Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html <comment><USER2> Very cool, but I sometimes worry that the illusion of safety is more dangerous than the original danger itself.

In Boulder, where I live, several crosswalks were identified as being particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and pedestrian crossing signs with big flashing lights were installed at these locations over the past 5 years. This spring, a report was released[1] that showed accidents at many of these crosswalks had actually _increased_ since the lights were installed. "Taken together, the data suggests that approximately eight additional crossing accidents per year occur at these locations," says the report.

There are lots of theories about why, but I think it boils down to one thing: when pedestrians can hit a button and light up these big signs which are supposed to make everyone stop, it makes them feel much safer, to the point that many people will hit the button and start walking almost immediately, without taking the time to make sure that all lanes of traffic are aware of their presence and stopping.

The prospect of automated cars scares me because, obviously, they cannot be perfect, and they will not be able to identify every dangerous driving scenario. Of course, there is a manual override, but I fear that the car being right 99% of the time will lead to such a complacency in "drivers" that, in the 1% of cases where the car is wrong and about to hit something, we will not be able to stop in time. The more accurate the car is, the more safe we feel, and the less likely we are to monitor it as closely and notice when it is wrong.

Anyway, I rather hope I'm wrong. I'd really like to drink my coffee and read during my commute as my car drives me to work.

[1] <http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_14859190>

<comment><USER3> I walk a lot and the times where I've been nearly hit by a car have ALWAYS been at crosswalks and traffic lights (where the pedestrian light is green and cars should be stopping).

Crosswalks are a problem because you can't predict car behaviour: some will stop. Some will completely ignore them (for reasons unknown). If there were no crosswalk you know exactly what cars will do. That's much safer for both parties.

The "illusion of safety" is most dangerous at traffic lights. 2-3 times I've had cars just sail through, completely oblivious. Note: they're sailing through on RED lights. Not amber going red. It's not one of those borderline cases.

Once I had a cop have a chat to me about jaywalking but I've never been fined. I would be _pissed_ if I ever was. In a fight between a car and a pedestrian the pedestrian loses (big time) so pedestrians have a higher vested interest in their own safety. I know what the light changes are at intersections I cross a lot. Where are these cops when cars sail through red lights or nearly run over pedestrians when turning when the pedestrians have right of way?

I get the distinct impression these skills will come in handy when I move to New York next month!

Anyway, back to the self-driving cars: this I believe will be a painful transition that will take many, many years. It's nice to see Google working on this.

<comment><USER4> That <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_turn_on_red> is the source of almost all dangerous situations I had on the roads as pedestrian. The one single time when cause was different that I can remember was when somebody drove in one way street in wrong direction and I was crossing the road assuming that this was impossible.

<comment><USER5> There is no right turn on red in NYC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is such good news -- probably some of the best tech news so far this year -- that I keep looking for problems. It's _too_ good.

So, although I'm hugely supportive of this, and I think it's possible to have fully autonomous vehicles within a decade, I want to see it. In production. Then I'll believe. Up until that point it's like one of those science stories where it works in the lab but nobody has any idea whether or not it will work with humans. There is a long, long way to go from the mechanics of AI and auto-driving and the real thing happening. It's not just the technology. There are about 17 large groups of people and organizations that need to be re- aligned before this would ever fly, even if it were perfect. This could easily end up like pot legalization, where it's obvious for years that the current laws are idiotic but it takes an entire lifetime to get the politicians on the same page as the public.

I'd love to go all blue-sky on this, going on and on about the massive changes true auto-drive would entail. But instead I'm opting to be very cautious about separating press releases from real products and benefits.

(Still, it's awesomely cool)

</comment><comment><USER7> The key question is why would Google produce this technology and enter the autonomous driving market?

I think one of the key issues for Google, from a corporate strategy standpoint, is "freeing up people's time." Driving is one of last places where we spend significant time awake without being able to use the Internet and hence any of Google's services (except if you use a smartphone, which is now illegal in some states, and in any event isn't an ideal place to be clicking on ads). There is a safety issue here as well. Although using a smartphone while driving is illegal in some states, people are driving while using their smartphones with increasing frequency. We need our Internet "fix."

I am sure this driving technology also taps into several of Google's key capabilities: e.g., programming expertise, its voice recognition technologies, search, and its mapping software (Google Maps and Navigation).

<comment><USER8> _Dr. Thrun is known as a passionate promoter of the potential to use robotic vehicles to make highways safer and lower the nation's energy costs. It is a commitment shared by Larry Page, Google's co-founder, according to several people familiar with the project._

It sounds like this may be as much an idealistic pet project as it is any kind of corporate strategy.

<comment><USER9> Larry's idealistic pet projects _are_ corporate strategy. That's why Google dominates - they are unpredictable and creative.

Crazy stuff Google did:

* mapped all the world's roads using cameras and a mechanical turk, destroying billions in market cap for map data providers

* Android, groundbreaking in both technology and pushing the envelope on patent law

* launched a satellite

* deep tendrils of fiber optics and community oriented wi-fi projects to connect the world

It doesn't surprise me at all Google is building autonomous cars. Search and adwords are not even the most intriguing things to me about Google these days.

Imagine a mad scientist who has $12,000,000,000. That is Google's strategy... also lots of testing.

<comment><USER10> Small correction: Google didn't "map all the world's roads using cameras and a mechanical turk, destroying billions in market cap for map data providers." That is more than a stretch. They mapped SOME of the roads in the US, augmenting existing TIGER data from the US government, and used it in place of TeleAtlas. The "new" data is pretty bad, so I use Bing for directions because of it. They still rely on TeleAtlas (one of the map data providers they "destroyed") for almost every other country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _And in the event of an accident, who would be liable — the person behind the wheel or the maker of the software?_

The insurance company, just like today. Possibly paid for by the manufacturer and entirely included in the sales price, or possibly paid for by the driver/owner like today.

<comment><USER12> Civil liability is only half the issue. What about criminal liability? If your autonomous vehicle runs someone down because of a bug, who goes to jail?

<comment><USER13> We deal with that issue today. Who is liable when brakes fail? It's usually determined on a case-by-case basis. Why would this system be any different?

<comment><USER14> Failure is one aspect. But what if there's a bug?

Suppose there's an extreme edge case where a bicyclists fluorescent jacket appears as a road to the car; so the car chases down the cyclist and runs him over. This is not a hardware failure, but an active decision made by the car to cause injury to a person. So in such a situation, who would be responsible? I guess it is a question for technolawyers to decide.

<comment><USER13> How is that not a system failure? Because the car has some kind of intent? Well, we have an analogue for that today, too: who gets punished when a dog attacks someone?

I'm not saying there are no details to work out. I'm just saying that it's not some unfathomable chasm we have to cross. We deal with similar questions all the time right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Finally! A giant step towards 'packet-switched' personal transport, using dynamically-routed, market-dispatched autonomous cars on standard roads.

Cancel the bullet train, and instead plow all that money into rapidly deploying this.

<comment><USER16> This is not a solution to much, apart from getting stupid people away from control of vehicles. We still need to move to mass transportation, to reduce pollution, decrease traffic, stop our reliance on fossil fuels, increase productivity, remove noise, free up space in cities, and lots of other reasons.

<comment><USER17> While cars that drive themselves are not the final solution they could be a necessary stepping stone to mass transportation.

Imagine a future where cars are not owned by individuals but are owned by few companies (or maybe even government, the way public transport is) and participate in what is essentially a global taxi network.

Instead of using your own car you would just step out of your home, enter destination address into your phone and press a button. That would be sent to a server which given your location, position and destination of all existing cars in route would pick one that is the closest to you that has available seat and goes in that direction. That car would just pull up and you would be notified in real time how far it is from you.

If a car is not available, it would be dispatched from the closest holding area.

Think ZipCar except with cars that come to you, drive themselves and you can share with other people while it drives itself (or you can have it for yourself, if you prefer, except at a higher cost).

This kind of a network would drastically reduce number of cars needed to drive people around and given global knowledge of where people are and where they want to go, it could plan the absolutely most efficient route.

For popular routes (e.g. if it detects a pattern that a lot of people commute from San Francisco to Mountain View around 9 AM on Mondays through Fridays) it could deploy bigger cars (i.e. buses), further reducing traffic.

When you think about it, it's not surprising that car companies will not work on a technology like that since it would drastically reduce demand for cars and if this comes anywhere close to reality, expect lots of legislative and political battles (after all, this will mean that Americans in Detroit will loose jobs).

<comment><USER8> You have described my personal vision of a PRT-connected future even better than I have myself.

What's so beautiful about it is that it takes a massive infrastructural liability -- a century of building our world around the automobile instead of around rail or other mass transit systems -- and turns it on its head. We get out of infrastructure jail free.

Think of the time humans spend behind the wheel of a car today. How many hours a day? How many solid days of driving a year? How many man-years of humanity are wasted on fruitless idling in traffic? A society with autonomous personal transport becomes a measurably more productive one and likely a happier and more satisfied one as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ha, I saw these cars multiple times this past week in San Francisco, including turning from Broadway onto Columbus in heavy traffic. If that was done autonomously, then I'd be very impressed since I have trouble navigating through those intersections without hitting the many bold pedestrians.

<comment><USER19> I'm be willing to bet money that most of the times when you saw them, the car was autonomous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is clear that one day automated cars will make less mistakes than human drivers, and that such systems can reduce the amount of traffic accidents.

There is one big problem - convincing some people this is true, and that cars will make mistakes, but far less mistakes than humans.

The problem is there are many people that fail to see it that way. More than once I was in a situation of explaining the concept of automated cars to others, and always the opposing arguments go something like: "But, can you be absolutely certain that there isn't going to be one single case where a car makes a mistake and kills someone". No, I cannot, and I will not.

And, of course, once the self-driving cars become a reality, such cases will happen. And than there will be an article in some scandal-seeking newspaper how an automated car killed the father of two, and how this is a what happens when you let science control your life and when you let all those over- educated people do what they want... Or something along that lines...

Frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER21> The thing that excites me about this isn't the driving, it's the parking. Living in SF, it would be __AMAZING __to be able to pull up to whereever you were going, get out, and tell your car to go find it's own parking spot. Then, when it's time to leave, click that button on the key fob, and the car is waiting outside in five minutes.

</comment><comment><USER22> In Google's blog post, they said that they think automated cars will "significantly reduce car usage". I have no idea what they're basing that claim on.

Automated cars eliminate many of the costs of driving--lost time, frustration, etc. When you decrease the cost of an activity, people are going to do it _more_ , not less.

In fact, if you ask people that can afford cars but commute by train why they do it, many will say that it's because they can work on the train and not have to deal with driving in traffic. Those people would definitely consider switching from the train to automated cars.

<comment><USER13> Because an automated system would be less prone to congestion, and the average time for travel would go way down. You'd have to do the math to find the break-even point, but I'd imagine that you could add many more cars into an optimally flowing traffic system and still end up with less total running time.

<comment><USER23> If that's the case, then people will just end up using the roadways _even more_.

"Hey, traffic's not as bad as it used to be since the Google auto-drivers smoothed out the traffic. Let's go to the store at 5:00 today!"

Congestion will again increase to the same point of suckage as before, but then, only non-human drivers will be qualified to be on freeways.

<comment><USER13> Like I said, you'd have to do the math. It's very possible that's true. But it's not a certainty. People have a limit on how much they want to drive regardless of how easy it is. After all, the store itself will still suck when everyone decides to go at 5.

I'm in NYC, I could hop on the subway any time I want without any hassle at all, but it's not like I do just because the option's there. Transportation is a means much more than an end for most people.

<comment><USER23> _Like I said, you'd have to do the math._

Uh, maybe you'd have to look at the history of urban planning for the past 50 years? In densely populated urban areas, just about every time people add more roads, the capacity gets used up by increased development in the outlying areas served by those roads.

Network bandwidth and CPU capacity are subject to the same phenomenon. Do end- user desktops really have more functionality than 10 years ago? Besides things like increased 3D graphics capability and more things to do with a web browser and an internet connection, not so much. As bandwidth has increased, the amount of data in a webpage has increased, and it becomes practical to use a web browser for more.

But don't take my word for it:

[http://www.assmotax.org/Releases/AMCT%20release:%20building%...](http://www.assmotax.org/Releases/AMCT%20release:%20building%20more%20roads%20relieves%20your%20wallet,%20not%20congestion.php)

<http://www.walkablestreets.com/widen2.htm>

[http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding- futility.ht...](http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding- futility.html)

Basically, there can be a certain amount of pent-up "latent demand" which is there but which can't manifest until the roads are built and such travel becomes practical.

<comment><USER13> I'm granting that miles driven or number of cars on the road could go up, maybe way up. I'm just guessing, subject to actually doing the math, that increased efficiency and assumptions of reasonable limits on how much latent demand is actually out there could be sufficient to make time spent in cars, fuel consumption, emissions, or other metrics better regardless. Since we're using networking analogies, basically I'm guessing that current uncoordinated human-driven traffic is copper wire to an automated system's fiber-optic cable.

But again, it's just a guess, and I'd be the first to accept that I was wrong if the numbers didn't actually work out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nova did an excellent (and surprisingly technical) episode [1] on the 2005 race mentioned in this piece, including Thrun's Stanford team. It was especially impressive as a triumph of Thurn's software-based approach over several of the other veteran teams that relied heavily on complex hardware (e.g., those teams used camera gimbals while Thrun's team just compensated for camera bumps using code).

For those of you on Netflix, it's available as a streaming video [2], and I highly recommend it.

[1] <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/> [2] [http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/The-Great-Robot-Race- Nova/700...](http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/The-Great-Robot-Race- Nova/70050544)

</comment><comment><USER25> "The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light."

Google robot > Humans

<comment><USER26> Let us all pray that it doesn't agree with you.

<comment><USER8> I Have No Pedal and I Must Brake

<comment><USER27> Speaking of being impressed by Google, I wouldn't have been able to decipher that reference a decade or so ago, but today, I can type "i have no * and i must *" into a text box, and the answer is presented to me. The future is pretty great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if this is legal. I mean, if one of these cars went haywire and mowed down a bunch of pedestrians before the "driver" was able to take control, I reckon Google would have some splainin to do. With autonomous vehicles coming closer and closer to a reality, it's somewhat alarming that there appears to be no legal body attempting to define some guidelines on this subject. At the rate our government works, we'll have fully functioning, marketable autonomous vehicles long before it's legal to use them.

<comment><USER29> According to the article, Google's lawyers decided it was OK, because a human was sitting in the driver's seat ready to override the system at any time. I guess it's a little bit like student drivers being supervised by experienced drivers, but who knows what a random cop would think?

<comment><USER30> Actually the article says the legal counsel for the California DMV 'decided' it was o.k., which is even better!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you're interested in more, Brad Templeton has been singing the praises of a future with robot cars, and how to get there, for many years, both in all the futurism un-conferences I've visited in the bay area, and on his very thorough website:

<http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/>

</comment><comment><USER32> That's very promising. Living in a pretty safe place (Canada), driving is probably the most dangerous thing that I regularly do. I'm very happy with the safety advances of the past decade (more airbags, electronic traction control, brake force distribution, better crumple zones, more high-strength materials, etc), but it's not quite "active" enough to make me feel truly safe (especially because it doesn't address human error).

Truly looking forward to the commercialization of technology.

<comment><USER33> Me too. I bet this could bring accident rates down substantially and maybe we will also get rid of those insidious traffic jams. But the best part: I'll have a ton of free time on my hands during transit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> From TFA:

 _"The technology is ahead of the law in many areas," said Bernard Lu, senior staff counsel for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. "If you look at the vehicle code, there are dozens of laws pertaining to the driver of a vehicle, and they all presume to have a human being operating the vehicle."

The Google researchers said they had carefully examined California's motor vehicle regulations and determined that because a human driver can override any error, the experimental cars are legal. Mr. Lu agreed. _

<comment><USER34> Gack -- that was supposed to go under eogas' item.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> In the short term, I could easily see the value in a souped up cruise control for driving on interstates. combined with infrared/night vision, this could easily make nighttime driving safer.

Also, this has great potential (though would probably generate a lot of controversy) for drunk driving. Imagine if your car had a safety mode that could watch out for potential accidents and prevent them even with a human driver.

Amazing possibilities ahead.

<comment><USER36> > Imagine if your car had a safety mode that could watch out for potential > accidents and prevent them even with a human driver.

Well, if my car would do that I'd certainly drive to the bar more often. I'd want the fully autonomous "drive me home, Jeeves" system though.

<comment><USER29> If these systems can be trained to learn your habits, you might be surprised to find your car driving you to that spot where you used to see the other girl...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Google is an AI company, they just don't advertise the fact."

<comment><USER38> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=324640> \- the only hit for that quote. I totally agree, BTW.

<comment><USER37> I know I'm not the one who said that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Timely, I wrote about some German research project that has a car doing a trip in normal traffic in a big city:

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/Autonomous+driving+cars+one+big+s...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/Autonomous+driving+cars+one+big+step+closer+to+reality)

The google car seems very much reliant on its gps data, in the article there is this passage: "He did [interrupt auto mode] so twice, once when a bicyclist ran a red light and again when a car in front stopped and began to back into a parking space. But the car seemed likely to have prevented an accident itself."

Seemed likely is not really good enough though, you have to be sure enough not to interrupt the auto-driving at all for this to be usable.

The biggest problem with auto-driving cars that have a human supervisor is that there is nothing more dangerous than having to be alert for a long time when nothing happens. Invariably you will be distracted when something does over the course of tens of thousands of miles.

Regular traffic is one thing on mapped streets is one thing, but that 100's of thousands of emergency situations that a normal career on the road throws at you over a lifetime contains quite a few where I really wonder how a 'robot' driver would deal with them.

I'm all for 'automated drivers', but I'd like the researchers to be sitting in the passenger seat and to have their kids playing around the car (or come out on their tri-cycle from between two parked cars) while they drive it to prove that it is safe. Overrode but the car would have probably done it is not good enough yet, even though the achievement is very impressive this is not as close as it seems.

Computer programs are great at dealing with everything that you can think of beforehand, it's the exceptions and the response to those exceptions that matters in an application like this.

I also wonder how they'd deal with liability issues if their driver was not actually paying attention to traffic and the software made a mistake and caused an accident.

</comment><comment><USER40> Where they'll get their foot in the door is closed campuses. I bet the military could run this on the base and keep the liability issues in the family. Similarly, perhaps a large corporation would license it. Or even better, airports.

</comment><comment><USER41> Yes, they are coming: [http://jalopnik.com/5572978/driverless-audi-tts-gets- new-col...](http://jalopnik.com/5572978/driverless-audi-tts-gets-new-colors- plans-for-pikes-peak)

Seems like quite a few people are working on projects such as these. I heard some hairdo on TV the other day musing that they will reach general availability "as early as 2022". How do they even come up with those numbers?

<comment><USER42> > _Rather than cameras and lasers providing situational awareness and plotting > course, the TTS uses high-resolution comparative GPS to follow a pre-plotted > course at an accuracy up to 1 cm of deviation._

Don't think I like the sound of that...

> _The only trouble with this set up is the car will be incapable of reacting > to unexpected obstacles, say a boulder rolling onto the road or a spectator > jumping out to get a picture. Careful spectators._

Seems they agree.

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell I'd expect a situation to arise where cars are allowed to go into automatic driving mode on motorways/freeways but not in cities. Gradually more and more roads would become available for automatic driving as more and more cars get the automatic driving capability. I don't think people will ever be ready for an instant complete switch over. I'd expect it to be a gradual switchover which takes years.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think we all see where Google is headed with this: free self-driving cars in return for advertising, like <http://www.kahdo.com.au/kahdo.htm>

_Driver, there's items you like on sale at that store. Driver, I think we should stop and check it out. Driver, we are stopping._

 _Dear, I don't feel safe having Lisa drive with that new Mark boy. You can just tell he dials aggressive._

But seriously, from a marketing perspective, I think the low-hanging fruit here is highway driving. It's a small, logical and therefore adoptable step up from _cruise control_ , just with a little auto-steering (they already have auto-braking IIRC), and perhaps some networking for predicting lights, congestion and co-ordinating with other (online) cars.

Start with an "online-only" lane.

</comment><comment><USER43> Single page: [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=1...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER44> I had no idea the technology was this advanced. Last I heard was the DARPA challenge where they were still struggling to navigate traffic-free dirtroads. Google blows mind once again.

<comment><USER45> It's gone way beyond that. The Stanford team is now trying to race up Pike's Peak in an autonomous Audi, drifting around corners at full speed. They already are doing trials at 130mph, drifting, in the Nevada salt flats.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exdUD02JryI&feature=chann...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exdUD02JryI&feature=channel)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned one of the biggest issues with general acceptance of this system:

Police will be able to force anyone to pull over anywhere, at any time, and for any or no reason.

Even though they can do that now, people still _decide_ to pull over. They are not _forced_ to.

And what if there becomes a database that police forces compile, showing the history of movements of everyone? That database could potentially be leaked.

I think the privacy implications of this should get at least some thought.

<comment><USER47> Doubt it. When this system becomes commonplace, the most common traffic violation will be operating a vehicle in manual-only mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I am very happy to be an engineer. I would be very uncomfortable turning the world over to robots if I was some other kind of job, but as I am an engineer I will hopefully be the one MAKING those robots, which is the only end of the stick I want to be on when robots reach the critical point in taking care of us.

</comment><comment><USER49> It will take a decrease in sensor costs for this to become commercially viable. The "device" on top of the car is a Velodyne LIDAR system, which if I recall correctly, costs around $75k. Using a sensor that costs more than the vehicle it controls makes selling this difficult, to say the least.

<comment><USER50> You could say this about any new technology. Mass demand will solve this problem.

<comment><USER51> Aren't car companies essentially all about wringing huge efficiencies out of mass production? Compare an automotive product to something requiring a similar manufacturing technique with more niche demand and there's usually a huge price difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Have they tested it in the rain?

Have they tested it in the snow?

Have they tested it driving on ice?

Does it know when its fuel gets low?

Can it tell when a head gasket blows and the engine is overheating?

Have they driven it on the highway?

Have they driven it on the countryside?

How does it treat cyclists?

How does it treat pedestrians?

How does it treat deer, squirrels, birds and other fauna on the road?

How does it respond to aggressive drivers?

Can it park?

Can it parallel park?

Does it know not to block the box?

Does it know what to do when a traffic light is out?

Does it know to pull over when emergency vehicles need to pass by?

Does it know how to merge?

Does it know how to avoid hanging out in other cars' blind spots?

Does it know that eighteen-wheelers have large blind spots ("If you can't see me, I can't see you")?

Does it know what to do when four cars come to a four-way stop intersection simultaneously? (Does anyone?)

Can it find parking?

Can it pick a parking spot that's far enough away from driveways and fire hydrants?

How much of the logic is dependent on the car it's installed for?

How much work is involved in installing it to a new car?

What does it do if it gets boxed in by FBI agents on the highway?

What does it do if debris knocks out the camera?

What does it do the if car in front of it starts fish-tailing on ice?

<comment><USER48> > Can it tell when a head gasket blows and the engine is overheating?

Sorry, how do YOU know when your head gasket has blown and the car is overheating? What's that, your first indicator is the _electronic temperature sensor on your dashboard_!? My, there certainly is no way a computer could detect that.

If you are about to say, you detect it through loss of power, steam from the engine bay, coolant in the oil... I got news for you, you just detected it slower than a computer would have. A properly designed automatic driving system would monitor the vitals of the engine, and pull over in the event something goes critical, much the same way your PC shuts off when the CPU hits some predetermined temperature. Even better, if all cars were automatically driven, it would communicate this abnormality with the other cars on the road. It would be able to determine that this is unusual (it's not just a hot day), and it would also be able to co-operate with the other cars on the road to pull over safely as fast as possible.

The things you list are not "this is why automatic driving is impossible". They are just "here's special cases we have to make sure to catch". In the case engineers miss a case, good feedback control systems can often cope for the unexpected event, and in the event they can't, there's always manual control. Hell, let's be honest here- most drivers would not detect a blown head gasket until the car simply stopped functioning, and the engine was completely destroyed anyway. There's tons of case where humans perform terribly, including some on your list. Accidents are caused all the time by people braking for squirrels when they shouldn't.

<comment><USER52> > _The things you list are not "this is why automatic driving is impossible". > They are just "here's special cases we have to make sure to catch"._

You are exactly correct; this is actually all I meant to express in my post. I suppose I should not be surprised that my comment was taken to be espousing one of the prevailing extremes! Sorry about that--I should have been a little less terse.

> _most drivers would not detect a blown head gasket until the car simply > stopped functioning, and the engine was completely destroyed anyway._

Ironically, this exact thing happened to me at the end of last year. That's actually why I included it in my list... not because I think it's un-doable, but because I really really hope it's an edge case they cover! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This will never take off because Google or carmakers can not assume more liability for accidents than hundreds of millions of drivers can. Technically, cool. From a practical legal perspective, a non-starter.

</comment><comment><USER54> It is impressive how Google just goes to new areas with success all the time.

<comment><USER55> Actually, most of the time we hear about their failures (Wave, Buzz, etc.); but this is to be expected if they are as fearful of opportunity costs as they're reputed to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I really hope that cars can become safely automated in my life time but I'm worried that people will start "jailbreaking" their cars so they can exceed the speed limit.

<comment><USER57> If you are surfing Internet while riding your car -- you likely would not care much about exceeding speed limit.

<comment><USER58> People will always push boundaries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Personally I _love_ driving. I hate being a passenger. I can see this being useful for some people, but not useful for me.

<comment><USER59> WTF Downmodded? Jeez whatever

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> a novel solution to ending drunk driving

</comment><comment><USER61> Think of the millions of hours spent behind the wheel today, which could be spent on Google instead. Maybe this is what they're "driving at."

</comment><comment><USER62> can anyone see this completely eliminating human taxi drivers within the next 10-15 years?

<comment><USER63> only if they throw in a chat bot :)

<comment><USER64> And they spray the inside of the car with that authentic cabbie "scent."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Code + howto on github, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER66> Has anyone else read Daemon?

</comment><comment><USER67> It will take only a few of these:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNi17YLnZpg> (volvo crash avoidance failure)

to shake people's confidence in these systems.

</comment><comment><USER63> So, why is google driving cars?

what about if GM announced a search engine? Everyone would have their opinion then.

</comment><comment><USER68> Great news for terrorists. Now all they have to do is bomb Google's data centers and kill everyone on the roads :)

<comment><USER30> I am pretty sure the default response to a lack of connection is going to be revert to manual mode with loud siren, not zig-zag like crazy in traffic.</comment></comment>


Caterpillar Inc. Funds Viterbi 'Print-a-House' Contour Crafting Technology - <AUTHOR> http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/caterpillar-inc-funds-viterbi-print.html <comment><USER2> It's great to see a company recognize that it is in a certain industry that is meant to provide SOLUTIONS, rather than trying to protect its (eventually, in this case) outdated business of selling tools to do things the "old way". This is how you remain relevant as technology advances, not kicking and screaming as your industry attempts to pull you into the future.

It's like when oil companies realize they're in the energy business not the Black Gold, Texas Tea business; and when record companies realize they're in the entertainment business, not the plastic disc business. Oops. Scratch that last one.</comment>


Why Microsoft is betting its future on AI - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/7/12111028/microsoft-bot-framework-artificial-intelligence-satya-nadella-interview <comment><USER2> "conversation as a platform"?

Is he talking about that "Tay" debacle? [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/microsoft-tay-racist- twe...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/microsoft-tay-racist- tweets_us_56f3e678e4b04c4c37615502)

Reading this article reminds me about the story of McDonald's. After a certain level in the organization, at a certain executive delusion, McDonalds starts thinking they are all restaurateurs, and not low-quality fast food establishments to get a quick bite. They are so out of touch with what people are really doing and using their products, so misguided, they actually fail to innovate on their core concept.

For a company that finally has a decent web browser (and it's still not anywhere near Chrome/FF in terms of features and developer adoption), I am skeptical at best. Does anyone remember when Steve ignored the web and mobile for so many years, while Google and Facebook and Apple practically ate their lunch? Remember when he famously said he was "betting the company on .net"? [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2000-10-29/microsofts...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2000-10-29/microsofts- big-bet)

"AI" is just a tool like .net is a tool. It's not a product or idea. It's not a service. It's cool to be excited about your HoloLens and 3D calendar, but it's just a calendar, and after the hype has worn down most people would prefer to look at a calendar on a laptop anyway. "AI" is Microsoft's new .net

<comment><USER3> _" AI" is just a tool like .net is a tool. It's not a product or idea. It's not a service. It's cool to be excited about your HoloLens and 3D calendar, but it's just a calendar, and after the hype has worn down most people would prefer to look at a calendar on a laptop anyway. "AI" is Microsoft's new .net_

This. It is as vacuous as saying "betting the future on the Fourier transform", or something.

And besides, they just closed the venerable Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, so it's not that they are putting their money where their mouth is.

<comment><USER4> > they just closed the venerable Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, so it's > not that they are putting their money where their mouth is.

I seem to remember they fired Leslie Lamport.

<comment><USER4> Am correct.

[https://j2kun.svbtle.com/what-microsoft-lost-when-it- closed-...](https://j2kun.svbtle.com/what-microsoft-lost-when-it-closed-msr- silicon-valley)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Will CAAP be the next best thing? Who knows? But one thing that has surprised me about MS and this whole bot-frenzy is how much they are opening up to other platforms.

MS offers tools to build a bot within their framework using Node.js with first party library support[0], and for deploying your bot to third-party chat apps (e.g. Telegram, Slack and FB messenger[1]). The idea is to build a bot once, and their service routes the bot's API between different endpoints. All of this with no obligation of ever touching VisualStudio, Azure or dotnet.

This type of attitude would be unthinkable three years ago.

[0] [http://docs.botframework.com/builder/node/overview/#navtitle](http://docs.botframework.com/builder/node/overview/#navtitle) [1] [http://docs.botframework.com/connector/getstarted/#navtitle](http://docs.botframework.com/connector/getstarted/#navtitle)

<comment><USER6> Interesting. Does the framework support menus and stuff though? Like this:

[http://www.humanisethebrand.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/05/f...](http://www.humanisethebrand.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/05/facebook-messenger-bots-1.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> After losing on search, mobile, and social, Microsoft needs a win.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps some company introspection would make more sense than investing in an unproven, (currently) hard to monetize CS problem.

<comment><USER7> What business wants from Microsoft is It Just Works. The same thing business wants from the power company and the water company. No constant fixes. No viruses. No crashes. Overall, corporate America liked Windows 7 and does not want to upgrade.

Maybe they could focus on that for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who isn't betting their future on AI?

<comment><USER10> We've been getting along just fine so far without it. I imagine that could continue for a few more centuries, right?

<comment><USER4> Now there's a contrarian opinion ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Use AI to fix their blue screen of death first?

<comment><USER12> Hey that's not fair, I haven't seen a windows blue screen since...

...well yesterday, actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I remember smarterchild way back in the day. It was pretty cool, but it never seemed to take off. I wonder if any of this stuff will?

</comment><comment><USER14> Because Google started before?

</comment><comment><USER15> So, let's see: Microsoft is thinking that a lot of the future of their business is new versions of a _user interface_.

They might make some money this way, but I have to doubt it will be very much money.

Why? At the core, from their computing, people want some significant _utility_ , _content_ , functionality, etc. E.g., I come to HN for _content_ and find the user interface to be just fine except too often there are too many characters per line and to see the whole like I have to use horizontal scroll bars twice for each line or just copy the screen into my favorite text editor and reflow the lines to fewer characters per line.

Satya, for developers, there is a lot that is good in .NET. Now, if you would do much better documenting it, then it would stand a much better chance of taking off like it should and a lot of developers wish it would.

I'm doing an ambitious startup: By a very wide margin, far and away the worst problem was working through 5000+ Web pages of Microsoft documentation of .NET and SQL Server; the quality of the technical writing was not good -- need better explanations and for the jargon links to a glossary. The next worse problem was having to rebuild the boot partition as attempts at SQL Server installation ruined it. The next worse problem was rebuilding the boot partition after malware ruined it. All the work unique to my startup was fast, fun, and easy. Mud wrestling with Microsoft's work wasted literally YEARS, seriously hurt both my startup and me, and nearly killed at least my startup.

It appears from the article and more that Nadella is short on good, new ideas for new directions for Microsoft, is ignoring a lot that users are screaming about, e.g., security and system management, and that developers are screaming about, e.g., better documentation, and is having vague, ethereal, dreams about the power of new user interfaces.

Uh, Satya, I don't really have any problems with translating foreign languages; for any serious content in a foreign language, no way would I trust a machine translation; I don't want my computer talking to me; even when alone I don't want to talk to my computer; no way in front of others will I talk to my computer.

Satya, for my computer giving me advice, no thanks. For unsolicited advice, no way. The second or first time my computer tries to give me advice, I will look how to turn off that functionality.

Satya, what you call _artificial intelligence_ I call at best trivial and otherwise nearly useless, silly, annoying, insulting, absurd, a pain in the back side, and just _genuinely stupid_.

Satya, I am NOT going to talk to my computer. That is just not negotiable. And, I'm not going to wear a helmet or funny glasses. And I do NOT want a touch screen interface.

I WOULD very much like a better keyboard, e.g., as good as the old IBM PC/AT keyboard.

Satya, let me give you some warm advice: Computing is the greatest opportunity in the history of civilization, but you are addressing it with all the seriousness of toys in Cracker Jacks boxes. Satya, get real, get serious.</comment>


FAA to ground Boeing 737 MAX -8 and -9 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/boeing-737-max-8-ethiopia-airlines-crash/index.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19381931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19381931)</comment>


Bogle Sounds a Warning on Index Funds - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/bogle-sounds-a-warning-on-index-funds-1543504551 <comment><USER3> [https://outline.com/DGK9Td](https://outline.com/DGK9Td)

</comment><comment><USER4> A bit click-baity, but the warning here from the father-of-index-funds is not that they've become a bad investment, but that their popularity is leading toward a handful of financial institutions holding controlling interests in most of the largest companies. Pretty interesting unitended consequence.

<comment><USER5> Why would that matter? If they are obligated by their funds' charters not to intervene, then all the governance decisions happen exactly as if they hadn't invested, right? 10% vs 90% of share votes being on auto-pilot shouldn't matter?

Is the argument that the vast majority of them could change their funds' charter to _allow_ them to be actively involved with governance? If so, that would be really hard to achieve even if many of them worked at it.

Edit: three people have made the same "it's easier to get a controlling interest" argument. See my reply in the follow-up before making another redundant comment.

<comment><USER6> If 90% of shares are non-intervening that means hostile takeovers are now 10x cheaper to implement. It would be weird to be a company with market cap $100M, where $10M could buy a controlling interest in voting shares.

<comment><USER7> Non-intervening usually means the vote according to the recommendations of the board, and not that they abstain from voting.

<comment><USER8> That seems like a different kind of problem though. If funds that _vote according to the recommendations of the board_ own >50% of the company, the board becomes unaccountable. (Unless they apply different rules to board elections, but then we're back to the original problem because the minority activist can elect their own board.)

<comment><USER9> This seems to be mostly in keeping with the spirit of index funds. It's a hands off approach that lets the company run itself.

In theory an index fund should never own that much of a company, because that means it would own >50% of all publicly traded companies. The whole point is to spread the risk evenly so you can realize the average returns without having to put any thought into it. It shouldn't mean it's buying $100k shares of GE and also $100k shares of Mom&Pop Pickle Fork Inc.

<comment><USER10> But if all the index funds together own >50%, and they all go with the board, then it's the same as if it was a single company that went with the board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The summary: if Coke and Pepsi are owned by different guys, Coke will take an action that makes them an additional $1 million, even if (especially if) it causes Pepsi to lose $1 billion. Most commonly, cut prices.

If the two companies are owned by the same guy, they have the incentive not to compete with each other since their owner cares about the sum of their profits. This is why one wouldn't be allowed to acquire the other. But the effect is the same when a single index fund owns a large chunk of both companies. The companies are encouraged to compete not too fiercely with each other.

<comment><USER12> Even without index funds the drive towards large portfolios and diversification would do the same thing. I'd go so far as to say that unified ownership of competing firms by large investors is just unhealthy in general. Not really sure what can be done about it though since many companies are rather multi-industry.

<comment><USER11> Well the idea of an index, whether done through a fund or not, is to buy some of each company. A value investing approach would be to find the better stock and invest in it, so Coke stockholders would rarely own Pepsi stock and vice versa.

<comment><USER12> Still, even without index funds, the first thing most people are told is that diversification is key and that sector allocation matters more than the specific companies you hold. Plus people want to mitigate risk, so they buy a little of each thing that matches whatever profile, and soon a sector essentially has unified ownership interests rather than competitive (and antagonistic) ownership interests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> decimalst-s Is there anything legally preventing these funds from having some kind of system where you have fractional voting rights proportional to your number of shares in the mutual fund vs. the weight of the company in the index it represent? e.g. You have 100 shares of a mutual fund that has 1% of its holdings in some company- thus you have 1 vote for that company's shareholder ballot, or whatever the fractional representation based on market cap would come out to. I'm not sure if a single holder of funds can cast "partial votes" in each direction though. Either way, it seems like a problem that could be fixed through technology.

<comment><USER13> The article says that this solution has unintended consequences too, since you are now transferring voting rights from the share owner, who cares about the long term performance of the company, to share renters, who generally just care about the short term, which is counterproductive.

Although I'm not sure I get that - I don't quite see how the renter's would be especially more short sighted - it's not like the fund is obligated to hold the stocks any longer than anyone else.

<comment><USER14> > you are now transferring voting rights from the share owner, who cares about > the long term performance of the company, to share renters, who generally > just care about the short term, which is counterproductive.

This logic is backwards; index fund holders are _more_ likely to hold their shares for a longer period of time, compared to day traders. The whole point of index fund investing is to _avoid_ short holds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A while ago some article had a great example of what can happen if the majority of shares of most companies in the same industry are held by the same investors: It punishes competition within the same industry. The example was about the airline industry where investors don't want airlines to go head to head on pricing. While some companies might benefit from this, it would lead to lower margins and thus profits for the industry as a whole. So this in essence might form a cartel.

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, because I find it odd to hear this from Bogle himself. Vanguard doesn't own or control the equities in their index funds. You do. Vanguard is structured so that you can own your piece of the index fund pie. And while there are large holders of index funds such as Vanguard's Total Stock Market fund, I don't think there are any majority holders. For 51% of equities to be channeled through Vanguard but owned by stockholders does not seem to be a risk.

If I'm wrong, can you explain what I'm wrong about?

<comment><USER17> The risk is that Vanguard, State Street, and Blackrock, employ small 'governance teams' whose job is to vote on your behalf. Since they don't have an explicit fiduciary duty to the shareholders of the index funds, but do have an implicit one, it can be argued that you don't actually have a vote in how the component companies are run. More here: [https://outline.com/njXPEu](https://outline.com/njXPEu)

<comment><USER18> Vanguard explicitly asks you to vote your shares. I've gotten letters in the past asking me to cast a vote.

<comment><USER19> Vote on mutual fund governance questions. Not on each of the thousands of companies that the fund is invested in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> He also warned in 2017:

 _Bogle noted that trading would dry up if the stock market comprised only indexers and there were no active investors setting prices on individual issues. Everyone would just buy or sell the market.

...

Shareholders of index funds could then suffer more than owners of actively managed funds, and they could take their losses harder due to the perceived security they feel precisely because they merely own the market and aren't trying to beat it. That might make active investors feel a bit of schadenfreude for indexers who have been free-riding at their expense, but the feeling probably wouldn't last. The greater price swings that could ensue in a heavily indexed, less-active market are likely to exacerbate losses for everyone._

[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/john-bogle-has-a- warning-f...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/john-bogle-has-a-warning-for- index-fund-investors-2017-06-01)

It seems a good bet that this warning, like most pre-downturn warnings, will only become obvious during the next major downturn.

</comment><comment><USER21> > "There is no America, there is no democracy, there is only IBM and ITT and > AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon … The world is a college of > corporations inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The > world is a business, Mr. Beale, it has been since man crawled out of the > slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in > which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and > ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve the common > good, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, > all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."

Network -- 1976

</comment><comment><USER22> Of the proposed solutions, some combination of the following three items would be a solid first step (incremental without being too drastic):

* Full public disclosure by index funds of their voting policies and public documentation of each engagement with corporate managers.

* Require index funds to retain an independent supervisory board with full responsibility for all decisions regarding corporate governance.

* Make it clear that directors of index funds and other large money managers have a fiduciary duty to vote solely in the interest of the funds' shareholders.

<comment><USER23> > Make it clear that directors of index funds and other large money managers > have a fiduciary duty to vote solely in the interest of the funds' > shareholders.

That's easy to say, but deciding what the shareholders interest is can be incredibly difficult. On any difficult decision, like "should this merger be approved", index funds taking any position is the same as active management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is fascinating. Selfishly though this seems to signal for investors of index funds (such as myself) that they will only continue to be good investments unless major government regulation occurs.

Does anyone know of any investment risk to index funds if everyone is now doing it?

<comment><USER25> The risk is because index funds don't do stock analysis (instead they buy and hold all stocks) they will invest in bad companies and prop their price up. Then when the bad company goes bankrupt (as everyone paying attention knows will happen) the index funds are left holding all the stock suddenly worth nothing.

Which is to say the traditional more expensive managed funds that actually pay attention to the fundamentals of the companies they invest in should see a comeback. While this style of fund is more expensive (because a human can only examine a few companies in a year in enough detail to decide if they are worth investing in - as a full time job you can maybe do 50) by investing only in companies that will do better than average they can beat the market (or shorting if you want to play companies that will do far worse than average). So far the low costs of index funds have made them a better investment despite them not investing in strong companies, but we should see the day where a managed fund can beat the index funds just because the index funds are leaving the advantages of analysis on the table.

You can argue [meaning this might or might not be correct] that historically managed funds have done worse than index funds because there are so many managers that anytime there is a slight deal someone jumps on it before the deal is large enough to pay for the costs of finding it. However if you don't jump on it someone else will and they make something on the deal while you make nothing. Thus as index funds take over there will be more and more deals for the managers to find, and managers can wait until they are large enough to be worth the price.

It will be interesting to see when/where the line is crossed.

<comment><USER26> This is not exactly true. Many (most?) indices are market cap weighted, so if a company's stock is tanking (i.e, their market cap proportional to other tickers in the index is going down), the index will sell the shares.

In my view, index funds aren't really passive at all, they are crowdsourcing the best ideas of active management. This is why many indices (like S&P 500) produce pretty good returns.

If you created an index held every US equity in equal proportions, regardless of price movement, that would be like what you're talking.

If you compared the returns of the S&P 500 against this theoretical index (let's make it an ETF and call it "DUMB"), you would find that the S&P 500 would have much better returns.

The takeaway from this is that many indices produce stellar returns and aren't as "passive" as one might think. Think of factor indices or whatever.

<comment><USER27> The point is that the stock won't always tank when they're doing something that'll negatively affect fundamentals, because too few people are actively researching & investing in the stock to affect the price. And then when a tipping point _is_ reached and the stock price starts to go down, index funds will exacerbate the slide as they rebalance out of the falling stock and sell off its shares.

Normally markets remain efficient because they provide an incentive for people to actively research & surface all available information on a company's future prospects. If most people aren't doing this, then a.) the market price will be slower to react to bad information about the company and b.) people who _do_ actively react will make larger profits, as they can trade on their information before the majority of the market takes it into account.

There's an equilibrium level of disequilibrium - as more people pursue passive investing, returns to active investors rise, until some of those passive investors realize they can make large profits as active investors, restore market efficiency, and destroy the profit potential of active investing. I'm not sure exactly where we are in that cycle, but there's some evidence that stock prices have become less volatile overall except for major news-related panics, which would be expected if a large proportion of people are passively investing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting. I've heard these warning signals before about index funds. Lets just hope index funds stay healthy for another say 60 years so i can fully utilize all the $$ I am dumping into the market now in my 20s. Please??

<comment><USER29> i thought an index fund's health depends on the health of the companies inside it. even if people decided they wanted to replace their index funds with direct stock purchases they managed themselves, the underlying value of the fund wouldn't change right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Limit the voting power of corporate shares held by index managers. But such > a step would, in substance, transfer voting rights from corporate stock > owners, who care about the long-term, to corporate stock renters, who do > not... an absurd outcome.

This sounds like the most viable strategy to me. Just don't let index funds vote. I don't understand his objection at all. The index fund _managers_ are not long term investors in these corporations. The people who own the index's shares are, and they are deferring their votes to the managers right now.

<comment><USER31> How long has AT&T been in the dow jones index or IBM or Coca Cola ?

<comment><USER30> A long time. What are you getting at?

<comment><USER31> So index funds would have to hold AT&T long term.

<comment><USER30> Did you read what I said about that?

> The index fund managers are not long term investors in these corporations. > The people who own the index's shares are, and they are deferring their > votes to the managers right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If the stock market becomes dominated by _copycats copying each other_ , can it price equity risk accurately?

<comment><USER33> As long as there are at least some active investors left they can, because they follow price changes set by active investors passively.

If index funds start to create systematic valuation errors, active strategies start to perform better and they start to outperform index funds. This is not the case, because index funds beat active fund management constantly over longer periods. (The article raises concerns of corporate governance and accumulation of power that is different issue).

Matt Levine [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-08-24/are- in...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-08-24/are-index-funds- communist)

>there is an alternative view that the rise of passive investing will improve capital allocation, because bad active investors will be driven out but good ones will remain. The passive investors can't influence relative prices, since they just buy the market portfolio, meaning that the fewer but better active investors will continue to make the capital allocation decisions. On this view, lower returns to active management are a sign that prices are more efficient and capital allocation is getting better

<comment><USER34> >index funds beat active fund management constantly over longer periods

This was only the case because 'long periods' include the periods in which free riders (indexes) were small relative to the active and activist shareholders.

<comment><USER33> This is still the case and nothing indicates that things have changed.

Index funds have two main benefits:

* Lower cost,

* Never miss a new trend. At any moment only handful of stocks are responsible for disproportionate growth and index funds catch them all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> (Index) funds solve a problem that we shouldn't really have anymore.

The problem is that (semi) manually trading securities is inherently expensive.

Funds solve that problem by massively reducing the number of transactions that are required: 1000 people investing in a fund investing in 1000 companies needs 2000 transactions instead of the 1000000 transactions needed when 1000 people invest in 1000 companies directly.

But there really is no fundamental reason anymore why you shouldn't be able to just buy small numbers of shares from a thousand companies via electronic systems. A million transactions is not really a problem for modern IT, nor is managing 1000 positions in your account.

Yes, there are some more practical problems (the valuation of individual stocks being too high for small investors to buy even a single one, preventing front running on index changes, tax refunds, ...) - but I would think all of those should be possible to solve in a way that is both economically feasible and has the individual investor holding the actual stock to prevent those accumulations of power. And you still could have the possibility to delegate your voting rights to some organization you trust--but that could be decoupled from the investment "product" or account itself, plus you wouldn't be required to delegate the power for all your investments.

Or we could just make laws that mandate that funds must delegate voting rights to their investors, i.e., make it as if they were holding the stocks directly in that regard?

<comment><USER36> Tracking the index on your own would be more than a full time job. You could do it automatically, but that just reinvents the fund

The S&P500 had 500 stocks. Do you want to vote ~1.5 times a day?

<comment><USER35> > Tracking the index on your own would be more than a full time job. You could > do it automatically, but that just reinvents the fund

That reinvents funds ... without the problem of accumulating all the power in a few hands, which was exactly my point?

> The S&P500 had 500 stocks. Do you want to vote ~1.5 times a day?

No, and why would I have to? For one, many index funds don't vote on many stocks either. But more importantly, the point is to unbundle voting rights from the portfolio management aspect. Just as that doesn't mean that you have to manually track an index, it doesn't mean you have to manually vote either, does it? You can just delegate it to some group that you think represents your interests, and you could do so selectively. If some group wants to get some particular company to change something and you support that, you could just delegate the voting rights for that one company to that group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > Force giant index funds to spin off their assets into a number of separate > entities, each independently managed. Such a drastic step would—and > should—face near-insurmountable obstacles, for it would create havoc for > index investors and managers alike.

Set a cap of $1 trillion or $500 billion that any single firm can have under management. This probably only breaks up Vanguard and BlackRock. Not sure how this would cause havoc. Seems like we need to relearn the reason anti-trust laws we passed in the US and start using them again.

I do think Vanguard has been a great boon for American investors and would not like them punished for their success. Not sure how to square that fact with the need to break them up.

</comment><comment><USER38> Related to this, supervoting shares are popular with tech startups that are going public, but the street generally frowns upon these structures from a corporate governance perspective.

Founders pitch supervoting control as a way to make sure the company can realize its long term potential by protecting themselves from activist investors with a short term view.

So far, ownership of new IPOs hasn't been affected much due to their small market caps and subsequent miniscule weighting in indices. It will be interesting to see if increasing concentrated ownership by index funds may eventually play a factor and perhaps increase acceptance of supervoting.

</comment><comment><USER39> This seems quite easy to fix. Just give me the option of voting my shares in the underlying companies of the index funds I own. I just want to own the market average but I'm happy to be an activist investor in the decisions I happen to care about.

Index funds may even want to differentiate themselves by having good research teams to advise me on what to decide and having convenience options where I get to set specific generic voting policies that they will then implement automatically for me.

<comment><USER40> Have you ever voted before? Assume 10 questions per company. Exposure to S&P 500 would mean 5,000 questions to answer. I don't know what the general stats are, but some proxies I've seen have 20+ questions.

Now, you will most likely be uninformed about most of the decisions that need to be made, which lead to your 2nd point about default options suggested by the index fund manager. But that just circles back to Bogle's points in the article. Also, with index fund costs at rock bottoms, good luck getting quality research into your voting options.

<comment><USER39> _> But that just circles back to Bogle's points in the article. Also, with index fund costs at rock bottoms, good luck getting quality research into your voting options._

The alternative is active funds where you're already paying for exactly the same thing plus a bunch of compensation for underperformance to people who pretend to know what they're doing. Paying a research team is cheap in comparison and once funds are at <0.10% expense ratios making them cheaper isn't that big of a market advantage anyway. A good research team and interface would definitely make me pick a 0.10% fund over a 0.05% one for a life-long investment career. If I'm reading the numbers in the article correctly at the scale of Vanguard that's a cool billion dollars a year to provide research and systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> If I own a 1000 shares of an index fund, (which maybe includes 3 shares of AAPL or something) shouldn't the 3 shares of voting power go to me? Why not?

</comment><comment><USER42> He didnt mention Federal Thrift program which is like five giant index funds of five asset classes. I dont think they have any activism. But some top federal official could polticize them like you-know-who who often disparages individual companies and perhaps ask for the sale of a large amount of stock.

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't understand why this is a problem. The actions of index fund managers are constrained enough to be almost automatic (hence the rock bottom fees). They just balance the portfolio to track an index. With this constraint, how does it give them power over corporations?

</comment><comment><USER44> Author complains about high barrier of entry to create a new index fund, but all solutions he list are just even more barriers of entry.

The common sense of not putting new laws until clear evil has been observed should be applied here.

<comment><USER45> >the common sense of waiting for a massive crisis before doing something by which time it is too late for millions of investors who lose everything

That _is_ the conventional approach, I think Mr. Bogle is suggesting that we act to prevent such issues ahead of time for a change.

And the main barrier to entry he refers to is essentially the size of the established players. They have economies of scale that a new entrant would be hard-pressed to match. And the author is the man who essentially invented the index fund, and whose company, Vanguard, currently is the market leader in these products and has the most to gain from maintaining the status quo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Now that everything is getting rolled up into index funds, might as well just turn over the means of production to the workers.

</comment><comment><USER47> Well, significant amounts of assets will be essentially controlled (votes) by people who do not own it...

</comment><comment><USER48> I work in this industry. I'm on the indexing side of it, not the ETF/fund side. We obviously have relationships with all the major fund providers, especially the three big names mentioned in the article. And I happen to work for the big dog - S&P.

 _" Why? Partly because of two high barriers to entry: the huge scale enjoyed by the big indexers would be difficult to replicate by new entrants; and index fund prices (their expense ratios, or fees) have been driven to commodity-like levels, even to zero."_

I can attest that is absolutely 100% true. This business structure is perfect when economies of scale come into play. And S&P is a master of this. It's extremely difficult for others to compete with us because, like everything else, there is a range of services/quality. S&P is at the top end - <USER2> Mercedes of index providers. People pay more, but they get the best service/products. The margins are extremely high for any business. But for an service that is considered to have been "commoditized" (and it has to a large extent), our margins are insane. All our competitors want to attack those margins but they have trouble because they aren't able to provide the quality, variety, or depth of service that we do. Which leaves them only able to charge much less and be on the lower end of pricing. Time and time again I've seen some clients leave to go with someone cheaper and become displeased and end up coming back. That's because they simply don't have the internal systems, data contracts, or expertise from having been doing this for as long as we have.

Another thing is that the business model in general is damn near unbeatable. The 500 and DJIA combined require very little work overall as they are just two out of thousands of products we have. But they account for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. That's sort of like having a hit movie or book. But the difference with this business model as opposed to most other areas of capitalism is that the revenue is _recurring_. No where else have I seen unpatented, non-copyrighted intellectual property retain its value like this. Usually there is a surge at the start and then it tapers off fast after release/purchase. That creates a cash cow which they use to build stronger infrastructure and stay at the top.

That being said, let me address the main concern of the article - the issue of ownership for the index funds (not the index providers). I might very well be missing something here, but the answer seems obvious to me. They should just update the law so that the shares owned by the fund providers aren't considered theirs but rather the end holders of the ETFs/funds that they are packaged into. In fact this is so obvious to me I don't understand how it's not already the law since that's the case for a lot of other things like this. If you have a Charles Schwab account and issue an order for a buy, they buy it for you by placing the order under their trading ID on the market. You are later updated to be a holder of record during the trade settlement process. Schwab is a service/pass-through agent. It's very similar for the fund providers. They just buy the shares to package/securitize in advance and then sell to someone. This is the creation/redemption aspect of ETF management. When the creation/redemption process goes on or ETF shares change hands, a process similar to becoming a holder of record through trade settlement should occur. Yes, that would result in you technically being listed as owner of a fractional amount of shares, but that's a hell of a lot better (and easier to deal with) than saying that the fund provider owns all the shares and you just trust them to vote properly for you.

<comment><USER49> I don't want to vote for each of the thousands of stocks I own indirectly through my index fund. I want Vanguard to vote on my behalf such that it proportionately replicates the votes of the non-index shareholders. This strategy is just an extension of the idea behind index funds in the first place: mirror the existing market.

<comment><USER35> In other words: You want them to not vote at all.

Which is a dumb idea, of course, as that just leaves the control over your capital to your adversaries. Passive investing works because goals are aligned: The only way to influence an index fund on the investing side of things into doing something stupid is by doing something stupid yourself. If you want to make an S&P500 index fund buy some penny stock, you have to buy it yourself first in massive quantities paying massive prices for it to drive up the market cap. Voting does not work that way.

<comment><USER49> The other stockholders are almost never your adversaries. Their interests are in alignment with yours: to vote in such a way that it maximizes the value of the stock.

The only exception would be some kind of action that is specifically discriminatory towards your shares over theirs, which is typically not legal. If it were to occur, that is the only situation where I would want Vanguard to be voting on my behalf.

You're right though that not voting is equivalent and much easier than trying to replicate votes.

<comment><USER35> > The other stockholders are almost never your adversaries. Their interests > are in alignment with yours: to vote in such a way that it maximizes the > value of the stock.

Nope. Their interest is to vote in such a way that it maximizes the value of their portfolio. If that doesn't match your portfolio, then your interests are not aligned.

> The only exception would be some kind of action that is specifically > discriminatory towards your shares over theirs, which is typically not > legal.

There is nothing discriminatory about voting for selling a division of company A to company B, say, and it is certainly not illegal. But it might well still be in the interest of the owners of company B who also happen to hold the only voting 10% of company A, and to the detriment of the owners of the other 90% of company A.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tackling Technical Writing - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/alainakafkes/tackling-technical-writing <comment><USER2> One of my favorite tech writing tips came from an email exchange with Owen Linzmayer, the author of Apple Confidential (No Starch Press):

"The most important thing to remember about technical writing is that the goal is not necessarily to be understood, but rather to avoid misunderstanding. As such, consistency and clarity are paramount, and you should never assume your reader has the knowledge you possess.

"I try to make sure to tell readers not only how to do something, but why. That way they are not just following instructions and learning by rote, but rather, they're building their understanding of the system you're explaining, and perhaps can devise solutions to problems you haven't covered."

<comment><USER3> >"The most important thing to remember about technical writing is that the goal is not necessarily to be understood, but rather to avoid misunderstanding.

That quote is fantastic. Having worked as a Technical Writer, the problem I most often run into is what I term the "forest for the trees" issue. Oftentimes, I work or did work with engineers who knew a language, framework or low-level system inside and out. Sometimes they even spent their entire adult lives learning it. When it came time to communicate the essentials of said technology or language, it was almost like they froze, unable to go back to basics or build concepts from the ground up. If it wasn't high-level or advanced, they stumbled.

I was often brought into situations like these with little knowledge of what I might be asked to write about. I was usually given the option of starting a project by interviewing engineers, but often delayed that and did a bit of my own research first. Once I had the most basic of concepts and understanding locked down, I would guide the engineer toward those areas, and have them start remembering their earliest introduction to whatever their area of expertise was. I found that was oftentimes the best way to avoid being misunderstood — not for me to understand everything 100 percent, but to get those who did to break things down into the simplest terms and build things up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote a detailed post[0] (also on dev.to) about how to write technical posts. Submitted it earlier today but didnt hit the front page. Hope you find it useful. Feel free to ask questions.

[0] [https://dev.to/yelluw/how-to-do-technical- blogging](https://dev.to/yelluw/how-to-do-technical-blogging)

<comment><USER5> Nice! One thing I struggle with is removing I/me/mine from writing. When you do, it almost always condenses the thought and makes it simpler to understand. E.g., in your post you could combine the first two sections and halve your word count:

 _Intro

Many software developers blog to share technical knowledge and experiences. Some don't realize that sharing that technical knowledge is a skill they must develop on top of basic blogging skills.

This post explains how to structure a technical post, provides examples, and includes personal tips._

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I received some feedback from a coworker about some of my writing to avoid the passive voice. I'm not sure where I developed my passive voice habit (maybe in my Chem 101 lab reports?) but it's been a hard one to break.

Is active voice always better?

<comment><USER7> Always, no, Usually, yes. And, since most people overuse passive voice, advice to avoid using it benefits most writers.

Passive voice hides the thing that is performing the verb in the sentence. That obscurity has some costs. It tends to make the sentence longer. See "benefits most writers" above instead of "is beneficial to most writers".

Worse, it tends to make the sentence harder to "get into". You want the reader to concretely visualize what you're saying. When the sentence gives you no actor to place in the scene, it's harder to grasp what's really going on. That vagueness in turn makes your writing harder to understand and harder to remember.

On the other hand, sometimes you really do want to hide the actor. The thing performing the verb may not be relevant or may be actively distracting to mention. It may be that one or more actors may be the thing that performs the verb and you don't know which one it will be. Being specific could be incorrect. In those cases, I think passive voice is fine.

But as a first approximation, "avoid passive voice" is good advice. Be skeptical of every use it, and don't be equally skeptical when you use active voice. But don't tie prose in knots trying to avoid passive voice entirely. Sometimes an "is" is fine.

<comment><USER6> > The thing performing the verb may not be relevant or may be actively > distracting to mention.

That's exactly what I was thinking when I mentioned my Chem 101 lab reports.

I tend to write in a passive voice and if I read my words out loud rather than silently, it's obvious to me. It's almost sounds like I'm using cop talk ( _the subject was observed exiting the vehicle_ ).</comment></comment></comment>


How much open source saves you? - <AUTHOR> http://kkovacs.eu/how-much-open-source-saves-for-you

<comment><USER2> I have a feeling the author forgot about the time and man-hours required to invent semiconductors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Point taken :)</comment></comment>


I made a node.js page to search npm+github - <AUTHOR> http://blago.dachev.com:8000/modules

<comment><USER2> Neat! Thanks for this. I've been playing with node this weekend and I was pining for something like the <http://rubygems.org> site and this fits the bill nicely.

<comment><AUTHOR> I created it so I can compare different alternatives before picking a module to use. I'm glad it's useful to other people too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> None of the existing sites like this (<http://npm.mape.me/>, <http://search.npmjs.org/>, and now yours) don't do anything special when a project has multiple maintainers, even though that information is all in the package.json file.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the message he has about IE6/7/8 users when you click on the top node.js+npm+github

      The page is broken? Sorry, I spend enough time dealing with IE 6/7/8 at work. Spare time is for fun. If you are using a modern browser though let me know: @blago

</comment><comment><USER5> Gorgeous design (and speedy interface)! When I searched for a couple of my npm modules, however, I couldn't find them ("calais" is one). A small wishlist of stuff I'd love to see in an online npm index: related modules, rating, and comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a bug where only 2.x compatible modules are indexed. This will be fixed soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very nice work, navigating backwards wasn't exactly intuitive (clicking the tag gets rid of the tag, maybe add an [x] or breadcrumbs).

</comment><comment><USER7> Love it to see a true "I hacked this together" post. Looks great, glad to know the node.js crowd is growing. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice. I've had a tough time finding modules for node with Google. Github search doesn't help too much.

<comment><USER5> <http://npm.mape.me/> is a straight-up list of what's in npm. I follow twitter.com/nodemodules for updates to npm. It would be nice if everyone with modules listed in the Github wiki (<https://github.com/ry/node/wiki/modules>) would get onto npm.

<comment><USER6> There is also <http://search.npmjs.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You need to do input validation on your search input. Accepts tags and processes them.

</comment><comment><USER10> The repo link is not obvious. I expected the name of the project to be a link.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call. I'll make it link to the npm page.</comment></comment>


Russian Hackers Reach US Utility Control Rooms, Homeland Security Officials Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-hackers-reach-u-s-utility-control-rooms-homeland-security-officials-say-1532388110 <comment><USER2> I hate how this has for some reason been big news the past few days. One mediocre article came out about it, now it keeps getting regurgitated through other news sites. This is nothing new, the US infrastructure has likely been compromised for quite some time. Many of the very critical plants that hold the keys to keeping the lights on, water flowing, water treated, etc are mostly running on systems built pre 2000 that weren't built with security in mind. Many of these systems can not have security integrated with them, and they can not be replaced. The most you can do is cover it with as many blankets as you can (firewalls, extensive logging, behavior analytics, etc). The biggest question is not whether or not these facilities are compromised, it's whether or not a bad actor is going to use it for malicious purpose. It's one thing to shut down a website for the lols, it's another thing to overload a nuclear reactor and contaminate an entire chunk of the US.

Notice how the article is based entirely on "what ifs". >> "They got to the point where they could have thrown switches" >> "where they could have caused blackouts"

At this point it is a waiting game. Who is going to be the fellow to push the enter key on their keyboard that then causes a 7 digit number of people to go without power, clean water, or even be exposed to radiation? It's understandable that countries feud and people just don't like each other, but actually shutting down key infrastructure like these scenarios suggest is an end game move that establishes the point of no return in global conflict.

<comment><USER3> > _This is nothing new, the US infrastructure has likely been compromised for > quite some time_

Just because something isn't new doesn't mean it can't be news.

"The well is poisoned!"

"Bob noticed that last week. Why are you still talking about this?

"..."

It's being discussed now. Better late than never.

<comment><USER4> It's more like, "The well is poisoned and Bob noticed last week, but we can't fix the problem because then people go without drinking water for 2 weeks"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For a long time it seems like these places have made things more secure by building fences, adding giant rocks, putting in lights and cameras, other physical security measures to keep threats off site. Hopefully at some point they will focus on the network side of things now. It's been obvious for at least a decade that one bad guy, or even a team of bad guys can take out a single location with a truck, but one bad guy or a team can take out a bunch of places with a computer. From what I've seen the utility industry has been defending against trucks.

</comment><comment><USER6> Really? It'd be surprising if they hadn't.

I'd expect utilities to be one of the softest targets out there, based on prior interaction with the industry...

edit: About 8-10 years ago I used to collect news articles, reports to congress, etc, about ICS (industrial control systems, the superset of utilities) being hacked. It was regular, comprehensive, and depressing. The ICS industry was running 15-20 years behind in grasping the fact that hacking could be a problem. Think 1990 era security mindsets in 2010.

<comment><USER7> >Really? It'd be surprising if they hadn't.

Ding ding ding. PLA Unit 61398, Bureau 121, Unit 8200, Fancy Bear... doesn't surprise me if all of them have any variety of ways into our infrastructure.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I expect pretty much every funded "cyber" agency has explored our systems, from the UK to Somalia. I expect any neutral to semi-hostile country (e.g., North Korea) has dormant C&C systems in our infrastructure.

The conversation needs to be around, "we have known electronic critical infrastructure has been thoroughly compromised for a decade, how do we contain, mitigate, and remove the compromises."

I don't mean to fear-monger or suggest fear mongering. The status quo has been "don't do anything particularly troublesome" on all sides, and that has been stable to date with only mild perturbations such as Stuxnet. It's probably a MAD calculus, with the recognition that open hostile acts would escalate to, as the phrase goes, "kinetic actions".

The US could open the dialogue with the frank admission that our pants are not only down, but blew away in the breeze - we should, all of us, mutually, improve our security. I don't know that this is possible with, e.g., the US power grid _without_ nationalizing it - the profit motive for defending against rare argues against security, as we all know...

<comment><USER7> I keep waiting for someone to accidentally discover something in networking hardware that shuts down/shits itself when it gets some specific VLF signal, with it baked right into an IC.

Example: Hostile satellite broadcasts VLF signal, the compromised hardware is always sitting there listening for a specific command with a hybrid IC that does both its expected job and acts as a radio receiver for a very specific signal or signals with code that gets activated when a specific match is detected. VLF is used by submarines to get small amounts of data out from deep underwater, would pass through buildings with ease. Code triggers chip to stop its intended purpose or to run some other code. Even with a few % of networking hardware compromised you'd create a massive disruption that could bring the internet to a grind leading up to an invasion.

You could have the same hybrid chip in traditional telephony hardware, cellular telephony hardware, civilian GPS units, power industry hardware, vehicles. It's not unplausible, in fact, counterfeit chips have already been found time and time again in hardware, polluting a supply intended for sale in the U.S. at one or more Chinese factories would be trivial for the Chinese government for example.

Even just sending a signal to cheap IoT devices or those cody streaming devices all over the internet, at gun shows, at fairs, at flea markets and you could instantly turn on some massive army that starts randomly pinging specific IP addresses or just random sets of IP addresses to just bog down the internet.

People worry about the software, I worry about the ICs themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Russia's cyber military is James Bond level cool. There are speculations (nobody can prove it) that they set up their own TOR using onion-like proxies, with a custom crypto protocol, over Shodan-discovered endpoints, through a clever use of tunneling through UPNP systems on the internet, with incredible OPSEC - even burning the whole infrastructure several years after it was discovered.

Some day we'll get uncensored versions of these Ops disclosed by the various governments that run them and get to read about the research facilities and intense personalities that run them.

<comment><USER9> Is this sarcastic? A dream? An outline of a short story? Is there any basis?

> intense personalities

?

<comment><USER8> Sorry for the opaque comment. Was gushing over the cool exploits of the "Inception Group" or "RedOctober APT" \- believed but not proven to be Russian espionage.

[https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat- intelligence/inception...](https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat- intelligence/inception-framework-hiding-behind-proxies)

[https://securelist.com/red-october-diplomatic-cyber- attacks-...](https://securelist.com/red-october-diplomatic-cyber-attacks- investigation/36740/#7)

James Bond level epic awesomeness and sophistication. Keep reading if you want to nerd out.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure HN is the right forum for that. Enjoy, uh, gushing.

<comment><USER8> HN is for technical conversation, which includes being impressed and commenting on the state of the art.

Seriously encourage reading about capabilities, especially the operations security maturity. The level of research and development is truly impressive.

<comment><USER9> I think if you look around, you won't see anything like it. You don't need to repeat the 'gushing'; I read the prior two comments. But anyway, have fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Calling using Telnet hacking is about as accurate as walking up to someone's unlocked computer and posting to their Facebook and then saying "you got hacked"

</comment><comment><USER11> I sat in on this webinar and can say there was a few things misleading about this article. These networks were not "air-gapped" they were able to be accessed with lateral movement in the networks. Also they were able to detect them get get all the way to the point where they were able to flip the switch on the ICS. When asked later in the webinar why they didn't there was really no explanation as to why not even though that was their goal as the attackers. That is just fishy to me.

</comment><comment><USER12> "russian" determined how?

<comment><USER13> They lost Putin agent card in utility control room.</comment></comment>


Domain & SSL prices are on the rise - <AUTHOR> http://www.universalwebservices.net/domains-ssl/

<comment><USER2> Seems very much like an advert for namecheap</comment>


Explosion and Disappearance of BitcoinXT Nodes Yesterday - <AUTHOR> http://xtnodes.com/other_nodes_and_xt_nodes.html

<comment><USER2> 404?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, works for me</comment></comment>


How Internet Explorer cost a website a month's salary - <AUTHOR> http://www.voodooalerts.com/blog/is-internet-explorer-costing-your-site-money-heres-how-it-cost-one-site-owner-a-months-salary/

<comment><USER2> Slashdot moron clickbait. TL;DR Newsflash: idiot doesn't test his website on known buggy legacy browsers and pays the price. And this happened how long ago? Five years ago?

</comment><comment><USER3> One nitpick: IE6 does not generally treat text-indent as moving the background image. The fact that that technique worked in all the major browsers of the IE6 era was one of the reasons it became the most popular image replacement mechanism in the first place. Are buttons an exception to this case?

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems like he could have just tested his site before deploying it? If IE 6/7 were such major money makers for him maybe he should have made sure they worked.

And why did he find the bug and "not immediately fix it"? That itself is ridiculous as well.</comment>


Darpa Experimental Program to Develop the Next Generation of Vertical Flight - <AUTHOR> http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2013/02/25.aspx

<comment><USER2> _"Strapping rockets onto the back of a helicopter is not the type of approach we're looking for. The engineering community is familiar with the numerous attempts in the past that have not worked. This time, rather than tweaking past designs, we are looking for true cross-pollinations of designs and technologies from the fixed-wing and rotary-wing worlds. The elegant confluence of these engineering design paradigms is where this program should find some interesting results."_

</comment><comment><USER3> A modern refactoring of certain old projects, like the Hiller Flying Platform, could yield some excellent results.

</comment><comment><USER4> So, DARPA is ready to write checks for just technical plans just as engineering presented just on paper for very challenging problems. And they intend to evaluate the plans, just from what is on paper. So, the check comes before any prototype, alpha, beta, users, revenue, traction, proof of product/market fit, etc. And the DARPA batting average is not awful. The VC industry might see from this DARPA practice that such things are possible.</comment>


TheFunded.com: The Resource for Entrepreneurs. - <AUTHOR> http://thefunded.com/ <comment><USER3> It's a good site and a good service, but this isn't anything new and I question its appearance on the front page of HN. We've talked about TheFunded before:

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153778> \- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576385>

etc.

<comment> daniel-cussen And the design is still pretty stomach-churning.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I only just learned about it. And its appearance on the front page - <USER2> for so limited a time - suggests that others didn't know about it yet either.

I agree re its design: so bad it made me question its authenticity!</comment>