Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3 - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/come-tesla-earnings-tsla-195239276.html <comment><USER4> Since this came out as part of the Tesla earnings, here's my recap from their earnings release and call....

\- Tesla will be late getting up to 5,000 units a week of Model 3. It will happen at the end of Q1 instead of the end of this year. The bottleneck is batteries.

\- Some lines are at only 500 cars a week. Namely the battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly.

\- The $2.92 a share loss was much bigger than the $2.27 analysts expected.

\- The company burned $1.4 billion and has $3.5 billion in cash. Raising money shouldn't be necessary.

\- Automotive gross margins fell from 28% to about 18% and will slip to 15% next quarter.

\- Auto revenue grew 10% to $2.4 billion as sales of Model S and X grew. Revenue is at risk, though. Tesla will divert resources from Model S and X to the Model 3.

\- Tesla didn't say much about China. The company added a supercharger station with 50 chargers in Shanghai, but no word on a new plant.

\- Musk expects to spend $1 billion on capital expenditures next quarter. That's consistent with expectations for ramp up for Model 3.

\- Tesla installed 109 megawatts of ``energy generation systems'' in the third quarter. It acknowledges this is an underwhelming figure: ``the lower deployments are in large part a result of deliberately de-emphasizing commercial and industrial solar energy projects with low profit and limited cash generation.''

As to the battery delay.... Tesla says it's the suppliers fault. "key elements" of the battery module assembly had to be taken over and redesigned, Musk says.

 __EDIT __

\- most importantly, Elon has moved his desk to the giga factory as that is where the largest bottleneck is.

<comment><USER5> _" key elements" of the battery module assembly had to be taken over and redesigned, Musk says._

Tesla seems to be taking the opposite approach to Apple here. In my observation, Apple drives its suppliers extremely hard to achieve the quality it requires. Tesla, on the other hand, is too eager to bring any sundry part in house (e.g. car seats). Apple's approach appears to work in that it pushes suppliers to do what's necessary. I worry that Tesla, having already bitten off a large bite to chew, is inviting too much distraction that will, in the long run, not put Tesla in a stronger position (there is a reason most automobile manufacturers outsource their seats after all).

<comment><USER6> Then how do you explain Apple making their own SoC?

<comment><USER7> It is a part of their core product differentiation. They can get better performance and longer battery life by owning the hardware design and OS design and being good at it.

Apple in particular understood lomg before competitors that battery life is an extremely important real world metric. Doing their own SOC helps them optimise that.

<comment><USER8> Seems like revisionism to me? Before the iPhone/smartphones in general, battery life on a mobile phone of a week was not uncommon. One of the first criticisms of the iPhone was that you had to charge it every night. I'm not sure I'd say that they had some unique insight into the importance of battery life.

<comment><USER9> Not revisionism. Prior to the launch of the iPhone, "smartphones weren't very smart" to quote Steve Jobs.

Anyway, you are comparing the battery life of touch-based smartphones with its non-touch predecessor which isn't a fair comparison. Besides, mobile phones that could last for a week from a single charge are definitely not considered smartphones, those are feature phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> SeekingAlpha predicted this a few weeks ago: [https://seekingalpha.com/article/4114125-will-tesla-zero- mon...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4114125-will-tesla-zero-month)

"Leading up to the end of September, we saw new-high Model 3 VIN numbers in the wild almost every other day, culminating in number 521.

But since the beginning of October, nothing. I can't find a single one above 521 with VIN picture evidence on any forum.

It's unlikely to end up this way, but the sole evidence we have to date is this: Tesla is on track to deliver zero Model 3 units in October.

Of course, I don't believe it will be exactly zero. However, it's no longer an impossibility. It's looking like my previous estimate of 240 units may be way too high."

Tesla says today they produced only 260 vehicles in October--and it's unlikely very many of those got all the way to end users!

From SeekingAlpha October 17: "At this stage, I'll continue to roll the dice one more time in favor of betting that for a third full month, the Chevrolet Bolt EV will out-sell the Tesla Model 3 in the U.S. - and probably by a very wide margin, along the lines or 10:1 or more. Maybe even 100:1 or an infinite margin."

Even if you consider Elon Musk a sort of demigod (as much of the tech industry seems to), the leap from 260 vehicles a month--which indicates the vehicles are still being made mostly by hand--to 5,000 a week is going to be incredibly difficult to make in just a few short months.

<comment><USER11> One or another amateur writer on that site predicts the bankruptcy of Tesla every other week. Even a stopped clock is right once a day.

<comment><USER12> It turns out that if you have billions in cheap funding, you can keep doing things the wrong way for quite some time.

<comment><USER13> "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

<comment><USER14> Except in this case it's more than other way. The market is fine, it's tesla causing issues.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, I thought the analogy was clear, but evidently it wasn't :) "Tesla can remain irrational longer than the investors can continue to bet against it". More of a flippant remark than anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As an engineer who has zero investment in Tesla, I truly hope they overcome this setback. Simultaneously, I know from experience that failure is a real possibility.

At this point, it's nice to have the additional transparancy into the current production bottleneck.

<comment><USER16> What would failure look like? Worst case outcome to me seems that they would just take longer to get to their goals rather than not achieve them at all. They have enough money in the bank and no unsolved technical issues - it's not black hole physics. I mean they've delivered cars already. They just are slower than expected at scaling up.

<comment><USER17> Their burn rate is incredible. If they run out of money and nobody is there to give them more, they file for bankruptcy.

<comment><USER18> They burn it that fast because it brings more money in the future and they have funds reserve. Their net loss is getting smaller proportionally to the revenue constantly. They could stop capital investments any moment and be profitable, but that would mean much slower growth later.

<comment><USER19> Not sure that's the case as looking at this graph from The Verge, their revenues are growing but their losses are also getting larger proportionally to their revenues.

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/1/16593582/tesla- model-3-pr...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/1/16593582/tesla- model-3-production-q3-largest-quarterly-loss)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The first two zones of a four-zone process to produce battery packs are being completely reworked, and this is something they only found out about after they were already failing to deliver on promised production goals?

I've mis-estimated a lot of things in my career, so I'm trying to be sympathetic, but it seems like someone with production line experience should have been able to test individual parts of the production line before committing to thousands of units per month.

<comment><USER21> As much as I'm a fan of Elon, the Model 3 production always had me worried when they kept having to replace senior production and battery executives in the run up. I'm still very bullish on Tesla long-term, but I think the Model 3 will be a fiasco unless some sort of miracle happens, and we haven't even gotten into initial quality problems that may arise once enough units are in customer hands.

<comment><USER22> Initial quality problems may not arise. They will definitely arise. It's a brand-new model, with brand-new (To TESLA) manufacturing processes - <USER2> will always be problems in this situation.

What they should hope for is for these problems to arise sooner, rather then later - lessening the cost of recalls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > But a problem with a subcontractor, compounded with other issues, forced > Tesla to start over in certain areas, delaying production.

> "We had to rewrite all of the software from scratch," Musk said, adding that > they'd redone "about 20 to 30 man years of software in four weeks" for the > battery module.

Maybe I'm just overcautious, but I would prefer not to be anywhere in the vicinity of a high-discharge actively cooled 100kWh battery whose control system was written, presumably as a rush job, in four weeks.

<comment><USER24> Yeah doing 30 man years of software in 4 weeks is nothing to brag about. It's like assuming putting 9 women together can output a baby in a single month.

<comment><USER25> So your opinion is parallelizing software development is impossible? Interesting.

<comment><USER26> This is not an unorthodox or unreasonable position. The Mythical Man-Month is a classic text in software engineering and project management and essentially argues this very point. The analogy to child birth is actually also a classic one made originally by the author.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law)

<comment><USER25> Of course just like everyone on HN am aware of the book and heard this quote a billion+ times. And of course I know it's badly misused in this particular case (as it often is).

<comment><USER27> software development parallelization works about as well as it does for actual software, ie non-linearly at best. Add to that overhead/mistakes/difficulties caused by "synchronization" and you come to the conclusion that a significant amount of that "30 man years" of software had to be just discarded when rebuilt

<comment><USER25> But consider that the existing "30 man years" design had couple year calendar time for it at most. Doesn't that say something about the task at hand?

EDIT guess this is just rephrasing of your point, in a way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The great thing about corporate missions & goals is that they are written so broadly: "Our goal when we created Tesla a decade ago was the same as it is today: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible. " ([https://www.tesla.com/blog/mission- tesla](https://www.tesla.com/blog/mission-tesla)).

Thanks to Tesla - seriously(!! COULD not and WOULD not have happened without them), we now have a compelling mass market electric car on the market.

The Chevrolet Bolt.

<comment><USER29> Well no, companies have been trying on EV every decade since the invention of the car.

The Prius normalizing an electric drive train pushed full electric further into the mainstream then Tesla has. Granted Tesla's investment into batteries bumped Panasonics time line up a bit and bumped full BEV up a bit but a compelling mass market electric car on the market has been clearly inevitable since 2000.

Edit: I changed it from "Tesla ... may have". To "Granted Tesla " to more accurately reflect my evaluation of Tesla's contribution to the time line.

<comment><USER28> Fair enough - I did fail to give Toyota credit, where credit is definitely due.

But I would say it is more a case of "necessary, but not sufficient."

Toyota unarguably pushed electric into the unsexy, mass production, mass consumption mainstream. This was a necessary step.

But Tesla showed that electric COULD be luxury, performance, etc - <USER3> necessary for mass market - but the related headlines generated arguably were.

But also that _pure electric_ could be delivered with _more than enough_ range to eliminate range anxiety, even with "notably better than a Prius" levels of performance. And it could at least appear to be "mass manufactured" (even if, on Toyota/Chevy/Nissan scale, or if you will, BMW/Mercedes/Lexus/etc they really weren't). This WAS necessary, and did cause a tipping point that, IMHO led to the Chevy Bolt.

The Prius led to the Bolt evolutionarily.

The Model 3 led to the Bolt "by Marketing force."

And now we have a Bolt.. and basically no Model 3.

We'll see what happens in the next couple of years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So this is the real reason that they had those 'performance-based' layoffs. If you need to fire a certain number of employees, just give bad performance evaluations to those people and fire 'for cause.'

As a company, Tesla can use whatever nonsensical management techniques they want. But firing people 'for cause' will unreasonably hurt otherwise productive people in their future careers. And it will make future candidates far more wary to ever want to work there.

<comment><USER31> Or maybe they could normally keep lower performing employees around, but cash is getting tighter so they decided to let some of them (less than 4%) go.

"Cash being tight" and "firing some employees for performance reasons" are not mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER22> Are they replacing them, or are they just making everyone else work more for the same pay?

How much ramp-up will replacing them require? How will that impact their production rate?

<comment><USER31> Low performers (and especially the bottom 2%) can often provide negative value to the company. It's quite possible there is no net additional work to distribute, or if there was, that they had additional capacity in the rest of the workforce for the same tasks.

They may not need to be replaced. If they do, we can safely presume they determined those resources (cost / time) involved in doing so were less than what it takes to replace them.

It may not negatively impact their production rate. They may be able to improve their production rate by spending that money in a more targeted way now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Out of curiosity, has anyone who paid the $1000 to get in line for a Model 3 actually heard back from Tesla?

I've never received any communication about timelines at all.

<comment><USER33> Me neither. Also, I am trying to get my $1000 back for 2 months now since it probably would take around 2 years until I get my Model 3. They are delaying and delaying the payout, so instead of me becoming a Tesla customer I am hating them more from day to day.

<comment><USER34> I got mine back fairly quickly, for what it's worth.

<comment><USER35> I canceled my pre order on June 29 and got the money from paypal on August 18.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Seeing as how this is an issue in one of their core competencies, this is concerning. Tesla wants to be a battery company(amongst other things). I hope that with this redesign, they're actually fixing problems and working their way to viability. Its easy to doubt Teslas viability(and I think they're overvalued for sure)but Musks teams are solving hard problems at SpaceX so I think they at least have a shot...

</comment><comment><USER37> Disclaimer: I own Tesla shares. Tesla has a long history of taking far longer and far more money to achieve a goal than they forecast. They don't show signs of adjusting their forecasts based on previous misses. For the last couple of years the market has given them a pass for that when the market has punished other companies for far less. Tesla has gone to the well again and again to raise money. One concern is that if market support drops, they may not be able to go to the well again. And history suggests that they will need to and will miss their revised goal as well.

<comment><USER38> > Disclaimer: I own Tesla shares

why do people do this? it is not relevant, helpful or required in order to comment. Anyone with a NASDAQ index fund in their portfolio or 401k has at least one share of Tesla...which is basically everyone here

<comment><USER39> It's just to be honest that you're not hyping up a stock for a pump and dump scheme (see some cryptos). But you're right it doesn't really matter for such a big/liquid stock like TSLA

For what it's worth, Disclaimer: I own Tesla Shares :)

<comment><USER40> FWIW, I think you all mean disclosure, not disclaimer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What is the main practical selling point of a model 3 over, say, a leaf? Longer range and that's it?

Good thing tesla has a lot of vertical investment in batteries. The market is very competitive.

<comment><USER42> > What is the main practical selling point of a model 3 over, say, a leaf?

Much better value, larger size, better fuel economy, more conventional, more power, more range, and superchargers.

Cost per mile of range: $200 for the 2018 leaf, 132 for the Model 3. 147 hp vs 258 hp, 10" of extra length and 6" of extra width, over twice the range at less than half the capacity.

The Tesla is way superior to any other electric car on the road. The supercharger alone makes it the obvious buy for almost all consumers.

<comment><USER43> How about compared to the Bolt, though? The Bolt seems dramatically more competitive than the Leaf. 200hp, comparable range, and cheaper than the model 3.

I think people getting fed up with the wait and switching to Bolts en-masse is a possible scenario. Imagine if Chevy made an ad targeting exactly that scenario....

(You can thank me later Chevy ad execs)

<comment><USER44> The Bolt is a sort of unsexy compact hatchback so I can see it being unappealing to some groups of people even though from all accounts it's a fantastic product that matches the Model 3 in quality.

Tesla should be concerned if GM expands their market by taking their Bolt technology and rapidly expanding into vehicle lines that appeal to other groups, such as a Bolt crossover or sexy Bolt hot hatch.

Personally the Bolt looks a bit lame to me, but I'd consider one that was a bit sportier and that looked about as good as a Golf GTI.

<comment><USER43> Give me a bolt coupe and I'm sold in a heartbeat.

Or this thing: [https://www.wired.com/story/crazy-cute-concept-cars-from- the...](https://www.wired.com/story/crazy-cute-concept-cars-from-the-tokyo- auto-show/)

<comment><USER42> A mini countryman is already over 5" longer than a Bolt- there isn't much more coupe to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> There will be Tesla defenders right till the end.

<comment><USER46> They have earned that. There aren't many companies who care about anything other than making money.

<comment><USER45> I have a bridge to sell ...

So Tesla is good ("anything other than making money"), and Nissan with doing more good by selling more Leafs is not? If Nissan is good, which electic car producer is bad?

I would agree on SpaceX - though a cynic might say it's Musks way out of the earth catastrophe[1] - but with many more companies selling electric cars the argument falls flat for me.

Especially if one looks at all the allegations by employees - if they are employees at all or sub-contractors without rights. Either Tesla has bad press or there are much more than with other car companies.

[1] Because you can be sure you're not the one on the last ship out

<comment><USER46> > _So Tesla is good ( "anything other than making money"), and Nissan with > doing more good by selling more Leafs is not?_

Not saying that. But where were the other automakers when Tesla was single- handedly pushing _against the market_ to make EVs viable?

I get people are cynical, but come on. Musk has been actually proving for years that he cares, and the goals for Tesla and SpaceX were idealistic for as long as he was involved, did not change, and the companies did nothing to suggest they're not what he says they are.

<comment><USER45> Musk? How? By giving away money? Or by making money? I'm confused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> There's good information at the Daily Kanban.[1] They describe what corners Tesla cut, and why it backfired. "Tesla has not yet built a Model 3 using the automated tooling", says one of the people from the company that builds the automated tooling.

Normal testing and tweaking time for a new body assembly line is 6 months to a year, and before that, sections of the line are run in test at the supplier's factory. Tesla skipped all that. It didn't work out well.

[1] [https://dailykanban.com/2017/10/source-tesla-responsible- mod...](https://dailykanban.com/2017/10/source-tesla-responsible- model-3-production-hell)

</comment><comment><USER48> I feel like I should cancel my reservation of Tesla Model 3. Something tells me that subscription-based autonomous cars will be here before my Model 3 and will render purchasing cars useless. Anybody in a similar boat?

<comment><USER49> While I agree that the Tesla 3 backorder delay is pretty long, I think you may be underestimating the time it will take before we see any subscription-based autonomous cars by perhaps a factor of 5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I've been considering cancelling my preorder. As late as they'll be (assuming they do deliver) and my estimated place in line, the other manufacturers will have competitive offerings

<comment><USER51> No other manufacturer has a charging network like the Supercharger network, and that isn't likely to change anytime soon. Not being able to take a car on the occasional long-ish trip greatly diminishes its utility for a lot of people.

<comment><USER52> I'm guessing that most households who are likely to go for one are also multi- car households, and you probably aren't going to normally be taking _all_ of your cars on a long-ish trip at the same time. I'm guessing most of any potential loss in attractiveness represents anxiety more than it represents a genuine loss in utility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Elon's ROAs (returns on announcements) are getting slimmer.

</comment><comment><USER54> TSLA was up 10 points. Now is down 10 points. Interesting time.

<comment><USER55> 20 point swing? We call that Wednesday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> And now other media outlets are reporting that Musk shouted "SHAME" at a reporter on the earnings call. All in all, not Tesla's finest hour

[https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-just-yelled-shame-at-a- bunch-...](https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-just-yelled-shame-at-a-bunch-of- journalists-1820059349)

</comment><comment><USER57> Elon Musk project not as fast as he claimed, yet still faster then everybody else.

That literally every Tesla/SpaceX story in the last 10 years.

<comment><USER58> "Faster than everybody else"? I guess that depends on exactly what you're looking for. This year's Bolt has a 60kWh battery, which is supposed to give it a 238 mile range - more than the base Model 3. What exactly will the Model 3 bring to the table when I can actually walk into a showroom and buy one?

<comment><USER57> Thinking in a bigger scale then just right now Model 3 will make it clear. The way Tesla has transformed the whole car industry and the scale at which they approach the problem is way beyond anybody else.

The Bolt can not be produced in the numbers needed for a revolution. The people who produce it are not interested in a revolution in the first place.

The stock might be below peak right now, but the scaling they have achieved since they started is massive, and in the long term they are still on track.

<comment><USER58> >The Bolt can not be produced in the numbers needed for a revolution. The people who produce it are not interested in a revolution in the first place.

That's an odd argument to be making in favor of a company that's having so much trouble producing cars. Why do you think the Bolt can't be produced in larger numbers? Does Tesla make in a year as many cars as GM makes in a day?

<comment><USER57> I'm not saying its impossible. I'm saying that they don't seem to want to do it.

Meaning that they are totally unprepared to sell 1million cars a year and they also don't seem to have plans of scaling to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> "cuts production"

I don't follow official statements closely but it sounds like they are using this retooling as an excuse for low demand for the S and X. This way they get to have their cake and eat it too: low S/X numbers justified and re-energized promises for increased 3 production.

<comment><USER60> Musk said on the call that they will produce fewer cars but that they expect increased deliveries, with the difference being covered from their existing inventory.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Well, if they have all that existing inventory just sitting around, surely it implies they've built more cars than they've been able to sell, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> It feels like all of musks other business could align and take over everything, sort of like Go strategy

</comment><comment><USER62> I really wonder what kind of hell it is. Supplier issues ? bad management / employee relationships ? Design failures ? ...

ps: someone explained to me that Tesla cars are still mostly hand assembled. Explains a lot of things

</comment><comment><USER63> If Tesla goes under what happens to long term support for their cars? Don't Tesla owners depend on a lot of Tesla services? Subsidized charging stations, sending it in for maintenance, etc.?

<comment><USER64> You might want ask Fisker Karma owners: [https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/hybrid-support- solutions-...](https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/hybrid-support-solutions-to- fisker-owners-join-us-or-kiss-your-100k-bricked-karma-goodbye/)

I imagine the same fate would await Tesla owners. However, there enough Teslas rolling around that someone might find it profitable to pick up support. Multiple vendors still sell, and in some cases manufacture, parts for fifty year old Volkswagens, for instance.

<comment><USER65> Yeah but 50 year old Volkswagens are a lot simpler, including being almost wholly mechanical. And even today there's a pretty robust aftermarket parts market for ICEs generally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Tesla best car I ever owned. I will wait 6 months if that what it takes for perfection.

<comment><USER24> What makes it better than other cars of similar price range in your opinion ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> On the side note - good time to buy Tesla Stock

<comment><USER68> Only around a 10% drop from the start of trading today. Some nice opportunities short term but I don't see that changing anyone's longer term outlook. At $300, the stock is still either a great value given the company's potential or terribly overvalued

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Not really all that suprising.

<comment><USER70> Especially not with other articles talking about lack of the right production mindset or process[0]. I'm a bit worried these days for Tesla cause these seem like problems stemming from ego of "doing it better through technology" and ignoring wisdom from the rest of the industry that actually works.

When major leadership keeps leaving[1] it feels like it's more of an ego, expectations, and political problem than a technical one.

[0]: [https://mondaynote.com/teslas-new-car- smell-315c72c955d3](https://mondaynote.com/teslas-new-car-smell-315c72c955d3)

[1]: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/two- tesla...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/two-tesla- production-chiefs-to-leave-ahead-of-biggest-challenge-yet)

<comment><USER69> I feel like they are trying to invent the wheel anew. Yes, electric cars have some differences, but everything besides the drive system has been a ton of times and there are a lot of companies and people who know how to get what you want.

Also I agree with you that it feels that they belive that they can do everything better than anybody else and thus try to do everything themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> My shares!!!!

</comment><comment><USER72> It sounds like they are struggling. Hopefully they can pull it together and turn things around.

<comment> crush-n-spread They are not struggling. This Yahoo article is fear mongering. I just listened to the whole earnings call and everything sounded terrific: They pulled their best engineers to Gigafactory to mitigate a supplier misleading them about one of their battery production lines, and so they dropped production of S and X. Apparently as a result of the supplier f __* up, they rewrote "20 man years of software in 4 weeks". Which is absolutely incredible.

Don't listen to this fear mongering BS. Tesla is the only one in the electric car game. Who else has the charging network, the half-million pre-orders, the 3.5 billion in cash and easy ability to raise more, the Elon shine?

Can't stand these articles

<comment><USER73> > they rewrote "20 man years of software in 4 weeks". Which is absolutely > incredible

... if accurate, if bug-free (for varying reasonable values of same). Otherwise the mythical man-month seems to creep in.

That's a project that's complicated enough to require 240 developers (12 months x 20 years, fitted into 1 month), yet somehow was reliably chunked up, retrofitted into their supplier screw up, tested and deployed in 4 weeks??

I'm considering myself skeptical.

<comment><USER74> Sounds a bit like doing the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs?

Seriously though, you can probably redo a typical 20 Man Year project in 2, given how much of the development process is usually taken up by missed requirements and re-work, IF you have a bombproof specification and a well- drilled team of stars.

The part I'm not quite getting though is how a battery software issue impacted on wider productivity? Couldn't they get them in-place and then patch the software after the fact?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> <shout>most importantly, Elon has moved his desk to the giga factory as that is where the largest bottleneck is.</shout>

wow elon musk must be something out of a movie! daniel (aka me) WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING WITH YOUR LIFE

</comment><comment><USER76> I can't help but feel that price is an inevitable factor here. Tesla Model S and Model X are expensive! Now that the novelty is wearing off and more EVs are hitting the road from other manufacturers, it strikes me that they just won't remain competitive models.

I expect the Model 3 to go some way towards helping this by being much more affordable, but with delayed production on those and an interior design that won't suit everyone, I'm yet to be convinced.

<comment><USER77> I disagree completely. Tesla has 400k people who put down a grand to 'reserve a spot in line' for a Model 3.

The issue is production. Tesla fired off hundreds of workers a month ago, right as they were ramping up Model 3 production. Elon seems an awesome person in terms of what he's doing at a macro level, but he sounds like a horrendous person to work for.

<comment><USER78> If they can achieve the production goal of 5000/week (an order of magnitude more than they are currently at), it will take nearly 2 years to just fulfill pre-orders. I have to believe a lot of people will be cancelling their pre- orders, and Tesla wont be getting many new pre-orders until production has caught up with demand.</comment></comment></comment>


When Betelgeuse goes supernova, the brightness will rival a full moon - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/betelgeuse-dimming-1.5407038 <comment><USER2> How long will the supernova last? If it were to happen, will it be over in a few hours, days or last for years?

<comment><USER3> I looked it up, turns out it could be any of those depending on how big it is, how far it is, and what its peak brightness here. [1] does a good job of explaining it

[1]. [http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/physics/85-the- universe/sup...](http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/physics/85-the- universe/supernovae/general-questions/419-how-long-does-the-supernova-stage- of-a-star-last-intermediate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> if the mass is ten times that of the sun, wouldn't the remnants of the star collapse into a black hole once the show is over?

<comment><USER5> In theory, although it would take an infinite amount of time to do so.

From Earth it would just get redder and dimmer - when we couldn't see it anymore it wouldn't be a black hole yet, but it would be hard to see the difference. (Especially surrounded by the accretion disc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not to be a grump, but surely this doesn't qualify as news</comment>


Show HN: My first django website: full-length youtube movies - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I have created: http://keepermovies.com/ Website which searches throught twitter, reddit and youtube to find full-length youtube movies. New movies are being added every hour. This is my first python/django website. Please give me your feedback :)
Best, Wiktor <comment><USER2> Great idea!

Just a few things: The time is displayed in seconds, that should be changed.

It would be great if the actual movie information was displayed. Others have mentioned IMDB, buy you can also have a look at themoviedb[0] and Rotten Tomatoes [1].

Do you have plans to expand this to other video sharing sites?

[0]: <http://docs.themoviedb.apiary.io/>

[1]: <http://developer.rottentomatoes.com/>

edit: links

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. For now no. Yes I will change that in next iteration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Whoa, it's pretty neat! I may have a suggestion to improve it: as gingersnap suggests, would it be possible to get a quick description of the movie from imdb and add a description of the movie. From gingersnap, there seems to be an API to get data from IMDB, but I was thinking of crawling the website using Mechanize to use the search. I'd be happy to help!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for suggestion. I am thinking about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice.

I'm curious as to how you're searching YouTube, if you are. Is there a method to specify a long time besides the 'long' param or are you mainly scraping the links from twitter/reddit.

Really neat work. On the lol side, you just make the life's of the copyright claimer easier. Don't let that stop you though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great work, have actually been missing a service like this. One suggestion, why don't you match it to IMDB and get automatic categories and rating. This would help when trying to find movies to watch, and would cut out the problem with all movies in uncategorized.

<comment><AUTHOR> But how to do that automatic? I don't think that it is possible

<comment><USER5> There are some different APIs, both official and unofficial, most of them described here [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1966503/does-imdb- provide...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1966503/does-imdb-provide-an- api) In my opinion, if you would make the match work most of the time, so you get a category and rating that would improve the service. You can still have the users report when the movies don't match.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm.. ok, thanks for link. I will check this

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Vote for this category

The button doesn't work, does it? My Browser: Chromium 25.0.1364.97 (Developer Build 183676)

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you chosen category? You have to choose one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> how long it take to make this website?

<comment><AUTHOR> about 6 days

<comment><USER8> did you take the site down? It takes me to some domain provider site. I'm currently learning django and would like to know how you went about learning it. thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Projects from the Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon West - <AUTHOR> http://stupidhackathon.github.io/index.html <comment><USER2> One of the projects, GNU Pricing, made the front page last earlier this week:

[https://github.com/diafygi/gnu-pricing](https://github.com/diafygi/gnu- pricing)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521177)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm so happy that Yo sponsored this. I can't think of anyone more fitting.

<comment><USER4> I think Yo sponsors lots of hackathons.

<comment><USER5> They're following the VC model - spreading their cash around, just needing one hit reason for people to use Yo.

<comment><USER6> I heard they're working on Yo Enterprise. It'll have features to collaborate and listen.

<comment><USER7> I can't tell if this is a joke, therefore I'm coining Stavros' law:

Without a clear indicator of an author's intention, it is often impossible to tell the difference between a startup direction and a parody of one.

<comment><USER6> I'll raise you my law of circular credulity.

When I was young and naive, I believed a lot more silly and bizarre things. Then I got older and wiser and more cynical and learned to dismiss them as nutty, jokes, satire, etc.

But...

As I got older still, I accumulated so many bizarre experiences with the real world that I wrapped back around. I now have trouble again picking up on satire or easily debunking wacko theories, since I learned from experience that the world actually is that crazy. I've seen many things and met numerous characters that a fiction editor would reject for sheer implausibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's funny is that these ideas are all better than the typical projects and ideas proposed within a company. Hell they're excellent in that their scope is limited, their budget is limited and the time to build them is limited. _Successful_ projects by any measure!

</comment><comment><USER9> Ha! HipChat is on the list.

<comment><USER10> Watch the video — you might be surprised.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best books you've read on how to start a startup? - <AUTHOR>

Classics, new books, tech, non-tech... what's helped you grow the most? <comment><USER2> Peter Thiel's Zero to One was outstanding. Its advice was actually different from most other entrepreneurship books out there. It's most appropriate for startups trying to make it big (i.e. become "unicorns").

Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a great startup managerial book. It chronicles Ben Horowitz's struggles as CEO of LoudCloud. Probably most appropriate for more mature startups.

</comment><comment><USER3> The phonebook, because it has customers and your competition.

Nothing has helped me grow more than _actually running a startup_ a couple of times.

If you're just looking for startup-themed books, I'd honestly suggest _Masters of Doom_ , _Dreaming in Code_ , and _Soul of a New Machine_.

 _Lean Startup_ if you're feeling trendy.</comment>


The Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris is a trove of cunning inventions - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/best-little-museum-you-never-visited-180956025/ <comment><USER2> If you can't visit but are interested in the topic and the beginning of the industrial revolution in general, the YouTube channel "Machine Thinking" has a video about this[1][2] and related topics.

E.g. in another video he explains how to get a perfectly plan surface from scratch: Rubbing two somewhat flat surfaces together until they are smooth enough does not work, you might end up with a subtly concave/convex combination. But do that with three surfaces and the result can only be perfectly flat, though it will take quite some time.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waEqmfH7z2Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waEqmfH7z2Y) \- Paris' Temple To Science - Part I

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djB9oK6pkbA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djB9oK6pkbA) \- The 1751 Machine that Made Everything

<comment><USER3> Nice channel, thanks for sharing. Great presenter, too: _The Fresh Revolution is a vast and complicated subject, but that 's not going to stop me from grossly simplifying it._

Our equivalent museum here in Sydney is the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) / Powerhouse Museum[0] which is currently in a state of transition as a political football, unfortunately. Australia seems to have largely given up on creative industry and industrial education.

I can also recommend [http://507movements.com/](http://507movements.com/)

[0] [https://maas.museum/powerhouse-museum/](https://maas.museum/powerhouse- museum/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fantastic! I'd love to visit.

Similar to that museum (in obscurity and interest, if not in beauty) is the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Mercer collected tools & objects that were hand-made, before the industrial revolution.

It's a huge, poured-concrete (!) building, full of an amazing variety of objects. Small rooms contain dozens of things such as hand drills, ladies' hair-combs, etc.

This photo gives something of an idea: [https://www.mercermuseum.org/exhibits/mercer-museum- exhibits...](https://www.mercermuseum.org/exhibits/mercer-museum- exhibits/permanent-exhibits/)

<comment><USER5> I had very mixed feelings visiting the Mercer Museum. It's basically this guy who was obsessed with castles his whole life and always wanted to live in one, backpacked around Europe for 8 (!!) years after graduating college, and came back to use his rich aunt's money to build himself a castle and live in it.

I thought the collection was interesting, but his whole life seemed kind of one long vacation where he tried to learn a lot of different things and achieved nothing in particular.

<comment><USER6> So what?

Dude was a collector of art and old tools, sold his own art, was the architect for his own buildings, and wrote several books. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Chapman_Mercer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Chapman_Mercer)

Most people (including most scientists, artists, writers, businesspeople, etc.) never "achieve something in particular" by this kind of standard.

Certainly plenty of "idle rich" do significantly less socially beneficial work than Mercer. If you start looking around at the rich more generally (e.g. people whose names are on university buildings) a substantial proportion were crooks of one type or another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Craft" here translates the French word "métier", which means something like craft but also something like profession or vocation.

There's a gallery of looms, which is immensely confusing until you realise that "métier" is also the word for loom.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I don't think they should have attempted a literal translation and instead described it as a museum of science and technology (as they do in the article).

"Arts and Crafts", at least in modern American English has a very different meaning, and would make people expect to find the kinds of things that are sold on Etsy.

EDIT: I'm not sure why you would be surprised to find looms there, even aside from the double meaning. I believe machinery for the production of textiles were among the earliest triumphs of the industrial revolution and the Jacquard loom (invented in France) was the first known programmable machine.

<comment><USER9> I live just a few miles from the Henry Ford Museum, and its outdoor section, Greenfield Village. It sounds like exactly the same sort of place. As a kid, I spent a lot of time around the tractors and trains, and the large stationary steam engines. (There's one fixed in place so you can climb into the cylinder through the valve opening, if you're so inclined.)

As an adult, I appreciate so much more of the collection, even the furniture and household appliances that seemed utterly boring to my younger self. They tell a story of everyday life for the people who used them, and the design and manufacturing capability of the industry that produced them.

Out in the Village, there's a weaving shop with several treadle-operated looms, and one spectacular Jacquard-style machine that's so tall part of it is upstairs. They make new cards for it periodically, and run off 1800s-style textiles with "Made in 2020" and such woven into them. ;)

I need to get to Paris next!

<comment><USER10> Thanks for sharing. Another museum for my bucket list.

 _"...and the large stationary steam engines."_

The first time I recall seeing an actual functioning steam engine was at last year's Deming Logging Show. It was an early model of steam donkey.

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

[http://demingloggingshow.com](http://demingloggingshow.com)

Like a lot of kids, my son was obsessed with trains, steam shovels, dozers, etc. There's probably all sorts of reasons to not exhibit actual machinery. But it'd be cool. Maybe scale models or replicas.

I know that if I could watch a working loom, the docents would have to drag me out at closing time.

<comment><USER9> Why on earth would you not exhibit actual machinery? It's plenty strong -- just keep it painted and greased so it doesn't rust -- and it's so much cooler. They rebuild the boilers in the trains every few years, using period tools and techniques so the "new" one is just like the old.

When they run the engines inside the museum, it's on compressed air rather than actual steam, for indoor humidity reasons. But outdoors, if it's running, it's because there's coal burning and water boiling not far away.

Everything in the Henry Ford is real, except the Wright Flyer replica and I think they've replaced a few floorboards in some of the buildings. But otherwise, you're walking on the same floors that Edison and Steinmetz walked on, while the generators they built spin at the other side of the room and light the bulbs overhead. The food in the café is from period recipes, and you can ride around the grounds in a Model T if you want to pay a little extra.

> the docents would have to drag me out

That's more-or-less what happened with me; they shut down the weaving shop an hour before the grounds close, and I easily had enough questions for three or four hours more. That's okay, I'll go back in spring!

You can spend at least a whole day in the museum and another in the village, so plan accordingly. Get here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ah, I loved visiting here. Strongly recommended for people who appreciate the history of technology.

My one surprise was that it turned out the French apparently invented everything. There was even an iPod display that managed to credit the French.

<comment><USER12> it's something you can find on wikipedia as well. Every local wikipedia attributes the original inventor of big things ( planes, cinema , internet...and even general relativity ( see poincarré)) to someone of its own nationality.

it's probably going to keep happening since R&D is nowadays pretty much always the work of international teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Visited this a few months ago - it's an absolute gem.

I love automata - mechanical sculptures that animate in some way - and it has a whole gallery of them, including a doll that can play the harpsichord that was once owned by Marie Antoinette.

I listed it on my niche museums website here: [https://www.niche- museums.com/browse/museums/30](https://www.niche- museums.com/browse/museums/30)

<comment><USER14> They even have a decimal clock dated from the French revolution: 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. Total of 100k seconds/day, making seconds a bit shorter. Was largely ignored, only lasted a few years. The computer section has a ZX81, a ZX Spectrum, an Oric Atmos, and a Commodore 64 on display if memory serves me right. All my childhood computers, feels weird seeing them in a museum. My kids were amazed by the first calculators made of paper and cardboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting, will definitely visit, however:

Here is a challenge for you: try to find the location of the museum on their web site [1].

This is so, so common to museum/venue/restaurant web sites. Most of the time it takes you multiple clicks and a lot of scanning to find one piece of information that should be literally on top of every page: the _location_ of the thing the web site is built for.

I think the problem comes from CMS or web site builder templates for businesses. This should definitely be revisited. A web site of something "visitable" in the real world should be centered around the physical location, and then the rest, not the other way around.

(P.S. if you have just guessed that the museum should be somewhere in the Arts et Métiers area of Paris, you are right)

[1] [https://www.arts-et-metiers.net](https://www.arts-et-metiers.net)

<comment><USER16> From what I can see there's only one page in English on the website[1] and it contains the address.

[1] [https://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee/visitor- information](https://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee/visitor-information)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Big fan of the place, especially fond of a very nice programmable (perforated cards) loom and a big Foucault pendulum.

<comment><USER11> And not just a Foucault pendulum, but _the_ Foucault's pendulum, the one that features prominently in Umberto Eco's novel: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum)

</comment></comment><comment> jerome-jh It is not that I am so old, but I was there with my kid some time ago (FYI it is free the 1st sunday of every month :). Kid asks: "Daddy what is it?". Me: "Ahem kid, this is a telephone". Basically the POTS phone we had at home as I was myself a kid. Now it is in a museum.

</comment><comment><USER18> The old huge IBM stuff they have is fascinating but I really was amazed by the Cray. What a cool weird design piece. They totally had some Bauhaus type designer work on the housing.

</comment><comment><USER19> Have been multiple times. It's a treasure.

</comment><comment><USER20> I really hate such titles "The Best insert (subject) You Never (verb) in (location)". especially since it's a blanket statement, which (a) shames people who haven't done it, and (b) makes people who did do it feel ignored. Common, you write for a living? don't use such tropes then.

yes I already visited the museum, it's nice, first car, first camera, lot's of cool stuff. Most displays are in French though, it could do with a little upgrade in how the collection is presented.

<comment><USER21> We change such titles so people don't have to comment here about how annoying they are.

<comment><USER20> I really appreciate that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Shameless plug but this is one of the places in my book: The Geek Atlas ([http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596523213.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596523213.do)).</comment>


NYC Subway travel time map - <AUTHOR> http://subway.nateparrott.com/ <comment><USER2> Semi-relevant but one thing I've been really wanting is a map directions app that optimizes for _wasted time_ instead of time.

\- Taking train for 60 minutes (with a seat): 0 minutes wasted

\- Taking train for 20 minutes (without a seat): 20 minutes wasted

\- Taking bus for 60 minutes (with a seat): 30 minutes wasted (efficiency of work cut by 50% due to bumpiness, people walking by and smacking my elbow, etc.)

\- Taking an Uber for 20 minutes (driver is not chatty): 0 minutes wasted

\- Taking an Uber for 30 minutes (driver is chatty): 30 minutes wasted

\- Driving for 50 minutes: 60 minutes wasted (+10 minutes for parking)

\- Riding bicycle, running, or walking for 40 minutes in a day: 10 minutes wasted (30/40 counts toward required-anyway daily exercise)

The application should factor in the probability of getting a seat on a train or bus, the probability of an Uber driver being chatty based on crowdsourced data, and simply optimize for the lowest mean wasted time for the entire route.

<comment><USER3> At least for me, "wasted" is a matter of perspective. Personal interactions and experiencing the surrounding world can be valuable — time is what you make of it.

<comment><USER4> Standing-room-only public transit vehicles are far and away the worst interactions and experiences I encounter on a day-to-day basis.

They were valuable in that they motivated to bike most of the way, and eventually to get promoted to a point where I could move into the city and stop relying on transit. But aversion is probably not what you had in mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool.

I toyed with the idea of visualising travel time using colour heat maps.

London tube map [https://tubermap.com/](https://tubermap.com/)

(in the options you can turn on 'times').

I'd love to see the transit authorities themselves put together something that encompasses all the possible forms of transport. Metro/bus/cycle etc.

<comment><USER6> I like this a lot.

If you don't mind my asking, how did you make it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to see (light grey) concentric circles for 10min, 20min, 30min 40min, 50min, that way can more accurately determine the distance.

<comment><USER8> Shouldn't be too hard I think.

Right now r = 30 min, so just use the circle without the label and scale it down, then add it at the same lines the hour circle is touched: [https://github.com/nate- parrott/subway/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93...](https://github.com/nate- parrott/subway/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=one+hour&type=)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The NYT made one for commuter rail a few years ago. It is one of my favorite graphics.

[http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/03/17/nyregion/nyregi...](http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/03/17/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/20070318_TRAIN_GRAPHIC.html)

<comment><USER10> Any idea why some trains that are further out have a shorter travel time to the city than the next closest physical station?

<comment><USER11> Express trains. Certain lines skip many intervening stops to decrease travel time between major hubs.

<comment><USER10> Ah makes sense and I see that in the legend now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is awesome and is pretty accurate wrt to average-to-best case scenarios on trips with and without transfers that I'm familiar with.

Kudos to the author.

<comment><USER13> Thanks! Turns out the MTA does keep a pretty detailed schedule (not that they manage to stick to it much, these days) in the GTFS format, so it's not hard to compute travel times client-side. As a plus, GTFS seems pretty-widely used, meaning it shouldn't be so hard to port this to other transit systems!

<comment><USER14> Would this method work for GTFS Bus routes?

I'm also keen to port it to Sydney's train network as we have GTFS and GTFS realtime!

GTFS realtime is a lot of fun, I built a simple JSON real time API for Sydney buses which could be easily ported to other GTFS realtime feeds: [https://github.com/jakecoppinger/sydney-bus- departures](https://github.com/jakecoppinger/sydney-bus-departures)

<comment><USER13> It should! As far as I know, GTFS is pretty transport-mode-agnostic. (I imagine the bus stops are a bit more dense, though — it helps that the NYC map has a recognizable set of line colors that remain familiar when you jumble it all up)

<comment><USER14> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Am I the only one who read it as "time travel", and thought it'd be some map of how it used to be?

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I was ready for a subway history lesson.

<comment><USER17> I was expecting a map of the subway for time travelers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This reminds of a Washington Post article I saw [0], that made me start thinking about travel inequality (?), where someone in Podgorica is more or less cut off from the rest of Europe, while someone in Paris may have an entirely different experience.

And that's not considering differences in income... even if they have the money to travel, it's simply more difficult.

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/06/05...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/06/05/map- the-remarkable-distances-you-can-travel-on-a-european-train-in-less-than-a- day/)

<comment><USER19> It's completely true, but the article only considers trains. Some countries ignored their train infrastructure, somewhere it's hard or expensive to build it and Montenegro is both poor and mountainous, making it hard and expensive to do.

On the other hand, Montenegrins are well covered by cheap flights and most of the population is within driving distance to an international airport.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is awesome. Sort of similar idea, different approach, definitely doesn't look as cool, but my team and I published this today:

[http://blog.gradientmetrics.com/2017/12/07/new-york-city- in-...](http://blog.gradientmetrics.com/2017/12/07/new-york-city-in- timespace/)

<comment><USER21> A map distorted by a non-spatial metric is often referred to as a "cartogram." The wikipedia page has a nice list of algorithms for computing different types, which might give you some inspiration.

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

<comment><USER20> Umm... wow! I did not know this, which shows my level of knowledge in this field (0). But this is amazing! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wrote a blog post about visualizing commute times. There's a section for New York in the middle. [https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/visualizing-commute- times-3...](https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/visualizing-commute- times-378009330ffa)

There's a tool you can play around with a little bit. Fair warning, it gets throttled pretty quickly. But source code is available for anyone who wants to experiment on their own.

</comment><comment><USER23> I love this graphic from the NY Times with travel times for commuter rail in the greater NYC area:

[http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/03/17/nyregion/nyregi...](http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/03/17/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/20070318_TRAIN_GRAPHIC.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> What makes this even more complicated is walking. 49 Street and 50 Street is only 4 minutes on foot while 10 minutes on the subway.

<comment><USER25> Also, a concern in London, if you look at only the tube map you might think the shortest distance is to take 2 trains since the map isn't to scale, however, it might only be a few minute walk. To try to help they've published a map.

[http://content.tfl.gov.uk/walking-tube- map.pdf](http://content.tfl.gov.uk/walking-tube-map.pdf)

Not sure if there is something similar for NYC.

<comment><USER24> Yeah but even that is just same lines and so bits like walking from Chancery Lane to Farringdon taking eight minutes on foot and "nope" on the tube ;) is missing.

Or St Paul's to Mansion House, that's just six minutes, even Blackfriars is only nine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I like the idea as its an interesting map visualization of the subway across a time domain rather than distance.

I'm wondering why there's such a large difference in certain areas between weekday rush hour and late night though (for instance, clicking on 68th St Hunter College and changing between weekday rush hour and weekday late night is making 59th street go from 2 mins away to 12 mins away).

A few notes about mobile (specifically iPhone usage): Its difficult to use on iPhone because the first tap doesn't seem to do anything to the map - if you tap again at exactly the right place (on the dot), then it will work on iPhone. I think I know what the issue with this is: the onclick event is being replaced with the hover state when you tap once, then the real onclick is called when you tap on the dot again.

<comment><USER13> I'm calculating travel times by simulating a rider starting from the selected stop at a specific time (for example, "weekday late night" is 3 AM, and "rush hour" is 8 AM) and "waiting" for he next scheduled train. That's why, when you select most stops during late night, the nearest stops are pretty far (~ 10 minutes) away — because that's a typical time you'd wait for a train at that time of night. It's definitely not a perfect prediction.

And yep — I really need to put some work into the mobile experience. I'm surprised it works at all!

<comment><USER27> To address that issue, a better calculation might be to compute possible wait times based on distribution of likely arrival times at the station and return some weighted average.

<comment><USER13> The issue with using average waiting times (as opposed to picking a particular time and computing actual waiting times) is stations with multiple trains — the N, R and Q might each stop at Union Square once every 10 minutes, but if you're happy boarding any of those, then your average wait time isn't 5 minutes — it's much less.

What I _might_ try is sampling a couple random start times (e.g. 8:00 AM, 8:03 AM, 8:22 AM) and averaging the predictions of all those.

<comment><USER28> > What I might try is sampling a couple random start times

My gut says this would be a better value, but I don't have the evidence to prove it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Tangent, anyone know where there's an altitude/elevation map of the NYC subway tunnels? Everything I've ever been able to find assumes they're completely 2D.

<comment><USER30> Hmm, I didn't have any luck finding any myself, nor did these redditors: [https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/3q1jyk/help_me_find_a_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/3q1jyk/help_me_find_a_depth_map_of_nyc_subway/), but you might find this to be some interesting trivia: [https://untappedcities.com/2013/06/26/deepest-highest- subway...](https://untappedcities.com/2013/06/26/deepest-highest-subway- stations-nyc/?displayall=true).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This was so confusing on mobile. I don't think it worked on my iPhone. Totally different experience on desktop.

<comment><USER32> Came here looking for this

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing

That super marketable "mobile-last" development

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I tried making something like that for Paris but it's far from looking as nice: [https://arnaudl.github.io/metro/](https://arnaudl.github.io/metro/)

</comment><comment><USER34> NUMTOT check-in

<comment><USER35> o7

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Very cool, love seeing the data represented this way. Curious about how it accounts for transfer times. I suspect with transfers the distances are actually a bit longer.

<comment><USER37> From the page:

 _"... when you click a stop, a simulation is run to calculate the travel time from that stop to every other stop. Using train departure times from the MTA, and the MTA 's predicted transfer times within stations, the code counts how many minutes it takes for a simulated passenger departing the selected stop at 8:00 on a weekday would arrive at each stop on the map..."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is really cool.

It would be interesting if there were a way to crowd source the average time from actual riders and compare them with the the MTA's feed.

</comment><comment><USER39> I was excited to check this out, but there seems to be a zoom limit, which makes this too difficult to try to use on a (small) phone.

<comment><USER13> Just pushed some changes to make it a (little) easier to use on a small phone. Still far from perfect, but a little better!

<comment><USER39> Thanks! The larger fonts help. I still can't zoom in far enough to tap a specific station, unfortunately. Even my tiny fingers cover a half dozen stations in Manhattan or at least 2-3 in Brooklyn/Queens - so I get a random selection from nearby stations.

I must be missing something, though, because all it will do is show a station label when I tap a station. I've tapped several stations but don't see anything else to interact with. How are you supposed to get it to show travel times? (Using Safari on iOS 10, if that makes a difference.)

<comment><USER13> You need to tap a couple times — the first tap triggers the hover state (definitely not ideal for mobile). Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to hit the same stop consistently multiple times...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is really cool, but it seems very overly optimistic when it comes to routes with connections based on a few pairs I tried.

</comment><comment><USER41> Related: [http://mapnificent.net](http://mapnificent.net)

</comment><comment><USER42> I misread the title and thought it said NYC Subway Time Travel Map. Boy was I disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER43> Any body knows if that google_transit.zip is somewhere available for other towns?

<comment><USER44> Yeah, you can find GTFS feeds for a lot of cities at [http://transitfeeds.com/](http://transitfeeds.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is so cool!

I would love more time radii (30 minutes, 15 minutes)!

</comment><comment><USER46> hmm, okay, WNYC project's version has much better data representation

[https://project.wnyc.org/transit-time/](https://project.wnyc.org/transit- time/)

<comment><USER47> There's no need to be snarky, even when someone else has a better data representation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I've been searching for a room in a foreign city since I'm going there for exchange studies. What I've missed is a map that would highlight an area on the map that is within a specified travel time using public transit. Some approximation could be done by picking points on concentric circles and checking travel times for those places, I imagine. Given that Google Maps provides an API for public transit directions, I haven't checked.

<comment><USER49> It's been posted by somebody else on the thread already, but do you know [http://mapnificient.net](http://mapnificient.net)?</comment></comment>


Forensic Pseudoscience (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/nathan-robinson-forensic-pseudoscience-criminal-justice <comment><USER2> I had a shocking experience with "expert" testimony in the case of a large lawsuit I witnessed.

This expert, paid by the litigant, had written a few papers for low-quality journals and taught at a class at a west-coast medical school on forensics. His written claims supporting the lawsuit were provided to the defense and he was questioned in a deposition.

The expert's conclusions in his report were based on bad probability. This was several years ago so I don't remember all of the details, but one error was the using 50% as a prior probability because the actual prior condition wasn't known and could have been one of two possibilities, X or not X; 50% was picked because there were two possibilities and disregarded the relative rarity of X in the general population. Another error was really quite laughable, at one point essentially arguing that P(A & B) = P(A) + P(B). All of this was hidden by somewhat confusing language.

It really wasn't a laughing matter because the lawyers, which had asked me to explain the report to them, couldn't understand the probability well and were consequently unsuccessful in exposing the expert's faulty reasoning during his deposition. Fortunately, the expert's so called report was not introduced at trial and he wasn't called upon during the trial.

<comment><USER3> Bad probability calculations show up a lot in the court room. A lot of probability theory is counterintuitive so people can get away with making an intuitive sounding argument that is fundamentally wrong. Two high profile cases that I like to bring up are OJ Simpson's murder trial and Sally Clark's trial.

I don't remember the exact numbers used in OJ Simpson's trial but the rationalization used is more important than the numbers. His lawyer argued that some very small percentage of men who beat their wives later go on to murder them. Therefore, the fact that OJ beat his wife shouldn't factor into his trial at all. The fundamental flaw in the argument is that there was no question on whether or not his wife was dead. We knew she was dead, so the correct statistic to look at would be, of women who were beaten by their husbands and later murdered, how often was the husband the murderer? And the answer was some large percentage, like more than 90%.

Sally Clark's case was even sadder. She was eventually released from prison but committed suicide not long after. She was on trial for murder after her second child died from SIDS, her first child having died the same way. The prosecution brought in an "expert witness" to give the probability of one woman having two children die from SIDS. All he did was take the incidence of SIDS at the time, 1 in 8500, and square it, coming up with 1 in 75 million. No other evidence of murder was found, she was convicted because of the statistical argument. This argument has multiple flaws. It assumes that the two incidences of SIDS in this case were independent events, which is not necessarily the case. On top of that, even if you could assume they were independent events, a 1 in 75 million event doesn't mean the event is impossible. A person should not be convicted on that probability alone with no other evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if whoever is supplying evidence via tests should be forced to (blindly) apply the tests to people other than the defendant. If your test says some random sample is more likely match than I am, it's very weak evidence.

<comment><USER5> Forensics is the only field of study I can think of where double blind studies aren't routinely done.

<comment><USER6> this is nonsense.

there are certainly a number of forensic fields which are garbage.

other portions are fine, and are effectively analytical chemistry applied to legal cases. are you aware of a lot of double blind studies in analytical chemistry? what would that even mean?

<comment><USER7> How much of the conclusions drawn from these investigative techniques are justified entirely by analytic chemistry, and how much goes beyond that? Using an example from a related article, there's a substantial difference between being able to say what's the chemical element composition of a particular bullet and being able to identify the particular manufacturing facility and batch it came from. The latter relies on a whole lot of assumptions about the ammunition industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> the US legal system relies on prosecution and defense both functioning. when expert testimony comes into play, that means there should be prosecution and defense experts. unfortunately public defenders are underfunded and frequently inexperienced, and can't/don't get opposing experts to review evidence.

many of the state lab testing scandals would be discovered years earlier if defense lawyers regularly had things retested.

</comment><comment><USER8> Cui bono?

<comment><USER9> There's no incentive to convict the right person, if you're a prosecutor or a cop.

<comment><USER10> Well, other than the fact that often the person who did it is often easier to convict than someone who didn't.

<comment><USER11> Are you entirely sure? Someone's race, ability to pay a lawyer, and prior history can be huge factors in convicting them.

Convicting a poor black man who dropped a cigarette butt at the scene hours prior to the crime may ultimately be far easier than finding the actual perp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> (2015) but still relevant

<comment><USER13> Updated, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> betteridge's law of headlines strikes again.

</comment><comment><USER15> Lots of strawman examples. Anything imperfect will have errors. I didn't see much 'scientific' about the criticisms in the article. For instance, measures of how often techniques are right, how often labs are correct.

<comment><USER11> How do you propose a scientific study be done of the end result with a billion confounding factors. Further the people on trial are heavily predisposed to be actually guilty to start with supposing we aren't just picking random people off the streets. They are the opposite of a random sample. Using nonsense to "prove" that the actually guilty is still false even if the ultimate answer was known by other means to be correct.

The logical thing to validate is the actual underlying science that is vastly easier to tease out and test independently and scientifically if we haven't even tried to disprove something it has limited merit and historically if its proponents resist even trying to prove it it is almost certainly hokum.

Wherein the means to test and validate the means we are using to deprive people of their freedom and sometimes their lives represents a fraction of the budget of the criminal justice system we are guilty of malpractice as a society.

This isn't something you can casually shrug off.

<comment><USER15> Nor would you dismiss it without some kind of measure. The article was no better than the worst of the practices it criticized?

<comment><USER11> You don't need to disprove measures that nobody has proved in the first place. Much as the burden of proof lies with the prosecution the burden of proof lies with those who assert they have the wherewithal to prove the defendants guilt.

This assertion is entirely inline with proper scientific thinking.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CloudApp is live - <AUTHOR> http://www.getcloudapp.com/

<comment><USER2> The register page could use a short "Enter your email and desired password" somewhere on the form. I clicked the link and thought I was at the login page (with login being highlighted in black at the top right).

Or just something to make clear that it's the register page and not the login page (I thought the blue register button was a link to take me to the real registration page).

I'm usually pretty good with these things, but I got thrown for a loop at first.

<comment><USER3> I agree. It took me 30s to figure out what was going on, and I run a web startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Everything shared on this service (by default, any screenshot a user takes) is mapped to a three character URL. In other words, it would be easy to download everything ever shared using this app. People will not realize this and soon there will be complete archives of every screenshot any CloudApp user has ever taken available on BitTorrent.

Some screenshots that were auto-shared will have sensitive info in them and there will be a massive privacy backlash.

<comment><USER5> Same thing goes for <http://tinygrab.com/>. I browsed through some screenshots once and I saw a scanned cheque...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're interested in putting stuff in Dropbox by just dragging it to an icon as shown here, check out this:

Dropbox Droplet <http://wiki.dropbox.com/DropboxAddons/Dropbox%20Droplet>

Needs to be somewhat polished but it works!

<comment><USER6> To make this work somewhat seamlessly, check out DropZone. It's a pretty cool mac app that allows all sorts of stuff to happen around drag and drop.

<http://aptonic.com/>

(It has a Dropbox extension as well)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Color me confused. I signed up, downloaded the app (Mona Lisa?) and it's running (I see a blue cloud in my menu bar). I tried dragging/dropping an image on top of it expecting it to upload.... nada. Tried dragging the Cloud.app file to the dock and then dropping an image on that.... nada. What am I missing?

<comment><USER8> Set your login info in the preferences (from the menu bar icon), then you should be able to DnD to the menubar icon, or use the shortcut set in the preferences.

<comment><USER7> Clicking and/or right-clicking the menu bar icon yields no menu. It doesn't even highlight in blue like when I click other menu bar icons. Should it be doing something when I click on it?

<comment><USER8> I'm seeing a menu when I click on it:

<http://cl.ly/5jL>

They did just launch, maybe hit up the site for some contact/support info?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> After playing for a few minutes I'm very impressed with this, and I could easily see it becoming an essential part of my workflow.

In short, one keyboard shortcut will give you a shortened URL to share whatever you're currently dealing with. For example, if I select a file in the Finder and hit the shortcut, it's uploaded to my account and a link is automatically added to my copy/paste buffer. If it's a web page, just the URL is shortened and placed in the buffer. There are a bunch of plugins ("Raindrops") to decide what to do in each case, with included ones covering the basic Apple apps (iTunes, Finder, Safari) and extra ones for things like Chrome, Aperture and Photoshop.

The whole thing is presented gorgeously.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, I think the best part of it is how well it stays out of the way!

History, download counts, and web access to uploaded files sweeten the deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very very cool, I just signed up, but I'd feel a hell of a lot better about the URLs for uploaded files if they were big, opaque UUIDs instead of short URLs.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea behind the short URLs is probably to encourage sharing (like via Twitter).

Why would you prefer longer URLs?

<comment><USER10> To prevent stuff like this, I guess:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226313>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It was extremely unintuitive to figure out how to delete files (you have to hover over the icon, and an x will appear).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if they had a part in this, but I found it through MetLab Design's founder/CEO: <http://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/11446214489>

MetLab: <http://www.metalabdesign.com/>

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks very similar to Droplr (<http://droplr.com/>). Has anyone used both? Does either one have a killer feature that the other is missing?

</comment><comment><USER12> Does this have permissions? Or is it intended to be open-sharing? The landing page is not clear.

</comment><comment><USER13> So is there a Linux version?

</comment><comment><USER14> boringgggggg - does anyone get new ideas anymore?

</comment><comment><USER15> Sexy

</comment><comment><USER16> dropbox?</comment>


Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/27/book-review-reframing-superintelligence/ <comment><USER3> The claim is apparently that superhuman, savant-level intelligence could be confined to a domain of knowledge and not risk becoming generalized intelligence. I'm skeptical.

If you're "only" superintelligent at language translation, or writing movies, or chess, I suspect as we ascend the tiers of increasingly super superingelligences, there's a depth of informational, structural understanding that avails itself of abstract meta principles, and meta-meta principles, and meta-meta-meta principles, and on to infinity. And that at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, something about be brilliant at translating the subtle irony of a Shakespearian sonnet into a dead tribal language is also at play in weighing strategic options in an incredibly complicated game of chess, is also at play in reading culture and finding out what kind of movie will be most successful at the box-office.

I think any domain-specific intelligence, as it approximates "perfect", would independently discover and solve similar high level questions and be transferable to other domains, the way there are general principles of manufacturing that apply to multiple products. And from a sufficiently advanced perspective, "solving" chess and "solving" Shakespearan sonnet translation would look as similar to each other and panting a car red vs painting a car blue.

<comment><USER4> If ImageGAN approximated perfect classification skills, would it spontaneously develop the capability to detect and evade predators?

No it wouldn't, and I think you may have missed the point. It's about constrained domains in the mathematical sense, that there is a clearly defined scope of inputs and outputs. It would simply be impossible for an AI service to develop outside that scope.

<comment><USER3> One of the things I was really at pains to emphasize in my previous comment was that I think there are elements of information processing that are outrageously abstract, that would be familiar and accessible to AI but non- obvious to us. The transferability and generality that emerges would be nothing remotely so crude as the ImageGAN -> predator detection example that's being used to dismiss my point.

An AI service that's only intended to solve one well defined problem may have pieces in its anatomy that are functionally equivalent to those in a different AI service solving a different kind of problem. You don't need to assume it's escaped the confines of it's well-defined domain, or that domains aren't well defined, for this to be true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also this summary of the report: [https://singularityhub.com/2019/06/02/less-like-us-an- altern...](https://singularityhub.com/2019/06/02/less-like-us-an-alternate- theory-of-artificial-general-intelligence/)

The argument makes a lot of sense to me as an AI researcher; the idea that we will somehow get to self improving agents that can do any and all things they want to maximize the output of paper clips (as in the famous Bostrom thought experiment) is miles away from how AI is done today in practice AND how software functions. I suspect most software engineers, especially with knowledge of AI, would find the 'AI service' idea which actually reflects how AI is done today much more plausible and worth worrying about than the Bostom science fiction-y fears of AGI...

<comment><USER6> Taking the example of games like chess and Go, where AlphaZero dominates, wouldn't we have to fear people misusing AI by setting up specific arenas and applying AI there long before AI misuses itself?

<comment><USER7> Yes, the post mentions this:

 _Drexler is more concerned about potential misuse by human actors – either illegal use by criminals and enemy militaries, or antisocial use to create things like an infinitely-addictive super-Facebook. ... Paul Christiano ... worries that AI services will be naturally better at satisfying objective criteria than at "making the world better" in some vague sense. Tasks like "maximize clicks to this site" or "maximize profits from this corporation" are objective criteria; tasks like "provide real value to users of this site instead of just clickbait" or "have this corporation act in a socially responsible way" are vague. That means AI may asymmetrically empower some of the worst tendencies in our society without giving a corresponding power increase to normal people just trying to live enjoyable lives._

The arenas of finance, business, journalism, and politics already exist, so we should watch for AIs trained to "win" those games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand why people are so worried about superintelligence. Moore's law is dying. Computers are not going to get much faster, or much cheaper. Parallelization is going to be the only way to get more powerful computers and there are real, possibly insurmountable, limits on how well you can do that. The computing sector is going to look like aerospace: the Boeing 737 of today is better in some ways, but it still looks almost exactly like the Boeing 737 of 50 years ago

<comment><USER9> > Moore's law is dying. Computers are not going to get much faster, or much > cheaper.

Moore's law doesn't really matter. We're just at the beginning of computers, they will get much faster and powerful in the years - decades to come.

I just read this for example: [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chip- carbon-nanotubes-no...](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chip-carbon- nanotubes-not-silicon-marks-computing-milestone)

<comment><USER10> So computers are unlike any other technology?

<comment><USER9> What do you mean? I think they are like any other technology, we keep making improvements to them.

<comment><USER10> But we don't make exponential improvements once the technology matures. The parent was either claiming that computers are different, or computing hardware won't mature for decades to come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > But in the end, it would just be a translation app. It wouldn't want to take > over the world. It wouldn't even "want" to become better at translating than > it was already. It would just translate stuff really well.

> It could have media services that can write books or generate movies to fit > your personal tastes.

I'm not an expert in this topic, but wouldn't you say that the ability to create compelling narratives (even more so than 'mechanical' translation between languages), pretty much _relies_ on your ability to empathise at some level with people who want to take over the world or the people who want to stop them?

How would AI come up with the plot for one of the most profitable franchises in recent history - "Avengers: Infinity War" movies? It would have to be programmed with an understanding for Thanos' perspective, and the fundamental will of most everyone around him to be terrified of that and disagree - <USER2> even then it's not a good movie franchise without the romance and familial dynamics between so many characters.

If an AI can already understand all that (and _know_ that it has to understand all that) - well you've created a pretty smart human already - and the OP's argument about differentiating these powers doesn't seem to hold...

</comment><comment><USER12> I've never been very interested in the Bostrom view of AI, as the viewpoint there seems to come from someone fairly removed from how computer programming works. It's always felt more like an intellectual exercise rather than very grounded in practicality (but that's just my two cents).

Where I got more interested in Bostrom was some notions I heard from him (I think) on the general nature of science. I'd always assumed that learning more about how nature actually works was a strict positive, but now am convinced (more than ever) that we are just in a race to discover a technology that will harm us all (we've found some already, but who knows what worse discoveries are out there?)

</comment><comment><USER13> Bostrom also wrote a paper on The Simulation Argument that was pretty awesome[1]. It was referenced recently in The End of the World podcast. [2]

1- [https://www.simulation- argument.com/simulation.pdf](https://www.simulation- argument.com/simulation.pdf) 2- [https://www.theendwithjosh.com/](https://www.theendwithjosh.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I see no a priori reason why "superintelligent services" as defined in the review would necessarily be inherently safer, due to the complexity of the systems they affect, and the possibility of emergent effects that might be in some sense equivalent to the hypothetical effects of an "agent type" AI. I also think that the concept needs more elaboration for that very reason. Furthermore, it could be that there is a "recipe" for forming general AI by integrating a small number of "service type" AIs, assuming that term refers to a real concept in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER15> A review of a book by a serial fabulist (Drexler) compared to that of a bozo moonlighting as a science fiction writer (Bostrom) done by a psychologist on a subject none of them have the slightest whit of a clue about.

> All of this seems kind of common sense to me now. This is worrying, because > I didn't think of any of it when I read Superintelligence in 2014

Dunning Kruger is something that should come to mind here, doctor. People who know a decision tree from an echo state network kind of saw that as being incredibly dumb when it came out.

What has happened in the last 5 years isn't that the field has matured; it's as gaseous and filled with prevaricating marketers, science fiction hawking twits and overt mountebanks as ever. The difference is, 5 years later, rather than the swingularity-like super explosion of exponential increase in human knowledge, we're actually just as dumb as we were 5 years ago when we figured out how to classify German traffic signs, and we have slightly better libraries than we used to. No great benefit to the human race has come of "AI" -and nothing resembling "AI" or any kind of "I" has even hinted of its existence. In another 5 years I'd venture a guess machine learning will remain about as useful as it is now, which is to say, with no profitable companies based on "AI," let alone replacing human intelligences anywhere. And we'll sadly probably still have yoyos like Hanson, Drexler and Yudkowsky lecturing us on how to deal with this nonexistent threat.

Meanwhile, the actual danger to our society is surveillance capitalism and government agencies using dumb ass analytics related to singular value decomposition. Nobody wants to talk about this, presumably because it's real and we'd have to make difficult choices as a society to deal with it. Easier and more profitable to wank about Asimovian positronic brain science fiction.

<comment><USER16> You shouldn't be downvoted. The article is clickbait nonsense written by someone who's just making things up. There's no actual scientific basis to believe that the article or referenced books have any more insight or predictive power than astrology does. The reality is that no one has any clue what's going to happen and everyone is just guessing.

<comment><USER17> > The article is clickbait

The article is a review of the book "Reframing Superintelligence" titled "Book review: Reframing Superintelligence".

<comment><USER18> Yes but words don't mean things any more and haven't in a while.

<comment><USER19> Conversations about AGI always get really messy because it's so polarized. Everyone that's written a line of code, or watched The Terminator, or have heard about the singularity have an opinion on this topic. It's easy to fall into the Dunning-Kruger trap if you consider the above to be approximately the limit of human knowledge on the subject. We don't have an AGI yet, so how much could we know about AGIs? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was really surprised that there was no mention of APIs there. Obviously as "services" many (most?) of these AI services would be available via APIs. There are already machine-readable directories of APIs and AI services relying on external APIs, so we can extrapolate that we'll see more and more AI/ML systems experimenting with various external APIs as part of their learning.

From this perspective, it's very clear to me that there's a big difference between a translation service and a service that would "steer Fortune 500 companies". The latter will be much more open-ended and most likely dynamically rely on many other services. Indeed, I would also expect it to rely on artificial-artificial-intelligence services such as Mechanical Turk and Upwork, giving it a lot more flexibility.

What is to prevent that complex service from evolving beyond its creator's expectations?</comment>


Did Bill Gates Steal the Heart of DOS? - <AUTHOR> http://m.spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/did-bill-gates-steal-the-heart-of-dos/0 <comment><USER2> This is just an advertorial for CodeSuite. Srsly, there was "no way" to compare them until now, we read, then further down the page we read his methodology: download the easily available source code to both from the web, and search them for common strings.

 _My guess: "Comerr" was a routine that handles either communication errors or command errors_

When this guy encounters "foo" and "bar" his head will explode.

I expect better from IEEE, this is not even at the level of TechCrunch!

<comment><USER3> _I used a utility program developed at SAFE to extract strings of text from binary files._

man strings # strings, man!

<comment><USER4> strings is a very neat utility. I only recently discovered it can even extract 16-bit little endian (Windows unicode) strings by passing `-el`.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was never under the impression that MS-DOS (QDOS) was literally stolen from DRI, but that QDOS was a clone of CP/M back in an era when software copyright wasn't clear. Microsoft licensed QDOS but didn't buy it outright, and later made a deal with DRI to cover its ass. Both the original developer of QDOS and DRI ended up with the rights to sell DOS products. (As did IBM.)

Years later, DRI was selling its own version of DOS (DR-DOS) which was widely considered technically superior to MS-DOS or PC-DOS (e.g. At one point it supported preemptive multitasking and could also run Windows 3.x iirc.)

The real "theft" was that when the original developer of QDOS went bankrupt, its mos valuable asset was its DOS license. But when it tried to sell it Microsoft sued and forced the owner to sell the license to Microsoft for a very low figure. Meanwhile, DR-DOS was killed using a combination of deliberate incompatibilities and eventually Windows 95.

I never used DR-DOS, but I remember greatly preferring PC-DOS to MS-DOS because the default text editor was so much nicer.

The fact the article makes zero mention of DR-DOS is a bit puzzling.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS>

</comment><comment><USER6> I actualy saw the source code for MS-DOS (IBM in the early days shipped PC-DOS branded version and non IBM kit could buy MS-DOS). I can't recall if it was version 4.x or 5.x (think it was 4.x) and the only thing that struck me was the use of some Sun boot loading code without any visable (c) signs in comments apart from soemthing along the lines "This is from Sun for boot loader to work...".

But history does have its ability to make things unclear over time so can see why people argue about 2000 year old books, let alone software in our own lifetimes.

Only thing I feel sad about is that OS/2 was not open sourced 10 years ago.

Still in another 10 years or so people will be writting stories about how Linux was a rip of from Minix and other historical things without any hope of changing the past.

RIP Gary Kildall.

<comment><USER7> My unqualified guess: something to do with the Sun386i, an x86 Sun workstation which ran a port of SunOS and could virtualise MS-DOS.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun386i>

<comment><USER6> You may very well be right, though I would of expected some (c) signs in the source (assembler). Sadly I don't have access to those sources any more, so I won't be able to verify it. Also more I think about it the more I believe it was 4.x I saw and that with what you pointed out about Sun may very well be the case, especialy given the additions to volume ID'd (more than one disc) being added for that version.

One day the source may officialy be publicly available and that will be a interesting day. That said it does appear as if the 6.x source code was leaked and illegaly available from a quick google, but that's another story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> tl;dr Nope. Bill Gates checks out fine. Gary Kildall's claim of DOS theft could not be supported by modern software forensics.

</comment><comment><USER9> [Dupe of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4337902>]

</comment><comment><USER10> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines> strikes again.

EDIT: keep forgetting HN comments aren't Markdown.

</comment><comment><USER11> It appears that he looked for string similarity in the source and binaries. Another, and imho better, way to find code plagiarism is to build the call graph of the programs and perform graph isomoprhism to detect similarities. It is much harder to conceal plagiarism from that sort of analysis.</comment>


WikiLeaks, iPhone Incidents Show that U.S. Needs Shield Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/07/wikileaks-iphone-incidents-show-that-us-needs-shield-law182.html

<comment><USER2> The United States' global reputation as a champion of free speech is at stake. This is partly because the legal framework has not kept pace with the evolution of free speech, and also because the Freedom of Information Act is not being applied correctly. Today, the U.S. is in danger of losing its place as the bastion of free speech because other countries are stepping up and creating new ways to protect freedom of expression.</comment>


Show HN: Babysteps for iOS - Instragram for Parents - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/babysteps/id443281751?mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> We're in the middle of launching another product (IgnitionDeck), so I haven't had time to write a blog post or talk about this app, but we built it because we wanted a way to capture daily photos of our children, in a way that took advantage of photos already taken.

We're still iterating on design (long way to go), and working on the server side functions, such as user accounts, custom photo pages (ala Instagram, Camera+), and iCloud backup, but it's getting there.

I'm eager to get feedback from people that find this sort of thing useful. We're not formally "launching," but trying to keep working the MVP until we feel it's ready to announce to the world. So I guess you could call this a soft launch.</comment>


Ask HN: How much does Amazon AWS is going to cost? - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to figure out how much Amazon AWS Linux instance would cost for a website like AdMob.com? <comment><USER2> <http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> This would help but how would I know as how many instances, how much storage, bandwidth I am going to need? What's the best way to estimate this?

<comment><USER3> You need to profile your application to see your resource utilization at a given rate. From there you can estimate.

There are other factors involved with trying to look at a site and guess their optimizations. Perhaps they're using a CDN to distribute their assets so the actual website has a quite low load? Maybe there's an inefficient algorithm that's burning through CPU and they haven't optimized it yet because they're working on another new feature. In the mean time, they're paying for extra CPU time instead of paying for engineer time.</comment></comment></comment>