Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-06/bill-gates-aims-to-save-233-billion-by-reinventing-the-toilet <comment><USER2> This reminds me of software developer who favor deep, technical, architectural work instead of attractive, "sounds cool on paper" sort of work.

To an outsider, the animations look cool but the engine that drives the animation is cooler to software engineers.

Point being, this is not something a normal philanthropist would imagine being cool and awesome. This takes someone who actually cares about shit (in this case literally) to invest time and money into it.

<comment><USER3> One thing I always thought fascinating about Gates was his candid relationship with feces.

mindfuplay's comment reminded me of the famous glass of shit water Gates drank from his Omniprocessor project [0].

But within that 2015 article, Gates mentions a long term plan for seweage and shit[1]:

>If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.

>Western toilets aren't the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn't feasible in many poor countries.

He also mentions he wrote about toilets before in a 2012 article titled "Reflections on the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge."[2]

Digging deeper into that article brought me to a PDF from the Gates Foundation outlining grants from their 2011 program: "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge" [3]

————

[0]:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVzppWSIFU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVzppWSIFU0)

[1]:[https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Omniprocessor-From- Po...](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Omniprocessor-From-Poop-to- Potable)

[2]:[https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Reflections-on-the- Re...](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Reflections-on-the-Reinvent-the- Toilet-Challenge)

[3]:[https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/wsh-reinvent- the-...](https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/wsh-reinvent-the-toilet- challenge.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Western toilets seem to work reasonably well with septic tanks in rural areas. Those don't involve sewer lines or treatment plants.

<comment><USER5> The issue comes down to cost. As he mentions in the article, the goal is to get to 5 cents a day. Just a basic calculation, a "standard" septic system costs between $1500-4000 to install, and lasts roughly 25 years. Just doing the math on the low end costs brings you to about $0.16 cents a day, 3X the goal Bill Gates is advocating.

Note: this isn't even taking into account the cost of the toilet itself or any plumbing needed.

<comment><USER6> Really all you'd need to do to drastically improve things is get them to simply dig a hole for an outhouse instead of the rampant open defecation seen in India and some parts of Africa. We can solve the more complex and exponentially expensive problems of water treatment later. Digging a deep hole gets rid of rampant cholera and incidental exposure.

Basically you've got to learn to crawl before you can run a 10k.

edit: You can get someone who is completely illiterate and cut off from civilization to understand the concept of digging a hole for the shit to go in. This has the added benefit of not requiring advanced manufacturing technology or materials. they just have to dig a hole and move the outhouse top over to the new hole when the old one gets full. This makes them self reliant.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't really work for China though. Plenty of public toilets around, and people (mostly children) will still take a shit in the street.

Hell, I was in Chongqing a couple months ago and saw a teenager literally unzip, in full view of everyone, and pea on (on, not into) a recycling bin. Next to a god damn public toilet.

In the middle of a shopping center.

Near a police officer.

A lot of people just don't care.

<comment><USER8> If you gotta go, I guess?

I've seen people poop on the train platform in NJ. Really crazy, but Newark does not open the bathrooms until 7-8AM. So when you're waiting for the 3AM train to DC... what you gonna do?

<comment><USER9> Hold it.

<comment><USER10> Seriously. I can barely hold a piss with age.

<comment><USER9> We are talking about someone defecating on a train station platform.

<comment><USER10> I've a good 'decent' friend, who had to take a shit on the station platform. Because there was no other option available at the time. Some people can not hold their bowels. I'm sure he'd have surrendered to the station toilets if they were open. UK trains and stations frequently have shut or out of order toilets. I've foolishly hung on, thinking the train will be an option, only to discover it's a no can do. I'll go alfresco every time given the opportunity these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As an African, I can't help but think that all this charity to Africa might be contributing to us lagging behind in the world. With charities helping out so much, will the local government ever get their act together and provide these functions of public sanitation like they are supposed to? Or will they keep stealing public health funds in the knowledge that charity will always swoop down to save the day?

Charities work with the premise of preventing suffering, but most developed countries can point to a "great suffering" that made them quickly turn their shit around, akin to an addict hitting rock bottom. I would liken charity in Africa to the enabler who always features in morbidly obese people's lives, constantly bringing the person food out of a misplaced sense of love, where perhaps the truly loving thing to do would be to let the person hit rock bottom and change themselves.

<comment><USER12> We don't know if these systems will get better without external interference either. Another post on this page talks about fixing systematic corruption within African countries as being more helpful, but that's a hard problem also.

One solution I could think of is a foreign investor investing a lot of money into the campaign of a candidate who isn't corrupt. The caveat of that solution is the perspective that it would be foreign intervention in the political matters of a separate sovereign entity, thus generating discourse among natives.

Another solution is to raise money to raise political awareness, and use that money for programs that get natives to understand the differing positions of candidates (and towards the infrastructure for voting itself).

BUT it's a lot easier to focus on the immediate relief of general ailments such as life threatening diseases, and proper utilities to make the lives of the general public easier. This way natives of poorer countries won't have to worry about things we take for granted in the west, and can spend their time focusing on the systematic issues that caused those time consuming problems in the first place.

My line of thought in a way aligns with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Before one can begin worrying about psychological needs, one must have their basic needs met.

<comment><USER13> How much does it really help to have a noncorrupt leader of government when a large part of the bureaucracy below them is corrupt? Rooting out corruption is a terribly difficult problem that takes decades.

<comment><USER14> I read somewhere that removing corruption is a bottom-up process, not a top- down one. That is, the culture has to change. There has to be a grassroots movement to eliminate corruption. If society as a whole does not care about it, then it matters not whether the people at the top are corrupt or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I admire Gates a lot, but for him and way too many technophiles the answer is somehow always tech.

Africa does not have a toilet problem. Or a tech problem. Or even a resources problem. They have a lack of intelligent social organization problem; i.e. dysfunctional or non-existent institutions, laws and organizational structures, as well as myriad forms of corruption from top to bottom that make it impossible to create the systems that would otherwise keep them healthy, sanitary, safe, well-fed yada yada.

Maybe he could publicly ask, how every year, the Minister of Finance in Nigeria publishes a note indicating there is somehow billions of dollars missing from the coffers, that didn't make it over from the Ministry of Petro Resources, i.e Oil [1]? Or the like. Tackling the more obvious, glaring wide- open 'in our faces but we ignore anyhow' forms of corruption might be a good start, and would ultimately yield a lot more than functional toilets.

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/ni...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/nigeria- oil-corruption-buhari/473850/)

<comment><USER16> That's super callous and cynical. "Some African governments are corrupt so don't do anything." Deaths from malaria in Africa fell from 800,000 per year in 2000 to 400,000 per year today because of the introduction of affordable mosquito nets. That fact alone refutes your entire arguement.

<comment><USER15> My take is not cynical, it's pragmatic, moreover, I didn't imply that Gates shouldn't doing what he is doing.

"Deaths from malaria in Africa fell from 800,000 per year in 2000 to 400,000 per year today because of the introduction of affordable mosquito nets. That fact alone refutes your entire arguement."

This statement only enhances my argument. Africa is a bountiful land of resources and ostensible human capital for labour. They should _easily_ be able to afford (or make their own) mosquito nets.

Consider the vast numbers of unemployed people - and that making 'mosquito nets' doesn't require any skill or frankly machinery. The only ostensible 'import' would be some very inexpensive textiles. We're talking a few pennies per person. And that the 'upside' from the effort would yield dramatic benefits, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of saved lives. How on earth are zillions of people dying from something that literally only a few million dollars in 'external financing' (if they don't have the money, which they do) - and some pragmatic planning - should solve? That there needed to be intervention to solve this problem only highlights how dramatically dysfunctional the situation must be.

And as far as 'some' governments, no, it's pretty much all of them, maybe save Botswana, the shinning example, at least for now. [1]

Also - it's not just 'governments', and it's not just 'corruption' \- it's lack of civic function all the way up and down society.

[1] [https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept...](https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It many not be cool and glamorous but dealing with human waste in a hygienic way has been one of the biggest benefits to society that not many people think about. Better toilets means better overall hygiene which means less people sick which means a stronger more reliable workforce and less money wasted on easy to prevent illnesses.

For all of the negative things Bill Gates did when at Microsoft I am glad to see most of the money he made from those actions are being used for such positive things now rather than just going back into SV startups and the like.

</comment><comment><USER18> Okay, I'll bite. I was at a urinal today that had a mesh screen of a style I'd never noticed, and I thought: Some guy with a degree in engineering/fluid dynamics has this on his resume.

But when you consider there are what, 3.5 billion or so males on the planet, the benefits of urinal hygiene add up pretty quickly.

[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/08/urinal- splashback-...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/08/urinal-splashback- avoid-byu-wizz-kids_n_4234241.html)

<comment><USER19> A few years ago (maybe 10) we started getting "waterless" urinals in the UK. I assume that was a materials improvement (extreme hydrophobic coatings?). They have an outlet pipe, but no inlet.

That must save a lot of piping and water.

<comment><USER20> Not a materials improvement, but an improvement in the shape of the bowl, so mostly a direct result of better hydrodynamic and CAD modeling.

Not only do they use less water, but they /smell better/ \-- most of the "smell of urine" results from the pee being added to, and reacting with, water, so no water, no noticeable odour.

<comment><USER19> They are plastic though, whilst water flushed toilets, eg in pubs, are always (?) ceramic.

Seems that it could be retrofitted easily by replacing the trap if the materials aren't important.

I wonder if patent expiration is responsible for the apparent increase in use of similar systems.

Thanks for your correction.

[https://www.waterless.com/how-do-waterless-urinals- work/](https://www.waterless.com/how-do-waterless-urinals-work/)

<comment><USER20> Interesting; I've only ever seen ceramic waterless urinals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've always wondered why we never really saw toilets in Star Trek. They never really could re-imagine them back then (or now).

I have several fully automatic Totos (which have to abide by California/US water usage rules).. and while the bidets, seat heating, and automisting (it sprays water every 15-30 seconds to try to keep the bowl clean) features are nice the water limits and bowl design make it a pain to clean and maintain if you get what I mean. It's also basically useless if theres no electricity, I believe you can manually flush once if the power goes out with a pull-cord. For western/developed countries I think there is still a big market for a better toilet.

In developing countries obviously infrastructure is an issue, but for sewage would a composting toilet not be a viable option? Maybe solar powered for some higher power exhaust and ventilation along with water treatment/sanitation. It's kind of the low tech version of how Star Trek would turn matter into energy.

<comment><USER22> > _I 've always wondered why we never really saw toilets in Star Trek._

When the original series was made, you couldn't show a toilet on TV – it simply wasn't allowed.

But, beginning in 1989 with the release of the feature film _Star Trek V: The Final Frontier_ , you do get the occasional glimpse of an actual toilet here and there.

[http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Toilet](http://memory- alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Toilet)

<comment><USER19> Allowed as in illegal? Which country, what regulations?

<comment><USER23> In the USA: [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/potty- time/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/potty-time/)

<comment><USER19> Which intimates it was allowed but that studio policies, it again intimates, might be responsible. It does say one single TV series never showed a toilet, but only a tank.

Interesting taboo nonetheless.

I always thought it was just not done because it generally isn't moving a story on to show someone on the toilet. Books don't usually mention characters using the toilet either. I've played videogames with an eating mechanic but never one where you needed to defecate (though Sims could when I last played that).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> TOTO has been researching and improving toilets for many years. I've been to their Toilet museum in Kitakyushu, Japan and it's just amazing the research they put into it, specially in water savings measures. What's missing for them, it's to make them more affordable to everyone.

<comment><USER25> Many Japanese companies could make so much money if they'd figure out the international markets.

<comment><USER26> Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Sony, Nintendo, Canon, Suzuki, Yamaha, Panasonic, Toshiba, etc. are household names. I'd say that the Japanese have plenty of internationally-savvy brands, I wouldn't pity them :p

<comment><USER25> For sure. The thing is, Japan is very industrious and innovative in certain areas, it could have many more international players if it would push more abroad. Much of their services sector for example is almost purely concentrated on domestic market. Same goes for heavy industries, household devices and media industries, with some exceptions in gaming. Toto is a perfect example - they were 20+ years early in washlet innovation but never marketed them much abroad. There's a tendency of giving up after just timid marketing campaigns abroad I think. The most successful examples are mainly where they've built up foreign subsidiaries with a certain amount of autonomy, such as Honda & Toyota in US and Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Shit article. Basically it says, Gates has poured money into sanitation, and went to an expo.

No info about the technology, but there is mention of 5cents a day running cost. That's cheaper than my existing provider, so count me in.

Closing quotes were good.

"I never imagined that I'd know so much about poop," Gates said in remarks prepared for the Beijing event. "And I definitely never thought that Melinda would have to tell me to stop talking about toilets and fecal sludge at the dinner table."

Bypass the article.

</comment><comment><USER27> Toilets are a great example of how technological progress isn't just endless improvement. Sometimes we hit complete dead ends even on the simplest problems.

<comment><USER19> There have been lots of toilet innovations "recently".

Toilets that use excrement to generate electricity, for example, like in this situation [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41680867](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41680867).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I read the headline and thought, "That's weird, Gates isn't really interested in things that just save money these days." And sure enough, from the article:

> _"...may help end almost 500,000 infant deaths and save $233 billion > annually in costs linked to diarrhea, cholera and other diseases..."_

So I guess that's Bloomberg for you. 233 billion dollars is a way more interesting lede than a mere half a million lives.

<comment><USER29> Things that aren't cost effective don't normally work at scale. So this is what differentiates it from a feel-good PR stunt that will go nowhere. Cynical to be sure, but grounded in historical precedent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Gandhi would be proud.

[https://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2015/10/01/5-things-mahatma- ga...](https://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2015/10/01/5-things-mahatma-gandhi-said- about-sanitation/)

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

<comment><USER31> I've always believed that one of the signs that humanity is headed towards a post-scarcity world is when every human has access to a working toilet with a sanitized plumbing system. Glad to see Gates putting so many resources into solving this issue.

Perhaps we need to start having a conversation about which 'version' of Gates has had a bigger impact on society(not that it matters, but an interesting intellectual pursuit). I vote for post-Microsoft Gates, though I would imagine I'm in the minority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have to ask: the results of this research are amazing, but isn't this something that we should all realize is of material importance? Why did it take the funding of a benevolent economic dictator?

If you question my assertion of his economic role, this podcast [1] goes into the questionable aspects of the philanthropy of the Gates Foundation and some of the experiments being run in Africa without popular democratic input or consent.

[1] [https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-46-the-not-so- be...](https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-46-the-not-so-benevolent- billionaire-part-ii-bill-gates-in-africa-4329389dd4a3)

<comment><USER33> Most democracies are not even good at funding medical research for dramatic, emotionally immediate diseases like cancer or dementia. One can only imagine the response that tabloids like Bild, the Daily Mail or Fox News would have if any of our countries spent $200m on toilets for the developing world. This is a perfect example of why capitalism works in my opinion, because you have power bases who can independently pursue unfashionable or undramatic ideas without having to pursuade a population of millions to back them in advance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> >> contained as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells

Journalists can't grasp that saying a rotavirus is a cell is like stretching a wrench to be a SUV? What kind of twisted education system can get somebody to become so proficient with words and so noob in basic science?

<comment><USER35> "200 trillion rotavirus cells," at least in other sources, is written as a direct quotation from Gates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Toilet Day was recognized by UN in 2013 and is celebrated on November 19th. I guess this report was issued in preparation.

UN still doesn't recognize International Men's Day, which is on Nov 19 too and celebrated since 2003 [1]. It's a bit of a humiliation that they put Toilet Day instead.

[1] [http://internationalmensday.com](http://internationalmensday.com)

</comment><comment><USER37> Has anyone tried to make an SV startup-style company sell Japanese-type toilets in America? I think a lot of people would like them

<comment><USER38> I have a couple of Toto toilets in my house. They have washlets that fit most of their products. I have one.

I don't mean to overstate this, but it is life-changing. I can't imagine going back to a time when I used only paper and considered that sufficient.

<comment><USER39> I wanted to get one after visiting Japan, but I realized that it was something that would have to wait until I moved into a place with more than one bathroom, so I could leave a normal toilet in the one guests would use. I just didn't want to have a conversation about it with every person who visited my home.

<comment><USER40> The 'tools' are optional though?

Anyway, install a spray hose behind the toilet out of the way. I've used both the hose and the high-tech toilets and I'd pick the former any day.

<comment><USER41> I echo that the toilet hose or (apparently this is the common slang for them) "bum guns" that you see in many Asian restrooms would be pretty cool to retrofit to a Western restroom (they really are more sanitary than the simple paper wipe, MHO). They are indeed pretty cheap. Scanning forums, though, there are two points I see that one would have to consider.

The first seems to be that hoses / sprayers can be little more prone to leaking or, even in proper operation, creating a bit of a spray mess vs a typical Western toilet installation. Most Asian restrooms designed around toilet hoses have floor drains, so the dangers of general flooding and water mess are a lot less. Western bathrooms typically lack full-room floor drains. This point I can honestly see, which is why the built in washlet might have to be the practical solution for many Western bathroom designs unfortunately.

A more "technical" issue is that these toilet hoses may not be "up to Western code" in some countries per a few forum posts. The impression I get is the code violations are more "technicalities" due to Western code not really considering this concept. Forum posts are not what I would consider an authority, but it is enough where I think it would be a good idea to check with a plumber to see if there's any code the sprayers could somehow violate.

<comment><USER42> When you say "Western", which countries are you referring to? I ask because in Finland at least, bidet showers are very common, although so are floor drains in toilets. Nevertheless, I'm not aware of any widespread issues with leaks or mis-spraying.

<comment><USER41> Sorry, by "Western" I more refer to the countries (United States, Canada, UK) where bidets of any sort do not seem to be common at all. There are also other Western countries (such as France, Germany, and Spain) where I remember bidets being common, but they were stand-alone plumbing fixtures and not a simple hose shower like you see in many Asian countries. This type is probably a lot more expensive to add onto a US bathroom or similar.

I wasn't aware of toilet hoses being standard in Finland, thanks for the information. I'm currently in Malaysia for a couple weeks and personally I am seeing a little bit of mis-spray when using some public restrooms; the misspray issue popped up when looking at forums as well as well. Maybe the issue can be more easily mitigated than I thought (personally, I don't have a problem making sure the spray stays inside the bowl) but plumbing codes might like the drain just in case (it's not easy looking up technical codes in an unfamiliar language so I'm not sure about this though :) ).

It is probably a lot harder to mitigate this type of issue with the "squat" type toilet (you see a random mixture of both types it seems over here).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Gates does wonderful things with his philanthropy. I notice that he doesn't invest in any social issues or in politics, even when the politics is directly related (e.g., does he lobby the politicians or try to move the public regarding education funding?). Why not? Is it a policy?

Prior generations of philanthropists invested heavily in peace and justice, for example, including the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Certainly our society today has major problems in those areas - arguably we have great success with tech, which he does invest in, and have been terrible and social and political issues. Also, those problems in some ways directly harm Gates' goals (for example, U.S. political and racial issues greatly affect U.S. education), in other ways they lead to policies, such as nationalist economics, that will reduce economic activity and thus investment in these issues, and in yet in other ways the problems impose costs on people that dwarf the benefits Gates' programs provide - the oppression of Western-backed dictators and the cost of potential warfare being among them.

I realize I've assumed it's a policy of Gates', but does anyone have real knowledge about why he avoids those issues?

<comment><USER44> Politics is extremely divisive and, even more importantly, is perhaps no longer a major vessel to enact meaningful longterm change. There is of course the issue of one decade's change being overwritten by the next decade's party. But there's something more fundamental. In times past government was able to enact huge changes, because government enacted and enforced policies that directly harmed society. Slavery is the most obvious one. Government worked as an enforcer for slavery and was equally able to end it with little more than a vote and stroke of a pen. But in today's era I think we've started to reach an era of sharply diminishing returns for governmental action because the issues are ones that are less systemic and, in any case, cannot be directly solved by government in any completely clear way.

For instance you mention education. If you poll most people on our state of education in the US the results would have little to nothing to do with reality. And that reality is that we already spend an immense amount on it - more than nearly anywhere in the world. This isn't a proxy for population size, I am referring to cost per student of course. And this also isn't just a proxy for ridiculous university costs. If you look at only education costs outside of university, we are the 5th biggest spender in the world. And similarly this isn't a proxy for private spending with wealthier folks sending their kids to private institutions. If you compare just our public spending on this same group of education, we end up 7th in the world - comparing just our public spending to everywhere else's public + private spending. And as an aside, those costs are all normalized to account for the fact that a dollar goes a lot further in many places than the US - meaning we are indeed comparing apples to apples, by multiplying other nations' nominal spending.

All numbers mentioned here from the OECD data [1]. They list the private/public spending in GDP relative ratios which does silly things like put South Africa and Costa Rica as the world leaders in education, but you can convert those figures into something useful. For instance in the US our GDP relative share of public spending on education outside of university is 3.207. Our GDP relative share of private spending on education outside of university is 0.307. Therefore of all our spending on non-university education, 3.207/(3.207+0.307) = 91.3% is public. You can now take this and apply it to our gross spend on non-university education ($12,424.3 dollars per student) to see that we publicly spend 12423.3 * .913 = $11,342 per student per year on education outside of university - which leads to our public spending being higher than every other nation's, excepting 6, public+private spending

The point of this is that most people think that we just need to spend more money on education and everything would be dandy. No, our problems are more fundamental and require solutions that are in no way obvious. Bill Gates, though I do not particularly agree with his direction, is working towards trying to create these very sort of solutions. And these solutions, should he be correct, are what actually have the possibility of enacting _real_ longterm change.

[1] - [https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education- spending.htm](https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm)

<comment><USER32> Syndicalism is one possible solution, like what's being done in Jackson, MS [1]

[1] [https://cooperationjackson.org](https://cooperationjackson.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I recommend _The Humanure Handbook_ by Joseph Jenkins. The definitive guide to humanure composting, and the best reference for general composting I've read.

</comment><comment><USER46> The Gates Foundation focuses on real problems and how they can be implemented in the real world to actually solve things that work with the environment, economy and culture symbiotically as opposed to paying for porta-potties and drop shipping them. Knowing how to solve something is the point over blind action that has minimal chance of success. For me, this is the charity worth giving to if you must pick one.

</comment><comment><USER47> Since I recently read The Expanse, I keep thinking, more than usual, about the basic life supporting technologies we'd need to be able to live anywhere else in the solar system.

In The Expanse all biological waste goes into _the recycler_ , which, evidently, feeds a bioreactor to general clean water and new food.

It sounds like what Gates is keen to see deployed: Human waste > fertiliser > new food and hydrogen > fuel cell > energy & water.

We're still a long waste from having anything anywhere near a closed system. Baby steps.

<comment><USER48> Side question: are the books sufficiently different to the TV series to warrant a reading?

<comment><USER49> A lot of the key events are the same, although the timeline is moved around to introduce some characters sooner. The books go into far more detail about the cultures and their values, and backstory to the characters.

I personally recommend it. I'm typically quite busy so I don't really make my way through more than 1-2 books a month but I think I read all the books that are currently out in about 6 weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Most people don't think about all the factors of waste disposal. 200,000,000/100,000/7 = 285 educated peoples' salary for 7 years. Now thow in expenses. Doesn't seem excessive given the multitude of issues. What's the full disposal story? Throw in expenses and my response is "... and?"

As a SF homeless guy who frequently tweets about my hardships with pooping/water/grossness, I welcome toilet innovation like this.

</comment><comment><USER51> "And I definitely never thought that Melinda would have to tell me to stop talking about toilets and fecal sludge at the dinner table"

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder how much of the benefit from all this type of work will be wiped out due to climate change. Seems like increased coastal flooding, conflicts over scare resources, droughts, etc. will harm the most vulnerable far more than the benefit of all these programs combined. Like we'll win a battle but will lose the war.

</comment><comment><USER53> One of my colleagues spent a lot of time working on combination anthropological/aid missions. According to him, toilets/waste disposal was usually the number one way to help people in remote or less developed areas.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'd like to meet Gates one day and shake his hand and just tell him I'm glad he's doing so much good with his wealth. I take for granted a lot and he's helping to lift those that would love to have what I have.

<comment><USER55> I wish he hadn't accumulated all this wealth at the cost of strangling computing worldwide under his semi-broken operating system.

I not a fan of royalty, autocrats, or monarchs. Just because one person is OK when given that power doesn't make it morally just. It is good he is doing nice things, but I find it troubling.

<comment><USER54> He was a shrewd maybe ruthless businessman that's for sure -- but he's doing amazing things with his wealth now -- maybe this is his penitence?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Surprisingly related: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo)

</comment><comment><USER57> one potential area of innovation for toilets is in hospitals or pharmacies where people could defecate/urinate in a "smart toilet" which chemically analyzes the waste matter and sends results to a central lab for reporting.

when technology gets cheap enough, these smart toilets could then move from healthcare businesses into the home, analyzing waste matter on a daily basis to yield health insights.

<comment><USER58> Anytime this idea comes up I have to mention: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ)

A funny parody of SV but also has some neat ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> My guess is that those $200 will end up with a reinvention of the outhouse, but with a computer that will automatically open and close the seat. Seriously though, if you live in your own house and have a fairly big garden, and aint afraid to do some shitty work, then the waste can be used as fertilizer. I mean why does it have to be so complicated !?

<comment><USER60> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil)

"The use of unprocessed human feces as fertilizer is a risky practice as it may contain disease-causing pathogens. Nevertheless, in some developing nations it is still widespread. Common parasitic worm infections, such as ascariasis, in these countries are linked to night soil use in agriculture, because the helminth eggs are in feces and can thus be transmitted from one infected person to another person (fecal-oral transmission of disease).

These risks are reduced by proper fecal sludge management, e.g. via composting. The safe reduction of human excreta into compost is possible. Some municipalities create compost from the sewage sludge, but then recommend that it only be used on flower beds, not vegetable gardens. Some claims have been made that this is dangerous or inappropriate without the expensive removal of heavy metals."

<comment><USER20> It doesn't have to be that way: [https://humanurehandbook.com/](https://humanurehandbook.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I wonder if Gates could be a candidate to be president. He might win, although I'm curious about what politics he would be for.

It sounds like he could lean to the left, and I don't think you could call Bill Gates a socialist.

<comment><USER62> [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/80ow6w/im_bill_gates_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/80ow6w/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/dux44u6/)

He basically thinks he can accomplish more by _not_ being in the government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> That sounds like some interesting shit

</comment><comment><USER64> What is wrong with composting toilets?

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't think places that need better toliet could afford or properly run things resulting from this multi millon dollar research.

<comment><USER66> Solar panels were (are) a multi million dollar research project.

Yet they cost next to nothing and are really easy to operate and install

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> About 60% of toilets in Russia are how we call them "free fall toilets". Because everything that goes out has to fly more than 3 meters down the hole. My grand-grandma used "human wastes" to manure her garden each spring and it flourished. I guess it won't work nowadays because you've got to eat healthy food to produce healthy waste. But still... $200M?.. Hmm...

</comment><comment><USER68> Lol it's called a compost toilet Bill. The technology is already here, it costs almost nothing to construct and use and creates a safe fertilizer at the end of the process. The amount of basic knowledge humanity has forgotten just blows my mind.

<comment><USER69> Composting toilets do not produce safe fertilizer.

Worse, almost all the mainstream designs require handling the compost while the bacterial load is still very high, because the containers need emptying long before sufficient time to break down pathogens has passed.

Source: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC93126/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC93126/)

<comment><USER68> According to Jenkins that's not true: [https://humanurehandbook.com/](https://humanurehandbook.com/)

<comment><USER69> The NIH study I linked to tested the bacterial load after 6 months of composting in almost 100 toilets. They found 64.2% of them had dangerous levels of coliform bacteria.

Jenkins study, on the other hand, does not even attempt to measure the bacterial levels of his toilets - he simply claims thermophilic composting of human waste creates safe humus. The NIH study shows that thermophilic composting is not the mechanism that breaks down bacteria in these toilets; bacterial load is lowered through desiccation, drying out.

So - Jenkins does not understand how the composting works in his own product, he has not actually tested the bacterial load, and he is financially benefiting from people thinking his product is safe.

You're welcome to think the NIH study is falsified; but I would bet my money on Jenkins being wrong here.

Here's his study on the safety of his product: [https://humanurehandbook.com/downloads/humanure_sanitation_p...](https://humanurehandbook.com/downloads/humanure_sanitation_paper.pdf)

<comment><USER68> So after reading the NIH study it looks like the compost toilets they tested were the desiccation kind. I don't really think those should be called compost toilets at all. There's some link somewhere that I can't remember off the top of my head ( maybe it's in the humaure handbook) where Jenkins talks about having his compost sent to a local lab to be tested for harmful bacteria for like a decade or something and it always came back fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> This makes me realize how freaking stupid we are as a nation/group-of-nations:

There are issues/problems that are common to all. Especially common to ALL governments, societies, etc.

Given a population of X and an infrastructure level of Y with purpose Z that are impacts ABC...N

A=Cost B=Scale C=[whatever] N=...

So - when you look at the cost of a nation, we assume that we have an infrastructure maturity/development level of X

What does it cost to implpement, upgrade-to, maintain that level.

What is the standard.

etc...

</comment><comment></comment><comment>=

So, when we talk about "saving $X for reinventing Y thing" \-- this is a reactionary (albeit valuable) effort...

What if we restart rebuilding our societies from ground zero.

Lets build a preplanned city (yeah yeah brazilia etc) and first model it out ala simcity.

with AI running it over and over again until it outspits a detailed plan, it thinks is ideal and then a big committee of meat-bags review it and fuck it up.

Any Gates-level-ish people want to try to build something.

Fuck Mars. Earth First.

<comment><USER70> Why the fuck was this downvoted so much, comment and contribute please. This is a serious thought experiment.

<comment><USER71> I didn't vote on your comment, but would opine that it fit the downvote- attracting heuristic of "how freaking stupid we are" \+ pseudo-thoughtful symbolic algebra + inchoate nerdrage.</comment></comment></comment>


The Linux Foundation Announces Project to Build Real-Time OS for IoT Devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2016/02/linux-foundation-announces-project-build-real-time-operating-system <comment><USER2> Kinda interesting, but I'm not sure if I like the idea of The _Linux_ Foundation investing in alternative operating systems. Surely the industry would have some other venues through which they could do this.

<comment><USER3> I suspect they're getting paid to do it.

If so, it would still seem to be a distraction from their ostensible purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Had to dig a bit to find but seems Apache 2.0 licensed [https://www.zephyrproject.org/content/zephyr- kernel-v100-rel...](https://www.zephyrproject.org/content/zephyr- kernel-v100-release-notes)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I was hoping for a GPL license here, but given the amount of commercial backing I wasn't expecting to find a GPL like license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder whether they will add Intel Edison support in the future...

</comment><comment><USER7> _Early support for the Zephyr Project includes Intel..._

<<closes tab>>

</comment><comment><USER8> And an OS can be made to do things that you may not want it to do.

If I write it in firmware, and write it for that function, you just can't "hack" it, as the functions just don't exist. Well, unless they plan on a verified OS. In that case, good luck ever getting it written. (Or look at TRON - possibly...)</comment>


Microsoft is going to ship a full Linux kernel in Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18534687/microsoft-windows-10-linux-kernel-feature <comment><USER2> Makes you wonder if the endgame is to eventually just gut windows completely and have a Microsoft GUI running on Linux.

<comment><USER3> You've misunderstood what this is. It is a full kernel for the Linux subsystem, which provides the ability to run Linux code in Windows. As I understand it, the existing solution maps Linux kernel calls to the Windows kernel. I can imagine it would be much easier to just provide a true Linux kernel rather than try to support a brittle mapping layer.

They are not putting in a Linux kernel for Windows. Huge difference.

<comment><USER2> I have a decent understanding of what this is. I don't think WSL was added because they thought it would be cool to have two OS's. The bigger picture is every day windows becomes less relevant. Microsoft is now a powerful cloud company. I'm not sure even they even care about windows clients beyond legacy contracts. I think before thier users have no choice but to leave they want to say hey look, you are already using Linux, no need to go anywhere.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty confident in saying Microsoft has _zero_ intention of running Linux directly on the bare-metal serving as the driver layer for Windows.

This is nothing more than a way for Microsoft to provide a *NIX userspace competitive with Apple, you know, so developers actually consider using their products instead of Apple's.

Edit:

We're actually in the midst of quite the opposite happening with the Linux kernel. After Android pivots to Fuchsia/Zircon, it'll only be a matter of time before Linux running on the bare-metal outside of datacenters will be exclusively the niche domain of Raspberry Pi style tinkerer devices and the tiny population of Linux enthusiasts running them on increasingly poorly supported PCs.

PC owners will be increasingly less compelled to bother even trying a Linux installation when their OEM Windows install already contains it as a compatibility shim.

This all translates into Linux's native support for modern desktops and laptops deteriorating for lack of users, I fear it's not going to be a growing market.

<comment><USER5> Wow, I can't think of a future I'd like less. Thankfully this is nonsense ;)

It is true that desktop Linux users are a niche case. Hell, I would not be surprised if that niche got smaller, even; but I have some pretty intense doubts that it's dying or even going in that direction. In fact I would argue that the desktop platform as a whole has been on a decline, whereas desktop Linux has merely stagnated. The average user who is either gaming or just Facebooking on Windows PCs are finding increasingly less use out of their desktops. The gaming market on PC is healthy, but it's cracking: the fragmentation of PC game stores and the increasing power and versatility of game consoles probably poses a threat in the long term. For all other use cases, mobile operating systems like iOS and Android are rapidly becoming not only usable, but preferable. Banking on my iPhone feels like the future, compared to the shoddy web UIs full of age old cruft.

So Microsoft has made wonderful strides for developers using Windows. No sarcasm here; I've been developing software on Windows since Visual C++6 and it's been nothing but improvements. But I develop software for servers and browsers. The Microsoft ecosystem does not appeal to me. .NET Core is great but there's still a lot of work to go _and_ it's reaching maturity in a world where we have amazing languages like Go and Rust. I have still dabbled a bit in .NET Core and I'm impressed, but they would've probably had more success if it had kicked off years earlier than it did.

So what's going on with Linux? Frankly, quite a lot!

\- Wayland is finally reaching maturity, slowly. For now, this is causing loads of problems, but as those issues clear up it's looking like this might finally work out!

\- Valve continues to improve Steam, with integrated Windows emulation. It'll never be a substitute for real ports, but it's still cool.

\- The reproducibility and immutability bug has bit a few hands. New, advanced distributions like GuixSD and NixOS offer a pretty unique, extremely predictable experience (even if that predictable experience is not exactly compatible with the full range of existing software.) Fedora has rolled out OStree-based system upgrades too, which is awesome. This is one of those things where desktop Linux was really awful that is becoming a strength.

\- There is apparently genuine demand for OEM Linux. We see not one, but two vendors that appear to be thriving: Purism, and System76. I want one of those darn Helios boxes just to look nice in the living room (and yes, I run Linux in the living room, and it's been way less horrible than I would've imagined.)

(There's more; like btrfs and other innovations that benefit desktop AND server use cases)

There's more. And it goes without saying that there have also been negatives. Like graphics drivers from our green logoed friends. But by and large, I've had a great past decade with Linux. Aside from a small audio issue, my desktops have been free of any hardware compatibility issues throughout upgrades. Intel offers GPU passthrough that you can use in your KVM boxes for better virtualization. AMD IOMMU is reliable for nearly any Ryzen setup (got a GPU passthrough setup going great over here, and it didn't even take a whole weekend to set up.)

Is Linux dying? Hell no. Is it the year of the Linux desktop? Also no. These claims both come up constantly and neither ever materialize. Desktop Linux has its niche and it probably will for the foreseeable future. Don't extrapolate the ebb and flow too far.

<comment><USER6> Really? Maybe its because I work with biologists, but I have seen more and more non-techies with Linux desktops in recent years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _> Microsoft's integration of Linux in Windows 10 will interface with a userspace installed via the Windows Store..._

Given Microsoft's history, I can't help but wonder if this wholehearted embrace of Linux is part of a classic Microsoft embrace-extend-extinguish strategy.[a]

Is the endgame a Windows-only userspace layered on top of the Linux kernel?

[a] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

<comment><USER8> They can embrace Linux, but they can't extend it in any meaningful way. By which I mean they can't ever create a Microsoft brand of packaged Linux. The Linux marketshare is already flooded with distros, and any software that earns revenue running on Linux runs on all the major distros more or less equally well. What could Microsoft create for which Microsoft Linux would be an option so compelling that companies would pay money to buy Microsoft Linux?

For example, MS could create a whole new graphical alternative to X and Wayland that works better than them both. Their challenge for capitalizing on that would be to create a software that works only somewhat well on X or Wayland, but works perfectly on MS Linux. I predict the Linux crowd will not use it. At best, they'll end up providing an alternative for the benefit of MS aficionados.

<comment><USER9> Why not? Google did it.

Android was an embracing of Linux, they extended it with Google Play Services, and now they're moving toward extinguishing it.

<comment><USER10> But that doesn't negatively impact all the prior uses of Linux. The "extinguish" part means that they ruin Linux for everyone else. If Google stops using Linux as the kernel for Android... so what?

<comment><USER11> The embrace-extend-extinguish approach deprived us from non-Android (and non- Google) Linux on smartphones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Previous discussion, with the official source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842817)

</comment><comment><USER13> I want native bash commands in Windows shell. I know powershell supports some commands, but and actual Linux shell to interface with the rest of windows will be awesome. WSL is getting there, sucks I've gotta install Python and node/npm twice.

<comment><USER14> The interop is pretty good, I don't have cowsay on Windows and I don't have node in wsl, but this still works:

        C:\Users\Ryan>wsl cowsay hello
         _______
        < hello >
         </comment></comment><comment>-
                \   ^__^
                 \  (oo)\_______
                    (__)\       )\/\
                        ||----w |
                        ||     ||

        C:\Users\Ryan>wsl
        ryan@DESKTOP:/mnt/c/Users/Ryan$ notepad.exe test.js
        ryan@DESKTOP:/mnt/c/Users/Ryan$ node.exe test.js
        hello, world!

<comment><USER15> Do you need to do something special for "wsl" to send a command to wsl? I only get an error on my win 10 machine (that "wsl" is not a known command/let).

<comment><USER14> Do you have WSL installed? It's not part of Windows by default (at least not since I checked)

<comment><USER15> Yes, it's enabled- I can use bash and all.

<comment><USER14> No idea - sorry!

<comment><USER15> No worries -thanks for replying :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nevermind we tried to curb stomp you for the past 25 years. Haha.

<comment><USER17> I was thinking that when I read it. We're so far from the days when MS claimed that Linux had a lot of stolen and copyrighted code in the kernel.

<comment><USER18> Not really. We don't have ntfs and exfat drivers in the kernel due to patent claims. Fedora can't even show fonts properly. This is just usual diplomacy. Nothing to get too happy (or too worked up) about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So how will the kernel run? I guess virtualised behind the scenes using Hyper-V and accessed using the Windows Terminal? Seems that this should replace the WSL project entirely which is kind of a shame because it was pretty cool.

Also, unlike others here, I'm not a fan of a computing monoculture where everything is UNIX going forward.

<comment><USER20> You might find this interesting, [https://youtu.be/tG8R5SQGPck?t=24m50s](https://youtu.be/tG8R5SQGPck?t=24m50s)

Checkout the lightweight VMs (start around 38:00)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It replaces Wine-like WSL with some virtualization. Apparently performance of WSL didn't cut it comparing to VMs.

<comment><USER22> If this improves IO speeds, I will be positively surprised.

Those were always subpar with WSL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does GPL require Microsoft to open source Windows 10 then?

<comment><USER24> No, the only have to release the source for the custom kernel that they will use in their subsystem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wonder what this will mean. Is the ability to run Linux commands and programs going to be there just so people who like Terminal can do their job without VMs? Is this a deeper move towards making apps more universal? That would remind me of when Mac OS migrated to x86 in some fashion.

<comment><USER26> This is helpful for some of us doing data science and ML with consumer-grade GPUs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> systemd versus windows

<comment><USER28> systemd vs svchost.exe

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Will the kernels be able to interact at all outside of the filesystem? For example could I write a Linux program which opens a Windows browser?

<comment><USER20> This already works with WSL1.0, so I'd consider it to be a regression if not. I just verified with opening vscode from bash in a windows directory from WSL using `code /mnt/c/Users/zeusk/Desktop/memester`

Also, output of `which code`:

> zeusk@DESKTOP-F776PPQ:/mnt/c/Users/zeusk/Desktop$ which code

> /mnt/c/Users/zeusk/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft VS Code/bin/code

<comment><USER29> WSL1 shares the kernel, but WSL2 uses a hypervisor, so IPC is likely to take a hit.

<comment><USER30> Well, WSL1 has real bad performance with lots of small files and they say their internal performance tests unzipping a tarball 20x faster and git clone or npm install going 2-5 times faster. Not sure what IPC would make slower...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Do they also offer package management?

<comment><USER32> For Windows? No, that will continue to suck.

<comment><USER33> brew (used on MacOS) is working on extending support to Windows and Linux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-allen I'm very excited about this. It's like everything I wanted all in one operating system!

</comment><comment><USER34> OpenSuSE Leap 15 anyone ???

</comment><comment><USER35> World domination achieved.

<comment><USER36> Not on my boxen. Never again.

<comment><USER37> You run Chrome?

<comment><USER36> FF on Debian and Ubuntu.

<comment><USER38> * Fx

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Anyone else here remember "eunice" on Vax/VMS?

</comment><comment><USER40> oh man... if we can finally use native ruby gems on windows and host the sites through iis without the performance hit... this will be a game changer.

</comment><comment><USER41> Gonna be a big download.

</comment><comment><USER42> Sounds great, however I had already assumed that in order to save money, Windows 10 was probably just an obfuscated linux kernel running some weird MS fork of Wine.

<comment><USER43> ...you seriously thought this?

<comment><USER42> I seriously thought this not very seriously.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Starting at Google in a few weeks. Any tips? - <AUTHOR> A little background: I graduated from college in 2010 and have been employed a developer ever since. In a few weeks I'll begin my role as a software engineer for the Quickoffice team in the NYC office.
I think working at Google will be a great opportunity for taking my career to the next level, and I want to maximize my experience there. Do any of you current or former Googlers have any tips, suggestions, or advice for becoming a top contributor and getting the most out of my time with the company? Also, would any NYC Googlers want to meet up for lunch?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> 1\. Network widely. Get to know your Noogler class, and setup lunch/dinners with them for a few months after Noogler training ends. Get to know the folks who sit around you, and eat with them. Try to meet folks in other departments as well. Your network will probably be your single biggest asset in trying to navigate Google's often byzantine project structure.

2\. Your starter project will probably be pretty boring. Suck it up and do a bang-up job on it. Starter projects are usually a way for your team to get a sense of what you can do. If you establish a reputation as someone who gets shit done early on, good projects will come your way.

3\. Stay away from - well, I can't exactly say in a public forum, but basically any mailing list or internal app where you get long centithreads or pictures of cats. Corp G+, however, is pretty useful for getting plugged in to what the general zeitgeist at the company is - what concerns the rank & file employees have, what projects people are excited about, interesting new infrastructure that's available, teams you may want to join.

4\. 20% time is a great tool for getting to know a potential team and letting them get to know you, and a terrible tool for starting something new. When you first start, you should probably be heads-down on your main project, and dive in there. But once you've got a chance to see some of the other interesting projects in the company, don't be afraid to 20% there and transfer if you like the experience.

5\. Find and attach yourself to a good manager, do good work for him, and ride the coattails of shared success. Managers vary wildly in quality at Google. Experienced engineers (those with >1 year of experience in a department) all know who the good ones are. If you get a bad manager you will stagnate, find your projects are continually ripped out from under you, and come up short at promo time. If you get a good manager your career will be one success after another, and eventually you'll get a reputation as the "go to" guy in a domain. That's when you get your pick of high-profile projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice! That all sounds very reasonable. I thought I read that 20% time had gone away; regardless, I'm sure I'll have so much to learn on my first project that diverting any time away from it would be counterproductive.

Regarding good managers: I'll probably need to stay on my first project for at least one to two years. If my manager turns out to not be so great, what's the best strategy? Find out who the good managers are and work towards transferring to their team? Is it better to move horizontally based on the nature of the project or based on the team?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congrats, look forward to seeing what peoples' advice is!

If nobody chimes in, here are some possibly helpful Quora links. They shouldn't prompt you to sign-in/sign-up BTW.

[http://qr.ae/t3txB](http://qr.ae/t3txB) What are some things a Googler should do or experience before leaving to work elsewhere?

[http://qr.ae/t3tHP](http://qr.ae/t3tHP) What exactly should you do in your first few months as a Noogler to make the most of your Google experience?

[http://qr.ae/t3tQM](http://qr.ae/t3tQM) What happens during one's first month as Google Software Engineer?

[http://qr.ae/t3nGN](http://qr.ae/t3nGN) What is it like to work at Google?

And why not:

[http://qr.ae/t3nKN](http://qr.ae/t3nKN) What is the most frustrating thing about working for Google?

[http://qr.ae/t3nsf](http://qr.ae/t3nsf) What's the worst part about working at Google?

<comment><AUTHOR> These are great, both for the career advice and for the glimpses into the cultural side of Google. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is plenty of good advice on this question from ex-Googlers at Quora - What advice would you give to someone who just graduated and is about to join Google that you wish you had when you joined Google? - [http://qr.ae/t3Ac8](http://qr.ae/t3Ac8) (does not require login)

</comment><comment><USER5> I found that looking at the code of the best developers there was super useful. In particular, look at literally anything that Jeff and Sanjay write.

</comment><comment><USER6> Either kick someone's ass or become someone's bitch on the first day; there is no other way you'll be able to make it.</comment>


Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 <comment><USER2> Testing analytical methods of a field against engineered artefacts is a good idea but there is a fatal flaw here; devices that do a fetch-decode-execute- retire loop against a register file and a memory bus have perversely little in common with what neurobiology is concerned with. A more appropriate artefact would be a CPU _and its memory_ (where NOP'ing out code or flipping flags corresponds to "lesioning"), or even better, an FPGA design (where different functions work in parallel in different locations on the silicon, much like brains).

That the tools of neuroscience choke on a 6502 is as much of an indictment of the former as my inability to fly helicopters is an indictment of my fixed- wing airmanship; not coping well with notoriously perverse edge cases outside your domain of expertise isn't inherently a sign of failure (it's not a licence to stop improving, of course). Brains and 6502s are quite literally entirely different kinds of computing, much like designing for FPGA is weird and different from writing x86 assembly or C.

A far more interesting question is "could a neuroscientist understand an FPGA?".

<comment><USER3> >devices that do a fetch-decode-execute-retire loop against a register file and a memory bus have perversely little in common with what neurobiology is concerned with.

A key point of the article is that we can't really be sure this is the case, since the analytical tools used by neuroscience arguably wouldn't reveal this kind of structure even if it did exist.

<comment><USER4> The nice part of evolution is that most of the times you can see some leftover of the intermediate steps. For example, for the eye you can find animals with different complexity of eyes from a simple flat photosensitive area to a full eye of vertebrates (or cephalopods, that have a different but similar eye design).

So in most case you can get some people to specialize and understand the simple models and create concepts and tools to understand the more complex models.

In electronic circles you still have floating around a lot of mini-integrated circuits with 20-50 transistors that are easy to understand. And you can learn to group individual transistors in mall groups that do something useful (for example limit the output current, simulate a resistors, amplification, ...)

Then you can learn to decode the intermediate models with 100-1000 transistors, and then the models with a few thousand of transistors, and then ...

So, it's very suspicious that there are no animals with a minibrain with is finite automata of 3 states.

There are also some cases where all the intermediate steps dissapared, for example the transition form prokaryote(bacteria) to eukaryote (animal, plants, protozoa, ...) And IIRC nobody understand the intermediate steps. But there are some clues, many structures are shared between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, mitochondria are probably trapped bacteria (they have their own DNA and too many external membranes, ...)

<comment><USER3> >So, it's very suspicious that there are no animals with a minibrain with is finite automata of 3 states.

What is your basis for saying that no such animals exist? Exactly how many states there are depends a great deal on the level of analysis. How many states does a 6502 have? At the physical level, an enormously large (possibly even infinite) number. At the level of analysis appropriate for programming one, considerably fewer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great work.

"In other words, we asked if removed each transistor, if the processor would then still boot the game. Indeed, we found a subset of transistors that makes one of the behaviors (games) impossible. We can thus conclude they are uniquely necessary for the game—perhaps there is a Donkey Kong transistor or a Space Invaders transistor. "

A fantastic comment to show that describing a system is not the same as understanding the system!

<comment><USER6> It might start that way, but then they begin to ask, how do Space Invaders and Donkey Kong differ? Ah yes, in space invaders, you cannot move up and down, but in Donkey Kong you can. OK lets create a Space Invaders task where you can also move up and down. Does adding that function make the "Donkey Kong" transistor break the modified Space Invaders behavior? Yes?! So that transistor might not be about Donkey Kong, but for moving up and down. and so on...

An example. Early research which lesioned the hippocampus, lesions brought about impairments on memory tasks...but not all memory tasks. Memory of individual items, or feeling of familiarity without recollection seemed to be relatively preserved. Particularly affected however, were memories involving relations between pairs of items...but not always...those item pairs could be remembered by constructing a story about them, or making one item a feature of another item..so it seemed that item relations that were arbitrary were particularly affected by lesions, and showed more "activity" in neuroimaging studies. and so on. The hippocampus seems to fulfilling a role of binding high-lvel percepts into memory traces for which there is not some lawful/generalizable relation. This was a broad over view..but this goes beyond characterizing a brain region a "donkey kong".

<comment><USER7> > Does adding that function make the "Donkey Kong" transistor break the > modified Space Invaders behavior? Yes?! So that transistor might not be > about Donkey Kong, but for moving up and down. and so on...

Only there's no transistor uniquely responsible for moving stuff up and down. There are transistors responsible for particular bits of output of particular machine code commands, like ADD or MOV. But they are commonly used by almost all the code, so the most probable difference between code triggering the error and a code that's working correctly - would be "how big values we're working on", and if the values are in the "correct" range - that transistor will make a difference. It very well might be that x coordinates are big and y coordinates are low, so it's working for y but not for x. In that particular level of that particular game, assuming the memory was in a particular state before you started that game.

The problem lies in trying to assign too high-level meaning to stuff that works on much lower level of abstraction. It's very similar to alchemy or astrology. Searching for correlation between unrelated events and basing elaborate theories on that.

<comment><USER6> If that transistor was not about moving up and down, you'd have to explain why lesioning that transistor seems to break games with up and down motion. As what you say is correct, scientists would soon find other tasks it breaks that do not appear to have up and down motion. You might move to questions about complexity of objects, coding of directions, etc. Theories would emerge and begin to be related to emerging understanding of archtectures, transistor function, controllers. It evolves.

Aside from that, I object to the view point more generally. Can one not understand something about how cultures work without knowing how brains work? Can one not know something about how an ape behaves without understanding their gut-biome? I just disagree with the view that the only worthwhile understanding of phenomena is from the bottom...that there is some true level of description at which something must be understood.

<comment><USER7> > Can one not understand something about how cultures work without knowing how > brains work?

Yes, you can, but that's psychology or sociology, not neuroscience. The goal was to understand brain, and be able to replicate it or modify it. Understanding just the behaviour is like understanding that pressing "fire" will shoot in Space Invaders. It's something, but you don't need to dissect a CPU to know that, and it doesn't move you closer to creating your own CPU or modifying this one.

> the only worthwhile understanding of phenomena is from the bottom

That's misrepresentation of my point. I wrote that in the CPU example neuroscience tools failed because of missing the abstraction levels between transistors and behaviours.

> there is some true level of description at which something must be > understood

There is optimal level of description, yes. And notation makes a huge difference.

<comment><USER6> Neuroscience works at a number of levels of description or size. Neuroscience which focuses on synapses Neuroscience that focuses on dendritic tree or whole neurons, Neuroscience that ask questions of small groups of neurons, and Neuroscience that focuses on large scale networks. Most try to relate that function at that level to behavior in some way and to bridge the gap between levels of description.

When we try to understand deep learning, do we try to understand it at the level of individual transistors, at the level of a 'neuron', at layers, or at the level overall design? Well it depends, right?

<comment><USER7> I'm not a scientist, but it seems the various groupings of neurons yout enumerated are still hardware level, and not the software level.

Maybe there really is no software level between hardware level and behaviours, but it seems unlikely to me, because I can think about abstract ideas using that brain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's an interesting idea here. The paper is arguing that current brain analysis methods don't work well in an alternative environment with a lot of data, so maybe the methods are the problem instead of our lack of data in neuroscience.

However, I think this misses part of the point. We use these methods _because_ we have very little data available. There are tons of interesting new ways to analyze brain data that I think computational neuroscientists are dying to explore, but don't have enough data to do so. If we had a lot more data, we might not be using these approaches.

<comment><USER9> This explains the diversity of methods and their emphasis on statistical inference. But it isn't necessarily true, that the current best choice for methods implies that the outcomes from using these methods are good. In this case, if we expect that these methods are underpowered in the ecological context, then we should expect them to perform better in a more controlled one, or else they would be useless. But given the author is correct... then, well, there's obviously room for more thought.

</comment></comment><comment> yoz-y Older article in similar vein: "Can a biologist fix a radio?" [http://math.arizona.edu/~jwatkins/canabiologistfixaradio.pdf](http://math.arizona.edu/~jwatkins/canabiologistfixaradio.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Possibly worth noting that this article explicitly credits "Can a biologist fix a radio?" as inspiration.

<comment><USER11> Also available here: [http://www.cell.com/cancer- cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(02)00133...](http://www.cell.com/cancer- cell/fulltext/S1535-6108\(02\)00133-2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really happy to see this article. This viewpoint is not new, but it is still far from being mainstream.

A big issue touched upon in this article is that the space of possible dynamical systems represented in the brain is large, and trying to collect data is not a practical way of trimming this search space. It's more useful to look at types of dynamical systems that have certain stability properties that are desirable for computation.

But the issue then becomes that these dynamical systems become mathematically intractable past a few simplified neurons. So it's really hard to make progress either by looking at data, or by studying simplified dynamical systems mathematically.

There is a third option. Evolve smart dynamical systems by large scale brute force computation. Start with guesses about neuron-like subsystems with desirable information processing properties (at the single neuron level, such properties are mathematically tractable). Play with the configurations, the rules of evolution, the reward functions, the environment, everything. This may sound a lot like witchcraft but look at how far witchcraft has taken machine learning in recent years (deep learning is just principled witchcraft). This is IMO the only way we will learn how biological intelligence works.

<comment><USER13> I think is that the question is really close to how we design a modern Processor. Certainly is important to look at the data (i.e. how behaves a real machine under actual workloads). That data might suggest design improvements (through some form of experience, art and intuition). You use simulation the test those "potentially" good ideas. Most of them are discarded...

Perhaps neuroscience should move in the same direction: how I think cortex work? Test in under (simple) working conditions. See if it makes sense. Move to more complex working conditions. Rinse an repeat.

In actual processors math is rather useless too... beyond some niches. Even in susceptible issues such as formal verification of coherence protocol design, mathematical tools are rather limited (due to state explosion).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This paper offers some good points but exhibits a number of flaws that limit its applicability to the utility of current neuroscience methods. For a generally thoughtful conversation, see [http://www.brainyblog.net/2016/08/30/could-a- neuroscientist-...](http://www.brainyblog.net/2016/08/30/could-a- neuroscientist-understand-a-microprocessor-2/) from 2016. One comment that I'd like to highlight from this conversation is pasted below:

 __ _" But no attempt is made to analyze the similarities and differences in those behaviors. All three game behaviors rely on similar functions. Depending on the level of similarity between the behaviors, you might think of it as trying to find a lesion that only knocks out your ability to read words that start with "k" versus words that start with "s." That's an experiment that's unlikely to succeed. But if the behaviors are more like "speaking" vs "understanding spoken words" vs "understanding written words" then it's a more reasonable experiment.

The authors argue that neuroscientists make the same mistake all the time; that we are operating at the wrong level of granularity for our behavioral measures and don't know it. That argument denies the degree to which we characterize behaviors in neuroscience, and how stringent we are about controls.

The authors point to the fact that transistors that eliminate only one behavior are not meaningfully clustered on the chip. But what they ignore are the transistors that eliminate all three behaviors. Those structures are key to the functioning of the device in general. To me, those 1560 transistors that eliminated all three behaviors are more worthy of study than the lesions that affect only one behavior, because they allow us to determine what is essential to the behavior of the system. You can think of those transistors as leading to the death of the organism, just as damage to certain parts of the brain cause death in animals."_ __

</comment><comment><USER14> People do reverse engineer chips by photographing them. [https://youtu.be/aHx- XUA6f9g](https://youtu.be/aHx-XUA6f9g) (Reading Silicon: How to Reverse Engineer Integrated Circuits). But as far as I know, the same cannot be done with the brains even if we can photograph it. I guess the 3D structure of the brain compounded with high interconnection between neurons does not make it easy.

<comment><USER15> Or perhaps the brain works nothing like a CPU.

(The very idea that it does is actually laughable, akin to medieval fantasists imagining that flying machines must have huge white wings with fleshy feathers.)

<comment><USER14> Yes, a brain does not work like a CPU. As noted by another user in this thread, understanding brain is a considerably harder problem. "CPUs are deliberately engineered so that their different functions are nicely decoupled and easy to reason about but brains are the result of a very messy evolutionary process" -SilasX

<comment><USER16> Engineers are also the result of a very messy evolutionary process ;)

<comment><USER17> Being the result of a messy evolutionary process doesn't give you any special insight into other messy evolutionary processes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I had the odd, but unique, experience of taking "Computer Engineering" and "Formal Logic" (a neurology/history-of-thought course) during the same semester. One observation from that experience is that there is a great deal of cognitive overlap in our representation and communication of those fields of study. Typically, I would see that overlap as being indicative of broad similarity.

Reading this and the comments makes me question the similarity of the fields somewhat. Perhaps it is just our tools for comprehension that are shared between the two rather than any deeply tactical, functional commonality.

To that end, I think that experts in these fields could communicate very effectively with each other once some vocabulary had been sorted out. How effective one expert would be in the other's field is less clear to me.

</comment><comment><USER19> what i don't like about this sort of thing is: the only guaranteed way to succeed in the (apparent, revealed) objectives of the paper is not try very hard.

The obvious problem here is the clear mismatch between the behaviors and their research objectives and methods.

If they wanted to understand transistors, they'd do what cellular neuroscientists do, and isolate and manipulate individual transistors inputs and measure the outputs.

If they wanted to understand how clusters of transistors, whose activities are tightly coupled (as you'd expect them to be in a logic gate), then you'd isolate those, and manipulate the inputs and measure the outputs.

If you wanted to understand higher levels of organization, using a lesion approach, you need to decide how much to lesion. In the brain, function is localized in clusters of related activity, and there is usually a lot of redundancy. Single neuron lesions are not usually enough to have noticeable effects. But even then, a lesion approach is more interesting when you couple it with real experiments. Consider this paper by Sheth et al. [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11239](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11239), which had subjects perform a cognitive control task before a surgical lesion to the dorsal anterior cingulate, coupled with single unit recordings, and then had them perform the same task after the lesion. The experiment yielded pre-lesion behavioral and neural evidence of a signal related to predicted demand for control, and post-lesion, the behavioral signal was abolished.

Of course, the Sheth paper would not have been possible without the iterative improvements in understanding made by prior work, including Botvinick's neural models of conflict monitoring and control. That is, its iterative; and this cpu paper was never intended to be iterative.

</comment><comment><USER20> Author here, happy to answer any questions! Always a pleasant surprise to find stuff you do making it to HN.

</comment><comment><USER21> > An optimized C++ simulator was constructed to enable simulation at the rate > of 1000 processor clock cycles per wallclock second.

Following links in through "code and data":

[http://ericmjonas.github.io/neuroproc/pages/data.html](http://ericmjonas.github.io/neuroproc/pages/data.html)

I found:

[https://github.com/ericmjonas/neuroprocdata](https://github.com/ericmjonas/neuroprocdata)

But I couldn't find any link to the c++ code. Surely the emulator is also needed in order to be able to reproduce the research?

A bit of a shame they used closed source games - I'm not sure how one would go about obtaining copies (legally). But it would be interesting to try replication via other places/demos - as they only model booting anyway.

</comment><comment><USER22> "This example nicely highlights the importance of isolating individual behaviors to understand the contribution of parts to the overall function. If we had been able to isolate a single function, maybe by having the processor produce the same math operation every single step, then the lesioning experiments could have produced more meaningful results. "

I submit that this direction is an important one to pursue.

<comment><USER23> That also highlights why understanding the brain is a much harder problem: CPUs are deliberately engineered so that their different functions are nicely decoupled and easy to reason about. Brains are the result of a very messy evolutionary process that never came close to optimizing for "easy reasoning for refactoring".

<comment><USER24> Yet if a particular CPU is produced in enough quantity and is cheap enough people will engineer uses out of it that the designers never thought of, and had no intention of making possible.

It reminds me of talking to another player in an online Risk game where they didn't understand what an AI player was trying to do. The code was open source and something like only three functions, but in practice they did something completely different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It would be interesting to repeat this for a GPU.

A CPU has so much hardware common to most instructions that any failure will take it down completely. That's less true of a GPU, where a failure of one of the massively parallel units is likely to manifest as some alteration of the output image.

<comment><USER26> It would be interesting to repeat it with a microprocessor connected to two motor control boards, two ADC boards connected to sensors, and an LCD. Present them as black boxes to the neuroscientist. Run code on the microprocessor that exercises the peripherals, instead of games.

Creating a "lesion" in the motor control boards would effect behavior of the attached devices, as well as, perhaps the output on the LCD. Similarly for the sensor boards.

Once the "lesions" have let the neuroscientist determine the function of the peripherals, they could look at the effect of lesions in the microprocessor on the functions of the peripherals and system as a whole when running various programs.

Maybe a program that exercises the "left side" motors, a program that exercises both sides, etc.

Maybe a microprocessor alone is too small of a unit of functionality, akin to studying an amygdala in a petri dish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I didn't read it but the abstract's first sentences sound as if it's rather about "Do the issues neuroscientists face when examining the human brain persist when they examine a microprocessor instead?"

</comment><comment><USER28> Of course a neuroscientist could understand a microprocessor by other methods. The point of the article is the usual methods of neuroscience would have limited results though I think in general in science people use whatever methods they can think of to figure what's going on and the methods of neuroscience are probably the best people can come up with for figuring brains. Though there are also interesting results from the AI researchers mucking about with artificial neural networks also.

</comment><comment><USER29> From some conversations with neuroscientists, it seems that one issue that limits investment in new tools to measure the brain is that its easier to get a publication by analyzing an existing data set in a new way, or even generating and analyzing a bigger / different data set with fMRI or eeg or clinical data, than it is to develop a novel tool to measure the brain (like optogenetics). but there are a lot of advances being made in new tools to get better data on how the brain works

<comment><USER26> I would guess doing research with optogenetics in the brain is probably an order of magnitude more expensive than non-surgical methods. And developing new tools that involve surgery is probably an order of magnitude more expensive still. At least.

<comment><USER29> It probably is, but it is also at least an order of magnitude more beneficial to the field than some of the computational work. There are some groups working on non-invasive optogenetics methods, which are still early stage but really cool

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's definitely easier to understand a microprocessor than chemical-oriented protein systems that have mostly evolved into an operable state by chance.

A CPU is founded on a limited set of basic components that possess reasonable qualities, behave consistently, and only scale to large quantities with identical repetition.

Just leave out the deeper materials science and solid state quantum physics behind the "why" of how transistors operate.

</comment><comment><USER31> This feels like a silly strawman being made out of the methods used in neuroscience. In a microprocessor, a single bit being flipped the wrong way potentially stops the whole show; your Donkey Kong game from 1981 doesn't run at all. By contrast, you will not anywhere near fully incapacitate a brain by lesioning a single neuron, if at all.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder, if an alien species stumbled upon a DVD, would they be able to decode the video contained within it?

</comment><comment><USER33> > This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of > producing meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the > amount of data.

Using the same analytical techniques against a cpu who's design is unknown at time of analysis. Nice meta-analysis, clickbait title.

Edit: reformatted, thanks.

<comment><USER34> Prefixing lines with spaces breaks formatting on mobile. I've reformatted your excerpt here:

> This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of > producing meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the > amount of data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This isn't even wrong. It follows Drexler's method. Just keep writing and writing and writing.

</comment><comment><USER36> is this something like this XKCD? :)

[https://xkcd.com/1588/](https://xkcd.com/1588/)

</comment><comment><USER37> It is garbage :(.

Srsly a CPU has nothing to do with a brain at all. It doesn't make sense to use technics from one for the other.

I have no idea how anyone comes up with such an idea and even publishes it.

A Brain itself is everything. Ram and CPU.

A CPU is just a CPU there is no state in physical form.

A CPU is a turing machine, a brain isn't.

</comment><comment><USER38> That question ist weird. "Sure, why not?" would be my reply to that. I thought one should avoid yes/no questions for a paper?

I'm not a neuroscientist (I cannot afford medical education), nor am I a microprocessor engineer (yet). But I understand how systems work, so I might have a chance to understand how neural networks work (as models and their real counterparts) and I might have already an understanding on how microprocessors are designed by principle. So, yes, a neuroscientist who decides to visit some lectures on digital logic circuits and microprocessor design might have a chance to understand it! I'm really confused about this quenstion.

<comment> B-Con No offense, but it seems like you didn't click through.

From the abstract:

> here we take a classical microprocessor as a model organism, and use our > ability to perform arbitrary experiments on it to see if popular data > analysis methods from neuroscience can elucidate the way it processes > information. Microprocessors are among those artificial information > processing systems that are both complex and that we understand at all > levels, from the overall logical flow, via logical gates, to the dynamics of > transistors. We show that the approaches reveal interesting structure in the > data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information > processing in the microprocessor.

The idea is to apply the modern neuroscience approach to a microprocessor to see what level of understand of the microprocessor is extracted. tl;dr: The high-level "meaning" of the processor's design is not extracted.

The purpose seems to be to examine the inherent limitations of modern neuroscience by applying it to a design that we do understand quite well apart from neuroscience, something we ourselves designed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> "Could a computer scientist understand a brain?"

<comment><USER33> Could a doctor understand a car?

<comment><USER40> Can a car understand a road?

<comment><USER41> Autopilot apparently can't

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Give me a neuroscientist who's willing to learn, and one week.</comment>