There's no clear evidence Autopilot saves lives - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/sorry-elon-musk-theres-no-clear-evidence-autopilot-saves-lives/ <comment><USER3> Something that works really well but is pretty uncommon:

My 2016 Honda Accord coupe has a wide-angle camera on right mirror whose feed displays in a center display on when I turn the right blinker on (or manually turn the camera on).

Rather than actively do anything (like stear for me) or abstract anything (like warn me when there is a vehicle in my blindspot), it just gives me a plain view of the road to the right of me extending back hundreds of feet, with only the small augmentation of 2 added virtual lines on the road, one at a single car length back and the other at two car lengths back, to help me guage distance.

Simple features like this, which increases situational awareness without abstracting important dicisions away from the driver, are terrific and, despite only having anecdotal evidence of their effectiveness, I would bet my last dollar that improvements like this reduce accidents drastically. I don't cut anybody off anymore ever, not that I ever did it intentionally in the past, but I am always extremely confident now in knowing whether or not I'm going to be pulling into a lane that has a speeding car approaching from behind or whether a car is in my blind spot, or somebody is about to change into the lane next to me from two lanes over, etc.

Unfortunately, the market seems to be rewarding features that attempt to replace, rather than augment, situational awareness.

<comment><USER4> I guess that's good, but I've always found properly positioned mirrors, and turning my head to give me a good ability to assess if there is anything that I need to be aware of when changing lanes. It's a little unclear what value add the camera gives you. Blind spots can be very small if the mirrors are well adjusted, and then turning your head allows you to fill in the blind spot.

<comment><USER5> You answer your own question here, but since you might not realize you did... You said:

"Blind spots can be very small _if the mirrors are well adjusted_ , and then _turning your head_ allows you to fill in the blind spot."

Nevermind what a driver _should_ do, features like Honda's system can save the lives of people who do not use best-practice driving techniques. _This describes most people._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Watch the last two minutes of this test from Edmunds and tell me why Tesla is even allowed to sell this junk.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RxeK0F-D3gg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RxeK0F-D3gg)

<comment><USER7> I've heard that lane assist and blind spot sensor features could make things worse because people will start to pay less attention to the road.

This video is pretty frightening and seems like it could be closely related to the most recent Tesla crash into the exit barrier.

The biggest problem is Tesla marketing this shit as "auto-pilot" where as Honda and others tell you what it is: lane assistance. It's obviously far from perfect and I really don't think anyone should rely on it at all.

The article separates out auto-breaking and adaptive cruise control and I'm glad it does. Those are present on a lot of other vehicles and it makes sense that those have prevented accidents. Side/blind-spot cameras connected to turn signals are also incredibly helpful.

Going back to actual self-driving tech, I think this helps prove it's a long way away. I'd say at least 10+ more years of prototypes and I'm honestly sick of tax credits going into it. States should work on fixing our god damn public transport infrastructure first. It will cost less, transport orders of magnitudes of more people and self driving trains are real tech that exists now, verses some sci-fi fiction that may or may not be viable in a decade.

<comment><USER6> I don't think this proves anything about the state of self-driving tech generally. It just proves that Tesla doesn't have any, and that camera vision alone can't do much. Waymo's car doesn't drive like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If Tesla's autopilot is clearly 3 times better, put out the data. I know me and many other data scientists would be happy to analyze the data and see how Tesla autopilot is doing. Surely if Tesla's data proves out their point, why not release it?

In general, I think autopilot is a controversy magnet. From its name to its seemingly speedy initial rollout, to the highly publicized Harry Potter death, to the recent crash. Not to mention, anything to do with Musk and his futuristic ideas gets huge play in the press, though the actual reality is the features are quite slowly rolling out and are fairly underwhelming given the hype.

Also, the hype about this being self-driving: this is basically only a highway assist system, there are numerous challenges around the ~30 MPH, suburban/urban driving challenge to overcome. At that speed range in particular, I think lidar could be useful to Tesla, since it'd provide even further data in a variety of conditions, thus redundancy and more potential for completely safe driving in this most tricky and unsafe speed range where one must interact with pedestrians, bikes, and various things entering the roadway.

<comment><USER9> >to the highly publicized Harry Potter death

I must be living under a rock. What happened? Did Dumbledore die in a Tesla?

<comment><USER10> > [2016] Tesla owner killed in crash was watching 'Harry Potter' while using > car's autopilot

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "They should be writing a story about how autonomous cars are really safe," > Musk said in his Wednesday earnings call. "But that's not a story that > people want to click on. They write inflammatory headlines that are > fundamentally misleading to readers. It's really outrageous."

I'm so very tired of the attack-the-messenger (i.e., attack-the-media) strategy. Musk provides no support for his claim that autopilots are safer, but he does try to change the subject from autopilots to the reporters. What a cheap strategy, even if trendy, for such a smart person.

IME, usually the reporters turn out to have raised important questions, and perhaps the more the subjects of the report complain, the closer to home the news report has struck. (I'm excepting editorials, columns, blogs, etc. - <USER2> mean real journalism in serious publications.)

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand why Tesla bet on Autopilot. They're a small car company that's just getting started, why not concentrate on selling electric cars? That in itself is unique enough, the Autopilot feature is mostly a gimmick which adds complexity and liability. Even if they think self driving cars are the future they could wait until it can be bought from suppliers, or at least develop it in house without releasing it to the public until it's done.

To a lesser extent I think the same about Falcon wing doors on the model X, although that isn't a safety issue and they seem to work ok now. But the car would have been done sooner and cheaper if they had released it with regular doors, and I doubt the customers would have minded.

<comment><USER11> > the car would have been done sooner and cheaper if they had released it with > regular doors, and I doubt the customers would have minded

IME, and speaking very generally, when businesses take the approach that 'customers won't mind', their products revert to the mean, to commodities.

If you want to have a special brand, to charge a premium, you need to thrill customers, not do things in a way that the customers 'won't mind'. Consider Apple and their 'obsessive' focus on small details. Consider the Beatles - they didn't say, 'lets just do it the easy way; our listeners won't mind'.

Also, I think customers do notice these things, even if unconsciously. It applies to any craftsmanship. Most people can distinguish a cheap men's suit from an expensive one, even if they can't consciously name many reasons. The cheap suit is made to the standard of customers 'not minding'; it's a commodity and nobody cares about the brand.

<comment><USER12> I get that special features can be important to stand out from the crowd, but my point is that Tesla is the only available well designed electric car at the moment, have been for years, and will be for a while longer. That's why people buy them, not because of new kinds of doors or overhyped Autopilot. You could call the interior screen a bit of a gimmick too, but I think it's mainly a way to save on interior design cost, and then made out to be a futuristic feature.

I think it's more of an ego thing, they want to show that they're more high tech than the old "dinosaurs" that still use fossil fuel and requires you to drive your own car. Focusing on the car part and less on gizmos in the start might have been better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think that Tesla (Musk) are putting a lot of marketing into Autopilot. Other automakers have comparable technologies but they are not marketing them as aggressively and definitely not position them as an autonomous driving platform as Tesla does.

If we just look at the set of technologies (ACC, line assist, emergency braking, etc.), it is actually quite impressive how far we jumped in only a few years. However, it is also clear that true autonomous driving is definitely not available in consumer cars today (I don't count Waymo and a couple other companies as consumer car company). We are closer to it today than we were even 5 years ago. But not there yet.

Disclaimer: I mentioned it on HN before that I had an overnight test-drive of Tesla X and I didn't like the autopilot at all (among other things). I do like the set of similar technologies (adaptive cruise control, keep lane assist, etc.) in my Q7.

</comment><comment><USER14> They should renamed it to "Super Cruise"

<comment><USER15> That's what Cadillac calls it

[http://www.cadillac.com/world-of- cadillac/innovation/super-c...](http://www.cadillac.com/world-of- cadillac/innovation/super-cruise)

<comment><USER7> Huh. I still don't like that it doesn't require hands on the wheel (I fell like a creative person could trick the eye tracking). But unlike the Tesla, it does have LIDAR.

<comment><USER16> > a creative person could trick the eye tracking

People have already started to bypass hand requirements by placing a weight on the steering wheel . At a certain point, you can't really blame the manufacturer when the driver is actively trying to defeat safety features put in place for their own good.

<comment><USER17> Sure you can, because those features aren't just there for the driver's own good: they protect _all the other people on the road_.

<comment><USER15> Don't forget, a big part is absolving the car manufacturer of liability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well, we're going to need _something_ as the Boomers continue to age, eventually aging out of being able to drive themselves _en masse_ but being... let's say _disinclined_ to give up their car keys and rely on someone else to drive them around.

Meeting them halfway with self-driving cars is going to save a lot of lives, compared to having octogenarians with horrible reaction times and the idea that having their own car makes them an adult filling the roads.

<comment><USER7> We could do what every other country does and build a really good public transport infrastructure so they can take trains and buses everywhere. That will also greatly reduce drunk driving and help people who are very poor whose lives can literally fall apart if something on their car breaks and they can't afford to fix it right away (and then can't get to work, and then lose their job -- or they fix it and forego insurance, and then get in a wreck and then own more money and legal fees).

Cars should be an optional luxury, unless you intentionally chose to live in a suburban area.

<comment><USER18> You're ignoring the massive rural areas of the country, which are neither urban nor suburban and will never be served by a mass-transit system.

<comment><USER7> Actually in the US, rural areas are served pretty well by AmTrak as a principal way of getting to big city airports (although more expensive than a drive, AmTrak is way cheaper than using a rural airport to connect to a flight).

But if you live in rural areas, you're choosing to require a vehicle. That's fine. But in cities, are transport is shit in the US.

Even with rural areas, Northern Indiana has the same population density of Scottland. It could easily utilize a decent intercity rail system. The US use to have more passenger track at one time than Western Europe has today!

We had rail once. It went away and we spread out, but if we rebuild it, people will start living closer to it and everyone can benefit.

I think once the US hits a really hard economic collapse (not that piddly one in 2008 the banks just used to buy other banks) is the only time when US politicians will be forced to fix infrastructure (because the poor literally won't be able to go to work, and politicians really only care about the poor once they're no longer generating taxable revenue they can feed to their supporters). Once that happens you will see things change very fast, but things do have to get considerably worse before politicians invest in people.

<comment><USER18> > Actually in the US, rural areas are served pretty well by AmTrak as a > principal way of getting to big city airports

This alone tells me you've never lived in a rural area in the US _or_ relied on Amtrak.

> But if you live in rural areas, you're choosing to require a vehicle. That's > fine.

It proves my point, to the extent that people who live in rural areas (by choice or not) need individual vehicles, and that given that the number of people who are too old to drive will be increasing in the medium term, we'll need something to provide people who are too old to drive with individual vehicles.

> Even with rural areas, Northern Indiana has the same population density of > Scottland.

I'm sure it does. Now shift your gaze westwards, to North Dakota, Wyoming, eastern Montana, and, really, most of the rest of what used to be called the Great American Desert and is now referred to as the high plains or, more simply, flyover country.

You're doing something I see software developers do for their programs: Take a hard problem, solve the easy part of it, and consider their job done because they don't/won't/flat-out refuse to see the really hard bits their "solution" leaves unsolved. It's like their vision... slides over the hard parts, their minds automatically move away, as if you were trying to make two bar magnets touch at the wrong ends.

<comment><USER7> > This alone tells me you've never lived in a rural area in the US or relied > on Amtrak.

ad hominem

You know absolutely nothing about me. I have lived in rural areas. I've never relied on Amtrak, but I've used it quite a bit. Most of what I was saying comes from facts out of people like Wenover Productions:

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

This video doesn't go into the rural -> plane connection; can't find that one at the moment. But he has another video on it. But yes, people do use Amtrak for connecting to major airports from rural areas.

> I'm sure it does. Now shift your gaze westwards, to North Dakota, Wyoming, > eastern Montana ....

I was not addressing any of those areas. At all. You built some argument I wasn't making. I never said trains would be good for those regions. I think if we did build good rails, those areas would get some service eventually.

Australia has a similar situation (a region I have lived in btw). They only over 30M ~ 40M people. I have taken trains intercity and they are very touristy and not meant for general transport. But each capital city: Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney ... they have train systems that would make any US capital be ashamed of itself. The only capitals without any rail are Hobart, ACT and Darwin.

Australia has the infrastructure to accommodate high-speed intercity if they ever got around to implementing it. The United States does not and it has a much higher population density and much larger cities.

American cities, CITIES (which I've been saying a lot) need real transportation. If we built that, the rest would start to naturally follow into place. We'd see rural rail as a byproduct. We use to have it in the US and it's gone now thanks to GM/Ford/big auto buying rail and bus lines and then killing them.

I'm looking back over my comment just to make sure I'm talking about cities. I really feel like your anti-rail stance goes to the hart of the problem. American hate rail and public transport for some fucked up nonsensical reason and it doesn't make any sense to me at all.

I lived without a car for five years in three different countries and I simply think American cities shouldn't require cars to be livable. I don't think that's unreasonable.

<comment><USER18> I'm talking about the whole country, not just the cities. Why are you only talking about the cities?

What I'm really talking about is _all old Americans, all across the country._ I'm not focusing on any subset.

> American hate rail and public transport for some fucked up nonsensical > reason

Nonsense. This is simply wrong, as talking to an American would tell you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This argument seems so pedantic to me.

Human driving has basically capped out at its potential to improve. It may even be starting to get worse...

Automated driving, has barely begun and even if it is less safe today, it will clearly be much safer than human driving soon. And will only continue to get safer and safer as the technology improves.

Do you we need to be so micro-focused as to have an exact day/model/release where autopilot is safer than human drivers?

I for one have been hit by a drunk driver. My wife was in an accident where the other driver was ACTIVELY playing candy crush. We can all see that automated driving will make the roads a safer, better place even if that takes 20 years.

<comment><USER20> That's the point: I'm pretty sure that somebody will create automated driving technology that's better than humans within the next decade or so. But it won't necessarily be Tesla. If I had to guess I'd say Waymo is likely to get there first. And as I say in the piece, there's good reason to think that Tesla's incremental approach—start with ADAS, evolve into full self- driving—may be an evolutionary dead end because humans are really bad at supervising a driving technology that works 99.99 percent of the time but gets in a fatal crash the other 0.01 percent.

<comment><AUTHOR> > And as I say in the piece

Are you the author of the article?

<comment><USER20> Yes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


G Suite users get free Hangouts Meet upgrades thru June in response to Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/03/03/g-suite-users-get-free-hangouts-meet-upgrades-through-june-in-response-to-covid-19-crisis/ <comment><AUTHOR> sorry, official post and commentary over here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22476349](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22476349)</comment>


Hydrogen Cars Take to Britain's Roads - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/04/the-future-is-here-mass-market-hydrogen-cars-take-to-britains-roads <comment><USER2> I don't think Hydrogen cars will take off. I worked on an industrial site where Hydrogen was decanted from large trucks into smaller cylinders. On the same site we produced Acetylene. The Acetylene reaction is very volatile, and even after it is in the cylinders a hard knock is enough to create a run-away exothermic reaction.

I was once in a toilet, doing my business, when I heard a fire alarm go off. I stood up, pants still round my ankles, and looked out towards the acetylene filling plant. Nobody was running away, so I knew I had time to sit back down and wipe.

The last major accident on our site was an acetylene cylinder exploding, which immediately amputated a man's leg.

With all that in mind, all the workers on the site were STILL more afraid of doing Hydrogen filling than acetylene, due to its inherent volatility.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why??? There is no environmentally friendly way to produce hydrogen. Either it is stripped from natural gas producing CO2, or from hydrolysis with currently about 30% efficiency. That means an equivalent electrical car can drive about 3 times as far on the same amount of electricity. Finally, refueling stations are extremely expensive to build because hydrogen is a rather volatile substance.

<comment><USER4> Hydrolysis from solar is '30% efficient' of nearly limitless solar radiation. Hydrogen fuel cells emit no CO2. Its hard to underestimate what a gigantic win that is.

<comment><USER3> Unless we have enough photovoltaic energy production to close down all coal plants, the "limitless" part isn't really there. And even then it is cheaper to store the electricity directly in batteries - they are even cheaper than the devices required for hydrogen fuel cell cars. Hydrogen fuel cell cars still need a battery, though a smaller one, then the expensive fuel cell and finally the gas tank which has plenty of issues by itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe to save VW, the new management will switch to all-electric or hydrogen vehicles. It would be a huge change, but maybe necessary to save their brand. And it would be a huge win for customers, the industry as a whole, and the environment.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would like to have an estimation of total hydrogen leaks we could have if everybody used this technology everywhere. Hydrogen is so light that it's going into space when it's released in atmosphere.

If the computation shows that we will send 1% of earth's hydrogen into space every 5 billion years, no problem.

If we will send 1% of earth's hydrogen every 1000 years or less, I will prefer not to use this technology.

<comment><USER7> The water in the oceans weighs 10^24 grams[1] this equates to about 10^23 grams of hydrogen (2/18ths of water). This mass of hydrogen is about 10^21 cubic metres or 1.1 times the volume of the earth [2]. Think we are fine.

[1] [https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28volume+of+oceans%29...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28volume+of+oceans%29+*+%28density+of+water%29)

[2] [https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+10^23+grams+...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+10^23+grams+of+hydrogen+gas)

<comment><USER6> So if we destroy irreversibly as much water as we consume petrol (1.5 * 10^10, very pessimist hypothesis IMHO) we have for 10^12 years before consuming more than 1% of water.

This should be fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reading this book about the history of EV's atm: The great race: the global quest for the car of the future ([http://amzn.to/1kxnT0c](http://amzn.to/1kxnT0c)).

China had great plans but has been quite slow to implement them since the provinces kept competing for funds. The role of Europe has been quite limited.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. I didn't even know these existed. So the big question. I live in the US. Should I save up for an electric car or save and wait for a hydrogen car?

<comment><USER10> Go electric. Hydrogen is a zombie technology.

Twenty or ten years ago hydrogen seemed like a pretty good way to go, and these products are the end result of projects started way back then. But batteries have pretty much leapfrogged hydrogen in every way, and I can't see hydrogen staging a comeback.

<comment><USER11> What about range and recharging speed though? I would imagine hydrogen would have an advantage there...

<comment><USER12> Range, a little. Current hydrogen cars offer 300ish miles of range.

Recharging speed depends on how you're using it. On a road trip, hydrogen wins (if the stations ever get built out). For daily driving, electric wins, because the effective recharging time for plugging in overnight is zero, since you're not waiting for it.

Both are likely to improve for batteries much more that for hydrogen, too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


WildDuck IMAP server compresses emails by 56% - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nodemailer/wildduck#storage <comment><USER2> This looks cool, anybody used it yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's been used much as the project is fairly new. Wild Duck powers [https://ethereal.email/](https://ethereal.email/) but this is mostly for fuzzy testing purposes, I hope to get strange emails that would fail the system.

I've been building Wild Duck to replace the Courier based mail cluster we have deployed for 150k+ mailboxes in my day job. The current system really shows its age and something better was needed.</comment></comment>


Bad, Buzzfeed. Don't steal people's photos. Bad. - <AUTHOR> http://everydaydreamholiday.com/2013/01/12/sharing-or-stealing-buzzfeed-photo-attribution-and-creative-commons/

<comment><USER2> Yes what Buzzfeed did was wrong, however:

On Reddit many times I see users swiping photos from news sites, uploading them to Imgur and then go on to generate countless page views which don't help the news organization that paid for those photos in the first place. In fact many times there's not even any attribution.

Also it's not just reddit that does this but in the early days of Wikipedia many entries were scraped together by copying-and-pasting content from other websites without any permission. There are also sites like Pinterest which seem to exist to just swipe photos from other websites.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey michaelpinto - I agree with you. BuzzFeed are certainly not the only ones practicing this, but I suppose in this case there is a clear profit motive behind BuzzFeed, whereas a teen swiping a photo can't be as directly connected with one (yes, Reddit/parent company/hosting site would earn revenue that the original author is entitled to).

<comment><USER2> kerno i think you do have a good point!</comment></comment></comment>


A Darwinian Explanation of the Malthusian Trap [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://wulemin.weebly.com/uploads/1/4/6/2/14620598/jmp1110.pdf <comment><USER2> > It follows that the Romans were rich not because technological progress > temporarily exceeded population growth but because Rome had a business- > friendly legal system and an active market economy.

This is surely widely accepted and not in the least controversial. The rule of law in general and a functioning civil service were surely two of the defining features of Rome that distinguished it from both its contemporaries and successors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Abstract: This paper shows that the Malthusian mechanism alone cannot explain the pre-industrial stagnation of living standards. Improvement in luxury technology, if faster than improvement in subsistence technology, would have kept living standards growing. The Malthusian trap is essentially a puzzle of balanced growth between the luxury sector and the subsistence sector. The author argues that balanced growth is caused by group selection in the form of biased migration. It is proven that a tiny bit of bias in migration can suppress a strong growth tendency. The theory re-explains the Malthusian trap and the prosperity of ancient market economies such as Rome and Sung. It also suggests a new set of factors triggering modern economic growth.</comment>


Google - Our History in Depth - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/about/company/history/

<comment><USER2> Sergey Brin probably had the snazziest profile picture in those times:

[http://web.archive.org/web/19980418143602/http://www- db.stan...](http://web.archive.org/web/19980418143602/http://www- db.stanford.edu/~sergey/)

<comment><USER3> [http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/http://www- db.stan...](http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/http://www- db.stanford.edu/~sergey/photos/drag96.jpg)

I laugh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One interesting thing that stood out in terms of Google-the-startup: they incorporated on Sep 4, 1998 and raised $25 million in June 1999, and made their first acquisition in February 2001. The traction they must have been able to show must have staggering.

<comment><USER5> Keep in mind that (1) the standards for impressive traction were a lot lower back then, and (2) this happened when the first .com bubble was picking up a ton of steam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if they're old enough -- of prescient enough -- yet to realize they should probably have a staff historian.

<comment><USER7> Better to have others write your history than yourself. Less hubris that way. History has it's own way to deal with the notability criterion: everything that's not notable will be forgotten.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lot of firsts in 1999:

First dog

First chef

First non-engineering hire

First press release

First female engineer seems to be missing...

<comment><USER9> They may not have had a first female engineer, but in their first 21 employees, 6 of which were females.

Source: [http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-first-20-employees- wh...](http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-first-20-employees-where-are- they-now-2012-7?op=1)

<comment><USER8> I was making a little joke - I thought it was widely known that Marissa Mayer was Google's first female engineer.

Source: her wikipedia page, numerous articles.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I was a little saddened to see that they didn't mention her - sure she went to work for the competition but it'd have been classy to mention her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When did Slashdot first mention Google? That is when I first heard of it

<comment><USER12> That would be December 20 1998 in an article 'Good new search engine running on linux'

[http://linux.slashdot.org/story/98/12/20/2348230/good-new- se...](http://linux.slashdot.org/story/98/12/20/2348230/good-new-search- engine-running-on-linux)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just read this article on David Cheriton over the weekend: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/08/01/professor- bil...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/08/01/professor-billionaire- david-cheriton/)

And surprisingly, the Google Timeline doesn't include him in there (though he should probably be listed around the 1998 time that Andy Bechtolsheim wrote his check...unless they both contributed to the same check?).

<comment><USER14> I thought that basically David Cheriton made the introduction to Andy, invited the founders and Andy over to his house, and then Andy decided "Cool, lemme write you a check", and then David was like "While I'm here, lemme write you one too." In contemporary fundraising parlance, Andy led the round and David co-invested. The circumstances are covered in a bit more detail in In The Plex, although IIRC that didn't say that David invested, only that the meeting was at his house.

My guess is that David Cheriton, famous for keeping a low profile, didn't want it to be known that he was a billionaire through Google, and they honored that wish. But sometime fairly recently somebody else outed him (I recall reading an article a couple years ago that mentioned him as Silicon Valley's wealthiest unknown billionaire), and at that point the cat's outta the bag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> No mention of their funding from the National Science Foundation that helped them get off the ground?

[http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660](http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660) [http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9411306](http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9411306)

</comment><comment><USER16> I get this page in Dutch. I didn't ask for it and I can't change it. In fact, I'm logged in with an account which only has one language preference set (English), which Google happily ignores whenever it feels like.

And it would be merely annoying if it only affected the interface language, but it changes features, search results and in this case the entire content.

Which makes it pretty much impossible to participate in this discussion in HN.

This is one of the reasons why by now I dislike Google as much as I disliked Microsoft back in 90's.

Some people may find it hard to identify with, but imagine communicating with someone you know speaks perfect English, who you have politely requested to communicate in English, and who actually speaks English to everyone else in the room _except you_.

There are less offensive ways to say "fuck you".

<comment><USER17> This is a huge overreaction.

<comment><USER16> Did I mention changing _features_ (omitting some, changing the navigation to others) and _search results_ (Stack Overflow tends not to show up in local searches in language xyz) ?

And all this with no language/region switch in sight? Except the one inside the account settings, _which Google then randomly ignores_?

What would you consider to be the appropriate reaction to such a user experience?

Or just imagine clicking on the link at the top of this threat and ending up on a page called "Onze geschiedenis tot in detail", which contains a truly awful, low quality and barely readable Dutch "translation" with no obvious way of accessing the content people are actually discussing here.

Would this put you in a good mood?

<comment><USER18> Most Google services accept and honor a "hl" URL parameter. So it would be [http://www.google.com/about/company/history/?hl=en](http://www.google.com/about/company/history/?hl=en) for English, and hl=nl for Dutch (not that you want it). No cookie cleaning is needed :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Strange that Gmail is not mentioned in 2004 unless I am missing it! They mention Chat for Gmail but not Gmail?

<comment><USER20> As far as I remember, GMail was announced on April 1st, 2004 and was considered by most (all?) an April Fool's joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cool, I just discovered that they have Inactive Account Management.

[https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive](https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive)

</comment><comment><USER22> The Link for 2013 is actually pointing to 2011 - AM missing somethign here ? :-)

<comment><USER23> Probably just a sign that this page is hand coded!

<comment><USER24> :-) Any how do I report this to get fixed ? Couldn't just keep seeing this mistake!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wow! Is this new, or has it been out for a while?

Just finished reading Steven Levy's book on Google - amazing read and insight into Google's history.

<comment><USER26> This has been out for a while.

I was consulting it back in March 2013 for details I could use for my [http://gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns](http://gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns) so I know it goes at least that far back.

But you can also punch it into the Internet Archive ([http://web.archive.org/web/20120401000000*/http://www.google...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120401000000*/http://www.google.com/about/company/history/)) and see that it goes back at least to March 2012. As it happens, as part of the previous research I know that a lot of Google content moves around various URLs without redirects, so between that and how the first IA version is comprehensive, I strongly suspected that it was much older than March 2012; one useful trick for finding the original URL is to look for quotes of the page on other websites which point at a different URL. In this case, if you quote the bit starting with "Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford...." (the first entry) and you search in Google with a date-limit of 1995-2010 (in the 'Search Tools' option), you can see hits dated from 2005, 2008, & 2009\. The 2005 would be best, but it's some sort of spammy junk, so I try another hit, and it links to '[http://www.google.com/corporate/timeline/#start'](http://www.google.com/corporate/timeline/#start') which is quite different. That takes me back to August 2008: [http://web.archive.org/web/20080401000000*/http://www.google...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080401000000*/http://www.google.com/corporate/timeline/) We can't search for this because it's broken but it tells us that we can narrow our timerange even more, to early 2008. Another hit includes a 'trackback' link to another Google URL, which I duly load up: [http://web.archive.org/web/20020223143331/http://www.google....](http://web.archive.org/web/20020223143331/http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html) Useless, since it's not the timeline - but notice the sidebar! 'Timline', bingo. Now we can go all the way back to December 2001: [http://web.archive.org/web/20011213165211/http://www.google....](http://web.archive.org/web/20011213165211/http://www.google.com/corporate/timeline.html)

So, this page was started at least as early as December 2001.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd like to know more about what happened between 1995-'96\. Besides their introduction, how did they become partners? Were they office mates?

</comment><comment><USER28> Seems to be missing the word "reader"

<comment><USER29> It doesn't exist. It never existed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> They really need to add in the 'deaths' or transitions of their products as well.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is really great ! Especially all the April fool days Google gave us.

It reminds me of one of my friend. He had to explain "How Google works" in the class. He accidentally read half of this prank:

[http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html](http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html)

and explained it in the class. Everyone enjoyed !

But the thing to be noticed most was that most of the students, including the reached believed ! !

</comment><comment><USER32> Timelines are a tough, sometimes misleading/information-hiding format...they have a systematic look akin to data, but are much closer to regular editorial content in how they're produced.

Case in point, the Person Finder is mentioned twice on the Timeline, for the Tokyo Earthquake and the Boston Marathon bombings, but not for the event at which it was conceived -- Hurricane Katrina ( __correction at bottom) -- something that was arguably a more epic disaster than the bombings or earthquake, while at the same time being a much bigger and more surprising technical feat at the time...given that it was 2005, when Facebook and the social web had been barely a product.

\- __My bad, Google 's actual adoption of Person Finder was during Haiti in 2010, which, well predates both Tokyo and Boston and was definitely a bigger disaster in terms of human life than both. But Haiti isn't mentioned in the Google timeline

[https://support.google.com/personfinder/?hl=en](https://support.google.com/personfinder/?hl=en)

But the Tokyo earthquake and Boston bombings are more fresh in our mind, hence their greater prominence on a timeline generated from today's perspective.

(Not criticizing anything in particular about the OP, just pointing out that timelines can be just as obfuscating as they are clarifying, and the Person Finder example stuck out to me)

</comment><comment><USER33> A good marketing piece.</comment>


The open-source entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/maggieshiels/2010/06/the_open_source_entrepreneur.html

<comment><USER2> _Mr Young sold the software as fast as Mr Ewing could produce it._

Is this a metaphor gone wrong or just English humor?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's English humour. Probably a journalist not understanding the subject.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> >Last year, Lulu created 400,000 titles and sold over 1.6 million books

So Lulu sold an average of four copies per title? I'd be interested to see a chart of sales by title - I'm guessing it would be the mother of all zipf distributions.

<comment><USER4> A lot of Lulu customers don't market their books, they just use the service to print private copies of family memoirs, documentation or other one-off products. No break-out hits that I'm aware of. Some indy RPG publishers sell reasonable numbers. Wil Wheaton's book ran pretty well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> More power to Redhat and the value in open source. No need to oversell:

 _Today, the Redmond giant has seen its market share erode; Red Hat has become the world's open-source leader._

Microsoft profit: $14,569 million [http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT&fstype=ii](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT&fstype=ii)

Redhat profit: $87.25 million [http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RHT&fstype=ii](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RHT&fstype=ii)

<comment><USER6> Bob Young notably said:

"One of the ideas behind Red Hat is to take a $10 billion market and turn it into a $10 million market".

His point being that hiding the source creates the inefficiency of having to get every little bug and feature fixed by the one company that has access to the secret source. This inefficiency is lucrative if you're that one company, but a vast drag on the economy for everyone else.

<comment><USER7> It's very easy to see this as the destruction of value. Microsoft, certainly, pushes this interpretation. Another way to see is that it's taking 10 billion out of the cost of doing business. Those 10 billion will be translate into more R&D, greener manufacturing or lower prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The winner writes history. As I remember it could be described much simpler - 'we found a way how to monetize open source OS and powerful friends to promote us (read: IBM) and arrange our IPO (big money)'.

Some might think after reading this article that Java was really open source at that time. It wasn't until 2007, when everyone realized that the hype started to decline. And it wasn't a part of RHEL/CentOS until 2008.</comment>


This Video of How Medieval People Walked Is Oddly Compelling - <AUTHOR> https://pictorial.jezebel.com/this-video-of-how-medieval-people-walked-is-oddly-compe-1819217663?utm_content=bufferc74e8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for nice comments all. I couldn't try things like Vibram, was painful for me. Roads also mattered, hard concrete was tough on me, whereas others were not so. At home I keep off any footwear.

</comment><comment><USER2> Heel strikers and toe strikers both exist in Western countries, and the majority of elite runners are toe strikers. It's not just people in areas where shoes are not worn, as the video says and depicts with images of people running.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm on the spectrum and I walk like this. It's always been a weird texture thing for me. I also walked on my toes a lot as a child.

Pretty weird coming on here and seeing how I walk (and got made fun of for it.)

</comment><comment><USER4> bullshit. I just tried ball-walking in socks and I was totally able to do it with bad posture.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to get a ML for my open-source project? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to create a mailinglist for GitX, but I can't really find a good place to create one. There's Google Groups, but I don't like its interface, and it does weird things with fixed width input. It also shouldn't line-break stuff like patches that are >80 characters wide.
I'd like it to be as open as possible, so no need to register to post, and preferably an easy registration process, like just entering your email address, or subscribing by sending an email (like mailman does).
I don't really want to host this myself, so I'm looking for a hosted solution, which should be free. It'd be nice if it had some support for this workflow, but shouldn't get in our way. That means it just should stay a mailinglist, but optional stuff like (inline) patch syntax highlighting etc. would be nice. It would also be great to have a spamfilter working on the web interface.
Anyone know of something that we can use? Google Groups seems to be the big guy here, but I don't really like it. Things like SourceForge allow you to host a mailman-like mailinglist, but I'm looking for something of this century. <comment><USER2> All of the free open-source project hosts that I've come across do Mailman (if anything). Could you elaborate on why you don't like it? Sure, it doesn't have the slickest interface, but it's certainly functional enough.

<http://dadamailproject.com/> is a little nicer looking and pretty usable (I like the interface much better than PHPList), but you'd probably have to host it yourself. It's not very difficult to set up, though, and since it's CGI compatible, you shouldn't have trouble finding a place to put it up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just wanted to say I love GitX.</comment>


Ask HN:  Who says tax breaks create jobs? - <AUTHOR>

While plausible, I would love to see some empirical evidence that tax breaks do, in fact, create jobs.  Where is it?  And where is the evidence against the Keynesian idea that the added personal income from a tax break will (basically) just be stuffed under the mattress in a bad economy (in bad investment climates, investors prefer to remain liquid).<p>My bias is toward Keynes, but I would like to actually have data, not just ideologically driven conjecture to base that on or to change it. <comment><USER2> Channel 4 in the UK recently showed a documentary by Martin Durkin ([http://www.channel4.com/programmes/britains-trillion- pound-h...](http://www.channel4.com/programmes/britains-trillion-pound-horror- story/4od)) which highlighted the economic effects of lowering taxes.

Hong Kong was his example of a booming entrepreneurial economy stimulated by light-handed governance. Britain was the counter-example: a vast burden of taxes imposed on the working population, and a corresponding stagnation of economy (and society).

I hope this is relevant to your question!

<comment><AUTHOR> It is relevant indeed, but I am hoping for something smaller and more controlled. There are plenty of low tax shitholes (I think much of S. America) and plenty of high tax super economies (Germany, the finance part of Great Britain), so I don't think the country level analysis is going to work. Again, I don't really know what I am talking about....

<comment><USER2> And here's a rather cool article which focuses more on low-tax/tax-free local economies:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thaddeus-russell/mafia- renegad...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thaddeus-russell/mafia-renegade- history_b_773546.html#s164710)

There's a pattern here! All of a sudden this is a far more interesting topic... ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The best book to read up on the subject is "The Growth Experiment" by Lawrence Lindsey. Here is the link: [http://www.amazon.com/Growth-Experiment-Policy- Transforming-...](http://www.amazon.com/Growth-Experiment-Policy-Transforming- Economy/dp/0465027512/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1289833879&sr=8-3)</comment>


Oakland mayor apologizes for promoting local lockpicking class - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/oakland-mayor-apologizes-for-promoting-local-lockpicking-class/ <comment><USER2> A quote: "However, what may be lost on the mayor and local media is that lockpicking has long been a part of hacker culture—best exemplified by the fact that Germany's well-known Chaos Computer Club has been holding a Lockpicking Competition since 1997."

How could they write this article without mentioning Richard Feynman's famous lock-picking activities at Los Alamos during the World War II Manhattan Project?

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

A quote: "Due to the top secret nature of the work, Los Alamos was isolated. In Feynman's own words, "There wasn't anything to do there". Bored, he indulged his curiosity by learning to pick the combination locks on cabinets and desks used to secure papers. Feynman played many jokes on colleagues. In one case he found the combination to a locked filing cabinet by trying the numbers he thought a physicist would use (it proved to be 27–18–28 after the base of natural logarithms, e = 2.71828…), and found that the three filing cabinets where a colleague kept a set of atomic bomb research notes all had the same combination.[21] He left a series of notes in the cabinets as a prank ..."</comment>


Ask HN: How to find the best buyers for your website/app - <AUTHOR>

I own a semi-popular webapp in a particular, highly-targeted, niche/industry. I'm considering selling it to move on to another project. How would you suggest the best way to find great, targeted buyers? I don't want to post on eBay or forums like Sitepoint because I don't want to reach people sitting at home with a few bucks to spare.<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> Do you have competitors? Large customers? Know any experts in this area? Those are the people I would look into first.

</comment><comment><USER3> why not post it on here or on your blog? i mean, i'm not looking to buy something, but if it looks like a good thing to invest in, i'd give it some thought.

techcrunch just posted up a for-sale type section, that might be a decent place, too.</comment>


Skycoin Team Status Update - <AUTHOR> https://www.skycoin.net/blog/statement/skycoin-team-status-update/ <comment><USER2> So... Their counter-measures are of those strictly used in centralized environments? Further, they disclose this 6 days after a "criminal" offense occurred?

> Thanks to wallet security measures, the group was only able to extract 18.88 > Bitcoin and 6466 skycoins during the robbery.

I call that _no_ wallet security.

I have no clue about skycoin or whatever it is about, but this whole thing just seems like a cover for the actual sell-off by owners/developers.

Generally, if you have a following who would give money to something that has no real backing, then they will eat whatever you tell them to.</comment>


Ask HN: If I 'Show HN', how many will visit? - <AUTHOR> Ask HN: If I 'Show HN', how many will visit? <comment><USER2> Depends...20K visits if it hits the front page amd stays there a few hours??? If I remember from the past time I hit 1st that is...

</comment><comment><USER3> My last three Show HN submissions:

3 points -> 10 views

1 point -> 25 views

1 point -> 24 views

None of them made it to the Show HN frontpage.

</comment><comment><USER4> For a normal submission, the rule of thumb is 100 * upvotes. YMMV

</comment><comment><USER5> 12.</comment>


Ask HN: Does minimum karma downvoting encourage elitism? - rm_-rf_slash When I started on HN a while back I had just assumed the visible lack of downvoting arrows meant that feature simply didn't exist. I preferred it, since to me it meant that quality comments would bubble to the top, while poor arguments would be ignored.
Then I hit the 500 karma mark and realized it was a privileged action.  From time to time I'll post a comment that gets downvoted without explanation, and I have to wonder what is being accomplished by signaling disagreement without standing up for anything.
I would like to hear your opinions, as I believe what happens is that when people are designated as part of a privileged class, they will think themselves to be smarter representatives of the community, such that it acts as a justification to downvote and stifle discussion without having added anything to it.
I'm not interested in gaining imaginary internet points, so I have to wonder what the purpose for downvoting is in the first place. If the comment is inflammatory, off topic, abusive, and so on, we have flagging mechanisms for that. So in that case, why bother downvoting?
(Yes, I realize a major reason to have minimum karma requirements is to prevent trolls and bots) <comment><AUTHOR> I haven't been on HN for a long time, and I don't even have enough points to downvote comments, but as far as I can tell there's always been this uncertainty about what downvoting really means.

Some think that one should only downvote poor quality comments regardless of if they agree with the point being made or not, others think that downvoting is "anti-endorsement".

I don't really agree with the latter to be honest. It tends to generate this echo-chamber environment. And it makes disagreeing very "cheap": as you said, people will just downvote without bothering to explain why.

Your idea of only offering upvoting seems pretty good to me.

<comment><USER2> It's not exclusive to HN, pretty much any site with a negative voting system gets used purely for disagreement rather than 'this is bad content'.

It's especially prevalent on Reddit, where you will quite often see words to the effect of "downvotes are not meant for comments you disagree with"

The only-allow-upvoting thing is something that Facebook has been doing forever. Now that they're added a dislike button, they will almost certainly fall into the same traps as other sites like HN and Reddit.</comment></comment>


IPO Market Has Never Been This Forgiving to Money-Losing Firms - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/red-ink-floods-ipo-market-1538388000 <comment><USER2> And if it is less forgiving then we can probably say good bye to the IPO because it'd Be better to stay private. We've regulated away opportunity and so should we be surprised to see inflation in what's left? Where else are you going to find growth if not in tech?

<comment><USER3> How many VC-backed startups were profitable before going public? Not many I can think of. Not any, really. That's why they push for growth instead of revenue or perish forbid, profits. It's easier then for the underwriter to create the pitch for potential investors. "Cash flow is negative but just look at those growth rates! Amazon made losses for 15 straight years,too yknow"

For VCs, the IPO is the end, not the means to an end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wasn't something like this going on right before the market crashed in 2007/2008?

<comment><USER5> "This time is different"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://archive.is/BivBB](http://archive.is/BivBB)

</comment><comment><USER7> "Stocks of money-losing companies listing in the U.S. soared 36% on average from their IPO price through Thursday. That is better than the 32% return for IPO stocks with earnings and the 9% gain for the S&P 500 index."</comment>


Tgppl, a new type of open-source license - <AUTHOR> https://electriccoin.co/blog/introducing-tgppl-a-radically-new-type-of-open-source-license/ <comment><USER2> This (under the same name and version 1.0) has already been presented to FSF and OSI in the 2000s and 2010 on their mailing lists and other places, so I guess it didn't get approval. Since it thus isn't an open-source license, why present it as such in article title - starting out dishonest is probably not a good idea.

If I'm wrong and it is approved by OSI, that info should probably be more prominent in the blog post.

EDIT: indeed, both the 2008 mailing list post and this blog post call it "Transitive Grace Period Public Licence v. 1.0".

EDIT2: to be more constructive, a more proper way to describe the license could perhaps be "open-source-like".

EDIT3: framing this as an issue of honesty was a mistake, because Zooko or whoever can hold whatever opinion they like. It is a big issue anyways, see downthread if not convinced.

<comment><USER3> I don't feel like we're going to make any progress in this space while a single entity is considered the sole authorizer of something being open source or not.

<comment><USER4> It's not - there are two entities (FSF and OSI), they happen to have similar definitions, and a number of important organizations (Linux distros, vendors with special plans for open-source users, employers with open-source contribution policies, etc.) all happen to have specified their definition in terms of one or both of those _because they 're pretty good definitions_. For instance, Ubuntu's licensing policy has text that pretty closely matches the OSD's, but does not defer to the OSI for the definition. (And Debian's, of course, is the text _on which the OSD was based_ \- any changes to the OSI- maintained OSD would not necessarily flow back to the DFSG. Debian also considers some of the FSF's own licenses non-free, for good reason IMO.)

Concretely, if the OSI were to change the OSD in either a way that included things like the SSPL or that included things like the Hippocratic License, I think there's a good chance that my employer's internal OSS policies would change to say "the version of the OSD before 2020," because it's not clearly in their interest to contribute company-owned code to projects under those licenses. On similar grounds, I'd expect companies that provide free services (hosting, CI, etc.) to F/OSS projects to say "these licenses don't count," Linux distros to not universally agree on including them, etc.

So you're _already_ in a place where there's no sole authority: you need to start by convincing everyone other than the OSI that a new sort of license is actually a good idea and the change you want to make to the OSD is actually something that they, too, should consider "open source." And once you get to the point where enough people agree with you, the OSI isn't going to be in your way in any practical sense.

<comment><USER5> > Debian also considers some of the FSF's own licenses non-free, for good > reason IMO.

I'm curious about this, do you know which ones?

<comment><USER6> The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). It's generally well-intentioned, but it places some weird restrictions on modification and reuse. In particular, it allows the author of a text to define "invariant" sections of a text which cannot be removed or altered in copies of the work, and automatically applies this restriction to sections of a document with certain names (like "Dedication").

The GFDL also _theoretically_ forbids users from storing GFDL-licensed documents on encrypted storage, as the license states that "You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute". I don't think that reading was intended, but the license doesn't clarify further. :)

Further analysis: [https://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml](https://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h Well I'm skeptical, but at least unlike 99% of "radically new type of open- source license[s]" I _think_ this one is actually, y'know, an open source license and not shared source pretending otherwise. If I'm reading "External Deployment" correctly, it's sorta like AGPL but with a time delay, which is... Not terrible, really.

</comment><comment><USER7> Haven't gone line-by-line on this one, but I like the new trend of "time limit" licenses. If I'm trying to start a business, something AGPL-ish might make sense in the short term to avoid bigger competitors copying everything we're doing. But that doesn't mean I want my great-grandchildren to be able to sue for violations 90 years from now. "AGPL for now, MIT later" seems like a good compromise.

<comment><USER8> You don't really need a new kind of license for that; you can just AGPL now, and release MIT later (assuming you're assigned the copyright for all the code).

<comment><USER9> That doesn't guarantee downstream users that later they'll in fact have the code as MIT licensed. The author can change their minds, or just thinks it isn't worth the hassle. (Or some big corp buys them and they won't care.)

<comment><USER10> Isn't that always the case if the author is the sole copyright holder (or all copyright holders agree)? (Meaning that regardless of the license the copyright holder can always choose to not distribute new versions under that license anymore.)

<comment><USER9> But that's completely different than having a released version that we know will be available as MIT in X months.

It might mean you can start developing something based on the code and when it becomes MIT you can launch it and keep your additions to yourself. (Let's say in case of a server side thing.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems like a fundamentally bad idea for software.

Simply put, living software contains a constant stream of patches, which "reset" the clock continuously.

It would be one thing if this license were used on a book or some other work which is substantially finished. Once the book is published, the clock starts ticking and users eventually get to the MIT pot of gold at the end of the timer.

With software, the only time that happens if after the software is abandoned. At that point, there's rarely many people interested in using it anyhow.

<comment><USER12> I haven't read the license fully, but wouldn't that just mean you would be able to use releases that are older than the time period specified?

<comment><USER13> That's my reading as well. It's actually kind of funny to me: the term of copyright has grown so long that folks are essentially looking for ways to reimplement reasonable copyright term length inside of the construct of copyright protection itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "ECC released its implementation of Halo 2 under the TGPPL license."

This had me confused and excited for a second. Alas, it's hot the Halo 2 I was thinking of.

</comment><comment><USER15> This license sort of sounds like a patent. The creators get to make some money for a little while and then it gives everyone access to the software.

<comment><USER16> In fact, it almost sounds like copyright—or, would have, if not for disney.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _"Congress shall have power… to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."_

Depends on the time limit. US copyright was once 23 years, now it's 95-120 years in the US. If this is for 1 year, well, maybe. If it's for 10 years, no.

And can it be "evergreened", with the time limit running out 1 year after the most recent change? (See MPEG-LA for how to do that.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Can someone better-versed in legalese explain how this works? What is the restriction before the 12 months (and what happens after that?). Say I make money from the code, what about the contributors? Do they contribute code and get nothing for it, or am I supposed to pay them a cut?

<comment><USER19> If I'm reading the blog post right, it's essentially MIT for 12 months after you make changes, then (A?)GPL after. (To be clear, not those actual licenses.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can someone summarize in like 2 sentences what this license is trying to solve?

The article mentions underfunding, but since this is a license and not a price tag I don't see how this is going to change that. Also from the comments it reads like this is going to limit usage within "big $$$ cloud providers". Well, my wild guess would be that such projects would get even less attention (read as: money) then.

</comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me of Sentry's model: [https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing- sentry](https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry)

<comment><USER22> Their BSL has a 3 year period (whereas this license has a 1 year period). Sentry also admit it is by definition not an open source license since it has restrictions on particular uses.

TGGPL claims to be open source and probably is because everyone gets the same rights. But you are always potentially looking at code that is a year behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've never understood why there isn't a dev framework to allow users to "unlock" certain FOSS features.

E.g., you scroll through a list of already implemented/tested features that are stored somewhere that isn't publicly accessible, perhaps with demo videos if it's UI stuff. Each one is priced. If someone pays the price, then the source for the feature gets automerged (if possible) and ships with the next version of the software.

If it's served by the same maintainers who run the project then there's no trust issues with it.

<comment><USER24> So you want developers to spend a lot of time making new features on spec?

<comment><USER23> That's what FOSS developers already do. It's just that typically they don't get paid for it at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sounds radicałly similar to: [https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php](https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php)

</comment><comment><USER26> This doesn't seem like it actually solves the capture problem, though. The most egregious cases I can think of of third-party capture involve taking a project, bundling it with infrastructure, and offering it via a SaaS model (obviously thinking of Kafka, Elastichsearch, Postgres, MySQL, etc. via AWS). Only direct modifications to the project source are covered by the license, right? So the infrastructure code that make it easy to create instances of the product (but don't involve changes to the product code directly) aren't affected.

</comment><comment><USER27> >Radically...

I vaguely remember reading a similar Open Source License, but couldn't google it.

And it reads very AGPL like. Which may be a big no no for many Cooperation and Enterprise. And what if the Author Set a Grace Period of 50 years or longer?

It feels to me a solution looking for problem.

<comment><USER28> It is a solution for people who want to keep their software proprietary because they think they can't make money out of it if it is open source. All the while they get to claim credit for it being "open source".

The problem is that this license completely obliterates the major points of OSS licenses - which are open collaboration and security. Nobody is going to contribute and fix bugs in old versions of the software which may not even work anymore (e.g. because some underlying protocol or infrastructure have changed already).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is just more license proliferation and a solution to a nonexistent problem. Releasing software under a license like the GPL doesn't somehow prevent you from making money from it. See Ardour - GPLv2, paid binaries.

<comment><USER30> ... and collecting US$17-20k per month (post COVID19 expansion, or was it just version 6.0?)

<comment><USER31> Super! My understand is that Krita's distribution through app stores has a similar flavor - it's pure GPL, no tricks, but people pay for the convenience and assurance of downloading the official version of the app.

My personal feeling is that as PC's become more locked down and less under user control, paying for the digitally signed version might increasingly become a viable business model. Trademarks and TOS enforcement might be a more effective moat against being undercut than copyrights and licenses.</comment></comment></comment>


Intel kills consumer Larrabee - <AUTHOR> http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/12/04/intel-kills-consumer-larrabee-focuses-future-variants/

<comment><USER2> Man, this was my last hope at having decently-performing graphics hardware with well-written and well-supported Linux drivers.

Maybe someday AMD will release enough information about ATi's cards that the open-source drivers will become as reliable and featureful as Intel's...

<comment><USER3> Not sure what you mean, NVIDIA hardware works great on Linux and I use it on a daily basis.

Are you referring to the fact that NVIDIA's drivers aren't open-source? Well, there is no reason to expect that Larrabee's would have been.

In any case, there is probably nothing interesting in the driver source code anyway. (A lot of "copy this buffer of instructions to the GPU, this buffer back" and not much else.)

<comment><USER2> My understanding is that a lot of new X11 features (such as XRandR, GEM memory managment, kernel mode-setting and so forth) are added to the core and to the open-source drivers, and closed-source drivers lag behind significantly. Also, I've a friend with an nVidia-based laptop, and suspend/resume apparently works about one time in ten, while it worked flawlessly on my Intel-based laptop.

Also, apart from the Paulsbro/GMA500 fiasco (which was contracted out to a third party), all Intel's graphics hardware has had open-source drivers written by Intel themselves, so it doesn't seem too extreme to expect similar support for Larrabee.

<comment><USER3> > it doesn't seem too extreme to expect similar support for Larrabee

You have a point, but I think the reason NVIDIA doesn't open-source the drivers is the same as the reason Larrabee _probably_ wouldn't open-source them - i.e. fear of releasing the details of the GPU design to the competition. Current Intel's graphics has nothing to hide from NVIDIA, but Lrrabee would. But of course, this is just speculation, especially now that no consumer Larrabee is on the horizon...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't the great thing about consumer GPU processing like Nvidia's Cuda that it's pretty much everywhere, even in consumer devices? So that some research guy can convert his number-crunching code to run in parallel with Cuda right on his own workstation and see if it works.

If it does, then he can later put it up and running on a more efficient server or cluster. But initially he gets to try if X times speed up works for him, without getting any special hardware just to try out.

</comment><comment><USER5> Disappointing but not terribly surprising. The programming expertise just isn't there for consumer applications, yet, whereas for HPC many problems come close to being embarrassingly parallel.

Oh well. Another time, perhaps.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's too bad. More competition in the consumer market would probably have been good for consumers and for the pace of technological progress.

<comment><USER7> The article mentions a shift in focus, from consumer to HPC/Development.

I doubt it's gone forever, maybe just delayed.

I think the consumer market for Larabee is much smaller than HPC, so it makes sense for Intel to chase that money instead.</comment></comment>


A World Run with Code - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/05/a-world-run-with-code/ <comment><USER19> >Right now, most of what the computers in the world do is to execute tasks we basically initiate. But increasingly our world is going to involve computers autonomously interacting with each other, according to computational contracts. Once something happens in the world—some computational fact is established—we'll quickly see cascades of computational contracts executing. And there'll be all sorts of complicated intrinsic randomness in the interactions of different computational acts.

I don't think it takes a math genius to see how this is a bad idea. In the same way that trading algorithms can get into a feedback loop that crash markets, these "computational contracts" can cause cascading failures that hurt society as a whole. This is why human intelligence is so critical in running society: it has the ability to question whether its "programming" is correct and having the intended effects, and adjust accordingly. Computational contracts have no such introspection, by definition. They resolve because the rules are satisfied, for better or worse.

And all of that isn't even considering the attack surface area for malicious actors to target.

<comment><USER20> In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now.

While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larger and larger sub-worlds. e.g, if all cars were self-driving, I am reasonably sure we can design traffic to be more efficient with all cars coordinating with each other instead of humans trying to do so.

<comment><USER21> "My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different."

I can give you a _partial_ answer, which is that human intelligence is somewhat slower, which mitigates the ability to crash the entire economy in 15 seconds. That's why a stock market can crash in 15 seconds nowadays, but "the housing market" can't. This gives people some time to do some things about it with some degree of thought, rather than all the agents in the system suddenly being forced to act in whatever manner they can afford to act with 15 milliseconds of computation to decide.

<comment><USER22> That's also why there are trading halts built into all major exchanges, so if something triggers a large fall, there is a circuit breaker in the decision process of 18-48 hours for people to process and digest information

<comment><USER23> Just FYI, NYSE Rule 80B[1] halts trading for 15 minutes, or until the next day if the first 2 levels are breached. CME follows similar rules.

1 - [http://wallstreet.cch.com/nyse/rules/nyse- rules/chp_1_3/chp_...](http://wallstreet.cch.com/nyse/rules/nyse- rules/chp_1_3/chp_1_3_4/chp_1_3_4_21/default.asp)

<comment><USER24> Just for fun here's a link to a 2010 flash crash before those rules were in place where a trillion dollars were dropped in half an hour due to algorithms.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to, not because I want to.

In other words, if I could easily use the Mathematica library from Clojure, I wouldn't give the Wolfram Language a second glance. I can't think of even a single language aspect that would tempt me to use the Wolfram Language [context: I've been a Mathematica user since 1993] over Clojure. I have (much) better data structures, a consistent library for dealing with them, transducers, core.async, good support for parallel computation, pattern matching through core.match, and finally a decent programming interface with a REPL, which I can use from an editor that does paren-matching for me (ever tried to debug a complex Mathematica expression with mismatched parens/brackets/braces?).

This is why the man is a contradiction: his thoughts are undeniably interesting, but his focus and anchoring in the "Wolfram Language" is jarring.

<comment><USER26> It's quite clear what he is saying. Programming languages are what programmers use. And how programmers think is dominated by how a computer works, which is usually a gigantic distraction to actually solving real world problems.

Newton, Maxwell and Einstein didn't need to waste any of their time thinking about how to use a computer to solve the problems they worked on.

If I ask Google for the 2018 Wimbledon Champ it tells me it has found 47,00,000 results in (0.90 seconds). Take a step back and think about this.

They have their own knowledge graph. They have Wikipedia access. They have the ATP site cached. They have the Wimbledon site cached. But they aren't able to tell the problem being solved doesn't need 4.7 Million results.

This is the kind of mindlessness that happens when the focus is not on the actual problem, but what the computer can do.

<comment><USER27> "Newton, Maxwell and Einstein didn't need to waste any of their time thinking about how to use a computer to solve the problems they worked on."

Actually a lost bit of maths history is that computation ability was really important, it was just really manual. Think about Gauss doing least squares to find the orbital parameters of Ceres by hand! Then the stories about him being able to multiply large numbers in his head start to make a bit more sense, not just as a parlor trick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not directly related to the article, but going through the comments, I felt the vibes and wanted to express my theory about what it is that irritates many of the commenters here

The highest pursuit is the search for truth. This includes the challenging act of discarding things that we'd really like to be true, but are false. The success of science can be attributed to extreme selfless intellectual honesty. The more ego gets in the way, the more the truth is compromised. Intelligence can be used in service of finding truth or in feeding our delusions. My view on the distinctions made here between genius and madness are that they correspond to the degree in which intelligence serves truth or delusions. Therefore I'd expect the most outstanding scientists in history were also very humble (perhaps someone with better knowledge on the personality of great scientists can shed more light on this).

And to keep things consistent - I might be wrong and thus welcome challenges to this theory :)

<comment><USER29> While I definitely agree with you that this is the general pattern in life, the thing is that people aren't always either humble or arrogant, and it is possible to see the truth while being arrogant too. Even Wolfram must have days, or hours, maybe minutes - let's say seconds - when he's humble. And sometimes he also sees the truth while being arrogant.

Therefor it's a form of arrogance to dismiss (generally) arrogant people as always wrong. We have to be selective or we might miss something important they've seen.

Wolfram is a combination of irritating ego and inspiration.

<comment><USER28> You are absolutely correct and I even deleted an entire section in my original post how things are never just black or white but it got too long. Thanks for bringing it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I had this thought when I was 13 and first learned the basics of programming "hey dad if everything is determined by physics and chemistry and computers are real good at math can't we analytically deduce the future."

I eventually learned this was just the 13 year old's version of "why's the sky blue?" into "but why is Rayleigh scattering a thing?" and there are several limitations to both human understanding of science, and theoretical computation limits -- a computer to have sufficient accuracy to model the world would by definition need to have as much memory as the world, and model itself _in_ it. I moved on from that idea shortly after learning of that.

Is Stephen Wolfram just an overgrown child? Maybe unironically that's what being a genius is about.

<comment><USER31> > a computer to have sufficient accuracy to model the world would by > definition need to have as much memory as the world, and model itself in it.

But what if we had certain "compression" abilities that allowed us to simplify the world? Similar to how storing an audio codec lets us massively minimize how much storage we need for music?

<comment><USER30> Magical compression algorithms that have amazing compression ratios _and_ amazingly computational cost to reasonably decompress to process the data could theoretically raise the upper bound of a computational world. But compression cannot solve for an unbounded recursion problem in the simulator having to model itself it's model of the world, unless we arrived at an analytical closed-form solution for any prediction rather than relying on any modeling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> To be honest I haven't understood much of this.

Am I also the only one who's very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call "biological thinking" and computation.

Even though I don't know much of the theory behind AI, to me it's similar to saying that since we have lots of simple calculators, we can arrange them together in some specific way and emergent intelligence will arise.

Sure yes I mean but you can say that about everything: let's arrange a bunch of forks together and intelligence might emerge.

And actually from a math point of view you could luckily arrange some forks together and have intelligence since intelligence seems to emerge from an arrangement of atoms.

I don't see why computation has to get a go at intelligent, while anything else not. What's so unique about computation?

<comment><USER33> The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple calculators in ways that produce impressive results. Google search, world champion chess players, Fortnite are all examples.

I don't know of any impressive results with arranging forks. If there were, you could model the fork behavior on computers and probably run it 1000000x faster.

It's certainly possible that some other elements than the simple calculators we use today will lead to the big breakthrough in AI. Perhaps quantum computation is needed. But right now, arrangements of simple calculators seem like the most promising.

<comment><USER34> > The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple > calculators in ways that produce impressive results.

I view that as biological intelligence figuring out all sorts of clever ways to make calculating tools produce impressive results.

> Perhaps quantum computation is needed.

But why invoke physics if we're comparing biological intelligence to our computing tools? Isn't it enough to note the big differences? And here I'm not talking so much brain function as I am being a living, social animal that has to survive with a vast human culture.

This is the difference between looking at computers as as stepping stones to artificial replacements as opposed to enhancing our abilities. The AI stuff captures the imagination, promises fully automated utopias, scares us with apocalyptic scenarios, and is the stuff of lots of SciFi. While the reality is that computers have always been tools aiding human intelligence.

For some reason we view these tools as one day being like Pinocchio. The mythos of the movie AI is based on that vision where the robot boy becomes obsessed with a the blue fairy turning him into a real boy so his adoptive biological mother will love him and take him back.

But maybe like in the movie, someday the sentient robots will show up and gave our robot boy his wish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I watch his live CEOing youtube occasionally. Is quite interesting, but at some point I feel like I am stuck in a work meeting, with no real objections (understandably) being posed to Wolframs proposals.

I also think the word computation is used a bit too grandiosely by Wolfram. Which is evidenced in the writing here.

I do admire Wolfram for even advertising his CEOing meetings though. He goes into the detail to a level you would not necessarily think a CEO would do. Credit where credit is due, he is not shy. Many CEO's would not bother.

I mean, technically, everything is a computation, but we accredit actually complex things to that term, not everything. To use it "whilly-nilly" deflates the words impact.

</comment><comment><USER36> The idea of small rules leading to large patterns is not something Wolfram invented, but he seems to think he did. I think Conway's game of life predates it, as does Mandelbrot, then there is the Durer pentagon.

Maybe there is a something I am missing though?

<comment><USER37> From what I have heard, what you're missing is Wolfram's ego. That's why he magnifies the importance of what he has done.

<comment><USER38> I mean, Mathematica is a truly great, great piece of software, but his "New Kind of Science" was both utterly worthless and a fantastic treatise on how a person's grandiose religion of self leads to utter delusion.

<comment><USER39> I started to read it when I college, and read hundreds of pages into it before I started to realize that there was nothing there. The entire book can be summed up as "complexity arises from multiple iterations on simplicity" and, like, you can teach that to a middle schooler in a day, no need for a thousands of pages-long tome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> So he's comparing his eponymous programming language to the arrival of mathematical notation 400 or so years ago, and the advent of written language.

<comment><USER41> Yep. That kind of thing is pretty much par for the course for Wolfram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> perhaps wolfram is parodying his main idea in his work output. from a basic origin he's creating monstrous bloat and complexity, as a type of demonstrative self-referential proof.

there are people who write code until it works, and people who rewrite until it doesn't. room enough for both.

<comment><USER43> Excellent observation. Perhaps it's a twist on Conway's Law?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> If anyone is interested, Wolfram does what he calls "Live CEOing", and streams his sprints on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/user/WolframResearch](https://www.youtube.com/user/WolframResearch)

<comment><USER45> These sessions are streamed live on Twitch, too.

These sessions are vastly interesting. I think many commenters here should listen-in sometime.

The Wolfram Language is hard because mapping knowledge is hard.

What many people here call "ego" is one guy, and his talented team, tackling an enormous problem nobody has licked. So far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I love some optimistic view of software like I had when I first started into computers.

</comment><comment><USER47> Think of all the people in prison, justly or unjustly, under our current system where humans have to interpret and carry out our legal code. We may extend these practices into every domain at negligible cost. Why do we desire authority without conscience? I can think of two reasons: one, we do not wish to hold ourselves accountable; two, we desire to see the strong afflict the weak.

</comment><comment><USER48> Did he claim to invent computational irreducibility? Wasn't that Goedel or Turing or someone like that?

<comment><USER49> He claims it often. Yes, it was Turing, mostly based on previous work.

The worst part is that he misses the detail it being possible to describe all of Math as computation (so they are perfectly equivalent) and creates entire books with keen observations of how much of Math one can describe as computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Wolfram might be a genius, but I personally find his writing and lectures extremely dull. The only thing he seems to write is how everything is "computational", and how we need to embrace his idea that computing is what the whole universe is about. For example in this blog post alone, we can find this following word count:

      computer - <USER2>
      computation* - <USER3>
      computational - <USER4>

Make everything computational!

      computational intelligence - <USER17>
      computational contracts - <USER7>
      computational universe - <USER7>
      computational language - <USER8>
      computational thinking - <USER17>
      computational fact - <USER18>
      computational acts - <USER18>
      computational equivalence - <USER12>
      computational irreducibility - <USER13>
      computational system - <USER18>
      computational process - <USER18>
      computational work - <USER18>
      computational essays - <USER17>
      computational law - <USER18>

Throwing all these words around may sound smart but they lose any meaning or relevance that they were supposed to deliver if being overused in such a larger-than-life manner.

</rant>

<comment><USER51> Welcome to Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram is madly in love with his own ideas, even when those ideas are not nearly as original or world-shakingly profound as he seems to think they are. That he is a genius does not mean he is not in a state of arrested development; prodigious genius like his can impede one's development because people around the genius are so in awe of them that they are unwilling to give them the much-needed corrections and reality checks it takes to grow.

<comment><USER52> It's very hard to teach someone whose cup is full. Very smart people can rationalize their bad ideas faster than other people can talk them out of them. But that doesn't mean you've actually explained yourself. If you can't explain things to other people, do you really understand it yourself?

At this point Wolfram is lost to us. "What the hell are you talking about, Steve?". I was just fantasizing about resurrecting Richard Feynman and having him ask Wolfram this question but it turns out I don't have to:

In a letter from Richard Feynman to Stephen Wolfram:

> You don't understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" \- so > you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience > - but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal > with them in an effective way.

> Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical > people as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my > advice, my friend.

<comment><USER53> > If you can't explain things to other people, do you really understand it > yourself?

I hear this said every now and then and I don't think I agree with it.

A lot of knowledge builds on other knowledge. And the other knowledge might be required in order to understand the knowledge that one wishes to share.

So then either you have to explain it all, or you will have to simplify dramatically.

Few people will want the full explanation — it would take _much_ more time to explain than they would ever want to spend listening. And I am not saying that to criticize those people. The same goes for myself — there are very many things I wish I could understand deeply. But there simply is not enough time. Specialization is necessary. We must pick the few things that interest or have the most use to us, if we wish to have a chance to truly understand any topic deeply at all. And even in the topics we choose there will be a lot of subtopics that we won't ever have time to understand as fully as we would desire.

Even if they did want to listen the amount of information could be so huge that it might take several years to explain all of it. And so it can't be done.

So instead we have to simplify. A lot. Unfortunately, when we simplify we often end up skipping crucial information and might even communicate the knowledge wrongly. In the cases where at least we don't communicate it wrongly there is still a significant risk I think that one or several of

\- the truth,

\- the value, and/or

\- the utility

of the knowledge we try to share is not possible to see without a lot of context that would take too much time to explain.

I have seen time and time again other people jump from

\- the fact that someone was unable to explain something in a satisfying way

to

\- concluding that the person that tried to explain it doesn't himself/herself understand it

When really I think the real conclusion should instead be that it is impossible to determine at that present time whether what is being said is correct. But that neither means that the other person doesn't know, nor that they do know!

I think the fundamental problem is that we keep insisting that things should be simple when the reality of the matter is that they just aren't. Or perhaps there _is_ some simpler answer but the only path known by the person to understanding the knowledge they possess is based on the knowledge they learned before they learned the knowledge in question. Then it could be possible for that person to boil it down to something that does indeed both hold truth and is simple to explain. And perhaps that it is what it means to understand something at the deepest possible level — to have the explanation worked out so that it builds on the fewest and most simple prior knowledge required. But to sit down and make those simplifications could also take years. And unless it is the job or the desire of the person holding the knowledge to spend all of that time they could spend on other things just to work out the simplest possible explanation of the knowledge then it won't make sense for them to do so.

There are a few things more I would like to say about my thoughts on this too but I think this comment of mine has probably turned into a big wall of text already. So instead I will conclude with saying that I think that the ability of one person to explain something to someone else

\- relies on their own understanding yes

but

\- it relies to a much greater extent on the amount of knowledge that both parties already share

and

\- a lot of things in daily life builds on things we all know already, and does not extend it too much, so it is quick to explain and simple to understand

but

\- some knowledge is so far removed from shared knowledge, at least by the path to it known by the person trying to explain it, that it is for all practical purposes impossible for that person to explain to the other

<comment><USER54> You highlight a common fallacy that is repeated across the internet: "If you can't explain to me why I'm wrong, then I must be right," or something similar. But as you point out, this assumes that an explanation can be written in just a few paragraphs, which usually isn't the case. It takes years of study and experience to become an expert in a given field, and as a result, it becomes too difficult to accurately convey the necessary information to get a point across.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> As much as I wish Wolfram would dial back the egocentric tone in places, this is overall an excellent read

<comment><USER56> I wish he'd cite sources rather than implying by omission that everything is his idea. There's a reason _A New Kind of Science_ was self-published.

<comment><USER57> Bought the book some years ago, but never really got through it. Keeping it handy though in case I need to knock out a burglar. Thing is massive, shipping was half the cost ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> > And, yes, there's only basically one full computational language that exists > in the world today—and it's the one I've spent the past three decades > building—the Wolfram Language.

:/

<comment><USER38> If he means, from a mathematical point of view, Mathematica's ability to both symbolically and numerically solve advanced mathematical systems of equations, he's not technically wrong, even if his oversized ego oozes out of every word he utters.

If, however, he's talking about general computational systems vis a vis creating programs to run on today's microprocessors, he has obviously drunk too much of his own kool-aid.

<comment><USER59> > ability to both symbolically and numerically solve advanced mathematical > systems of equations.

I mean, python, matlab, julia, octave, sage, and maple would all fit that definition I think. I do think Mathematica's CAS is the best in the business but not the only player for sure.

I'm sure Steven has something in mind that sets Wolfram Language apart, just not sure what that is.</comment></comment></comment>