn't Apple need to pay Visa a $0.35 transaction fee, plus ~3% of the purchase price.

On a < $3 purchase, that's 15%+ already.

<comment><USER14> Transaction fees are just 0.3% in Europe since levying a 3% tax on every purchase is insane and hurts progress. You should probably go after those companies in USA as well.

Basically in Europe it is illegal to levy an unreasonable tax for generic services like this. The same applies to Apple.

<comment><USER13> So is Apple not allowed to take a 30% cut in Europe? How about Amazon for Kindle books? Are digital distributers allowed to charge 30%? Where does Europe draw this line?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Apple said the update violated an App Store rule that doesn't let developers > show "irrelevant" information to users.

I'm curious which rule this is and to what or whom the information needs to be irrelevant to to be in breach.

<comment><USER16> 3.1.3(b) is probably what they're obliquely referencing, but I was once told by an Apple App Reviewer that "not all of our rules or guidelines are published" which caused me to have an aneurysm and shout "THEN WHAT'S THE POINT OF THE RULES?"

"You must not directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase, and your general communications about other purchasing methods must not discourage use of in-app purchase."

2.3.10 has a bit about not including "irrelevant information about Apple or the development process." It's under the Metadata section, but still:

"2.3.10 Make sure your app is focused on the iOS, Mac, Apple TV or Apple Watch experience, and don't include names, icons, or imagery of other mobile platforms in your app or metadata, unless there is specific, approved interactive functionality. Make sure your app metadata is focused on the app itself and its experience. Don't include irrelevant information, including but not limited to information about Apple or the development process."

[https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/](https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/)

<comment><USER17> The app store guidelines are a complete joke.

Apple can change the guidelines at any time. They make up 'rules' to their own benefit. And selectively enforce existing ones so major players get a free pass.

Developers have no recourse, other than leaving the platform.

<comment><USER18> > And selectively enforce existing ones so major players get a free pass.

Are Facebook not a major player on iOS?

<comment><USER17> Facebook isn't a big enough player to get a free pass. Apple know they can bully Facebook and Facebook will back down (they have done this).

Here's a few examples of Apple selectively enforcing their rules.

Apple agreed to charge Amazon a 15 percent fee instead of the standard 30 for subscriptions [https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348108/apple-amazon- pri...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348108/apple-amazon-prime-video- app-store-special-treatment-fee-subscriptions)

Apple allows WeChat include Mini Programs. These are 3rd party web pages the user can install that are tightly integrated with WeChat features. They're basically apps that run within WeChat. In my opinion this violates the app store premise BUT WeChat is so crucial to Chinese users Apple can't pull the app. So they bent and rewrote the rules to allow it. [http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1137321.shtml](http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1137321.shtml)

But, when Facebook tried this with Facebook Gaming, which does something really similar to WeChat Mini Programs, they got banned by Apple. [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/technology/apple-ios- face...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/technology/apple-ios-facebook- gaming-app.html)

Apple allows Chinese customers to make app store purchases using WeChat Pay or Ali(baba) pay. Meanwhile in the US, it's impossible to pay using the competing Facebook pay / Google pay. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-app-stores- chinese-custom...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-app-stores-chinese- customers-get-new-way-to-pay-for-purchases-1504078004)

There's also the Hey fiasco [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542937) and the Wordpress fiasco [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24238856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24238856) . Meanwhile, Gmail and Netflix are unaffected.

<comment><USER19> I'm a bit confused on this point. What obligates Apple to treat all business partners the same?

<comment><USER17> Because that's what they told the US house antitrust committee. Apple CEO Tim Cook testified that "we [Apple] apply the rules to all developers evenly". But that's clearly not true, looking at the examples listed above. The poster- child is Amazon, which only pays a 15% fee instead of 30%.

Likewise, after Fortnite added an alternative payment option that avoids Apple's 30% tax, Apple banned not only Fortnite, but engine updates for _all apps_ that use the Unreal Engine. That's the opposite of what Tim Cook told congress.

> Epic Games also called out Apple on Tim Cook's testimonial at the recent > Congressional hearing.

> "Just over two weeks ago, Apple's CEO Tim Cook was asked during a > Congressional hearing whether Apple has "ever retaliated against or > disadvantaged a developer who went public about their frustrations with the > App Store". Mr. Cook testified, "We do not retaliate or bully people. It's > strongly against our company culture." But Apple has done just that," it > said in the statement.

[https://tech.hindustantimes.com/gaming/news/apple- continues-...](https://tech.hindustantimes.com/gaming/news/apple-continues-to- bully-epic-games-after-taking-down-fortnite-from-app- store-71597720893658.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love reading the Apple fanboys comments. Please do keep defending Apple and it's mafia cut, I am honestly amazed that people cannot see Apple's fault in this, not only do they make you increase your prices by 43% (to get the 30% cut, prices need to increase by 43%) they won't let you even explain to customers the reason why it is more expensive (Hint: they won't let you do it because they know it is a highway robbery).

When I buy something and get a bill, I like to know how much of the price goes to taxes, if anything else at least for the transparency.

<comment><USER21> > Hint: they won't let you do it because they know it is a highway robbery

This. If Apple thought their fees were reasonable they wouldn't be so insistent on hiding them from users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's funny, I looked but I can't find where Facebook discloses the credit card charges that come out of the transaction when you do the transaction on their website. Doesn't that seem like deliberately misleading anti-consumer behaviour. Do you transaction on our competitors' device and we'll harangue you about how your money is going to the evil guys, but do you transaction on our platform and we'll still take transaction fees, we just won't tell you about it.

<comment><USER23> Edit: Seems like they don't actually surcharge on Apple device. You can ignore this comment, I'll keep it for posterity.

I believe it's because they surcharge on Apple platform because of that fee, thus they want to show why they have to surcharge.

It's like saying that websites shouldn't show shipping if they got a physical store because at the physical store they didn't show the shipping rate they got there....

It's possible though that the 30% Apple fee could include the transaction fee, I guess they could round it up to 28% but then your comment right now would probably be that the number is incorrect as transaction fees are variable between cards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Apple is going end up getting the short end of the stick here. The optics on this whole debacle are just too bad.

Walled garden and enforcement of strict rules to protect the user is one thing, but walled garden to protect profits hits a little different.

<comment><USER25> Will they though?

They have a complete monopoly on distribution for all iOS devices and are willing to remove certificates for OSX programs. For all we know, they will remove SSL certificates for HTTPS websites on Safari if a company oversteps their bounds too much.

Congress will do nothing about this, and the EU and other governments are busy legislating other problems.

<comment><USER5> Apple have already gone a step further, they've started intercepting website traffic and redirecting it to their own walled garden Apple News app instead, without permission from the websites:

[https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/13/apple-news-web-links- re...](https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/13/apple-news-web-links-redirection- concerns/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Isnt that breaking consumer protection laws by intentionally misinforming customers? Users have a right to know where their money is going, and this is also presents false information to the user about how much the service costs (much like a receipt or ticket that does not break down the tax)

I m also surprised how people nitpick over apples rules as if they re some kind of laws. They re not , nobody voted for them and if enough ppl complain they may change

</comment><comment><USER27> > Facebook said that Apple cited an App Store rule that bars developers from > showing "irrelevant" information to users.

This is incredibly draconian.

I know it's Apple's platform but when ¼ of Earth uses that platform, letting one company have that much power and control seems dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER28> When Epic referenced 1984, I didn't think the Apple folks could read... maybe they can.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why they don't just make purchases on iPhones 30% more expensive?

<comment><USER2> Note that for parity you need to boost prices by about 43%: (100% + 43%) × (100% − 30%) ≅ 100%.

(I love sevenths in decimal. One seventh is 0.1̅4̅2̅8̅5̅7̅, two sevenths 0.2̅8̅5̅7̅1̅4̅, three sevenths 0.4̅2̅8̅5̅7̅1̅, _& c._ Just remember 7 × 2 = 14, 14 × 2 = 28, 28 × 2 = 56 and change the six to a seven for some reason and start again with that, and rotate the whole lot as necessary. It's just beautiful.)

<comment><USER30> I can't help but ask followup questions about what you're saying re: the 7's.

Firstly, why are your numbers wearing hats? (I know it represents a repeating number, but how do you type numbers with hats? I assume you're not copy- pasting 5̅7̅1̅ whenever you want to write it out. Is there a shorthand on MacOS?)

Regarding the 7's, I don't understand the pattern from 0.142857 to 0.285714 to 0.428571. Are you saying that 0.428571 is easy to remember, somehow? Or derivable from 0.285714? In fact, did you write out these numbers without using a calculator?

I see what you're saying with 7 x 2 = 14, x 2 = 28, x 2 = 56. And I see that if you change 56 to 57, then yes indeed it does match the ending of 0.1̅4̅2̅8̅5̅7̅, and then you can repeat the pattern of 7 x 2 = 14, which matches the ending of your 0.2̅8̅5̅7̅1̅4̅ number. But what's the connection to 0.4̅2̅8̅5̅7̅1̅? It's unclear how to use your trick to go from 7̅1̅4̅ to 5̅7̅1̅. Or even why that's helpful in general, or what the overall connection is between all of these seemingly unrelated things.

Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER2> I used U+0305 COMBINING OVERLINE to get the line above the digits. I don't use it at all often, so I had to look it up (I know its name but not its number) and typed it out with my Compose key (using WinCompose since I'm on Windows): `Compose u 3 0 5 Enter`. Since I do do this just occasionally, I've just set up `Compose ^ _` for it, by placing this line in my ~/.XCompose:

      <Multi_key> <asciicircum> <underscore> : "̅" U0305 # COMBINING OVERLINE

The digits in multiples of sevenths are always the same six digits in order, recurring: 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, 7; it's just a question of which digit you start from. For one seventh, start with the one (0.14285714285714…); for two, the two (0.285714285714…); three, the four (0.428571428…); four, the five; five, the seven; six, the eight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Tit for tat with the lost of their audience capabilities Facebook leverages momentum on Apple's tax friction with Epic Games.

</comment><comment><USER32> The craziest thing is that a 30% cut is close to what most state ask in terms of taxation.

<comment><USER33> Yea so as a developer I pay two taxes: The first 30% goes to Apple, the next 30% goes to the government, now for every dollar my app sold for I make 49 cents.

<comment><USER32> now compare how many services you're getting for that 30%: a legal system, roads, schools, hospitals, an army to defend the nation you live in, in some countries healthcare etc etc...

now back to apple: for that 30% you're quite literally getting the permission to keep working.

<comment><USER33> I mean to be fair I'm getting payment processing and hosting but yea it's a pretty steep fee.

<comment><USER32> Can I ask you something? Could you evaluate the storage/bandwidth price by using something like the S3 price calculator as a reference and stripe for payment processing?

It would be interesting to see how much is apple actually getting on top of publicly-available, practically retail prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A hilarious and unlikely scenario would be if Apple just pulled the plug on in-app purchases and forced everyone to charge an upfront fee for their apps.

While the downsides are fairly obvious - there _are_ a few things that this would improve.

<comment><USER35> there does seem to be mounting pressure for the current model to change. i doubt it will be like the scenario you offered, but i wonder what the options are.

i suppose more transparency on them getting a cut, and/or decreasing the size of the cut are plausible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What your thought process should be if your an Apple employee trying to maximize his value: If the megacorps are equally sized and competing against each other, your dependence on one employer will go down.

</comment><comment><USER37> I believe visa/mastercard has a similar rule. You can't charge more(to compensate the fees) for credit card transaction either.

<comment><USER38> You can in the UK

<comment><USER39> Not in most cases, since 2018.

[https://www.gov.uk/government/news/card-surcharge-ban- means-...](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/card-surcharge-ban-means-no- more-nasty-surprises-for-shoppers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Interesting how every big dog is attacking Apple as they continue to be the lone-wolf in enabling privacy and a secure platform for their users. Apple users are mostly computer illiterate because its Apple's mission statement to enable computing for everyone. Because of their ease of use, they are now targeted to open up their platform in ways that will jeopardize both their increasing user-privacy and user-security.

<comment><USER41> You're extending too much good faith to a corporation. Apple's privacy statements are a strategic position, as is not allowing apps to mention the 30% cut.

If Apple was seriously concerned about their users, they would not be concerned about apps mentioning the 30% cut - which is a truth!

<comment><USER40> Let me know next time you buy something and receive a distribution invoice knowing how much it cost to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> How is informing users of some true fact not protected by the first amendment. How is this not free speech?

<comment><USER33> First amendment applies to the US Government, not Apple, but it is a free speech issue in principle.

<comment><USER39> I strongly suspect this is actually not a free speech issue, and just boils down to contract law. Akin to an NDA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Facebook should also mention the product Apple is "taxing" has near $0 marginal cost (in most cases).

<comment><USER33> If these events are anything like the some of the AirBnb experiences I've attended, there's material cost and effort to adding more attendees: more cooking supplies, more equipment, more instructor attention, more work to followup, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> now it is getting interesting

</comment><comment><USER45> Maybe Facebook should go make phones and then try and waive fees that help third parties build momentum that they will eventually capitalise on..

I can understand the 30% tax being tough for indie publishers but when I see companies like hey.com and FB & Epic taking this stance, I feel like they are being treated exactly how they will treat others if they were in position of power in the relationship.

<comment><USER46> Epic has already demonstrated that they wouldn't treat others this way if the roles were reversed; they have their own Epic Games Store, where they take a 12% cut on any third-party games sold [0]. They explicitly called out Steam, which takes a 30% cut like Apple (for the first $10 million in sales, at least; Steam operates on a tiered model) [1]. Cynically, this is because they wanted to eat Valve's lunch in a space where Valve is the dominant player. But ultimately, that's exactly Epic's point here: on PC, it is possible for someone to introduce a competing platform, while Apple prevents such an ecosystem on iOS.

[0] Side note: I do think that Epic is guilty of anticompetitive practices here, because if your game uses the Unreal Engine, they roll the 5% engine royalty into that 12%, giving a huge advantage to using their product on their store: [https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/4/18125498/epic-games- store-...](https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/4/18125498/epic-games-store- details-revenue-split-launch-date)

[1] [https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/3/18123649/valve-steam- reven...](https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/3/18123649/valve-steam-revenue- sharing)

<comment><USER47> Epic is by no means turning a profit on the Epic store right now.

It's like calling out the taxi companies for being more expensive while Uber and Lyft are still subsidizing rides with VC and IPO money.

<comment><USER46> Yes, they do make a profit: [https://gamerant.com/epic-games-store-revenue- split-explaine...](https://gamerant.com/epic-games-store-revenue-split- explained/)

"Sweeney also said that Epic Games makes approximately 5% profit from that 12%, and this could grow to 6-7% as the store grows."

They chose 12% specifically as a balance between profit and undercutting the competition.

<comment><USER47> That's profit from game sales, which doesn't necessarily mean profit on a scale of the entire store when you account for paying developers, running the servers, getting content to users via CDN, etc. Once Epic is on-par with steam[0], i'd at least expect a 20% epic tax.

0: [https://twitter.com/shroudschair/status/1120464329239867392?...](https://twitter.com/shroudschair/status/1120464329239867392?s=20)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


25M Android Phones Infected with Malware That 'Hides in WhatsApp' - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/07/10/25-million-android-phones-infected-with-malware-that-hides-in-whatsapp/ <comment><USER2> Not sure I quite understand how to check if I've been infected.</comment>


Ask HN: What site should I use to find a good web designer for freelance work. - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to redesign my side project and need a freelance web designer. I'd be interested in hearing what everyone else does to solve this. Thanks! <comment><USER2> scoutzie.com</comment>


Firms help websites evade ad blockers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/10/25/the-internet-ads-that-would-not-die/2IiIl1niWZZZymfCy23cuN/story.html <comment><USER3> I block all ads. Full stop. I also whitelist a trimmed set of websites to allow logins. I disallow HTTP/S referrer, DOM storage, WEBRTC, and whole host of other things. I have not seen an ad in years, I have not suffered malware in years, my bandwidth is my own, not to be used for ad servers to serve up their dreck.

The morality surrounding ad blocking is up for debate, but I do not feel guilty because there is no OBLIGATION for me to view ads. Just because you serve them up does not mean I need to view them. I don't view ads on TV, live or DVR'd. I don't look at roadside billboards or look at magazines because they contain too many ads.

I don't like being tracked, seen as a means of income by fly-by-night operations, a target for malware because the ad server operators are too lazy to secure their servers because there is no ROI in server security. In short, I have a right to protect my precious bandwidth and my computers whilst on the Web.

<comment><USER4> I want to ask a question on this subject. Don't websites get paid for(most of?) the ads only when user clicks through?

People talk about turning off ad block "to support creators", but aren't you supporting creators only by clicking on ads?

Personally, I have probably clicked on at most 3-5 ads in the years before I started using adblocker(by accident). Does it even make sense for me to turn it off if I'm not going to click on links anyway?

<comment><USER5> > Personally, I have probably clicked on at most 3-5 ads in the years before I > started using adblocker(by accident). Does it even make sense for me to turn > it off if I'm not going to click on links anyway?

You'll end up clicking more than 3-5.

I've been using a computer without adbock for the first time this week in the last 6 or something years that I've been using adblock. I've clicked on a lot of ads, they're too relevant. Curiously, I'm getting a lot of ads for products that I've already bought.... and I end up clicking on them to find out more info. They're just too relevant, they'll be about the thing you were thinking about just the other day -- you'll click them.

<comment><USER6> >Curiously, I'm getting a lot of ads for products that I've already bought

Exactly the same thing happened to me. Prior to the purchase I had been doing a bit of web searches -- first for the family of products I was looking for (i.e. not a specific brand) and based on what I read I decided to learn more about one product specifically. Confident about its quality after having read a lot of reviews, I bought it shortly after I had began looking. Several days later I began seeing ads for the product and they kept targeting me for quite a while since then.

When I need something, I will generally research intensely and make a decision in short time. Sometimes the decision will be to not buy, sometimes to buy later and at other times to buy right away.

When I decide to buy later, ads are useful to remind me or to offer competing products which come out in the meantime since when I'd done my research.

Ads about something I decided I didn't want are mostly annoying.

Ads about something I have are always annoying. The only kind of ads which are worse are those for things which are so irrelevant that I've never even considered them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why on earth would they use TV as an example of a medium where ads worked? The response to the 1999 'ad-skipping' digital recorder was a ridiculous amount of lobbying to try and make it illegal, followed by an ever increasing torrent of ads, which has lead increasingly many people to move away from television altogether to other media with fewer ads.

<comment><USER8> Seriously. Does no-one remember ReplayTV, and the shit-storm that went up against them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" The Washington Post has begun testing a system that locks out visitors who block advertisements. "In the long run," said Post spokeswoman Jennifer Lee in an e-mail, "without income via subscriptions or advertising, we won't be able to deliver the journalism that people coming to our site expect from us."_

The Washington Post site has 21 trackers, ad services, and other junk. They dug their own hole.

</comment><comment><USER10> > For instance, the Washington Post has begun testing a system that locks out > visitors who block advertisements.

I understand that position. But that's a losing position. It's an arms race, ad-blockers will always find clever ways to bypass these schemes then consultants will come with more complicated scripts that will make web pages heavier and harder to visit for those who don't block ads ...

The Washington Post certainly is not going to win that war. The only solution for them on the long run is all their website behind a paywall, like the Financial Times.

I'm curious if youtube is going to do the same, since they introduced an ad free paid offer.

<comment><USER11> I do this the other way round; I block entire sites that use obnoxious ads rather than use an adblocker. Funnily enough, WaPo are on my block list - <USER2> must've hit me with a modal (I unblocked them temporarily to see if they're still doing it, apparently not)

The only ads I do block are the 'recommended for you' fake content from outbrain, zergnet, gravity and taboola. Just terrible.

<comment><USER12> You may be interested in this extension, which will do the site-blocking for you:

[http://tinysubversions.com/notes/ethical-ad- blocker/](http://tinysubversions.com/notes/ethical-ad-blocker/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Tools that work on the local resolver level:

[https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate](https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate)

[https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/](https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Similar articles:

[http://www.mediastreet.ie/blog/2015/08/17/ad-blockers- intern...](http://www.mediastreet.ie/blog/2015/08/17/ad-blockers-internet- advertisers-play-cat-mouse/)

[http://www.cio.com/article/2986749/consumer- technology/adver...](http://www.cio.com/article/2986749/consumer- technology/advertisers-can-now-pay-to-sneak-by-your-ad-blocker.html)

And this: some publishers are blocking visitors who adblock. Good, don't whine, just allow or block.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/22/reuters-america-google- seeks-...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/22/reuters-america-google-seeks-common- cause-with-media-firms-over-ad-blocking.html)

"Germany's biggest newspaper publisher Axel Springer last week banned readers who use ad blockers from its Bild tabloid website, stepping up a fight by publishers to stop online advertising revenues being eroded."

<comment><USER15> > And this: some publishers are blocking visitors who adblock. Good, don't > whine, just allow or block.

I am perfectly ok with this. But they don't get to whine when they start falling in the search results because fewer people link to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ignoring the ethics and just looking at the technology, would the next step for content providers be to do the ad bidding and serving from the webserver itself? This way, ad blockers wouldn't be able to just block an ad serving domain. They could write custom filters for each website, but that increases the work for the adblock lists.

<comment><USER17> All a website would need to do is tunnel the entire site through a proxy that rewrites all of the asset and other same-site URLs so they are all the same type of synthetic token or hash. This would remove the ability to do host or URL based filtering, forcing ad blockers to download every URL and try to classify by content.

This isn't even a particularly complicated change, and I've seen it done before (circa 1997). As for how this impacts the ability to play the current "ad bidding" game, that is trivially solved by 3rd (4th?) party proxies.

Ad blockers can be inconvenienced even more by making the content unique every time it is sent by the proxy, preventing trivial matching by file hash. The end-game of this type of strategy is having the proxy serve up a single opaque block of WebAssembly code that renders the page to a <canvas> using custom and/or obfuscated font rendering.

This is almost certainly a _stupid_ way to run a website, but I expect people that feel they are under attack from ad blockers to fight back in any way they can. Some of them are already trying to make up "moral" arguments (and legal wishful-thinking) against the recent increase in ad blocking. Obviously this won't work in the long run, but people that feel they are under attack are not know for making rational decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ironically this article was blocked by a "We hope you've enjoyed your 5 free articles" box – until I hid that div and set the content container overflow to "scroll" with a little location-bar jQuery.

</comment><comment><USER19> Question for the people who perceive ad blocking as unethical: what is your opinion on reading HN comments without giving an ad impression (clicking on the link)?

Without the content, the discussions about the topics wouldn't be available.

I generally don't read the articles that are linked, just the HN content, as it has higher value to me. (This means I have to try to avoid criticizing the source article based on comments, but I'm generally more of a lurker anyhow.)

Genuinely curious.

</comment><comment><USER20> Don't hate the player, hate the game. Well, I suppose you could hate both.</comment>


Ask HN: What AI/DL courses would you recommend me? - <AUTHOR> I'd describe myself as someone who has beginner/intermediate skills in the field. I started exploring AI field at the beginning of the last year. Then I took a year off, exploring other fields trying to figure out what am I interested in. Now I can confidently say that AI/DL is a path I want to pursue in the future.
- I have some basic experience across the DL field in general (GANs, convolutional nets, word2vec, LSTMs, math/reasoning behind these topics)
- I have experience building simpler neural nets (mostly conv nets + GANs) from the scratch using NumPy
- I was frequently working with Tensorflow but I can imagine that the library changed a lot since the past year
- I feel that my probabilistic/statistics skills could be better
- I feel that I have very little experience building AI in the real world
- I feel like I need to learn how to be able to apply the latest scientific papers
What I need now is to (1) refresh my old knowledge, (2) take more challenging courses/classes with more "real world" approach and (3) start reading (and applying) scientific papers.
Do you have any recommendations regarding me coming back to this field and getting deeper into it? <comment><USER2> kaggle.com is perfect for you. Pick any project and start competing.</comment>


A serious security vulnerability has been found in 7-Zip - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcgamer.com/a-serious-security-vulnerability-has-been-found-in-7-zip/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985460](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985460)

</comment><comment><USER3> Release notes for version 18.05, 2018-04-30 include:

> CVE-2018-10115 - Incorrect initialization logic of RAR decoder objects in > 7-Zip 18.03 and before can lead to usage of uninitialized memory, allowing > remote attackers to cause a denial of service (segmentation fault) or > execute arbitrary code via a crafted RAR archive.

Excellent article from the bug discoverer here: [https://landave.io/2018/05/7-zip-from-uninitialized- memory-t...](https://landave.io/2018/05/7-zip-from-uninitialized-memory-to- remote-code-execution/)

Some good discussion in the linked HN discussion from a couple of days ago.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't seem that big, if you open a RAR from a shaddy source, I would expect to get malwares anyway.

<comment><USER5> I would not. It's not reasonable that a pure data viewer runs something. This is like saying viewing a script in notepad can run it and is expected to infect you. And for better or worse antiviruses use 7z dll to scan archives too.

<comment><USER6> Remember when Microsoft Outlook used to automatically execute programs sent to you in email?

<comment><USER5> I'm not that old but I'd bet that it wasn't received well and caused infections and that's why it 'used to' and doesn't anymore.

A similar thing is with ldd (I don't know if this still works and can't search or check right now): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902958)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> previously discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985460](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985460)

</comment><comment><USER8> Haha, that sourceforge 7zip "trailer" at the end was great. I wonder if anyone actually found that useful? Like, if they found the video, I assume they could have found and installed 7zip...

<comment><USER6> Websites put videos on pages because watcing a video increases tome on page, and time-on-page metrics that feed into automated advertising spend. The website needs nothing from the video besides you spending time playing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is some real news. I use 7-Zip quite often. Being relatively new to the infosec community, I find it to be fun, and a learning challenge to keep up with any new exploits!

<comment><USER10> Yes, too true; old infosecers resemble Carrie Nation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Nation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Nation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't this old news or am I missing something ?</comment>


Smartphones, Electric Cars and Child Labour - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/longform/blood-sweat-and-batteries/ <comment><AUTHOR> The project [https://www.fairphone.com/en/](https://www.fairphone.com/en/) looks like is trying to tackle the issue of sustainability of materials at least in regards of the mobile industry</comment>


Maverix Theme: Angular + Bootstrap Boilerplate with OS X UI for Webkit. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tschundeee/maverix Maverix is a maccish bootstrap theme and application boilerplate. It gives your web-apps a native look and feel and bundles AngularJS and other components such as jQuery, Flot and rangeslider.js<p>I developed it to support HTML App Container based Apps :) <comment><USER2> Added to our resources list [https://twittstrap.com/maverix-bootstrap-theme- angularjs-boi...](https://twittstrap.com/maverix-bootstrap-theme-angularjs- boilerplate/)</comment>


Brad Feld Proposes a Solution to the "Facebook Problem" - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2007/06/the_facebook_pr.html <comment><USER2> This is the usual digital sharecropping that attracts about 95% of developers but repels the 5% you'd really want.</comment>


Hiring Hacks For Startups - <AUTHOR> http://recruitloop.com/blog/hiring-hacks-for-startups/

<comment><USER2> "24. Send a personal note (with meaningful feedback) to every person you interview. Thank them for their time, be transparent with your decision (whether successful or not), and if appropriate, offer constructive feedback. The last point won't work for everyone, but will be appreciated by most (reasonable) candidates, by giving them something to work on."

This is probably the best point in the entire article.

</comment><comment><USER3> In addition to offering a beverage, also offer bathroom breaks between interviewers.

</comment><comment><USER4> More companies need to offer 4-day work weeks.</comment>


Consumer Reports Calls Tesla Model S The Best Car Of 2014 - josh-wrale http://business.time.com/2014/02/25/tesla-model-s-consumer-reports/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've got nearly 20,000 miles on mine. One thing I just discovered is that the tires, 21" super-soft compound high-performance Michelins, only last 20,000 miles and cost $2900 to replace. This works out to $0.145 / mile, which is 3x more per mile than electricity costs me. And about what you would spend on gas for a 25 MPG car.

I didn't really buy it for the savings, though.

<comment><USER2> You could easily switch to a high (but not quite extreme) performance tire like Continental ExtremeContact DW in the stock 245/35R21 size, which would run you only a little over $1000/set for a much better cost per mile without compromising performance to a high degree.

Or you could switch (maybe another Tesla owner would trade) down to a rim size with a more reasonable sidewall profile. I frankly don't understand the trend towards lower and lower profiles for street cars. The improved cornering characteristics are offset by the substantially harsher ride and propensity towards rim damage, and on the performance Tesla I believe even 19" wheels will easily clear the brakes.

<comment><USER3> I highly recommend Continental's ExtremeContacts. I'm on my second pair on my 5 series* and I think my dad has used them on multiple vehicles as well.

*My 530 isn't nearly as fast as the Model S, but it is a stick and I tend to drive in a spirited manner, yada yada yada...

<comment><USER4> Seconded. I had these on both of my 5 series and they were great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Here's a link to Consumer Reports article on it. [http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2014/04/top- pick...](http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2014/04/top- picks-2014/index.htm)

Edit: They split it into categories a pick a winner in each and then somehow pick a 'best overall'. I like the Tesla but I don't understand how they can pick a 'best overall'. It doesn't seem like something that can easily quantified fairly. It's also worth noting the Tesla is over $30,000 more expensive than the most expensive winner out of the other categories.

<comment><USER5> Do people take anything consumer reports says seriously anymore? I was under the impression they started losing all credibility when they had a series of reviews where they ranked name brand products higher than their generic counterparts then it turned out the generic and name brand products were exactly the same (in some cases having come right from the same assembly lines) but with different badges.

<comment><USER6> Not that it was necessarily the case in the situation you are thinking of, but I believe that different brands often come off the same production line after QA is done.

So a factory for Duracell AA batteries might simply rebrand the batteries that to not meet their QA bar as "off-brand" batteries. The slightly defected or substandard batteries could then be sold to the consumer for a much lower price than the Duracell branded batteries, without risking damage to Duracell's brand.

<comment><USER7> I agree with that thought.

In fact at times I have purchased OEM hard drives through the Apple store instead of on Amazon.

My theory being that a manufacturer would (and this is important) be _more likely_ to send their "A" production to Apple and do a better job of screening defects.

Might not be important for a laptop bag but a mission critical part I'm willing to pay a few extra dollars.

It's not a new concept in business that the better and more important customers [1] get better product and service.

[1] Ever try to hire through a temp agency? You don't get the same crop of people that the big guys get who give them a lot of business.

<comment><USER8> Doesn't really apply to HDDs or any other electronics manufactured in large numbers. They can't screen every item and they will try to use the best components in all of them. So you get the same DOA percentage from Apple branded HDDs and OEMs...

And LG, for example, assembles worse monitors than their competitors, who are using the same panels LG sells them as an OEM...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow -- no matter what car is available over the next 10 months, it can't possibly be better than this one!

Anyone else hate "year inflation"?

<comment><USER10> This is hardly a new thing with model years.

<comment><USER11> That was the entire _point_ of model years. They needed way to make people want to upgrade their 'old' car. So instead of making the Ford Focus for 10 years there is the 2013 Focus and the 2014 Focus and....

Now your Focus is only a 2012 Focus. You're behind.

<comment><USER10> The fact that the 2014 focus goes on sale in 2013 only serves to accelerate this.

Not all vehicles are produced this way, some motorcycles are literally identical from model year to model year and get "blessed" with the year they happen to be sold.

<comment><USER11> They basically make up updates to cars. Just little tiny tweaks to justify the new number. Fully new generations still only come every couple of years or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> But isn't the result at least somewhat biased, as the car is mostly sold to environmentally conscious consumers, who might knowingly or not ignore car's potential problems to promote the nature friendly aspect of it.

<comment><USER13> "Electric cars aren't green" is a myth spread by a few op-ed pieces written in the LA Times and WSJ. The production of a battery is a tiny constant in comparison to the lifelong use of fossil fuels.

Electric vehicles become more environmentally friendly as grid power becomes more renewable, and grid power is becoming more renewable every day. When you invest in an electric vehicle you're investing in the future of renewable energy.

<comment><USER14> > When you invest in an electric vehicle you're investing in the future of > renewable energy.

Yeah, that's a bit of a stretch. Renewable energy doesn't need electric cars to take off, buying an electric car is not an investment in renewable energy in any real meaningful way. In the meantime, the US grid is currently 12.x% renewable, so you're running on 85+% non-renewable (2012). Not to mention the fact that running all those vehicles off electric would mean adding a huge amount of capacity.[0]

So yeah, powerful electric vehicles that enable you to continue to drive around like mad people while actually feeling smug about it is terrible for the environment. Buying non-powerful, non-oversized cars and using them a little bit (or a lot!) less is. We're much better of using the renewable electricity we manage to generate in other ways.

[0] To elaborate, electric power makes up about 40% of the total energy budget of the US, transportation makes up about 28% (2008 figures).

<comment><USER13> > the US grid is currently 12.x% renewable

Overall US power consumption has gone from 8.9% renewables 10 years ago to ~12.2% today. Vehicles that use fossil fuels as their primary source of energy will always make very little use of renewable energy. Electric vehicles have the potential to use solely renewable energy, which is the direction grid power is heading.

So should we invest in electric vehicles now, or should we use fossil fuels sparingly and settle with transportation that's unable to tap into renewables?

EDIT: 8.9% in 2002

<comment><USER14> Where are those numbers from? Wikipedia[0] states 8.90% in 2002 to 12.22% in 2012. (Edit: I see we're agreed on that.) Again, that's percent of the total _electrical_ energy generation, not the entire energy budget, which is much higher.

I'm fairly optimistic that we'll end up using electrical vehicles down the road. But it's a long way off from becoming a sensible alternative; it'll take a long time to satisfy the current electrical energy requirements by renewables, and adding the transport budget essentially doubles the amount required.

And people are deluding themselves if they think they're being environmentally responsible by driving around a Model S. Maybe if you buy a Model S and don't drive it.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER13> > But it's a long way off from becoming a sensible alternative

Electric vehicles aren't going to flood the market overnight, just as renewable energy isn't going to suddenly become our primary source of energy. These things take time and money. The more traction we give them, the more attainable they will become.

Environmental responsibility isn't possible when you ignore hard facts about the future. By the time I reach old age there will be 2 billion more people on this planet. They are capable of much more damage than we are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Tesla will reach $500 per share within 3 years, if not sooner. When Gen3 comes out, it'll basically be the iPhone of cars. Everybody will want one.

The stock does seem a bit overvalued currently and I wouldn't be surprised to see some drops in the coming weeks. But regardless, $500 within 3 years. Mark my words.

<comment><USER16> > Everybody will want one.

How many people do you think can afford a ~$100k vehicle?

<comment><USER17> the argument when the iPhone was released was similar

<comment><USER18> And they did drop the price (via subsidies), and it got way more popular...

<comment><USER17> yep. and they get cheaper over time as the market provides competition and technology advances. there will also be a larger pre-owned market and more supply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So here's what's been bothering me about electric cars. The battery life. I'm lucky to get 2 or 3 years of battery life out of a laptop or iPhone battery. So it scares the bejezess out of me to have similar technology as half the value of my car.

Can anyone re-assure me? Is there anything that lets car batteries last significantly longer than phone batteries?

<comment><USER20> Most smartphone batteries have only a single cell in them. Laptop batteries vary more, but you could expect around 4 to 8 cells in many of them.

The individual battery cell has a pretty hard limit on the number of times it can be cycled (i.e. discharged and recharged). Your typical AAA NiMH rechargeable has a lifetime rating of about 100 cycles I believe.

If a battery pack has multiple cells, they can be connected to each other in parallel or in series (and any combination of the two choices). In series gives you more voltage (i.e. kick), in parallel gives you more amperage (i.e. duration).

If the electronics hooked up to it are "smart" then any parallel sets of cells in the battery can be charged separately. This means that the laptop might drain parallel set A down to 30%, set B down to 50% and set C down to 90% leaving you at an overall percentage of roughly 56%. If you then hook the charger up, the laptop will charge the lowest set A first, then B, then finally C. If you stop charging before it gets to C then you've saved an entire charge cycle on that set which means it lives a little longer.

So.. now on to the Tesla. It has 8640 individual cells wired into 16 parallel sets of 540 in-series cells. The car will selectively drain and charge each individual set to maximize the life of the battery.

By default the car also does not charge the battery to 100%. The default is 80% which gives you a typical range of about 230 miles. That leaves more choice to the charger about which parallel sets to charge without reducing the life of sets that are nearly full by topping them off.

If you are going on a long trip, you can put the car in "range charge" mode which will force it to top off to about 260 miles of rated range.

The predictions based on modeling so far is that the battery should retain over 80% of its total capacity even after 8 years of typical use.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Follow up question. How does the regenerative braking affect battery life? It seems like you be charging and discharging quite a bit just during normal driving?

<comment><USER20> Regen is factored into their calculations of battery life. While no one but Tesla knows the actual details of their recharging strategy, I suspect that the regen also selectively charges certain cells/strings of cells to reduce the overall amount of charge cycles. Hypothetically, maybe the car drains one string down to a low level and then each time the regen kicks in, it goes to that discharged string until it is full then that string will be put back into use and another discharged string will be the recipient of regen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> thetruthaboutcars.com calls the 2014 Accord Hybrid the best car of 2013 if that matters.

[http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2014/02/review-2014-honda-a...](http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2014/02/review-2014-honda- accord-hybrid-with-video/)

<comment><USER22> Impressive. Still, reading the review and the comments, I'm still a bit concerned about a) the fact that it uses more of a series-hybrid approach to battery charging while b) having only a 1.3kwh battery.

Ride and cabin noise are very important, but even the Accord doesn't have air suspension like the Tesla Model S or many Mercedes models.

<comment><USER23> Well lets be real shall we, the Accord Hybrid plug in starts at 40k. It is priced within the reach of far many more households than the Tesla or Mercedes are. Then to top it off, I doubt the tax payers are ponying up 7500 dollars towards its purchase, so its a double win.

<comment><USER22> My 2005 Prius has a 1.3kwh battery. A 2014 hybrid can do much better - not to mention the fact that it doesn't sound like it's aggressively managing battery life like my Prius does (which still gets 53 MPG highway).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now please make a $10k model so I can get one.

Either that or I'll have to wait a decade for one with a depleted battery and rebuild the pack myself.

<comment><USER25> Not a Telsa but my Chevy Volt lease payment after rebates etc. is less than my cable bill; plus I get carpool stickers which down here in SoCal are priceless. My first American car after many Japanese and one German, and it's the most solid of the lot.

<comment><USER26> How high is your cable bill? I don't see the Volt leasing for anything under $200. My cable bill is $80. What am I doing wrong, or what are you doing right?

<comment><USER27> > after rebates etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wondering how many people on HN own a Tesla?

HN appears to have true love for any story surrounding Tesla.

<comment><USER28> > HN appears to have true love for any story surrounding Tesla.

That might have more to do with the fact that the Tesla is largely software- driven than that it's relevant to HN's readers as Tesla owners.

Also, it's a model for a future environmentally friendly car. I say it that way because driving a Tesla using present-day coal-generated electricity isn't a huge improvement from an environmental perspective, but a future power grid that's more reliant on wind, solar and nuclear, greatly changes an electric car's environmental impact.

<comment><USER27> I think it's because its a revolutionary auto maker that iterates like a software startup. They innovate like we want to innovate.

<comment><USER28> Yes, that sounds likely too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well how political...</comment>


Ask HN: When was the last time you made a big mistake? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> When I was working as a sysadmin, MySQL was popping up with errors in Nagios. I thought to myself, OK, I'll just restart the MySQL server to see if the errors go away.

Turns out, the client was using MySQL in a non-standard way and they were storing the last day's data in memory. Whoops.

I was fired from this position.

<comment><AUTHOR> sad story bro</comment></comment>


Palm Gives Up.  Latest Palm Pre update drops support for iTunes syncing - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/48021

<comment><AUTHOR> Palm has bigger fish to fry than worrying about iTunes

<comment><USER2> True, but it was so fun seeing them tweak Apple!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, maybe now they will work on an actual sync solution or buy one from Missing Sync.

</comment><comment><USER4> If anyone hasn't checked out doubleTwist (www.doubletwist.com) this is the solution I am using right now, and plan to use for all my devices once I am comfortable with it.

<comment><USER5> I use ... rsync.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My solution is to drag mp3's on to the palm mass storage drive and it is dead simple.

It helps that I never got into the iTunes habit.

<comment><USER7> Glad that works for you. But for users who like smart playlists, there aren't a ton of stable (well, relatively - iTunes is a lesser evil) options outside iTunes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of this interview (see Jobs at 4:20):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1wP6v4maL0>

</comment><comment><USER9> Now is the perfect time for some enterprising programmer to come up with a better solution.</comment>


Google engineers praise Microsoft open-source: 'We share the same soul' - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2015/google-engineers-praise-microsoft-open-source-collaboration-we-share-the-same-soul/ <comment><USER2> I still bet they'll build weird code generation wizards with fancy UIs which will produce what is essentially non-editable code. This is what most of their developer customer base craves.</comment>


Linus Torvalds says "Don't use ZFS"–but doesn't seem to understand it - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-statements-arent-right-heres-the-straight-dope/ <comment><USER2> Some miscommunication here. TFA doesn't distinguish between Oracle's ZFS and the Solaris fork, OpenZFS. Linus seems to be making comments about the former and is likely mixing up a few details about ZFSonLinux. His non-maintenance comments also appear to be about about the fork and probably mean "not keeping pace of feature parity with ZFS proper", which it doesn't.

I think he's just baffled by why anyone would expect the Linux kernel to make a special exception to support ZoL when there are already great native tools and the BSDs exist. And if you really need production ZFS, why not just buy into the officially maintained version from Oracle because you're not getting on-call support, paid or otherwise, from the open projects or Linux.

Largely, the article contains no impact or petition and reads like a click- trap set with Linus bait by someone with a real interest in defending (Open)ZFS's cult status as the pinnacle of all filesystems. I use ZoL at home, but it's not something I'd expect to see above SMB.

<comment><USER3> > I think he's just baffled by why anyone would expect the Linux kernel to > make a special exception to support ZoL

This isn't about special exceptions for ZoL. It's about removing FPU access in what appears to be a swipe by Kroah-Hartman against ZFS (maybe it was coincidental - we'll never know).

> And if you really need production ZFS, why not just buy into the officially > maintained version from Oracle because you're not getting on-call support, > paid or otherwise, from the open projects or Linux.

In that case, why use open source at all? Because you're not getting on-call support, paid or otherwise. And yet almost all modern companies DO use open source products in production.

> Largely, the article contains no impact or petition and reads like a click- > trap set with Linus bait by someone with a real interest in defending > (Open)ZFS's cult status as the pinnacle of all filesystems.

Really? So the part where he says that his gripe is about the public, well- respected figure Linus, publicly denigrating and spreading misinformation about another open source project while remaining willfully ignorant about it, contains no impact or petition?

If Microsoft had done it, we'd all be crying FUD.

<comment><USER4> > It's about removing FPU access in what appears to be a swipe by Kroah- > Hartman against ZFS (maybe it was coincidental - we'll never know).

It wasn't Greg Kroah-Hartman: [https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/12209993e98c5fa1855c467f22...](https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/12209993e98c5fa1855c467f22a24e3d5b8be205)

That commit has the real reason: "With EFI gone as the last user of __kernel_fpu_{begin|end}(), both can be made static and not exported anymore." So yes, it was fully coincidental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I already said it in another thread, but IMO Linus's comments are best seen as a legal positioning to avoid Oracle's thugs going after him for copying ZFS features or for developing code that he knows will be mingled with CDDL.

Having said that, I don't understand why ZoL can't just declare itself as GPL to the kernel and get access to whatever symbols it wants. I thought the only legal teeth that mechanism had is for showing willfull infringement. But ZoL releases source and already bridges the GPL and CDDL by strictly delaying their mixture until runtime, so I would think additional GPL objections by the kernel would be moot.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Linus should avoid authoritative statements about projects he's unfamiliar > with.

I'd side with the author here since he's shown to have experience and researched his points with using ZFS here and is quite frankly clear around explaining the background of ZFS enough to disqualify Linus's arguments for telling those who agree with him "Don't use ZFS".

I may have not gone as far as the author to do the benchmarks themselves, but the most misunderstood claim that Linus clearly went off the rails on what the claim about ZFS being unmaintained. As a part time Linux/BSD user, using Linus's own ranting language: This is complete B___S___.

When talking about "The" Linux kernel (no distros), Linus has his merits and his most excellent and decorated highness is respected by software engineers worldwide for the kernel. But as soon as he gets involved with topics which he has done little research and a clear lack of understanding, then the real experts will notice.

<comment><USER7> Isn't this completely irrelevant to the discussion?

Linus's only point was that ZFS for Oracle reasons can't be included in the kernel (despite what Canonical thinks). ZFS may have some nice features but is not worth the headache to rely on a possible copyright infringing, out-of-tree model backed by Oracle.

I have thus far seen nobody who disagrees with this. Instead people seem to got hung upon nitpicking or their own ego. E.g. but the features are important to me and not buzzwords. Good for you, every non-BSD OS thus far lived without them. Or "unmaintained". Of course it has maintainers, but *BSD switch to basing itself on ZFS on Linux because they don't have enough.

TLDR: Hyperbole != wrong and nobody disagrees with the substance just with the tone.

<comment><USER8> This is not correct. The api that was disabled was deprecated for over a decade when disabled. It was an api that wasn't meant to be used. Zol folks kept using it out of tree and when Linus finally removed/hidden them people went apeshit thinking it was some sort of attack. It wasnt, it was 12 years late...

<comment><USER9> An api may not be meant to be used but what makes it important to hide it? They could just let it be until there is a real need to delete it. Just going out of your way to hide something is a bit hard to understand.

<comment><USER10> It is the next step leading up to deleting it.

There are very good reasons to delete unmaintained or hard-to-maintain code that nothing important depends on, or should depend on. But just deleting it creates hardships, so things happen in stages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I agree with the author... The last few paras really explain what was supposed to be conveyed:

\- If you don't want to use it, don't want to muck around with the license, fine ...

\- But don't dis a FS that has been solving important problems for a few YEARS in production even before btrfs was being written.

Perfect summarization there. As a tech person, we could get biased into dissing other people's tech. But I feel that where it's due, one needs to give credit.

Historic aside: ZFS is 14+ years old, launched in November 2005. It's sort of a feature-parallel version of WAFL but eventually open sourced to the world with OpenSolaris in 2008. I used to work in NetApp when it came out and I was like, whoa. NetApp and Sun share a lot of history.

</comment><comment><USER12> Has ZoL integrated with the page cache yet so I don't have two dueling caches?</comment>


Linear Algebra for AI - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fastai/fastai/blob/master/tutorials/linalg_pytorch.ipynb <comment><USER2> "All the Linear Algebra You Need".

The title is misleading. In general, I like an applications-first approach, but I have hard time liking a tutorial with the title like that and which proceeds to say things like

>Neural networks consist of linear layers alternating with non-linear layers.

without providing a proper definition nor intuition what is linear and what is not. Next step they are constructing NN layers of ReLU's and not telling what is a rectified linear unit and only barely hinting it is supposed to do ("non- linearity").

The article is not a worthless, it's a nice tutorial to building a NN classifier for MNIST, but don't expect full mastery of the mathematics relevant in understanding NNs after reading this tutorial.

Chapter 2 of the book by Goodfellow et al. is a serviceable concise summary of the relevant concepts, but I don't think that chapter alone is a good primary learning material if you are not already familiar with the subject. For that I'd recommend reading a proper undergrad level textbook (and doing at least some of the problem sets [1]), one example: [http://math.mit.edu/~gs/linearalgebra/](http://math.mit.edu/~gs/linearalgebra/) and then continue with e.g. the rest of the Goodfellow's book.

[1] There's no royal road into learning mathematics. Or for that matter, learning anything.

<comment><USER3> It's the notes for a 40 min talk Rachel will give at the O'Reilly AI conference. It was originally meant to be a longer tutorial, so the scope had to be cut down significantly, whilst the title remained. There's lots of links in the notebook to additional resources with more background info.

Having said that, there really isn't much more linear algebra you need to implement neural networks from scratch. You'll need convolutions of course, although that's not too different from what's shown here.

For those interested in much more detail, Rachel has a full computational linear algebra course online [http://www.fast.ai/2017/07/17/num-lin- alg/](http://www.fast.ai/2017/07/17/num-lin-alg/) . Most of that isn't needed for most deep learning, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hrm. I find a lot of stuff on linear algebra not so intuitive or motivating. It's a bit harder to get through. A big motivator is the sheer scale of application, along with calculus. Yeah it's a must for AI but really linear algebra underpins much much more and gives you awesome problem solving tools in general.

As for intuition, a better approach may be to get 3 good books and cycle through them. Where one doesn't feel so intuitive at a given point, the other 2 might. They will explain things in a different way with different examples. Connecting the ideas across 3 sources will help it sink in.

For a light intuitive introduction, give this a try:

[https://betterexplained.com/articles/linear-algebra- guide/](https://betterexplained.com/articles/linear-algebra-guide/)

Maybe it's a little too light but the idea is important: voraciously grasp the ideas intuitively. If none are forthcoming, try to make one.

Another Linear Algebra book, by Heffernan, was a 'third' book:

[http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/](http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/)

It's free too. I think someone else has mentioned No Bull Linear Algebra. That's a cool book too.

I had to put my learnings aside a few months ago but I made more progress this way than just following one book.

</comment><comment><USER5> More linear algebra stuff to read with you weekend morning coffee: [https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/linear_algebra_in...](https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/linear_algebra_in_4_pages.pdf)

See also Section VI in this SymPy tutorial [https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/sympy_tutorial.pd...](https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/sympy_tutorial.pdf) or LA topics covered with numpy [http://ml- cheatsheet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/linear_algebra...](http://ml- cheatsheet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/linear_algebra.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there any book which actually explains where matrix and its rules come from? Instead of throwing on you matrix multiplication rules in dogmatic way so you blindly follow them like mindless robot?

I know there are lectures in YouTube from _3Blue1Brown_ :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjBOesZCoqc&list=PLZHQObOWTQ...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjBOesZCoqc&list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab)

So I want a book which covers linear algebra in the similar manner.

<comment><USER7> [http://linear.axler.net/](http://linear.axler.net/)

<comment><USER8> _" Linear Algebra Done Right"_ is a fine book but its enduring popularity leads people to recommend it as a universal default answer.

The parent asked if there was a LA book that covered the material in the _same style as 3Blue1Brown 's videos_. If that's the criteria, Sheldon Axler's book isn't the best book. One can compare a sample chapter to the youtube videos and realize they use different pedagogy:

[http://linear.axler.net/Eigenvalues.pdf](http://linear.axler.net/Eigenvalues.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> All the linear algebra you need for AI: [http://cs229.stanford.edu/section/cs229-linalg.pdf](http://cs229.stanford.edu/section/cs229-linalg.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> I found that chapter 2 of the Deep Learning book by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville is quite good.

[http://www.deeplearningbook.org/contents/linear_algebra.html](http://www.deeplearningbook.org/contents/linear_algebra.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Thank you for this! I've been re-learning Linear Algebra since my question[1] was answered on an earlier HN thread[2] on fast.ai. This will definitely help.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14878199](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14878199)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877920)

</comment><comment><USER12> This left me with a lot of questions, it could definitely use more explanations between code examples. I had to do a lot of "reading between the lines".

I've been reading [https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-deep- learning](https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-deep-learning) and have been liking it better than this tutorial.

</comment><comment><USER13> _All_ the linear algebra that is needed for AI is matrix multiplication and broadcasting?

Am I the only one who is baffled by this?

<comment><USER14> If AI == Neural Networks only, maybe matrix knowledge is enough, but when you start to include NLP, Expert systems, SEarch algorithms such as A*, Minimax, etc. in the AI category, you'll have to know more mathematics..

AI is much more than neural networks!

<comment><USER13> Even for NN alone, those few operations are not enough. Not only that, but to even understand what the operations that I need directly do, I need far more background knowledge of linear algebra.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> bra-ket "Coding the Matrix" : [https://www.amazon.com/Coding-Matrix-Algebra- Applications-Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Coding-Matrix-Algebra-Applications- Computer/dp/0615880991)

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder why there's so much more emphasis on Linear Algebra over Calculus (I've seen a number of courses teaching LA to complement DL courses), given that without Calculus, it's hard to understand optimization and backpropagation. Rote memorization might help for copying the same network over and over but isn't enough when you have to customize it.

<comment><USER16> How do you know a stationary point is a local optimum? Eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix! Even though vector calculus is taught without assuming linear algebra, a lot of the material is coupled. Further, many of the "first steps" machine learning ideas are essentially linear algebra problems (e.g., linear regression, PCA, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The purpose of this notebook is to serve as an explanation of two crucial > linear algebra operations used when coding neural networks: matrix > multiplication and broadcasting.

Um... no. While I like Rachel, and she's really smart and all that, this is a vaaast oversimplification.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have yet to go through the tutorial. LA is one of the areas where I am trying to improve... Coding the Matrix course/book is well written for those that find a good/intuitive approach to learning.

</comment><comment><USER19> Right now, sure. But give it five years and you'll no doubt also need at least a years worth of undergraduate (pure) math.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there a website that could interpret tbis... iPython notebook, I think it is? I'd love to read it on mobile.

<comment><USER21> Mobile friendly: [https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/fastai/fastai/blob/maste...](https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/fastai/fastai/blob/master/tutorials/linalg_pytorch.ipynb)

View from github URL: [https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/](https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> First line of fastai imports is a big "Fuck you" to usability. Don't import *.

</comment><comment> alishan-l Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER23> I may be biased because I have a background in mathematics, but after working with tensorflow for about 6 months now, I dont think you really need to understand linear algebra or multivariate calculus to work with neural nets, unless you're trying to implement your own engine.

Edit: I dont mean to discourage anyone from learning, as an understanding of the relatively simple mathematics behind NNs may afford the user an additional intuition about the behavior of neural nets, but it appears that one can treat neural nets almost like black boxes, given a suitable engine to work with like TF.

As an aside, TF is a pretty magnificent library. It pretty much works out of the box, and in addition to python and CPP bindings, there appears to be an unnoficial port to c#, although I haven't tried it yet. I strongly recommend the tutorials at tensorflow for anyone interested in experimenting.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, you don't need to be an automotive engineer to drive a car.

Most 'work' in AI seems to be using python to shovel data into libraries anyways.</comment></comment>


9 More Horror Stories from People Who Had Their Devices Searched at the Border - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/9-more-horror-stories-from-people-who-had-their-electro-1819328540 <comment><USER2> * If these are checks in the name of terrorism, why are they looking for drugs? I saw one story where they were "searching for Bitcoin" \- these just seem to be checks for any agenda. How long until they are fingerprinting people's laptop hard-drives for "pirated" content (where that may even extend to just owning digital copies of your own media and "having the intent to distribute")?

* By taking possession of your items, do they then become responsible for them and their contents? What if they damage something by inspecting it (delete a picture, send a text message, drop a camera, etc) - are they even insured to that end?

* Why is there no complaints process? Who is taking internal responsibility? Where is the manager in all of these scenarios? How are they screening the quality of the searches, both from a customer's perspective and a security perspective?

* Can you opt to have someone present or the process recorded for your own personal safety? In the UK at least we are able to film the police (although they really don't like it), if they have semi-policing powers then surely the same rules apply?

* Why is the search process almost always completely different each time? Is this supposed to be a standardized procedure?

* Why are some of these people never told on what grounds they were being searched on? Not even "this is a random screening".

Traveling through Heathrow, the worst I've had is the inside of my bag swabbed and my phone swabbed - but never searched through. I'm actually statistically picked out more often than not due to my beard and the fact I always carry an unhealthy number of electronics. Seems to be an entirely different kettle of fish in the US.

<comment><USER3> > the fact I always carry an unhealthy number of electronics.

A few weeks ago, passing through Heathrow, the lady at the security check commented something like _" wow, you really like technology"_ because I had a laptop, tablet, phone, kindle and battery pack... I never really considered 5 electronic devices as excessive, but I guess its out of the ordinary.

I get swabbed occasionally, but it does seem a bit more random than you (but I don't have a beard).

<comment><USER2> >because I had a laptop, tablet, phone, kindle and battery pack

Sometimes I'm also carrying another laptop, external hard drives (encrypted of course) and extra batteries for both laptops. If my backpack isn't over the weight limit, it's surely exceeding the LiPo limit!

>I get swabbed occasionally, but it does seem a bit more random than you (but I don't have a beard).

Maybe 75% of the time for me and I definitely don't look like a minority. My other friend maybe 25%. I must have a really "search-able" face :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I travel with no devices or blank devices every time I take the plane. It's a pain when you get to destination and have to redownload/restore a bunch of stuff/wait for the encrypted drive you mailed yourself to arrive, but that's the world we live in.

On the flip side I recently went on a 4 day trip where I needed to take a plane, and decided to just leave all devices at home except for a kindle. It made the trip very pleasant (obviously not always realistic).

</comment><comment><USER5> For leisure travel the US is just not a viable destination any more. There's plenty of other beautiful places in the world. Why deal with all this political insanity...</comment>


Nameof Operator for Modern C++ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Neargye/nameof <comment><AUTHOR> Header-only C++17 library provides nameof macros and functions to obtain simple name of variable, type, function, macro, and enum.

Before, you had to use string literals to refer to definitions, which is brittle when renaming code elements because tools do not know to check these string literals.

Try it online: [https://wandbox.org/permlink/ffnImjrPVcZR2l5y](https://wandbox.org/permlink/ffnImjrPVcZR2l5y)</comment>


Obstacles on the Path to AI - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxKBnD5y2M8NbWN6XzM5UXkwNDA/view?pli=1 <comment><USER2> "There is no way in hell that you can learn billions of parameters with RL." I really love LeCun's provocative stances, but I get suspicious when people talk about impossibilities. RL is making huge strides. People adopted the same tone with neural nets years ago, and LeCun proved them wrong...

<comment><USER3> He's saying you won't learn billions is parameters with RL /alone/ because "one scalar reward per trial isn't going to cut it".

I find that convincing and a key insight. RL is going to be fundamental to AGI, but he's saying curiosity / unsupervised learning will be necessary. And I say this as a big believer in the need for more work on RL.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I should have added the context about the scalar reward, but I'm not sure why that changes anything.

This may seem like a naive question, but it's sincere: What makes a scalar reward less effective at modifying a Q function than a scalar error that's used in backprop and assigned to a neural network's coefficients?

<comment><USER4> supervised learning: (after millions of operations you had just performed) out of 1000 you predicted label #136, but actually the true result for this input was label #25.

reinforcement learning: (after millions of operations you had just performed) out of 1000 you predicted label #136. That's not right, but I won't tell you what you should have done. Also, it could have been right, but maybe you had screwed up something in one of your last 100 predictions and I won't tell you what it was. Good luck.

<comment><USER3> To move the analogies into general intelligence, start with the example of Elon Musk (a top notch example of GI). What drives Elon Musk? In interviews he's said he wants to be useful. He's achieving that goal in a big way.

Take the moment he decided to build a rocket. It was after he had a difficult meeting to buy a russian missile. He quickly roughed out, from first principles, that he should be able to build one himself. The /drive/ to make that analysis was in pursuit of his goal (and required reinforcement learning).

But what lifelong process filled his brain with all the complex and nuanced information needed to rapidly draw that conclusion? His curiosity, aka unsupervised learning, which led him to learn so many things over the years that culminated in that moment.

For this reason, I might make the analogy that RL is the "conductor of the symphony", rather than calling it the "cherry on top" as LeCun does here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everytime I read something like this, I get sad that I don't understand most of it.

But then I get happy because at least I understand a little bit :)

<comment><USER6> Reading some random slides from a specialist talk is not exactly the easiest way to learn this stuff.

<comment><USER7> Most often the slides alone are useless, they are only supposed to be a support for the talk. Talks recordings (or transcripts) are more useful, you can only get a high level idea of what the talk is about from slides.

I would be awesome to have a platform where you get recommendations of what to learn / read or online courses in order to understand a given talk.

<comment><USER8> Yes absolutely! A platform where not only the answers are praised, but also curious questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The talk:

[http://techtalks.tv/talks/whats-wrong-with-deep- learning/616...](http://techtalks.tv/talks/whats-wrong-with-deep- learning/61639/)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the link, but goodness gracious, 6 GB for one hour of low quality video? What are these people thinking, that internet bandwidth is bestowed on all of us from on high?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's only the slides. Is there a video of the talk?(assuming there is a talk, that is)

<comment><USER12> I'd love to see the video too... LeCun is probably most interesting person to hear in this topic...

<comment><USER13> In case you didn't see the comment originally (I didn't either), someone else posted a link.

[http://techtalks.tv/talks/whats-wrong-with-deep- learning/616...](http://techtalks.tv/talks/whats-wrong-with-deep- learning/61639/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Although I'm working on deep neural nets, this material is too advanced to me. Looks like deep nets + bayesian reasoning is the next big thing.

<comment><USER15> Pick up this book. It's fantastic.

[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical- model...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models)

<comment><USER7> The title sounds familiar, it's also a course on coursera:

[https://www.coursera.org/course/pgm](https://www.coursera.org/course/pgm)

Last session was in 2013 though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The real obstacles to the path to AI is that we don't even have the right questions to ask and people are looking for answers to the wrong questions and announcing the next big thing in AI.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the focus on vector space.</comment>