YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-26/youtube-lets-users-override-recommendations-after-criticism <comment><USER2> It's crazy to think that clicking on the "not interested in videos from this channel" button previously did not remove videos from that channel in recommendations. I used to press it up to 5 times on the same video and it still did nothing.

<comment><USER3> I click on "not interested" when it shows videos i've watched the day before, but then assuming i don't want to see videos of a similar type would be a mistake, yet that's how broken the system is. Any attempt to "train" the algo is wasted effort based on past experience. You could say we users have been "trained" by the algo not to even bother anymore.

<comment><USER4> My approach is to vote on videos I've watched, and just skip it if I've already seen it. It works for me. I'm concerned that I'd see less relevant content if I start saying I'm not interested in previously watching interesting videos.

<comment><USER5> > I'm concerned that I'd see less relevant content

I used to have that concern as well, but then I realised I didn't actually get that much value from yt recommendations. The stuff I want to see comes from channels I'm subscribed to and only very rarely have I discovered something good from recommendations - most of the discovery comes from the right-hand side video column.

<comment><USER6> > I didn't actually get that much value from yt recommendations.

The last rec engine I got much value out of was early Netflix, around the first public competition to improve their engine.

My nightmare is that corporations suddenly realized that recommendation engines don't actually help them sell content. Maybe it's easier to persuade tons of people to watch something they'll all think is "good enough" rather than to identify or develop content some tiny subgroup of people will think is sublime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought for a moment they were going to turn off recommendations. For users not signed in, they are on by default.

Instead this is like asking users to click thumbs up or down in response to an ad, "Don't show me this ad again" or fill out a survey about the ads.

The issue is not that the user is annoyed by a specific toxic video. That is only the effect, not the cause. The issue is that Google's recommendation system is, as they say, "broken". Either fix it to stop promoting "popular" garbage (which is "popular" because it is auto-recommended and _auto-played_ ), or turn if off by default.

This is another example of an "opt-out" that most users cannot be bothered with. Instead of sane defaults: recommendations off, auto-play off.

If Google must force users to interact with a particular video and click something so they can collect another data point, then a more sensible approach would be "opt-in". Let users decide whether they want some recommendations based on a particular video they manually select. "Show me recommendation based on this video"

Just more dark patterns. If a choice was one users wanted (recommendations on, auto-play on), then the way to test that is to make them choose it. Instead, Google makes the default choices that benefit Google and requires users to change settings. Often forcing them to sign-in and be tracked in order to change a default setting.

<comment><USER8> > Either fix it to stop promoting "popular" garbage (which is "popular" > because it is auto-recommended and auto-played), or turn if off by default.

Or maybe people like content that you don't? People aren't drones who watch something because it was shovelled into their watch next. Chances are it was decent content. For them.

If you consider this a dark pattern then you probably need to get a better perspective. There are far worse actors online.

<comment><USER9> This is a reasonable thought, but how do you explain the new meme comment along the lines of "What the hell was this doing in my recommended?"

<comment><USER10> Easy: survivor bias. A lot of people are using youtube, and people who get good recommendations don't have any fuel to do memes. So, even if the amount of people who get bad recommendations is minimal, the meme would still exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This doesn't really solve some of the more concerning things about recommendations, which is the gradual ease into more extreme content. i.e., "super Mario speedrun" to "Top 10 speedrunning fails" to "Super Mario speedrunner gets owned" to "Why women shouldn't be allowed to play video games" or other such hogwash.

<comment><USER12> Was just talking to a family member recently about this. Her daughter is into horses and so is watching a lot of showjumping videos. Apparently the algorithm keeps trying to lead her off towards increasingly bad showjumping accident videos and from there basically into /r/watchpeopleandhorsesdie

<comment><USER13> While I can understanding wanting to not watch such videos because how the events are covered in such videos. Mainly to gawk at grevious injuries/incidents.

I do not like the idea filtering reality. A video could instead be if you do stupid thing X this happens. Then again it also depends on the age and maturity of the kid/teen. You dont want to terrify them or scare them wanting to try or learn new things. However learning from others mistakes is better than finding out first hand yourself. Like I said most videos on youtube are not an analysis of mistakes that lead up to an event.

Then you just have unfortunate accidents/events which don't really tell you more than sometimes life can be brutal.

Although, I think youtube filters violent stuff unless your account says your over 18, and removes really disturbing stuff outright.

Then again automated filters are not perfect.

<comment><USER14> But it is filtered. Just the other way around. The most horrible content gets morbid curiosity clicks and the normal stuff is under-represented, filtered out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To be honest, this looks like a CYA feature to get out, not like something that is actually intended to be used.

They took pains to give the "follow the recommendation" action the most frictionless path possible in the UI - just wait and do nothing. In contrast, this new feature to dial back recommendations is a buried in an obscure menu only reachable by clicking a button labeled "..." in a counterintuitive location. I can think of few ways how you could increase the friction any more.

<comment><USER16> Are you proposing that they don't autoplay anything that you haven't explicitly opted in to? Discovering new creators is pretty important to both Youtube and its users. Or do you want it to autoplay something that's not based on any personalized recommendation? That would reduce the value of Youtube over TV in that it caters to niche interests.

<comment><USER15> Actually yes, I would propose that you opt-in to Autoplay as a whole. Make it a separate function that people can activate if they want to binge watch or whatever, but keep it off by default.

I have seen a good number of people who struggled with the Autoplay mode in presentations, either could not stop it in time or forgot about it and then had their presentation derailed by the next video. I've seen exactly zero people who actually _wanted_ to use it.

Of course this is wishful thinking when the CEO's performance metric is to keep their users glued to the screen as long as possible.

> _The move comes after Susan Wojcicki and other YouTube executives were > criticized for being either unable or unwilling to act on internal warnings > about extreme and misleading videos because they were too focused on > increasing viewing time and other measures of engagement._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> On Firefox I just use 'Remove Youtube's Suggestions' addon:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove- youtub...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-youtube-s- suggestions/reviews/)

I'm perfectly capable of finding wanted content on my own, thanks, Youtube! :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Next thing you know, Twitter will let you view tweets in the order they were tweeted.

<comment><USER19> It actually does. The desktop website has a permanent setting. Mobile website has the setting, too, but occasionally resets it to Twitter's "Top tweets" sorting.

<comment><USER20> this has never worked for me - might try it again. my solution was just to unfollow 90% of people and put the rest in lists

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd be happy if it would stop recommending I watch videos I have already watched all the way through.

<comment><USER2> I'd also appreciate if it went back to recommending videos similar to the current video I was on instead of having the same recommendations on every video now.

<comment><USER22> No kidding. You can hit refresh as much as you want and it keeps showing the exact same recommendations. Very annoying, but not nearly as bad as all of the censorship going on, imho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there a way to hide particular channels from search results? There are a handful of channels that post videos I have absolutely no interest in, but they do really well in YouTube's search algorithm.

<comment><USER24> This is what I really want ... the ability to blanket block certain channels. I have zero interest in Joe f'ing Rogan... but apparently everyone else in my marketing profile does nothing but watch his videos. No matter what I look for, or what I'm watching, there's some goddamn Joe Rogan video in my search results or recs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The main thing I want them to do is not to keep repeatedly showing me the same videos I've already watched. They have little bars under them that show I've watched them all the way through, it shouldn't be that hard.

<comment><USER26> I'm really confused as to _why_ they do this: there must be hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of $s working on the YouTube algo. I'm seemingly in the minority that thinks it's largely brilliant, it regularly uncovers things that are related to stuff that I'm interested in but new takes on them, and sometimes throws up some absolute genius recommendation from nowhere. However, like you, my "Up Next" selection is plagued by videos I've previously watched! It's horrible UX.

<comment><USER27> I have two behaviours; TV-program-style videos I'll watch once, and music- style videos I'll watch repeatedly.

My theory is they have difficulty telling the difference, so they think the fact I've watched "80s-90s Hip Hop & R&B Playlist" repeatedly indicates I'd also like to watch "Plumbing bottle air vent teardown" repeatedly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> YouTube recommendations are terrible.

Is there some service somewhere that does a better job _with_ YouTube videos?

Google has historically been unfriendly towards third party API use, but here's hoping.

<comment><USER29> Agreed, I click through them once in a while when I'm bored and it consists mostly of stuff I've already watched mixed with stuff I have chosen not to watch from channels I follow combined with random crap. The most annoying thing is that it just fills your feed with stuff similar to whatever you recently did. This is made worse by the fact that they only show a handful of recommendations. The only way to get new recommendations is to either wait hours/days for the stupid stuff to go away or to engage with their fiddly "this recommendation was BS" system for getting rid of recommendations. Google news has the same "more of the same shit" masquerading as machine learning style algorithms.

On a positive note, I like what e.g. Spotify is doing in some places and I think Youtube can learn from that. They provide some great content discovery mechanisms. Curated playlists, users that listen to artist X also listen to artist Y, these are the top tracks for this artist (based on play statistics), etc. Very useful. Very low tech. Very easy to implement.

If only they'd stop confusing geo location with my interests. E.g. their release radar is full of German crap because I happen to live in Germany (I'm actually Dutch). Youtube does the same "you are in Germany! Here's some random German crap!" style promoted content on their front page. Most of it is very obviously not even remotely close to anything I watch. Location seems to drown out recommendation signals and all forms of common sense. It is used to push locally promoted content regardless of the not so subtle hints that I don't ever engage with that (my German sucks; why would I?).

There are hundreds of millions of migrants world wide, many of them have spending power and they are ignored and under served by most big tech companies (Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Google, etc.). This is surprising because they actually employ a lot of these migrants: they should know better. Getting content in the right language vs. the local language, localizing promoted content to the local language instead of what the user actually speaks and consumes on their service, etc. It's not hard and it's not because the content isn't there but because the algorithms are optimizing for the local lowest common denominator and most of these companies shoot.

<comment><USER30> I kind of disagree on what you try to accomplish in your second half. If you want to live here, you should be exposed to local culture and language, and have a somewhat hard time retreating into your own, separate filter bubble. Sure, Youtube could find more effective ways to achieve that, maybe by more gradually introducing you to it (especially language). But with their current capabilities, I'd vote for them pushing location based crap over not doing anything.

ps: So angenehm wieder nen Tag mit halbwegs überlebbarem Wetter zu haben.

<comment><USER29> Why should I be denied access to content I might be reasonably assumed to enjoy? What kind of weird argument is that? From my point of view it's just a good example of broken assumptions in what is obviously a not very sophisticated way to promote and recommend content.

<comment><USER30> I am not sure where you've seen anyone advocate you to "denied access to content". We are talking about a recommendation system. Those are pushing content, and as such include believes, values, etc. This makes companies have a responsibility on what they advocate for and what effect that will have on our societies. If you're talking about opportunity cost: Well, an imaginary flat earth'er or science denier would say the same about getting recommended stuff beyond his bubble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I just flat out stopped using their recommendations a while ago. I only look at my subscriptions feed.

<comment><USER32> Maybe I notice it because I use it more now, but it's shocking how bad it's become. I often get a heavy stream of suggestions for: ancient videos, and videos I've already watched. Throw in some clickbait and outrage focused content.

Then it seems to try to make me more extreme in some way (flat earther, hardcore gamer, etc) based on perhaps one partial watch of a semi-related video.

Surely there's some folks at Google who can see the raging dumpster fire this has become? I realize it's hard given all the competing interests (esp. advertisers), but this is horrendous.

As bad as it is, Netflix's suggestions are almost worse. I think these companies are optimizing on metrics that (ostensibly) show an improved experience while in reality they're destroying almost all user enjoyment.

Is it really a good thing that I "engage" longer with Netflix/YouTube trying to find something to watch with their terrible suggestions? (vs quickly navigating to a better video?)

<comment><USER33> >I think these companies are optimizing on metrics that (ostensibly) show an improved experience

They're optimizing for highest profits. For Netflix, that means showing you videos with the lowest licensing fees. For Youtube, that means showing videos where the uploader has paid to boost it.

<comment><USER34> I think the uploader doesn't even have to be the one paying now. If I remember right, Coke can pay for someone's positive Coke related video to be shown more and it bypasses the sponsorship disclosure requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> We still get recommended extremist videos on YouTube with no way to opt out, unless we create a Google account. Casual visitors will continue to be exposed to that type of content.

<comment><USER16> Everything is extremism to somebody. Just because you class what you saw as extremism doesn't mean it's wrong for casual visitors to see it. YouTube already has its own (however capricious) standard for what to hide from recommendations or remove completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is no way that "3 hours of planes taking off" or "3 hours of rain" are getting 10's of millions of views without getting recommended widely, including myself. 18 hours of "ambient sounds" has 130 million views so that's some heavy promotion, not just some occasional insomniac using search.

<comment><USER36> > "3 hours of planes taking off"

Now _that 's_ a video idea. I currently live right under the flight path for planes flying out of SFO; I should set up a camera and just record the sky, since they fly pretty close overhead.

<comment><USER37> It's great. Some folks really could watch that _all day_.

<comment><USER38> I dunno. For me it's _Jimmy Barnes screaming for 10 hours_.

Pure catharsis.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfkts0u-m6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfkts0u-m6w)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I just want to stop seeing an ad that drives my spouse absolutely insane. Nope. No option to not see it anymore.

<comment><USER16> I'd always assumed you could block specific ads or advertisers since there's a button on each ad with a menu for that (on the circled i button). But when I just tried it, it refused because it said personalized ads were turned off, even though there were turned on. So I guess that's just another weirdly broken pretend-feature.

<comment><USER40> Is that because you opted-out of ad personalization on [https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en](https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en) ?

<comment><USER16> No. That's where ad personalization was turned on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've been able to do that for a while. Are they advertising the outcome of an AB test? I'd love to be able to explain why, like I can per video.

<comment><USER42> Likewise here, for a good year or so, and it has always worked for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> >Users will now be able to tell YouTube to stop suggesting videos from a particular channel by tapping the three-dot menu next to a video on the homepage or Up Next, then choosing "Don't recommend channel."

By "now" do they mean `eventually`, because I just tried looking for said option with no success.

</comment><comment><USER44> As someone with a phobia for snakes I don't appreciate seeing such recommendations in my feed. I have clicked on not interested so many times but another snake video inevitably finds its way into my feed.

BTW, how about STOP SHOWING ME GRAMMERLY ADS!!!

</comment><comment><USER33> So they'll finally stop recommending me Asmongold clips? Hallelujah!

<comment><USER45> I bet there are dozens of channels which show up in everyone's recommendations. (E.g. "expert reacts to movie" seems to do well on the algorithm).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > While YouTube is introducing the feature now, this kind of tool is pretty > common place on other digital services. Spotify Technology SA has a version > for artists people don't want to hear from.

Where!? I've been missing this Spotify feature for _ages_. I do not like Mastodon. I do not want Spotify to ever automatically put on Mastodon. It keeps putting on Mastodon.

</comment><comment><USER46> These recommendation engines suck

During election month I watched lot of news videos

Then my feed was just news

Then I unfollowed and said "I want to not see channel x" for every 25 such channels

And then I watched standup comedy

And now my entire feed is comedy bits

I've moved back to watching tv shows/reading books and occasionally watching a specific video on YouTube

<comment><USER30> I have a hard time understanding how youtube can screw this up so badly.

Spotify does it nicely. They clearly recognized the few different tastes I have. And then offer separate discovery-queues for each of them and let me decide depending on what mood/situation i'm in.

But that might be the main difference... they signal back their knowledge to the user. Steam kind does the same with "Is this game relevant to you?" info. More clearly telling me what youtube thinks about me would be the first step towards correcting it...

<comment><USER46> Youtube screws it badly because they think they know better than users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I do some random walks from time to time to uncover hidden content: [https://youglish.com/](https://youglish.com/)

</comment><comment><USER48> Always found it completely insane that the block function doesn't entirely hide the channel from you.

</comment><comment><USER49> One of the things I hate about the current algo is that I get suggestions from freebooters who upload pirated content. Say for example, John Oliver airs at 9pm, by 9:32 his opening monologue is already pirated and at the top of my feed.

No matter how much I dislike, report, or ignore these videos, they always pop to the top. I don't view them, and never give them clicks, but because I watch every official John Oliver video, they get recommend to me.

<comment><USER8> His videos are region locked so re-uploads are popular in places like my country. Very unfair imo.

<comment><USER3> The official channel has recently been unblocked in my region, so those pirates must be having the desired result.

<comment><USER50> Good thing we have pirates then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Does YouTube have a "muted words" feature like Twitter does? I'd love to be able to block "Ben Shapiro", "Jordan Peterson" and "destroys".

<comment><USER52> I think it's called not consuming political content.

<comment><USER53> Or they could stop recommending strawman alt-right content when watching anything remotely leftist</comment></comment></comment>


Reeder Calls Out MobileRSS For Design Theft, Community Backlash Begins - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/reeder-mobilerss/ <comment><USER2> Looks like a 'typical' Chinese operation. And look: they're hiring a GUI designer [高级美术设计师(GUI设计师)]! <http://www.nibirutech.com/careers.html> Why bother?

Living here in China, one of the things that strikes me is that there is a complete disregard for the value of creative work. This is, of course a generalization, but for the most part, the education system here emphasizes rote learning. I've got a ton of thoughts/observations related to this (I attend a lower tier university here) but looking at the MobileRSS site, I'm reminded that great design demands taking risks and demands careful thought, neither of which is emphasized, culturally, here.

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't have to look any further than the OS and applications you're using right now to see the heavy re-use of design elements and UI paradigms between competing applications. Without it happening we'd probably all be using significantly worse software.

Used to be the community was heavily in favor of look and feel being free game.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_v._Microsoft>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_v._Borland>

 _League for Programming Freedom (LPF) was founded in 1989 by Richard Stallman to unite free software developers as well as developers of proprietary software to fight against software patents and the extension of the scope of copyright [...] The single event that had the most influence on the creation of the League was Apple's lawsuits against Microsoft about supposed copyrights violations of the look and feel of the Macintosh as copied in Microsoft Windows._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_for_Programming_Freedom>

<comment><USER4> For sure, the origin of creative work is always murky and collaborative, but there are lines and this theft flagrantly crosses them. Copying someone else's hard work and selling it as your own is bullshit and deserves to be called such. I don't think there is any defense for this kind of blatant copying. (Not to mention _bad_ copying. It's amazing how, even with a good design to crib from they managed to mess up all sorts of important details.)

<comment><USER3> I assure you that if you had used both quattro pro and lotus 1-2-3 you wouldn't be thinking that we're discussing the "murky and collaborative nature of creative work" - we're talking about imitation. Interface cloning and heavy borrowing of element layouts has a long and storied history in software design - look at any modern GUI and they all look much more similar than dissimilar. Is that the murky and collaborative nature of creative work? Hell no, it's people copying off of each other. And it's a good thing, unless you think it'd be a great idea to have to retrain everyone every time IT wanted to switch application providers (that used to be common).

Assuming you still disagree, I'd be curious about your opinion of non design issues. Do you think samba is bullshit for having reverse engineered the CIFS interface allowing non windows computers to share on corporate lans? How about various office applications that reverse engineered the file formats of various closed competitors to allow them to save and load the formats? Surely a lot of hard work went into designing CIFS or .xls, should that be off limits as well? If not, why is the location of buttons on a screen a bigger deal than the locations of bytes in a filehandle?

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry, I was too brief in my original comment. I shouldn't have brushed off imitation in design by talking about the murky nature of the origin of creative work. You are quite right that a lot of good has come from people stealing other people's design work; when people come up with something new and good, it is usually a good thing for others in the field to incorporate them into their own work. That's how we move forward. I mean, Reeder straight up copied the "pull to refresh" UI element from Tweetie.

But, as in all things, there is a balance, and one can go too far. What the developers of MobileRSS did is not wrong because they copied, it is wrong because they _only_ copied, and didn't make it better. They didn't incorporate good ideas from Reeder into their own, making something new and beautiful, but rather substituted Silvio's ideas for their own which is lazy and the opposite of good work. I know whose future development I want to support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why did ReadItLater feel that they needed to get their hands dirty and intervene? Now I have to use Instapaper.. sigh

<comment><USER6> Bad news: <http://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/17674488195850240>

It is an interesting question. I mean, Reeder was clearly cloned pretty heavily, but kneecaping interoperability in retaliation seems like a dangerous road to head down.

<comment><USER7> When you are using the resources of an API, you are entering a community. And when you abuse another respected member of the community, it responds.

These bookmarking services weren't cutting off a developer client to protect themselves, which I consider more dangerous. They were throwing their weight behind Reeder.

Checks and balances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How many design elements which were unique to Reeder are actually in MobileRSS? Sure, there are similarities, but they are two software packages which do similar a task, on the same platform.

Putting the platform specific stuff aside, they both have lots of similarities to other RSS reader software I've seen that most likely pre-dates them both.

If I was an iPad user, and I learned that there was another (presumably less expensive) application with all the same features as one I was using, I would certainly bookmark it and consider switching next time I had to do a paid upgrade - so I suspect that Reeder just scored a major own goal.

<comment><USER9> Did you click on the link? The side-by-side comparison is pretty damning. I think the similarities are way more apparent then just "similarities to other RSS reader software".

<comment><USER8> Yes I did click on the link.

The fact that the RSS stories displayed is irrelevant - that is data and not UI. Only looking at design elements: First screen shot:

Black bar across the top - that is presumably from the OS so doesn't count.

Overall layout: both have a navigation bar at the left (fairly standard for RSS readers), similar width (but there is probably an optimal width, and this may be it), the bar is a different colour but on the grey-black range in both cases (probably determined more by the platform). Both have a refresh toolbar button at the bottom - this placement is common for RSS feed readers. Some of the icons and icon placements are similar - how unique this is to the design depends on how common the icon placement is. It is certainly not a blatant copy with no changes, however - some of the positions have changed, and some icons seem to be different.

In terms of the layout of the right-hand side pane with the content, that is completely different. The date is displayed differently, and is repeated on each story in Reeder. The bullet point layout is different, and the MobileRSS version has images.

So it has some similar design elements, most of which are not particularly unique to Reeder, and some differences. They may well have taken some inspiration from their competitor, but they have also made some changes of their own - in other words, the article seems to be a beat-up of legitimate competition. I suspect the free publicity is probably going to end up helping MobileRSS more than it hinders them.

<comment><USER10> Reeder has a pretty unique look compared to all other RSS readers on the iPad. You wouldn't mistake another RSS reader for it. The bar on the left side, for example, is not a standard UI element on the iPad (iPad apps usually have bars at the top or bottom) and, as was said, the popover UI is also unique to Reeder (icons instead of lists).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would the Android developer community have reacted the same way?</comment>


Show HN: ObjectCropBot – Interactively Crop Objects from Photos with AI - <AUTHOR> http://www.andreykurenkov.com/projects/hacks/objectcropbot/ <comment><AUTHOR> I post this now (the project is a few months old) purely inspired by this post: [https://blog.photoeditorsdk.com/deep-learning-for-photo- edit...](https://blog.photoeditorsdk.com/deep-learning-for-photo- editing-943bdf9765e1)

They basically took the same idea and instead of just producing a hack finished a nice full version of the idea - very nice write up!

But, they don't have any web UI for it yet, so I am getting tempted to revive my dormant side project and likewise make a proper polished version of it with a web interface. If anyone on here is a talented web dev with an interest on working on this as a side project (for free, and for fun, though we could explore monetization if it works), feel free to get in touch! (ps extra get in touch if you are near south bay area/Stanford)

PS Incidentally, I independently came up with the same idea as in Deep Interactive Object Segmentation ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04042](https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04042)) and implemented it for my Stanford CS 229 (Machine Learning) project first - <USER2> hack came later. The ObjectCropBot hack allows only cropping and not clicking because it was faster to hack in that, but I think it is ideal to allow both cropping to constrict around target object and clicking (clicking alone leaves too much ambiguity , eg do you want to crop the person, or their shirt, or a subset of that shirt).

<comment><USER3> Nice work! My startup [http://objectai.com/](http://objectai.com/) has just launched something similar, Pizza Photo Editor: [https://pizza.pics/](https://pizza.pics/)

Pizza Photo Editor is still early-stage -- we're still adding features and increasing the coverage of different object classes in our training data set -- but the core tech is there, and it does have an interactive web UI, so it's already fun to play with. :)

Looking at the example inputs & outputs for ObjectCropBot, it's evident that the challenge is not just detecting the object and clipping it approximately, but tracing a tight precise boundary around it. We've found that DNN/ConvNet- based approaches don't offer the necessary precision, so it's necessary to perform some pre- or post-processing using other Computer Vision techniques. At Object AI, we've developed an "object boundary deduction" pipeline that combines ConvNets with other tech. It's interesting that the blog post that you've linked to makes the same observation!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this is great! Maybe i'll shelf my efforts a bit , if your online photo editor is this good... I did Google around and find some of these GraphCut- esque refinement techniques, but have yet to find an easily usable one that gave you a good crop with just an outline or tap (or both) - kudos for making one!

As to the lack of precision of ObjectCropBot, I think a lot of that is due to it running based on DeepMask and not SharpMask; Facebook's insight to run the final low-res features back through increasingly less downsized images with sort of skip connections is a good one, and I'd bet the resolution of the results would be a lot better if I just hacked it to use that instead of DeepMask (I think the thing I linked just uses that, pretty much).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading the title I was interested to see how this thing filled in the background after cropping an object from a photo... Alas, it's detecting an object in the selected region and providing a _cut-out_ of that object to use elsewhere.

Still impressive, just needs a better name. There are two problems in Computer Science...

</comment><comment><USER5> Neat. However I think the proper term would be cut-out. Cropping is just cutting of edges vertically or horizontally.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks nice. May I recommend getting free credits from OVH. [https://www.ovh.com/us/dlp/](https://www.ovh.com/us/dlp/)

Are you available for consulting? I have a project in this domain that you may be interested in.

<comment><USER3> Can you provide any more info about your project? Maybe my startup [http://objectai.com/](http://objectai.com/) could be of assistance.

(My email address is my HN username @ my startup domain, if you'd prefer to discuss over email instead.)</comment></comment>


Inconvenient truth hiding behind the excitement about educating girls. - <AUTHOR> http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/whats_sex_got_to_do_with_it <comment><USER2> My sincere belief is that the change of reproductive patterns of women (and all associated social, human rights, and political change) is just a consequence of economic growth and demands which it brings up. Change in mortality, on the other hand, obviously results from vaccinations.

Western countries who invented both things (economic growth through division of labor and later, machines, and vaccines) have been lucky to keep both processes approximately in line with each other, thus avoiding population explosion (while even them didn't completely evade trouble).

Then they brought vaccines (that are cheap) to developing countries out of their 'humanistic' values, but could not bring modern economy along with it.

We see the result. Genie is out of the bottle - and there is nothing we could do. We cannot bring modern economy to these countries quickly. We cannot deprive them of vaccines, because they are cheap and they can even afford buying them without any foreign assistance.

Trying to fix this with some sort of 'education for girls' before the economic stimulus (market demand for women to join the organized labor force) arrives resembles attempts by Russians to build communism by killing all capitalists and forcing everyone to work. They will call these attempts 'sinful' and 'brought by our enemies who don't respect our traditional way of life', and rightly so.

All we can do it just sit and wait, that's my guess. Social change does not come by itself, or as a result of some external manipulation, it is always a product of change in productive forces.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really hope more aid organizations will heed this and similar advice, and understand that family planning via sexual education and the availability of contraceptives is going to be one of our best chances for a better world.

</comment><comment><USER4> A quote from the article: "Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University, who was widely criticized for his 2008 comment about women's lack of natural aptitude for science and math, ..."

It's false -- Summers said no such thing. Summer's remarks were widely misinterpreted and led to his resignation from Harvard, but his point was simple and has been made by many: there is a theory that both genders have exactly the same mean I.Q., but for evolutionary reasons men's sigma (standard deviation) is wider -- meaning men are more likely to be outliers than women, both smarter and dumber. So, on average, and contrary to the claim in the article, Summers said men and women have the same aptitude for math and science.

In other respects the article is constructive -- if women cannot control their own fertility, they can't control anything. This makes free access to reproductive methods and rights, and education, a top priority.</comment>


Do Not Listen To Customers - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattle20.com/blog/Do-Not-Listen-To-Customers.aspx

<comment><USER2> I'm so not sure about that. The article cites a "dictator" (Steve Jobs) and the iPhone as an example. Isn't it because he created a product that is beyond expectations that the iPhone was successful? I'd like to have the point of view of Steve Jobs on that. Maybe he listened them complain about phones for hours before creating the product and that's why it was so good. As anyone have this info?</comment>


Grace Hopper: David and Goliath (1976) - <AUTHOR> http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/hopper_grace.htm#david

<comment><USER2> Fun to read her 1976 description of what sounds like SOA or microservices ([http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html](http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html)) - for her networking = modem over POTS and server = minicomputer but otherwise it's pretty similar.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems hard to believe how leading edge the military used to be with computers.

The Navy, for instance, adopted all-digital fire control systems in a concerted push to adapt to masses of Soviet planes equipped with anti-ship missiles... in 1961, years before IBM would even announce System/360\. At a time when Air Force tracking computers filled entire buildings, the Navy's fire control computers had to fit on individual ships (an issue which hampered earlier Canadian efforts using vacuum tubes).

This system also could communicate with similarly-equipped ships in range wirelessly, so that ships detecting aircraft could quickly update the computer memory (and display) of allied ships.</comment>


A Slightly Skeptical View on Object-Oriented Programming (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://www.softpanorama.org/SE/anti_oo.shtml <comment><USER2> There's a lot of ranting here and it's hard to work through.

Since I predict almost everyone is going to come down on the pro-OOP side or change the subject to FP in order to show their professional credentials (and because they don't know any better), I'd like to note that some of this complaint about OOP marketing, though it sounds cranky, is strictly justified by the extreme amount of OOP hype that surrounded Java and before it, Smalltalk. And it is not just cranks who observed this (for example, there is the famous quote by Dijkstra).

However awesome Smalltalk was, many of the ideas now identified as "OOP" (like modularity and reusability) preceded Smalltalk by some time, and did not spring fully formed from Alan Kay's thigh. But all these individual things had to be presented as one big revolutionary change because it just isn't good marketing to talk about lots of incremental evolutions from a baseline set in the 60s.

Apart from the merits or demerits of OOP itself there's a meta-point here, which is that we can't get anywhere discussing sweeping methodological topics like this unless we break down language features or practices and present solid arguments for them individually. Too often discussion gets reduced to a slogan like "OOP allows reuse" or "typesafe programs can't go wrong" and then practice is enforced across entire companies without real reasons - just a lot of hand-waving, shaming and appeals to experience and authority which eventually harden into dogma. So in practice, almost nobody understands why we do things the way we do and dissent is dismissed without consideration. This is a terrible way to explore and validate ideas.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if unix isn't already working with some object oriented paradigm. A process is some sort of object if you think about it. It has inputs and outputs. It can be instantiated and stay in memory. It can even send and receive messages, it you care about reading the doc on how to do it.

Maybe it's more relevant to understand how a system work, instead of trying to organize abstract high level concepts of how the cod should be written.

Maybe people have been trying to make UML concepts be understood in code, I'm sure that's the main reason, and OOP seems to be just that, some attept of abstract harmonization between theory (UML) and practice (OOP code).

<comment><USER4> I'd argue that unix is more of a dataflow model

<comment><USER5> Correct. For a more OOP model, I'd look at microservice architectures or something like the Erlang VM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's "slightly skeptical"?

Sounds more like a case of waterfall of personal opinion.

</comment><comment><USER7> I generally disconsider OO as a basic programming paradigm, not only because it is mostly badly designed in most programming languages, but mainly because modern languages already provide what OO was there to solve in the first place - in a much better way.

However, this article is mostly flawed - it's just a lot of ranting entangled with some random facts, curiosities and things that have nothing to do with any valid reasoning.

Also, most reasoning behind the article falls into some argumentative fallacy, like ad populum. In summary, it just fails miserably.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hah, yeah this is by a guy that goes by the nick Tablizer. He coined a term called table-oriented programming.

[http://www.reocities.com/tablizer/top.htm](http://www.reocities.com/tablizer/top.htm)

Back when he posted this, it was almost sacrilege to be questioning OO. He used to get beat up a lot on various forums. Now it seems at least the emperor doesn't seem to be wearing a jacket when it comes to OO.

</comment><comment><USER9> I see some references to years as far as 2014, including a list of books published from 2000 to 2012... so I'm wondering about the 2001 on the title(?)

<comment><USER10> I think this is like a wiki; many people can edit it. (This is also why it reads like a rambling bunch of thoughts jumbled together, rather than like something coherent.)

<comment><USER9> > This is also why it reads like a rambling bunch of thoughts jumbled > together, rather than like something coherent

I was wondering about that too... plus a few grammar errors (then -> than)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Everything you don't like is cargo-cult.

<comment><USER12> Explains my ex-wife perfectly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder about the purpose and intended audience for a writeup like this. It is probably not intended for OO-practicers, since it starts out by calling them idiots and fanatics before even touching any technical arguments. Oh and calling them corrupt charlatans and religious communists.

</comment><comment><USER14> Live and let live, people. [Programmers are trees.]([http://www.jeffwofford.com/?p=915](http://www.jeffwofford.com/?p=915))</comment>


Don't Panic Documentary by Hans Rosling – The Facts About Population - <AUTHOR> http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/

<comment><USER2> Naturally it's a video, meant for people who don't read and probably don't think, the kind of people who can be persuaded that a world population doubling time of 60 years is no big deal.</comment>


Ask HN: What technology stack would you choose to build the next Facebook? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> It isn't about the technology stack!

</comment><comment><USER3> node.js

<comment><AUTHOR> Y ?

<comment><USER4> It's very well suited for real-time apps. Real-time apps with a good user experience that promotes flow helps maintain engagement.</comment></comment></comment>


George Lucas Criticizes "The Force Awakens" - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/movies/george-lucas-criticizes-latest-star-wars-installment.html <comment><USER2> I think he has all the right to criticize the new film. However I would disagree. I think many star wars fans enjoyed the retro style. I personally was disappointed with episodes 1-3 (midi-chlorians?). Many people asked for more X-wing and tie-fighter sound.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the term is seller's remorse. You give up your baby for adoption, you lose ALL control as a parent. How could he not know that? It appears Disney is doing a fine job creatively and fans will get to experience more of the franchise.</comment>


Renewables Aren't Enough. Clean Coal Is the Future - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/clean-coal/

<comment><USER2> Using the sequestered co2 to "frack" more oil out of the ground doesn't exactly sound like way to save us from out of control greenhouse effect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, if the quantity of carbon injected is commensurable with the oil extracted, it could provide CO2-neutral oil.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Ocus Puzzle – relaxing HTML5 puzzle game - <AUTHOR> http://ocuspuzzle.com <comment><USER2> Did you even open it in Firefox? Because this is what I see in FF 45: [http://i.imgur.com/S9A3CbG.png](http://i.imgur.com/S9A3CbG.png)

Definitely not relaxing...

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course. I was developing it in Firefox and Chrome. That's really strange. I just checked it in my Firefox - also 45. In linux. Works without any problems. Sorry, i really don't know what is the issue.</comment></comment>


How to raise a seed round with just a product demo - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cubeit-curate-your-content/how-to-raise-a-seed-round-with-a-13-slide-deck-and-without-a-product-ce5412d85d23#.bye2al434 <comment><USER2> The the title is misleading.

They raised money WITHOUT a product. They had a bunch of slides, but they don't even post them online, lol...</comment>


The FBI could have broken into San Bernadino shooter's phone without Apple - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/fbi-could-have-gotten-san-bernardino-shooters-iphone-leadership-didnt-say <comment><USER2> I agree with the EFF.. but:

They write _At the same time, according to the OIG report, the chief of the FBI's Remote Operations Unit (the FBI's elite hacking team, called ROU) knows "that one of the vendors that he worked closely with was almost 90 percent of the way toward a solution that the vendor had been working on for many months."_

90% finished with no definitive end in sight? That doesnt sound like a solution.. then the EFF concludes:

 _March 1, 2016: Comey testifies... The OIG report concluded that Director Comey didn't know that his testimony was false at the time he gave it. But it was false, and technical staff in FBI's own ROU knew it was false._

No it was not false. It was completely true at the time. 90% is not a solution. Comey does not have a time machine to see when/if the exploit would be completed.

 _March 16, 2016: An outside vendor for the FBI completes its work on an exploit for the model in question._

Now they have an exploit.. and what does the FBI do? They drop the their alternative approach involving the courts and apple.

Making weak, clearly disingenuous (or worse, technically clueless if they really believe 90% is the same as 100%) arguments do not help the EFF. This will be the first part that their opponents latch on to and attack.

<comment><USER3> "90% complete" can mean a very wide range of things. If it means having bypassed 9 out of 10 security layers, there's no guarantee it'll ever work. If it means that the system works in the lab and they're adding UI and documentation, then it's reasonable to be confident. I've heard situations both worse and better described as "90% complete".

I would guess that coming from a company selling security solutions to law enforcement, it'd be more like the latter (ie, it basically works and needs polishing).

<comment><USER4> In the case of developing an exploit, one might reasonably claim that getting 0xdeadbeef in %rip is 90% done. A lot of researchers would stop at that point, because it's sufficient to demonstrate that it's exploitable. Some years ago, before various mitigations, you'd just have to polish up the payload and then you'd be 100%. But today, there might be a fair bit of work turning a demo crasher into a weaponized exploit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >any system that is designed to allow law enforcement agencies all across the country to expeditiously decrypt devices pursuant to court order will be enormously complex, raising the likelihood of serious flaws in implementation.

Generally I agree with the EFF but I always find this particular argument specious.

If someone were to design such a system but without flaws in its implementation, would EFF be OK with that? I don't think so, because those agencies are rife with bad actors. A perfect system, in the hands of bad actors, is already a problem.

The problem at the outset is with the context of use. Yes there are other problems that would follow on because the system would not be technically perfect, but even before that, the flawed context of giving these tools to bad actors should not be overlooked. Setting up such a system, _perfect or not_ is a bad idea, period. Yes it will be imperfect but even if you buy into the mistaken idea that it can be made perfect, the context of use, in agencies with bad actors, is already broken even before the imperfections allow exploits by agency outsiders.

No, we don't have to assume that the agencies are staffed with only good people. Not even for the sake of argument, and not even for the sake of a polite white paper from the EFF.

<comment><USER6> IMO the toothpaste is already out of the tube on this one. We already live in a world where strong encryption exists, and is accessible to the common developer. The DOJ does not get to live in the world that it wants to. I understand this will make their lives more difficult, however I do not care. Currently they are in the "anger and bargaining" stage of grief, I hope they realize that "going dark" isn't really that bad.

<comment><USER7> > I hope they realize that "going dark" isn't really that bad.

I hope _you_ know that, because I don't know a single person, expert or not who with confidence can claim "going dark" isn't going to be "that bad".

<comment><USER8> Somehow the US survived in a world where everyone was dark 100% of the time for over 200 years. Maybe the FBI should just go back to relying on actual criminal research techniques and remember part of their job is protecting constitutional rights such as the right to privacy.

<comment><USER7> I knew my comment would be unpopular however I'm genuinely curious how you feel about law enforcements ability to wiretap, or perform surveillance suspects given a court order. This capability has existed in the period you referenced, and to me it would seem ... similar(?) to law enforcement being granted permission (by a court) now to surveil a suspect's digital devices. Why does the switch to digital change things? Similarly, If I lock my home/car/object, commit a crime - are you okay with law enforcement breaking into my property to gather evidence?

I'm honestly asking, not trying to snark - please help me work through how encryption differs from other "analog" tools meant to ensure privacy.

<comment><USER8> Think back even before technology. The police weren't allowed to sneak on your property and search it, or hide on it to surreptitiously listen to your conversations, without a court order. This was to protect your privacy rights, as well as restrain over-reaching government agents.

Now let's assume 200 years ago all of your property was exposed so that any potentially dangerous people (robbers, horse thiefs, politicians) approaching your house could be easily seen. But this also means that federal agents coming to serve warrants could be seen with enough warning to allow you to destroy evidence, and anytime they'd try to surveil your house, you'd know they were there.

Should it be illegal for your property to be so exposed? Should the government force property owners to plant shrubbery on approaches to their homes to make them easier to secretly surveil, and so surprise searches can be more successful?

The difference between this and wiretapping is that wiretapping didn't require you to change your property to allow it. The police merely tapped into existing infrastructure.

I say "didn't" because that stopped being true years ago. The feds were successful at forcing telecoms to alter their systems and equipment to make survellience easier, especially mass survellience. Now the FBI thinks that since they can force telecoms to put backdoors in their own equipment, they can also force companies to put backdoors in customers equipment.

Let's go back 200 years again where encryption was a popular way to assure the privacy of important messages and papers. Let's assume public/private key encryption was discovered, and companies spring up where they create unbreakable private/public combos for citizens to use to encrypt their messages and letters. The companies agree to protect their customers by never recording the private keys they generate for them.

Federal agents are outraged, and demand the companies record citizens private keys and store them permanently so whenever a court ruled federal agents could have them those agents could read any citizens private papers and letters. And that the citizens aren't allowed to know when their keys have been compromised. Can you imagine the theft, blackmail and other possibilities?

That's exactly what the FBI wants now.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for your thoughtful response. This thread is getting a little old, but I'm going to read this later, and might respond - however I wanted to thank you, in case I forget and move on - cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree with the EFF's position regarding backdoors, but this article isn't convincing.

\- There really isn't anything nefarious in trying to find a good case to set precedent. That's actually the EFF's (and ACLU, etc.) business model: find the most sympathetic plaintiff for the issue you want to litigate to improve your chances in court (and the court of public opinion).

\- A method that is "90% ready" just isn't ready. Not only are such numbers meaningless in such a project. It just doesn't matter, legally, if you gain such capabilities in the future. A good faith interpretation of the FBI's motivation must also accept that if(!) the FBI had _any_ interest in the phone's content, that interest was urgent.

I also consider the EFF's and tech community's technical arguments to be rather weak and transparent attempts to skirt the core issue: we don't want backdoors for governments, period.

By suggesting technical difficulties they are trying to shift the debate from the political sphere to the technology. That's probably good for the cause, but it circumvents the mechanism we have established for policy debates, namely democracy.

The difficulties also seem to be far exaggerated: a 1-of-2 encryption scheme should be possible. There are several such schemes (like 2-of-3) working flawlessly for Bitcoin already.

Safekeeping of master decryption keys also seems to be a solved problem. Certificate Authorities, as just one example, seem to do so mostly without any hitches.

<comment><USER10>
      > There really isn't anything nefarious in trying to find a good case to set precedent

Far enough, however the FBI's argument was that they needed a backdoor to get into phones like this, when it turns out that they didn't need the back door at all, and not only did they purchase a "crack" to open the phone, they also had Apple's help and could have gotten the information they needed using the tools they already had at their disposal.

As I read it, this is not about finding a nice court case, it's about misleading the courts with the respect to the necessity of the back door. In other words, they weren't finding a sympathetic case, they were manufacturing it.

<comment><USER11> > it's about misleading the courts with the respect to the necessity of the > back door. In other words, they weren't finding a sympathetic case, they > were manufacturing it.

Absolutely. Now they kinda of gave Comey the benefit of the doubt saying "he didn't know" but it turns out ROU team was doing it.

\---

The OIG report concluded that Director Comey didn't know that his testimony was false at the time he gave it. But it was false, and technical staff in FBI's own ROU knew it was false.

\---

Not sure what happened there. I think there are two levels of "truth" one is what is written and recorded, and the real "truth". How did ROU started working on the device to begin with. Did they go to the evidence box and started tinkering with the phone when CEAU wasn't watching? Did they clone the device and handed it to multiple teams "here if anyone of you can figure it out, you get an extra 10 days of vacation" or something like that.

On the manufacturing part. FBI, likes to manufacture evidence and skirt around entrapment whenever possible. What better way to look important and get more power than making your own reality. Here is their informant infiltrating a mosque in Irvine, CA and radicalizing people. [http://www.latimes.com/local/orangecounty/la-me-muslim- fbi-2...](http://www.latimes.com/local/orangecounty/la-me-muslim- fbi-20151221-story.html) he was reported to the, wait for it, ... FBI. There are other cases as well: [https://theintercept.com/2015/01/16/latest-fbi- boast-disrupt...](https://theintercept.com/2015/01/16/latest-fbi-boast- disrupting-terror-u-s-plot-deserves-scrutiny-skepticism/)

<comment><USER12> It seems a very likely strategy for Comey (based on past instances of him lying under oath) to have tasked the unit with breaking into the phone, then simultaneously pushing on Apple to unlock it.

In this scenario, all Comey had to do was NOT ACCEPT the final report from the unit working on the phone, and that project would remain at <100% indefinitely. In a military beaurocracy setting, until a work order or transfer order is signed off by the one who issued it, it is not legally binding as being completed. Also, easy for Comey to tell the unit not to contact him with any details so he wouldn't have to purjure himself.

In any case, he really should be in jail, as he is a total sociopath and all of those FBI guys are guilty of watching kiddy porn.

<comment><USER13> > and all of those FBI guys are guilty of watching kiddy porn.

What? I was with you up until that point. Then you lost me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> People inclined to give the government the benefit of the doubt perhaps because they are of the class of people so unlikely to run afoul of the law seem to be confused about what 90% ready means.

If it was ready 3 weeks later 90% ready means we have 100% broken the security involved and are wrapping this is a reasonable interface and writing documentation. Our developer could plug in your phone and crack it right now but we need to build something with buttons and documentation.

<comment><USER4> People certain they know what 90% means perhaps because they are of the class that doesn't know much about software development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> And if they had had some patience, they could have initiated an automatic WiFi backup from the iPhone to iCloud and probably accessed the information on iCloud through a court order that Apple would've complied with.

Quoting from this Buzzfeed article from February 2016. [1]

> "The Apple ID password linked to the iPhone belonging to one of the San > Bernardino terrorists was changed soon after the government took possession > of the device, Apple, San Bernardino County, and federal officials have > acknowledged over the past 48 hours. If that password change hadn't > happened, senior Apple executives said on Friday afternoon, a backup of the > information the government was seeking may have been accessible."

> "The Apple executives said the company had been in regular discussions with > the government since early January, and that it proposed four different ways > to recover the information the government is interested in without building > a backdoor. One of those methods would have involved connecting the iPhone > to a known Wi-Fi network and triggering an iCloud backup that might provide > the FBI with information stored to the device between the October 19th and > the date of the incident."

> "Apple sent trusted engineers to attempt that method, the executives said, > but they were unable to do it. It was then that they discovered that the > Apple ID password associated with the iPhone had been changed sometime after > the terrorist's death -- within 24 hours of the government taking possession > of the phone. By changing the password, the government foreclosed its > ability to obtain a fresh copy of the most recent device data via this back- > up-to-known-wifi method."

[1]: [https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/apple-terrorists- app...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/apple-terrorists-appleid- passcode-changed-in-government-cust)

<comment><USER8> One wonders why the FBI didn't focus on having a standard protocol/office for handling iOS and Android devices to ensure they could maximize the ability to access them. Like someone who could tell the field agents, don't change the password!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > According to the Times, DOJ officials are "convinced that mechanisms > allowing access to [encrypted] data can be engineered without intolerably > weakening the devices' security against hacking."

Why do people believe this? It will only make things more complicated and more complicated usually means easier to break.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't have a problem with legitimate inquiries into crime, with probable cause, approved by an independent whose role is to safeguard against needless intrusions by the government. I don't believe in legally requiring code to be insecure through backdoors, extrajudicious dragnet "intelligence," or other deeply disturbing secret police BS authoritarian strains of the intelligence communtiy seem to be advocating. If they can open the phone with or without Apple's help is almost irrelevant. What matters is if they have gone through an accountable process to gain legal authorization to open it.

On the other hand, the fact that the FBI used this to gain legal powers in the vein of the burning of the Reichstag is unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER18> It probably takes way more effort, time and money than the FBI likes to invest to break open an iPhone. So this high profile incident was used as a way to influence public opinion that this kind of heavy protection was helping pedophiles and terrorists. I think the main result of their initial declaration was people buying more iPhones if anything at all. And now it backfires.

</comment><comment><USER19> well they did right? Isn't that what they paid cellebrite $900K to do. ([http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-fbi-pays-israeli- co-90000...](http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-fbi-pays-israeli- co-900000-for-iphone-hack-1001188315))

<comment><USER20> Maybe they paid both, to get more "friends"

</comment></comment><comment> GCU-Empiricist Any access-key/backdoor is either going to be very distributed so it can be used, or it's going to be under a SAP (special access program or similar alphabet soup); either way it will be compromised either for profit, or by conscience by someone another Snowden like person.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have a very close friend that works for the clandestine service, Mussolini. He tells me that they have backdoors into all cellphones that exist. I didn't believe him at first but looking at the recent vault 7 leaks[0], now I am not doubting him.

[0]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7)

EDIT: Also it's not hacking/breaking in when it's a built in backdoor.

<comment><USER22> >I have a very close friend that works for the clandestine service, Mussolini.

Do you mean the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad? Mussolini was the name of the fascist Italian dictator.

<comment><USER4> It's actually a rogue nongovernmental intelligence service entirely made up of resurrected Mussolini clones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The Department's [FBI's] blind faith in technologists' ability to build a > secure backdoor on encrypted phones

Hasn't it been show time and again that, on any sort of reasonable timescale, there is no such thing as a secure backdoor? Governments wanting one to exist cannot change the nature of software, especially with the current pentesters out there. If such a backdoor exists, someone will find it.

</comment><comment><USER24> After this long given they don't upgrade the OS, it will eventually be cracked.

</comment><comment><USER25> Sorry to veer into whataboutism wrt Apple and regions they operate in, but I'm curious about the hypothetical: What if China demanded Apple create a signed version of the OS w/ the key bypass? Among other reasons for asking, one reason is to highlight that while the FBI were nefarious here, that Apple was able to fight it and publicly post that they disagreed without any repercussions makes me at least a bit happier about the process.

</comment><comment><USER26> second verse, same as the first

<comment><USER27> but a whole lot louder and a whole lot worse?</comment></comment>


The GNU C Library: Customizing Printf - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Customizing-Printf.html <comment><USER2> This is a security nightmare. For one thing, it makes it impossible to use GCC's (and clang's) format function attribute, which allow the compiler to statically type check the format string and variable argument list. For another, printf bugs are a fertile ground for remote code execution and this glibc feature, by relying on runtime-assigned function pointers, is considerably worse. Combined with the lack of static type checking (because you can't use the format attribute GCC extension), I'd fire anyone who relied on this feature despite my objections.

Thankfully, I've never seen real-world code that made use of this feature, and hopefully never will. And if glibc knew what was good for them they'd kill it off.

If you're early enough in your C programming evolution that you find this stuff enticing, there are better ways to screw around. For example, read about GCC's __builtin_types_compatible_p feature (and the slightly less powerful, but more portable, C11 _Generic), and ponder how you might devise an interface that transforms variable argument list arguments to self-describing structs which don't solely depend on a separate declaration in the format string for type information. (Hint: also read about C99's variable argument preprocessor macros.)

I wouldn't recommend it for production, but exploring that space is a decent way to hone your C skills. Learning what _not_ to do, and why not, is at least as important as learning what to do. Poking at glibc's printf extension doesn't offer such dividends.

Finally, if you're interested in the mechanics of printf more generally, stay as far away from glibc's implementation as you can. It's a nightmare by every conceivable metric.[1] While there are simpler implementations, of the fully compliant implementations which see widespread use, I'd recommend musl libc's and OpenBSD's implementations.

[1] It's not even a good example of what _not_ to do because by the time you've mentally mapped out what it's doing and why, you could have completed a Ph.D or burned through a dozen rounds of VC funding.</comment>


Show HN: Unifrost – Stream PubSub Messages to the Browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/unifrost/unifrost <comment><USER2> > SSEs are sent over traditional HTTP. That means they do not require a > special protocol or server implementation to get working.

Can you not combine your HTTP and WebSocket requests behind the same HTTP server/port in golang? Other languages I've used support that.

</comment><comment><USER3> You mentioned Twitter uses server sent events. Do you have a link you car share about that? I'm interested in learning more about how they use SSE.

<comment><USER4> One interesting use case to look at would be Marathon Event Bus: [https://mesosphere.github.io/marathon/docs/event- bus.html](https://mesosphere.github.io/marathon/docs/event-bus.html).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting difference between Server-Sent Events and Websockets if the former can deliver out-of-order like UDP: "Because SSE works on top of HTTP, HTTP protocol improvements can also benefit SSE. For example, the in-development HTTP/3 protocol, built on top of QUIC, could offer additional performance improvements in the presence of packet loss due to lack of head-of-line blocking."

<comment><USER6> SSE can deliver out of order? Is that within a single EventSource or across multiple. I thought that within a single EventSource all messages were in order.

<comment><USER5> Good point and a downer if you need to hack with multiple EventSources. In any case, I see there's ongoing standardisation work on WebTransport including a DatagramTransport on top of QUIC: "It can be used like WebSockets but with support for multiple streams, unidirectional streams, out-of-order delivery, and reliable as well as unreliable transport." [https://wicg.github.io/web- transport/#introduction](https://wicg.github.io/web-transport/#introduction)</comment></comment></comment>


The new kilogram just debuted - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/5/17/18627757/kilogram-redefined-world-metrology-day-explained <comment><USER2> So does this change the weight of a kilogram and all scales need to be updated? Or is it just set by physics and math and no cylinder of metal?</comment>


Ask HN: Database-first vs. code-first approaches? - <AUTHOR> I inherited several legacy Python projects written with a database-first approach, i.e. the migrations are written in raw SQL then we update the SQLAlchemy models.
My issues with this approach so far:
- writing SQL migrations is a slow and error-prone process (people here are Python devs (mostly junior btw), not DB/SQL experts)
- reviewing SQL migrations is a slow and error-prone process (for the same reason)
- it's impossible to see the model diffs on Git (each migration is a new SQL file, so we can't compare before/after. I thought about generating schema diffs as text and committing them, allowing the reviewer to see the impacts of every migration, but the diffs are noisy, it's slow to generate, it's 1 more file to commit, and overall it just seems like a hack for patching a bad design choice)
- it's impossible to track the history of the model diffs  (for the same reasons)
And I just don't see any benefits for us with the database-first approach.
Does anyone here had a similar experience? Did you move your projects to the other approach?
For context, we have 1 database/schema shared by multiple projects. So I guess we could create a new project handling the SQLAlchemy models/migrations and import it in the other projects. <comment><USER2> There are tools like sqlacodegen [1] to generate the model code from the database and liquibase [2] for migrations and diffing.

> And I just don't see any benefits for us with the database-first approach.

The main motivation for this is that the database is likely to outlive the application code and you will get a cleaner database design than what the ORM would generate for you [3].

> For context, we have 1 database/schema shared by multiple projects.

Sounds like trouble to me. Is there a reason for this design? Normally each project should have its own database.

[1] [https://pypi.org/project/sqlacodegen/](https://pypi.org/project/sqlacodegen/)

[2] [https://www.liquibase.org/documentation/diff.html](https://www.liquibase.org/documentation/diff.html)

[3] [https://blog.jooq.org/2018/06/06/truth-first-or-why-you- shou...](https://blog.jooq.org/2018/06/06/truth-first-or-why-you-should- mostly-implement-database-first-designs/)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Sounds like trouble to me. Is there a reason for this design? Normally each > project should have its own database.

Each project is a "microservice" but they use the same data so they are connected to the same database.

But I don't think anybody really thought deeply about it. It was probably more like "monolithic architecture = bad, microservice architecture = good".</comment></comment>


On Refusing to disclose your Salary in a Job Interview - <AUTHOR> http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/on-refusing-to-disclose-your-salary-in-a-job-interview/

<comment><USER2> I actually had a contracting outfit once ask me to provide my last years return and pay stubs, they had some work at Saber they needed someone for. I was in a bad spot at that time and it was the only contract on the horizon so I politely told them that we agreed on a rate and that if they use that information to leverage a lower rate against me that I would double my rate. I think at the time I was trying to do $10 an hour more over the last year. Anyways, they swore up and down that it would not be used to leverage me down. They did, as soon as they had decided on picking me up, not only did they try to negotiate me down, but they also tried to push me 5hr below my last gig. I doubled the rate, would not budge and their client Saber was getting annoyed on the length of time it was taking to complete the contract. Meanwhile, a contract with Marriott came up that paid my rate no questions asked. I learned my lesson on that one, I never divulge salary information to a prospective contract. I simply state that my rate is my rate.

<comment><USER3> Good anecdote and thank you for providing it. Still, there are some differences between contracting work and interviewing for a full time position.

<comment><USER2> It was a senior level, right to hire contract so I felt it was appropriate to the context of the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I went with a "total comp" number that included salary + signing and annual bonus as my previous salary. It ended up being a 20% raise when the new company matched it.</comment>


Platform for people who want to build tech products - <AUTHOR> https://producthub.app/ <comment><USER2> This product seems to be out of Serbia and has zero references or background info on who is running it, I'd be wary of handing any data over to this app.</comment>


Ask HN: Career paths taken after being an engineer - <AUTHOR> Curious to hear what career paths people have taken after being a software engineer/manager/product manager in the tech industry.
Making software for serving ads can start to make one start to feel like a bit unfulfilled and coming from a more physics based engineering field one feels like one is doing dirty work to help modern day Don Drapers get rich. Like many I know, we entered the field since building software can be a fun technical challenge and decent money.
Have people gone back into writing?  More "classical engineering" (i.e. physics based), though rare in NYC area where I'm based?  Maybe gone into some policy work?
Since this forum is still consists of many current engineers, curious to hear stories of those you know. <comment><USER2> In retrospect, I feel like I lucked into an industry where the work is extraordinarily flexible and disproportionately lucrative.

So once I reached a mature point in my career, I emphasized taking control of my own time so that I could blend other things into my life as I wanted to.

Industry stuff pays the bills and I can make decisions about how big I want those bills to be and how much I want to work to support it. The rest of the time can be spent doing almost anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've moved around within software — from developing a commercial app in the finance industry, to developing simulations of air traffic control for the FAA, to developing distributed a command and control plan view display for the Army, to building datamining a custom supercomputer-based hadoop sized VLDB for social activity for the government, to supporting HPC users in academia, to modeling disease in a pharmaceutical company, to analyzing 3D biomedical images to quantlfy drug effects, increasingly using ML and deep learning.

In all, that spans 32 years. I've found the trick to avoiding boredom is to not stand still in the same problem space for too long.

<comment><USER4> How's Scrum/Agile/micromanagement in the fields you've mentioned? I've heard that even some research units at universities are beginning to use Agile now...

<comment><USER3> When developing prototype apps, you tend toward agile practices naturally. Status/update meetings are regular and quick, if not daily. The chief difference may be the absence of Agile's task cards, which requires too much forward decomposition of the design into bite-sized units, IMHO. R&D projects know the starting point and the objective, but only in terms of utility, not the means to that end. You're managing your team's passage through the problem space, not the solution space. That requires a lot of interaction with the client, since you need to learn from them if what you can deliver will serve their need. Thus you need to revise the task cards a lot, to the extent they just aren't that helpful in gauging your progress. It also helps that the team size in R&D is generally tiny, like one or two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ski instructor was one I heard of. This was from someone who was already very sporty, so learning to ski then became an instructor in a short amount of time.

<comment><USER6> I know a young Bay Area engineer who left a large tech company recently to teach Brazilian Jiu Jitsu full-time. He felt that BJJ was the activity that was the most age-senstive to accomplish, not SW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Degree in Aerospace Engineering. After 6 years of job jumping became a fire fighter / paramedic. Still a FF/PM full time but got a master's in computer science and now work part-time remote as a programmer.

</comment><comment><USER8> Film making is one I heard of and also aspiring to do.</comment>


Why Throwing 92 Heads in a Row is not Surprising [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.marcsandersfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Stoppard_final.pdf <comment><USER2> _It's not only when we repeatedly flip coins that something unlikely is bound to happen – something unlikely is bound to happen with every intake of breath, every heartbeat, every step . If I'm surprised by throwing 92 consecutive heads, based just on its low probability, then I should be in a state of constant amazement ._

Or, from Terry Pratchett:

 _People have reality-dampers. It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual. Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They 'd say "Wow!" a lot. And no one would do much work._

</comment><comment><USER3> It's very surprising for 92 coin flips to have a tiny Kolmogorov complexity :)

</comment><comment><USER4> What is surprising about 92 heads in a row is the low entropy of the outcome, not the sheer unlikeliness of it. Yes every other outcome is just as unlikely. But almost very other outcome has MUCH higher entropy.

<comment><USER5> If we are flipping a fair coin, the "surprise" we have at the result of any individual flip should be the same for all individual flips. Therefore, the entropy of the event, call it "A", of 92 fair coin tosses each resulting in heads is the same as the entropy of any other 92 fair coin tosses, "B". The sum of the individual event entropys must be the same so entropy(A) = entropy(B).

If you are talking about information theory entropy and saying a message of a billion bits composed of all "ones" has lower entropy than a "random" billion bit message, then sure. This is like saying we can compress the billion bits of ones and send less bits but the same amount of information. But I don't think this is synonymous with the above. It would be like saying for event A, each proceeding individual event has less entropy than the previous -- we aren't dealing with a fair coin anymore.

<comment><USER6> It is true, if you do not have memory (memoryless chanel with a memoryless observer;)

But if you do have memory, then you are free to chose to see "92 consecutive throws with a fair coin" as one event.

In that case the Kolmogorov complexity describes perfectly well why you should be suprised at low entropy outcomes - simply because those are rare events (using our new definition of 'event').

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't it part of the issue that he conflates sequences with totals?

As he notes there are trillions of ways to get between 40 and 50 heads. Our surprise isn't in the sequence but the distribution of outcomes?

I would absolutely be "surprised" if someone accurately predicted a coin flip 92 times regardless of the distribution of heads and tails.

</comment><comment><USER8> i disagree with the author's logic here - yes any individual result is disconnected, yes the gambler's fallacy is wrong, but if we simply expand it to say, a 100 sided die landing on 1, 92 times in a row, then we can see the flaw here.

or to put it another way - expand his argument to 1 million coin flips, and all of them heads.

at some point probabilities should be evinced in results. it is surprising when they are not.

<comment><USER9> He addresses this in the article if you read a little further down. Briefly, _any_ sequence of 1 million coin flips is equally unlikely, so why are most of them not surprising?

<comment><USER10> He addresses this in the article if you read a little further down. Briefly, any sequence of 1 million coin flips is equally unlikely, but because most fall within our expectations, they are not surprising. 1 million heads in a row does not fall within our expectations _and_ is unlikely, and hence is surprising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Surprising is a poor word choice.

A: I just threw 92 heads in a row.

B: I'm surprised!

A: No you're not.

B: The hell you say?

<comment><USER9> "Surprising" is fine. The title isn't "Why you're not surprised at throwing 92 heads in a row". There's no agent in the title, so he's referring to an objective idea of an event being surprising. I'm not sure I agree with his concept of "surprising", but it's at least objective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does the author actually define surprising anywhere other than "George Shackle's definition"?

<comment><USER9> Yes, in the last section:

> Roughly speaking, it's rational to be surprised by an event if and only if > that event requires investigation and explanation.

<comment><USER13> If that happened to you, wouldn't you investigate it and try to explain it?

In practice, if you saw this happen you'd have probably notice that something was off. The coin is probably weighted, or some sleight of hand tricked you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well yeah because it's a weighted coin.</comment>


Heroku's Provisionless Hosting for Rails Apps is Revolutionary - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/05/heroku-provisionless-revolution <comment><USER2> Once you have a big knob to scale (or automatic scaling), you next need to identify points on the curve where app rearchitecture is needed, like adding a caching tier or moving activities out-of-band. It sounds like Heroku wants to help do this -- which is great.

Alternatively, I wonder if Five Runs-style companies will partner will cloud vendors, figure out your current cloud mapping and give you this kind of analysis.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why _wouldn't_ you deploy your small to medium RoR web app on Heroku? It seems damn awesome, but I'm just a business guy, so I might be missing some technical details.

<comment><USER4> I tried using Heroku for a (very) small project which I already had working in Ruby, and using Google App Engine (even though it meant rewriting the code in Python). The reasons were:

1\. Heroku didn't support a certain Ruby gem I needed for the application.

2\. While (1) in itself is understandable (and eventually I found a way around it) Heroku never replied to my email asking whether they would support it in the future. As far as I recall there was no other way to contact them but feedback@heroku email address - if they don't answer it, that's that.

3\. Heroku is just not certain to be around for as long as Google (or Amazon etc) will.

4\. I admit I didn't research this thoroughly, but Heroku seems more expensive for what you get than other options (eg GAE, perhaps even Slicehost & co)

All in all, I'd say support was by far the most important issue. The last thing you want is to trust your application to someone who won't respond quickly (or at all). I realize Heroku is a small team, but this is just a critical requirement for such a service.

<comment><USER5> Hey Nir, it's James from Heroku. Sorry to hear you had trouble with Heroku. I'd like to address some of your concerns:

1\. Gems

We completely support all types of gems, including gems with native bindings (which get compiled automatically for your app). Detailed documentation: <http://docs.heroku.com/gems>

2\. Support

While we were were running our completely unsupported public beta, we tried hard to answer support requests, but our main focus was getting the technology developed. Now that we have launched commercially, we have a full support ticket system, fast response times, and are committed to making immediate support a priority.

3\. Financial Solvency

It's true, we aren't Google. We are, however, backed by high quality investors with large investment funds, who are committed to Heroku's success. We have strong interest from many additional firms if we wanted to raise more capital, and we currently have a very healthy runway.

I'd love to talk with you directly to better understand your needs and get more detailed feedback, please feel free to email me at james at heroku dotcom.

<comment><USER4> Hi James. No worries, thanks for replying here :)

The gem in question was curb (<http://curb.rubyforge.org/>) - I suppose it might a particularly tricky one, due to libcurl dependencies. (I'll email you with more details)

I understand the issues of supporting a free beta and hope to give Heroku a try on my next project. You really did some impressive work.

<comment><USER5> Awesome, we look forward to it.

I just created a quick Rack app that uses curb and deployed it to Heroku, no problem: <http://gist.github.com/108315>

If you keep having trouble with your app, please shoot me an email or open a support ticket, and we'll get you sorted out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Which types of smaller RoR apps would work well with Heroku as opposed to say EngineYard's solo plan?</comment>


Show HN: Authorize SSH public keys from trusted online identities - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cmars/ssh-auth-id

<comment><USER2> Isn't this simpler?

ssh user@host 'mkdir ~/.ssh;echo '`cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub`' >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

<comment><USER3> That works for your own key, but if you visit `[http://github.com/<username>.keys`](http://github.com/<username>.keys`), you can get that user's pubkeys. Likewise for Launchpad at `[https://launchpad.net/<username>/+sshkeys`](https://launchpad.net/<username>/+sshkeys`). This tool pulls keys from these locations so that you can add other users to your servers.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This project may merge with the ssh-import-id project. Will post updates on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed it has merged. Read more here: [http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/02/ssh-import-id-now- sup...](http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/02/ssh-import-id-now-supports- github.html)</comment></comment>


Show HN: HireGun for finding marketing consultants/agencies - <AUTHOR> http://www.hiregun.co/ <comment><USER2> This great concept and as someone who hires agencies/consultant semi-regularly it's surprisingly time consuming to find good options beyond the obvious names. And frustrating when you know there are a bunch out there to be found but get buried in the forest.

To make this usable I feel you need at a minimum 1) location filtering as a main point 2) Public feedback on agencies from their hires. Without this it's hard for me to trust, or filter agencies via the work they do well vs all the options they claim, especially as options grow. 3) You need to allow clients to post jobs and let the agencies chase them. Currently the onus is on the job owner to chase an agency. Often the reason I use these services is to save time as our internal resource is booked vs lack of skill-set. The more time you save me the more I'm attracted to your platform.

Good luck as I hope someone can build a quality version of an Elance type site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hacker News! Today I pushed live an update to HireGun, which is my company aimed at bringing transparency to the consulting industry while connecting businesses with marketers (to start)!

HireGun is very upstream from eLance/Upwork and focused on businesses who don't have a Fortune 500 level online marketing budget, but also can afford more than $50 for a Twitter bot army.

There are a few more versions already planned with more around consultant/agency partner transparency, making the lives of service providers easier with payment support, and more. It's early days, but I'm excited to be working on it fulltime after wanting to for a few years now!

I'd love your questions and feedback!

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome to see your hard work pay off John, the your silent army stands behind you.</comment>


Cryptocurrency Schemes Generate Big Coin - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/graphics/cryptocurrency-schemes-generate-big-coin/ <comment><USER2> In other news, water is wet</comment>


Ask HN: Do you work on machine learning at a large SV co and regret it? - <AUTHOR> I have a successful career doing regular engineering work at a large SV company. I used to work (albeit not at a super advanced level) on machine learning but it was more expedient working on tractable problems with a clear path to a solution, rather than spending a lot of time on data prep, wrangling various ML algorithms and only sometimes getting somewhere. Maybe it was me, maybe it was the tools, or a bit of both. Now that there's a huge hype cycle very well underway (especially the last 5 years) and tools are getting better (hardware and software), I'm tempted to get back into it.<p>Do you work on machine learning (in various incarnations incl deep learning) at Google, FB or (Microsoft, Amazon) or smaller cutting edge companies? Are you really enjoying the day to day work, or not? Why? Would you rather have built a track record in a domain involving more "linear" engineering problems with a similarly large impact? Are you a thought leader and rely on deep technical knowledge of statistics and math? Is the 'risk / reward' from a career and personal satisfaction point of view worth the time invested? <comment><USER2> The "hype cycle" for machine learning is broken in the sense that advanced machine learning is stuck in the "trough of disillusionment" yet many beginners have just leaped off the "technology trigger" That is, people's experience is not well modeled by the "hype cycle".

If there is a single example to consider it is that almost every day we see another re-implementation of the NIST digits case. Have you ever seen anyone do a similar but different problem?

Probably not. Because the vast bulk of work in a machine learning project is getting the training set, data prep, wrangling with details in the algorithms etc. It is high risk.

Because so many people are new to it they blame themselves instead of the technology so it is not so clear we are in the "trough of disillusionment"; machine learning works some of the time to create miracle products from large companies, but it is not unusual to hear that "we'll never do that again".

Future advances will depend not on algorithms so much as (i) large investments to produce training data (could we get it to work with letters instead of digits? do you take that for granted?) and (ii) finding clever ways to get the training data at less cost.</comment>


Malaysia Airlines MH370: Plane 'changed course' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26527439

<comment><USER2> I had some hope that maybe somebody just snatched the plane in order to kidnap the Freescale Semiconductor employees, but that seems impossible by now. The only nation that has performed such Bond-esque schemes in the past and still exists is North Korea, but the plane could not have gotten there withoug being noticed by the airspace control of at least three nations.

Also, the plane should have veered to the East, not the West.

EDIT To clarify for the downvoters: I was hoping so because it is the only chance all those people could still be alive. Which sadly they aren't.

</comment><comment><USER3> I still find it hard to believe there is no cheap autonomous way of tracking an airplane. If flightradar24.com works, it means airplanes can transmit their location. If they can transmit their location it means there must be a way to create an autonomous protected module in each airplane that works no matter what.

<comment><USER4> Exploded transponders don't work. Radio waves don't really pierce water at all.

You're (as alot of other people) are grossly underestimating the problem of tracking things across oceans.

Not to mention the other simple fact: what's the point? Is there a difference if plane is found 1 day or 14 days after crash? Reliable tracking would be a huge investment into a system that at the end, wouldn't make much difference in survivability or cause of accidents.

<comment><USER5> > Is there a difference if plane is found 1 day or 14 days after crash?

If you're a relative of someone who was on board, yes, yes there is.</comment></comment></comment>