15 Biggest Ships Create More Pollution Than All Cars in the World (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-more-pollution-than-all-the-cars-in-the-world/ <comment><USER2> The article lacks a description of which specific form of pollution is compared.

When talking about pollutants is important to keeps the following points in mind:

\- Is the pollutant effecting health?

\- Is the pollutant effecting climate change?

\- Is the amount of pollution locally concentrated or very distributed?

Cargo ships typically have a very high emission of nitrogen Oxides (NOx) and sulphur dioxide. When emitted by cars / factories on the mainland these often strongly contribute to harmful smog especially in megacities or cities with poor ventilation. Also they can be generally bad to the ecosystem also on the water due to causing acid rain etc.

The main pollutants on cargo ships have a very strong short term effect but are often out of the air in a few weeks. Because of that they don't rise to the atmosphere and don't directly contribute to long term climate changes. Thus I think the comparison in the article is very dangerous. When considering pollutants that effect climate change cars are more dominant.

So depending on which effects are discussed reducing pollutions from cars can still be benefitial. As an additional thought, the polutions of the cargo ships are spread out over a very large geographich area while the exhausts of cars are much more concentrated around cities. So when considering ones own quality of living, cars have a much bigger impact.

I think an article that better manages to discuss the subject is this one from the guardian: [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping- pollution)

Excerpts:

\- Shipping is responsible for 18-30% of all the world's nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollution and 9% of the global sulphur oxide (SOx) pollution.

\- Shipping is responsible for 3.5% to 4% of all climate change emissions

<comment><USER3> > Because of that they don't rise to the atmosphere

Funny choice of words. It reminded me of the classic sketch,

Interviewer: So what do you do to protect the environment in cases like this?

Bob Collins - Australian Senator: Well the ship was towed outside the environment.

Interviewer: Into another environment...?

Bob Collins - Australian Senator: No, no it's been towed beyond the environment, it's not in the environment.

Interviewer: No but from one environment to another environment...?

Bob Collins - Australian Senator: No it's been towed beyond the environment, it's not in an environment.

<comment><USER4> Here a link to the sketch if anyone's interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcU4t6zRAKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcU4t6zRAKg)

<comment><USER5> Official and better quality version:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1 ship producing the same pollution as 50 million cars? I find this very, very difficult to believe. Let's look at some numbers: The biggest ship engine in the world has around 25,000 litres displacement, weighs 2,300,000 kg, produces 109,000 hp and has a fuel efficiency of 0.26 lbs/hp/hour.

Using very conservative equivalent estimates for a car of 1 litre, 100 kg, 75 hp and 0.6 - 50 million cars would displace 50 million litres (2000 times more than ship engine), weigh around 2175 times as much, produce 34,000 times as much power and use 79,000 times as much fuel.

Keeping in mind the ships engine is very fuel and thermal efficient, 1 ship producing equivalent pollution to 50 million cars just does not seem plausible, in the slightest.

<comment><USER7> The article addresses this in the paragraph containing the line "...these powerplants are some of the most fuel efficient units in the world. The real issue lies with the heavy fuel oil...lack of regulations applied to the giant exhaust stacks"

Have you ever been stuck behind a car with a broken exhaust system? The amount of pollution coming out of such a car is surprising, and that's with relatively clean gasoline.

"But, unlike power stations or cars, they can burn the cheapest, filthiest, high-sulphur fuel: the thick residues left behind in refineries after the lighter liquids have been taken. The stuff nobody on land is allowed to use." [[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-16-ships- create-pollution-cars-world.html)]

I'm not saying you're wrong. 50 million does seem high, but there are other factors. A a former Navy nuke technician, I'm wondering why these ships aren't nuclear powered. I suppose it is the cost.

<comment><USER8> > A a former Navy nuke technician, I'm wondering why these ships aren't > nuclear powered. I suppose it is the cost.

I rather assume the risk of terrorism.

<comment><USER9> This is not a serious risk. You could easily armor the reactor module to resist any amount of pirate weaponry, and rig it so when damaged it just drops to the bottom of the ocean intact.

Getting into it isn't a threat either: terrorists aren't going to be plasma torching into a reactor and surviving long enough to do anything.

<comment><USER10> Incomplete thinking. What about land-based fuel handling - creation, storage, transport, delivery? What about waste processing? The attack surface isn't just the ship.

<comment><USER8> Exactly what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And that would be just 15 of the largest ships, with 100,000 other big commercial ships out there burning an especially polluting type of diesel fuel:

"The world shipping fleet consists of over 100,000 vessels larger than 100 gross tonnes ... Oceangoing ships running large slow-speed diesel (SSD) engines generally burn low-quality residual fuels that tend to contain high amounts of sulfur and heavy metals. Smaller vessels, such as tugboats, fishing vessels and ferries operate medium-speed diesel (MSD) engines that use mostly distillate fuels within nonroad equipment fuel quality standards [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2004]. International commercial shipping vessels operate across international waters with little or inconsistent regulation of fuel quality or pollution emissions".*

* Particulate emissions from commercial shipping: Chemical, physical, and optical properties [http://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/black-carbon/lac...](http://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/black-carbon/lack-et-al-2009.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a 2013 summary of a 2009 summary of the actual article?

Actual article: [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping- pollution)

I think the original article interesting and current and worthy of being on HN :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Headline should've read: "World's 15 Biggest Ships Create More SOx- and NOx- emissions Than All The Cars In The World, COx-emissions a Whole Other Story"

<comment><USER13> Yeah but anyway those gases are far more powerful than CO2

<comment><USER14> In terms of irritants, but not as greenhouse gases, which is what the title implies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The solution to this would be embracing wind power again: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1)

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

</comment><comment><USER15> Credit should go to actual article : [http://www.autoblog.com/2009/06/02/report-pollution- from-15-...](http://www.autoblog.com/2009/06/02/report-pollution-from-15-of- worlds-biggest-ships-equal-that-o/)

This is copied one.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is partly outdated.

Tight sulphur emission regulations happened in 2015. However they are limited to more populated areas. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulphur_Emission_Control_Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulphur_Emission_Control_Area)

NOx limits are tightening. Didn't get a great link but this has something: [http://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Environment/PollutionPreventio...](http://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Environment/PollutionPrevention/AirPollution/Pages/Nitrogen- oxides-%28NOx%29-%E2%80%93-Regulation-13.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER17> The headline is (I suspect deliberately) misleading. The actual guardian article is here [1] and is more nuanced, claiming that "One giant container ship can emit almost the same amount of cancer and asthma-causing chemicals as 50m cars, study finds". That's hardly "all the cars in the world", given that latest estimates put this figure at over 1 billion [2].

Ships produce more sulfur oxide pollutants than cars because they use different fuels, and thus produce different pollutants.

A large container ship does produce more more carbon dioxide emission per mile and per gallon of fuel than a car, but ships in general have the lowest emission levels of any other method of cargo transport , producing fewer emissions per ton of freight per mile than barges, trains or trucks.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping- pollution)

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

</comment><comment><USER18> The shipping industry has been able to keep costs artificially low by treating air pollution as an externality. Eventually that loophole will be closed through a combination of emissions taxes and outright bans. I expect the long- term solution to be a combination of: larger (more efficient) ships, lower cruising speeds, biofuels, and auxiliary sail propulsion.

</comment><comment><USER19> Honest question: Why don't they employ catalytic converters? Is the amount of exhaust just too much for them to be able to practically build them, or is it simply "We haven't been told we need one, so we're not going to bother."

<comment><USER20> they are registered in places like panama that have no regulation on such things

<comment><USER21> Why cant the developed countries have regulations which stop the ship from coming in its waters?

<comment><USER22> There are some regulations - some ships switch from burning heavy bunker oil to diesel when close to port.

<comment><USER23> The regulations have increased heavily in recent years. E.g. near the U.S. and Europe. It's not just close to port anymore. See e.g. [http://www.joc.com/maritime-news/shippers-brace-low- sulfur-f...](http://www.joc.com/maritime-news/shippers-brace-low-sulfur-fuel- surcharge-january_20140925.html) for details.

Small quote from the article:

      Maersk Line CEO Soren Skou said in a Copenhagen
      presentation yesterday that lower sulphur fuel was more
      expensive and would increase the carrier's bunker cost by
      estimated $200 million a year.

That additional 200 MUSD/year is just for the stricter rules in Europe.

You can save a massive amount of money by "ignoring" these rules. Meaning: unless it is checked, there is a huge risk of unfair competition between companies which abide by the rules and companies which do not. Especially if a company is in difficult times it needs to be checked carefully.

You'll notice that the bigger companies are ok with such rules, as long as it applies to everyone and is checked thoroughly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Given the lack of incentive or possible enforcement on these boats, one answer would be to simply approach the owners and either offer to pay for a new boat (assuming such a boat exists) or to retrofit the existing boat. If they are really that dangerous to the environment, it would seem like a no brainer for governments to band together to do this. The only question is if there are environmentally friendly alternatives.

<comment><USER23> If you pay for a new vessel, the owner will resell the old one and it'll get reused. What has happened in recent years is that (mainly) Europe and U.S. has employed stricter regulations. If you enforce this strictly, then it'll become more economical to do a retrofit. Note that lower SOx is quite difficult, retrofits are mainly done to save on bunker costs.

<comment><USER24> You could buy the old vessel and scrap it, but I hear you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This blurb links to an article that says the same thing but was published in 2009. No clue how old the original Guardian article was.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'll bet the fifteen biggest ships also haul more cargo than all the cars in the world, too.

</comment><comment><USER27> _MEAT CONSUMPTION_ is the main reason and where everyone should be focusing on first for reducing the negative impact we have on nature.

Meat consumption and livestock in general creates more pollution than ALL transportation means in the world all together.

[http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/](http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/)

I suggest everyone watch this documentary. It changed the way I eat.

<comment><USER28> Compare [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for- meat-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat-eaters/)

<comment><USER29> The environmental impact of chicken is less than beef.

<comment><USER28> The author comments on these thoughts later. The article is not fully formed thought.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing DirectWrite (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd371554%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

<comment><USER2> Edit: Apparently someone _completely_ changed the title and the article? Ten seconds ago this was about how fonts are finally fixed in Chrome on Windows. See Akhilan's comment.

I suspect this will drop off the front-page in a flash now that the URL has been changed from something relevant and newsworthy to an introduction article about Microsoft's six year old font rendering API.

Original comment below:

<comment>

This is great and its very significant to HTML canvas users. Canvas fonts looked _awful_ in Chrome (and FF) when pretty much any transformation matrix was applied before rendering fonts, but everything looks correct now. (This flag existed in April, but still had serious issues[1]. Those all seem fixed now.)

(For canvas in Chrome, letters used to kern so poorly they'd be stuck in each- other, or create letter-sized gaps, or have punctuation like commas in inappropriate places. Animation where a font "zoomed" looked like a text earthquake, as the glyphs shifted back and forth)

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=176351](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=176351)

<comment><USER3> When I looked an hour ago the link was pointing to the Devnet article but the title still mentioned Google.

Was that not the original link? The Google Code link is better but still lacks context as the significant piece of information is that this has hit Chrome beta - which is buried at the end of the very long Google Code page.

Mods - what happened here?

EDIT - my guess is that Akhilan posted with the Devnet link originally and hoped his top comment would add context. Akhilan - it doesn't really work like that on HN. It's best to post your own short blog post (or Tweet or Google+ or whatever) - give some context there and link to that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Chrome is finally rendering fonts with the advanced DirectWrite font rendering engine.

[http://www.istartedsomething.com/20140412/google- chrome-35-b...](http://www.istartedsomething.com/20140412/google- chrome-35-beta-adds-much-needed-directwrite-font-rendering-on-windows/)

<comment><USER4> I find DirectWrite to be a step down from GDI in terms of crispness and readability, and I don't think I'm alone.

Infinality on Linux can look great on the other hand, if configured properly.

<comment><USER5> Have you tried adjusting ClearType settings to match your preferences?</comment></comment></comment>


CPA vs CPC - Who Wins Who Loses And Why. - <AUTHOR> http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster-forum/threads/6056-CPA-vs-CPC-Who-Wins-Who-Loses-And-Why. <comment><AUTHOR> from 2004, but I found it to be a pretty good + thorough read. I'm sure things have changed, but the base logic is good.</comment>


YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185 <comment><USER2> Google taking competitive advantage again.</comment>


OpenCV-Python Cheat Sheet: From Importing Images to Face Detection - salma-ghoneim https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/opencv-python-cheat-sheet-from-importing-images-to-face-detection-52919da36433 <comment><AUTHOR> PyImageSearch [1] is one of the best resources for doing actual stuff with opencv. I personally find the writing style a little patronising sometimes, but the content is excellent and kept up to date.

[1] [https://www.pyimagesearch.com/](https://www.pyimagesearch.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm not sure it's a cheat-sheet really, more a primer. Looks good though for those who've not used OpenCV (me!).

</comment><comment><USER3> At this book you could find many good examples using opencv+python.

[https://www.packtpub.com/application- development/opencv-3x-p...](https://www.packtpub.com/application- development/opencv-3x-python-example-second-edition)

It explains concepts in a simple manner for beginners and it introduces cool stuff in little steps chapter by chapter.

(It is quite cheap, but probably you could also find the pdf version free on Internet)

</comment><comment><USER4> I find this extremely unnerving to look at, let alone trying to process its contents. There is huge amounts of whitespace, huge fonts, huge images, single lines of text with more whitespace, a wide variety of font styles without any clear hierarchy. Hardly more than 3-4 sentences on the screen at a time. And of course useless, persistent header and footer banners that induce a feeling of looking through a closing garage door.

And then it hit me, this is just another TED talk style Medium publishing influencer.

Nothing of value here, just a bunch of random OpenCV examples you can just as well find in the official docs [https://docs.opencv.org/master/d6/d00/tutorial_py_root.html](https://docs.opencv.org/master/d6/d00/tutorial_py_root.html)

<comment><USER5> I'm someone who just took a computer vision course. I have other priorities (namely finals in other courses), so I haven't had much opportunity to repeatedly practice some of the more basic tasks in opencv. I wouldn't necessarily want to pour through my old assignment code to jump-start my memory on these tasks -- skimming through this now, I love how it's presented, and can see myself returning to this.

What you've linked targets a different use case. I don't need to relearn the core concepts through tutorials, and I don't need every possible config option from the docs. I just need simple, easy-to-parse demonstrations of basic use cases. This works for me.

>And then it hit me, this is just another TED talk style Medium publishing influencer.

"This" is a bit of an uncharitable way of framing that person, don't you think? Behind those blanket labels is an actual human with feelings and motivations that you and I don't actually know. Handwaving away a person's efforts like this is unnecessarily dismissive, imo. It smacks of "I don't like the motivations I've assumed from you, therefore your output doesn't matter." How would you feel it you were on the other end of that?

<comment><USER6> +1. I'm at the same noob stage and appreciate easy-to-digest courses. I, for one, am appreciative of the work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice job, this would have been nice to read through when i first started OpenCV.</comment>


Palantir Announces Confidential Submission of Draft S-1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200706005622/en/Palantir-Announces-Confidential-Submission-Draft-Registration-Statement <comment><USER2> As someone who worked in defense consulting/IT contracting many moons ago, let me clue you in on a simple fact: there is an INSANE amount of money wasted on these contracts.

The project that we were working on was projected to _maybe_ go live in ten years (when the tech would be laughably outdated), and we were the sub-sub- sub-contractor of the massive company at the top. It was nothing more than a vaporware webapp built by 22 year olds right out of college who were white/American enough to get clearance immediately, and our team got $100 million for it.

The money in these DoD contracts is truly nuts. And it never gets slashed because how politically terrible slashing defense is, and it never gets audited because too many people are making money.

So as it relates to Palantir, sure, they're scammy and unethical as all hell, but they certainly know where the bread is buttered in America. Even in a (likely) Democratic adminstration.

<comment><USER3> What's the best path to get on this gravy train?

<comment><USER4> [https://beta.sam.gov/](https://beta.sam.gov/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lemonade and Agora's IPOs in the last two weeks both doubled right out of gate and have kept going (1)

Bankrupt HERTZ pumped 500%+ over a couple of weeks in June, to such a degree that their board nearly got a $500m unprecedented "worthless" equity offering out into the public market before the SEC shut them down. (2)

Tesla is trading at $1,400. Their latest competitor Nikola - who has no sales and no actual consumer product - was briefly worth more than ford (3)

I would assume that board rooms & investment bankers are SCRAMBLING to get their IPOs pushed out in Q3 or early Q4 2020.

In the meantime hold onto your hats, don't risk what you can't afford to lose :)

(1) [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/bankrupt-hertz-terminates- co...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/bankrupt-hertz-terminates- controversial-stock-sale.html)

(2) [https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/17/all-bets-are-off-as- hertz-...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/17/all-bets-are-off-as-hertz-pulls- plan-to-issue-500-million-in-new-stock/)

(3) *Was for a minute - off to an $18b valuation vs $25b for ford today haha - [https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/09/as-stock-price- mor...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/09/as-stock-price-more-than- doubles-nikola-founder-bo.aspx)

<comment><USER6> As my financial advisor from firm of WSB likes to say, "J Pow make money printer go brrrrrr".

Honestly none of this makes any sense, record unemployment, skyrocketing covid cases, people trapped at home shopping groceries online. Yet $TSLA is at 1400, and to quote my advisor "is going to the moooon".

Sigh.

<comment><USER7> Or maybe bitcoin was never worth $17,000. Speculation is speculation. Stocks like tesla have such a retail following that they are no longer grounded in any fiscal reality. To properly invest in these stocks, one needs to find a financial advisor specializing in reading tea leaves.

<comment><USER8> Since it was 1,000 USD or so and was raising quickly in early 2017, I thought a good price for 1 BTC was a solid 10k USD. Happy with more, but w/ its current usage and interest, it seems to be the #

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the long line of rounds of raises (what are they on now, their L round?) my guess is that Palantir is a money fire and is vastly overinflated in valuation.

It'll be good to actually see their numbers now in Q statements.

</comment><comment><USER10> Without knowing what they actually do, Palantir is a terrifying name.

<comment><USER11> Thiel actually explained this in a talk when I worked there. It comes from Lord of the Rings which Peter Thiel is very fond of. Apparently the Palantiri aren't inherently good or bad, it's just that power's impact reflects the people who use it. The ancient elves or wizards or whatever used them for good. But Sauron got his hands on one and used it for bad. The sinister potential was a deliberate choice, to remind people to be sure that power isn't abused. Actually kind of a good message for the tool Palantir builds, but probably not good for PR.

Also Thiel is _very_ consistent on using Tolkien's pronunciation. It's not PA- lan-tir. Or Pa-LAN-tir. It's pa-lan-TIR with emphasis on the last syllable. There's actually a written accent in the books: [http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri](http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri)

Regardless everybody at the company sad PA-lan-tir.

<comment><USER12> I find it hilarious that Thiel is a fan of Tolkien, yet he seems to embody Saruman's ideology (if not worse), while Tolkien's philosophy is more of Gandalf's. Tolkien was generally against technology, but especially against something so easily abusable (if not abused already) by malevolent power.

<comment><USER11> Is Thiel seeking to build an army of ressurected elves to destroy all life in the planet? And what did you have in mind for "if not worse"?

<comment><USER12> Note that I meant Saruman, not Sauron. Unlike most of LOTR characters, Saruman is a very modern and enlightened kind of person striving for "Knowledge, Rule, Order", but using Machiavellian means to achieve this purpose. Maybe Sauron was also initially led by good intentions, one would have to look it up in Silmarillion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If there were any good in markets this IPO would fail. We are without conscience and this despicable enterprise will continue.

<comment><USER14> Ex-Palantir engineer here. What exactly do you think makes the company despicable, apart from them working with some entities you don't like?

They don't even source or store data themselves... they just provide a glorified federated search engine on top of data organizations already have, with fancy visuals and user interface on top.

<comment><USER15> >What exactly do you think makes the company despicable, apart from them working with some entities you don't like?

I mean, this is certainly enough for me.

The Gotham system and who Palantir decides to provide it to borders on dystopian. [0]

>The LAPD uses Palantir's Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic offenders, says Craig Uchida, whose consulting firm, Justice & Security Strategies Inc., designed the Laser system. The list is distributed to patrolmen, with orders to monitor and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets. At each contact, officers fill out a field interview card with names, addresses, vehicles, physical descriptions, any neighborhood intelligence the person offers, and the officer's own observations on the subject.

This is terrifying.

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter- thiel...](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/)

<comment><USER14> It's just a search engine... and don't get me wrong, it's a really robust and expressive search engine, but all it's doing is data analysis. As scary as that is (and it is absolutely scary), it's not anything that someone couldn't do with tableau, or with a whole lot more patience and data manipulation, straight elasticsearch.

Palantir makes that easier, sure, but at what point is a tool sufficiently generic so as to not be held accountable for what it's used for? And if there is no amount of generalizability that absolves the author of software from what its used for, how do you square that against open source software?

Should the elasticsearch authors feel guilty if their software is used for something unethical as described here? No money is changing hands is one difference, but for a decision of morality does the payment matter?

To be clear, I don't think there's one right answer here. Different people will absolutely have different opinions, and that's not the type of disagreement that's likely to be swayed on a forum, I just wanted to provide you a different way to think about it, if you're open to doing so.

<comment><USER16> >It's just a search engine

do you have any comment on this?

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir- predict...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive- policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd)

How do you square using 'predictive policing' technologies on predominantly minority populations to _forecast_ who will commit crime, which sounds somewhat like Minority Report, with "just a search engine"?

<comment><USER17> complete bs

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of people in this thread are raising questions about what Palantir actually does. I worked as a software developer at Palantir in 2014, so maybe I can shed some light on this though this info may not be up to date. Back then they had two main products: Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis. Accompanying this was a big infrastructure to ingest data from various sources. First the two frontends:

Gotham is focused on displaying entity based data. Entity based data was often things like people, reports of events, invoices, etc. Gotham let you do things like click on a person, and see all criminal records associated with them. Or their relatives and known associates. This was called "search around" and was apparently a very big deal. One sample use case for Palantir Gotham was to search for people that made more than one purchase of the same Schedule 2 drug, and plot those purchases on a map. A common method of finding pill mills was to plot these drug purchases on a map and see when there's a bunch of purchases along a highway route. Big indicator that someone is buying in bulk, but splitting up their purchases to fall under thresholds which traditional alerting mechanisms relied upon. Palantir Gotham is the product that people usually associate with Palantir - it's the one used by a lot of three letter agencies.

I don't know too much about Metropolis. It was more about quantitative analysis. I think it was popular for insurance companies. IIRC it could do things like plot the frequency of adverse weather events on a map, and then insurance adjusters to fine tune premiums. I think there was also a Palantir Metropolis product aimed at small businesses.

Now, the above covers the frontend. A huge part of Palantir's operations is data ingestion. Basically, this consisted of moving data out of government or enterprise databases and moving them into Palantir's format. This usually involved forward deployed engineers that would work with the government or business and work out a way to ingest the data. An un-glamorous job but one of the really important ones.

Another huge component of the business was customer specific customization. When I worked there something like 40-50% of software engineers worked on business development. They rest worked either on infrastructure of UI platform (basically building the components of the UI that aren't customer specific). Business development at Palantir when I worked meant "software development for a given business (or agency)" not sales. If you worked in business development you were a developer for a given business or agency. This was also a lot of grunt work. One customer wanted to bucket items based on the phase of the moon. I distinctly remember this ask - maybe the FBI was investigating a werewolf. Implementing features and customizations like that was the role of business development.

Is it a powerful tool or is it snakeoil? Well, given that the workflows it's replacing are often whiteboards and excel spreadsheets it may actually be a very significant gain. Ultimately what Palantir has is a flexible way of displaying and finding relationships between data. Flexible enough to ingest very different types of data. Perhaps more importantly they have a technical workforce capable of rapidly extending the product to meet new customer needs. And if customers are happy with the product I guess it's worth it.

I just hope they've moved off of god-damn java swing for the UI.

<comment><USER18> So basically it's an Orwellian surveillance tool that justifies it's own existence based upon remnants of an unjust war on drugs created by Nixon? I'm so sick and tired of Palantir's advertising tactics of doing good.

We should enable the government to create massive databases of peoples lives and communication, then link those ... so that we can stop kids from doing ecstacy or "catch terrorists".

Give me a break. Palantir is basically like PRISM ... except it came out of the minds of Silicon Valley (from whom I would expect much more) ... than the NSA/CIA

<comment><USER11> The main use case or illicit drug detection that I as aware of was detecting fraudulent pharmacies selling shitloads of legal opiods. Which primarily affects rural white people - I don't think that's part of Nixon's drug war which primarily targeted inner city people. And the drug detection use case is only one example. IIRC anti-terror work was the first big use case for Palantir Gotham.

As far as whether or not it's an Orwellian tool, one thing to be aware of is that Palantir doesn't collect any data or have access to government data. The ingested data is still administered by the agency. I don't think they can even legally transfer it to 3rd parties.

Palantir builds tools to browse and make correlations with the data that government agencies already have. It's more of an investigation tool, not a surveillance tool. There's a substantial latency between something happening and being able to actually see it in Palantir - it needs to first be logged and recorded, and then go through the ingestion pipeline.

Sure, it's a valid position to be against government collection of things like pharmacy purchases and financial transactions. But that strikes me more of a moral position against government data collection rather than something specific to Palantir.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This was long overdue. Palantir has always been a darling of the valley. I often wonder how much of Palantir is actually owned by DoD and if that information would be made public after they IPO.

Edit: Looks like In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, already owns some stake in the company. [1] [[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/technology/palantir- techn...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/technology/palantir-technologies- ipo.html)]

</comment><comment><USER20> It's hard to watch the stock market right now as an underpaid employee at a pre-IPO unicorn. Who else here is desperately hoping the next S-1 post is about their company?

</comment><comment><USER21> From the other thread: Forgive my ignorance: For most other companies, I've seen a direct link to an S-1. Is sending in a confidential draft first normal and we just don't hear about it, or is the confidential draft sent but not announced usually, or is this unusual?

<comment><USER22> It's pretty common to submit a confidential draft. This started with the JOBS Act [1], which loosened disclosure requirements generally for "Emerging Growth Companies" [2] when they are going public and introduced the notion of a confidential draft registration statement. You originally had to meet certain requirements to qualify for confidential filing, but that privilege was subsequently expanded to all companies [3].

Exactly how common it is to announce your confidential filing is harder to assess, but it's not _that_ unusual. They likely decided their filing would leak and thus it was better to get ahead of it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startup...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startups_Act)

[2] [https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC](https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC)

[3] [https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2017/07/sec- pe...](https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2017/07/sec-permit- issuers-submit-confidential)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very bold to do it in the current landscape but I'm sure they've got their reasons to do so

<comment><USER24> If I were Palantir I'd be worried about the funding from my primary customers (defense, law enforcement, ICE) in the likely coming very Democratic federal government. There's been a lot of noise made about changing how much money is being spent on law enforcement, which would directly impact Palantir's bottom line. If they can IPO and gracefully transition to private sector work, then they'll be golden; but afaict private sector hasn't gone as well as they'd hoped yet.

<comment><USER25> I'm expecting they'll have a pretty good IPO, but I'm considering going short for that very reason. They're almost a caricature of "evil" startup companies. Peter Thiel's association only makes it worse. Not committed to this thesis though, since it's possible they could be swept up in TINA mania for the next ?? months/years.

<comment><USER26> What issue do you take with Thiel? I think it's a bit of a stretch to call him evil.

<comment><USER27> He secretly funded a lawsuit against gawker which was pretty shady of him.

<comment><USER28> >He secretly funded a lawsuit against gawker which was pretty shady of him.

You can't be serious. In a court of law, Gawker was found to be (extremely) wrong, and outing people ain't cool.

It was anything but shady.

<comment><USER29> The shady part was strategically structuring the damages for Gawker's insurance to not be eligible and ensure bankruptcy. If I remember correctly (don't quote me on this), they lowered it enough for it not to kick in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't know anything about the legitimacy of this IPO, but if they have a competent ML team, then what terrible things they can do with their data are [unfortunately] worth killing for if you're an authoritarian government.

</comment><comment><USER31> Congrats to a wonderful company.

<comment><USER32> Is this sarcasm?

<comment><USER31> No. Most of the deriders here have no idea of the amount of good they do.

<comment><USER33> Perhaps you can enlighten us?

<comment><USER31> Its about helping organization utilize their data - nothing more, nothing less. Palantir does not own the data. They do not fuse some secret magic data source with other secret magic data sources. They provide tooling and platforms to allow companies to make sense of their data.

Look at [https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/platform- features/](https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/platform-features/) for instance. It lets you draw connections between data, it allows you to spin up graphs to look at relationships, or plot things on a map, or perhaps make a nice web-based pivot table. But it is not some draconian evil thing, where moustache twirling villains sit around, finding new ways to pry into your personal data. Nor are they some scary shadow government-corp that seeks to entrench itself in the military-industrial complex in order to control things from within. It's tooling, its refinements on data, and its your typical software as a service company. The value proposition is giant players are good at having lots of data, but bad at using it, or finding insights, or visualizing it, or whatever - so they offer a one-size-fits-all set of tools and solutions.

I am very tired of the misconceptions around them because of their cool name. Some of the most intelligent, humble, and hardworking people I know work there. Their mission is misunderstood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> [redacted]

<comment><USER35> For what it's worth, Thiel isn't supporting Trump like he used to so far. [https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/21312154/peter-thiel- trump...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/21312154/peter-thiel- trump-2020-election-campaign-shying-away-distancing)

<comment><USER36> I wouldn't take anything that Peter Thiel "says" he's thinking about doing too seriously. He also said this in 2016:

>I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. … I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, their question is not, 'Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?' or, you know, 'How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?' What they hear is we're going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What does Palantir do again? Serious question.

<comment><USER37> Their site should have some info about that, let's see...

"At Palantir, we build software that lets organizations integrate their data, their decisions, and their operations into one platform. Our software empowers entire organizations to answer complex questions quickly by bringing the right data to the people who need it."

Whoops! Never mind, I have no idea what this is describing.

<comment><USER38> It's vague on purpose. Their target demographic is CIOs and CTOs at large corporations and bureaucrats in governments. That language actually makes sense to them.

<comment><USER39> >That language actually makes sense to them.

Maybe they _think_ it does, but it can't actually.

<comment><USER40> But it does. You see, these high level executives often have a goal in mind, but the best way to go about it is with this sort of ambiguity because it gives them room to inflate the expectations and plausible deniability when it goes wrong. If you look at the PowerPoint therapy know as consultant-driven product development, you will see the same language. Vague, ambiguous when documented.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pingo, a fast image optimizer for web - <AUTHOR> https://css-ig.net/pingo <comment><USER2> Whats the performance like compared to [https://tinypng.com/](https://tinypng.com/)?

Edit: Preformed an Unscientific test of feeding them a random screenshot.

Original file size: 11.417kb

TinyPNG: 4.408kb

Pingo: 5.315kb

From a quick glance it looks like Pingo is also making the image slightly darker.</comment>


ZeroVM: Smaller, Lighter, Faster - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspace.com/blog/zerovm-smaller-lighter-faster/ <comment><USER2> I like this alternative to titling.

The original headline is preserved, and clarified by the editorial clarification in square brackets. It would be great for HN to adopt this as a solution to the modified headline problem, with the provisio that editorial comment must only be used for the purposes of clarification.

<comment><USER3> It _was_ nice, until it was removed because fuck context.

ZeroVM: Smaller, Lighter, Faster [RackSpace acquires LiteStack]

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Van Lindberg here from Rackspace. If you have any questions, I am around to answer.

<comment><USER5> * The ZeroVM site makes a big deal about application execution being completely deterministic. How does this interact with applications that require random numbers, such as crypto?

* Is ZeroVM capable of running unmodified Linux binaries? If not, what compiler toolchain is required to get it working? The main advantage of other lightweight virtualization solutions (OpenVZ, LXC) is that it's very easy to take regular binaries (e.g. postgresql) and drop them in a sandbox with minimal fuss.

<comment><USER4> \- It is deterministic based on the inputs. You would need to pass in a seed or read from an external source of randomness to get different values out of a PNRG.

\- Binaries need to be recompiled. There are two toolchains, a GCC-based one and an LLVM-based one. We can also compile within the ZeroVM container itself.

We expect that a lot of people will use existing language runtimes (Python, Lua, JS) To avoid compilation.

Over the long term, though, a lot of the power comes from composability. Think Unix pipes, in parallel, across the cloud.

<comment><USER6> Does the hypervisor use multiple communicating CPUs? If so, how do the races inherent in concurrency not destroy the determinism? Is this a single CPU/thread/fiber hypervisor?

<comment><USER4> Each container has a single process. Each Individual part is deterministic, so the entire system is composable deterministically.

<comment><USER6> That's not true if the processes communicate, or contain communicating threads. In one run, an input queue looks like {A, B}. In another, {B, A}. The source of the non-determinism is just entropy bubbling up from the hardware.

EDIT: using completely synchronous I/O (mentioned below) is a very clever solution, but it requires a process to know its inputs ahead of time. This may also cause cluster scalability issues, as now each "round" of inputs is gated by the slowest of the source processes.

<comment><USER7> All reads from other sessions are blocking. There is no input queue, zerovm processes read and write directly to each other. This way determinism can be preserved even for clusters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Perhaps a bit off-topic, but I would like to get to the point where I can make intelligent comparisons between technologies like CoreOS and ZeroVM, and in general better understanding of containerization, virtualization etc. Can someone suggest a list of books that can get me started on that path?

<comment><USER9> CoreOS and ZeroVM are so young that there's not really much literature about them yet. That said, VMs and containers have been around for decades.

Lots of the recent activity is more about packaging and usability improvements, rather than theoretical improvements.

A quick overview: CoreOS is a super-minimal Linux distribution designed to be used as a base for applications. It's essentially equivalent to the JEOS buzzword from five years ago. It would run inside of Xen or KVM or VMWare.

Xen, KVM, VMWare, Virtualbox, you probably already know about- they provide a virtual machine, the operating system running inside of it (theoretically) can't tell it's not on its own hardware. Xen uses a 'hypervisor', which is essentially a very tiny, custom kernel. KVM uses the Linux kernel as the hypervisor, which makes a lot of sense- you don't have to reimplement all the years of hardware support and scheduling work they've done. VMWare and Virtualbox run as applications on whatever OS you provide. You lose out on some opportunities for clever performance hacks this way, but there are other advantages. VMWare ESX[i] is more like Xen & KVM, but I don't really know that much about it.

Containers (BSD jails, Solaris zones, LXC, and of course, HN's lovechild Docker) let you provide VM-like isolation and resource management between processes or groups of processes, but you only run one kernel. This means much less duplicated effort and memory, and Docker's AUFS lets you deduplicate your storage too. There are slightly more security concerns about this approach than full VMs, the Linux kernel (and others, but let's be honest about the target audience) has a long and ugly history of local privilege escalations.

ZeroVM is based on Google Chrome's NaCL, and that's about all I know about it. I would expect VM-like security (it validates machine code), and an environment that requires serious porting from POSIX. That said, if you use Python, Ruby, Mono-compatible .NET, or Go, the heavy lifting has already been done for you.

<comment><USER10> ESX and ESXi are bare metal hypervisors, unlike KVM which is kind of like a quasi-bare metal hypervisor which happens to sit in the Linux kernel. ESX has been EOL'd, however it relied on something called the "Console OS" to bootstrap itself until the vmkernel would take over and start scheduling tasks. The Console OS was actually a modified Red Hat Advanced Server (later Enterprise Server) instance which once the system was booted would act as a kind of "privileged guest". You could log in to it and do sysadmin-y tasks like add users, install RPMs etc.

ESXi, on the other hand, was written to do away with the Console OS entirely, but it still has a fairly rudimentary shell. Many of the utilities are based on busybox and the idea is it should be stripped down with only really minimal functionality. It also sported something called the Direct Connect UI (DCUI) which is a curses based interface for doing things like settings up an admin password, reviewing logs and changing security settings.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Based on "Why ZeroVM?" ([http://zerovm.org/wiki/Why_ZeroVM](http://zerovm.org/wiki/Why_ZeroVM)), a large part of the motivation for ZeroVM is based on the premise that regular VMs require a full OS and are therefore unacceptably fat. However, there are multiple platforms for running unmodified applications directly on VMs without requiring a traditional OS, e.g. the work I've been involved with: [https://github.com/anttikantee/rumpuser- xen/](https://github.com/anttikantee/rumpuser-xen/)

Determinism, OTOH, sounds interesting at least on paper. Is there any experience from tests with real applications in real world scenarios?

</comment><comment><USER12> Big congrats to Cam and the whole team! I work for one of the other companies from their TechStars class, they were a blast to have in San Antonio.

</comment><comment><USER13> ZeroVM is LXC but with NaCl.

<comment><USER14> almost,

LXC starts as a general purpose Linux container with everything built in, and adds more isolation as development continues

ZeroVM starts with no general purpose Linux, and will add support as development continues

ie, LXC will work with what you have now, ZeroVM will eventually work with what you have now, but shims will have to be developed for everything, either in your code, or in ZeroVm's

IMO the future endpoint will have similar functionalty in both projects, but LXC will see more testing and use /now/

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Huge congrats to the LiteStack team. I was in their TechStars class and those guys are super smart.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've read the architecture doc ([http://zerovm.org/wiki/Architecture](http://zerovm.org/wiki/Architecture)) and I loved it.

But, when you say tantalizing things like 'erlang-on-c', you raise the question: what does the clustering control plane look like?

One of the great things about erlang is that the cluster's got supervisors that receive execution-level messages (e.g. 'EXIT') and can then take whatever action they feel like. Is that control plane level exposed to ordinary containers?

And the other great thing about erlang is that the messaging model is either synchronous if you care (with return receipts) or asynchronous if you don't (fire and forget) -- and that richness turns out to have a bunch of good use cases. What's the ZeroVM story there?

And the other great thing about erlang is being able to trace out messages, especially when your synchronous architecture just took a dump on the sheets and is staring at you belligerently. Does ZeroVM have introspection figured out yet?

<comment><USER4> The control plane is on top of ZeroMQ, to allow for various arrangements of components as well as the ability to observe the flow of inputs/outputs.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the response. It'd be great if the wiki were fleshed out with an overview of how that works and for the other questions to be addressed as well, for those of us examining it from other backgrounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How is does this solution compare to Google App Engine?

<comment><USER6> Why the downvote? This solution requires an app recompile, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So... how do I use this with my Rails app, and to what end?

It looks like interesting technology, but I need a more concrete example.

<comment><USER18> I think for stuff like your Rails app, you'd want to wait until there is support lower level in your stack.

But imagine that you're writing a commenting system, and want to sanitise stuff received from a user. Sanitising data is error prone, so you isolate the code in a new zerovm. If someone finds a way to exploit anything in your sanitising code, they might be able to write broken sanitised HTML out, but they won't be able to e.g. send queries to your database, or write to your disk, because the zerovm simply doesn't have permission.

And imagine the web server spawning a new zerovm for every request, that only has permission to talk to the inbound network connection and pass messages between that and a Rails zerovm for that request. If there's an exploit in the HTTP parser, that vm could be exploited, but it'd die at the end of the request, and would have no permissions to talk to the database server or write to disk.

And imagine the Rails zerovm similarly being split into pieces: Request handling might be done in one; authentication might be done in one.

The lower the startup costs, the more you can afford to chop the app into pieces _and_ the more you can leverage that to benefit in terms of security (by reducing the privileges of each individual component) and scalability (by allowing distribution of the VMs across CPUs and across servers)

<comment><USER19> How would ZeroVM instances talk to any server with persistent storage (e.g. a key/value store) in a deterministic way? get('top_stories') will change over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> why not just use docker.io? what are the differences between zerovm, docker, and warden?

<comment><USER21> I found the architecture page helpful in understanding what this thing really is: [http://zerovm.org/wiki/Architecture](http://zerovm.org/wiki/Architecture)

<comment><USER22> What does an instance look like. These are very lightweight instances of what?

<comment><USER7> It looks like hardened *nix process. It has no access to anything it's not permitted to access. And it has no notion of network, time or machine it's running on, although it can communicate with other instances (even on remote machines) via ipc. It can be suspended, resumed, relocated and so on without it ever noticing.

<comment><USER22> Thank you. When you instantiate a zerovm instance you give it the associated code as well? And which IPC method can it use? Is zerovm the library you use, is there such a thing as a separate zerovm instance, or is it just the way we are used to talking about virtualization?

<comment><USER9> You give it an x86 (or ARM) binary to execute. NaCL is also working on an LLVM version, that would get compiled to the specific machine at runtime.

IPC is super limited: [https://github.com/zerovm/zerovm/blob/master/doc/api.txt](https://github.com/zerovm/zerovm/blob/master/doc/api.txt)

You get nothing but /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, and /dev/stderr by default. You can optionally make other resources (network, files) available, through a similar api.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Am I the only one here who finds this approach somehow similar to Plan 9?

<comment><USER24> Yes, because after many years of using Plan 9 daily I see no similarity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I cannot see what this has to do with security. At the end of the day, it is the data that attackers are after and the app needs to be able to access it whether it is virtualised or not.

<comment><USER18> Each part of your application needs access to some sub-part of your data, but if you isolate your app at the OS level and run a whole app server inside a VM, every part of your application can at least in theory access all your data.

If you sub-divide your app in separate zerovms, whether per-request, or split it up further into functional responsibilities, then you substantially reduce the attack surface by ensuring that an exploit against any one part of your application can only exploit the specific subsets of data it is allowed to work on.

You can do this without zerovm too, but the more you reduce the cost and difficulty of spawning a new vm or container, the more finely grained you can subdivide your application, and hence the fewer privileges each subset of your app will have.

<comment><USER25> This is wishful thinking at the moment. I understand perfectly well what that means but data is data. An application typically has access to all data and the fact that you run it through a VM doesn't change anything.

I can find this technology useful only in areas where you want untrusted 3rd- party code to run without worrying about what it will do.

<comment><USER18> It is only "wishful thinking" is as much as people are usually lazy because the effort required to sandbox small pieces of code is prohibitive in most current platforms. But larger systems are already often layered in ways that layer access to data anyway (though often not intentionally for security).

<comment><USER25> Good luck with this approach. I am not saying you should throw away this - awesome technology btw - but rather impractical in many ways. You will find very little use-cases where you can apply this with direct benefit. In most cases this wont change a thing - only perhaps on highly specialised software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> why not a different libc, such as musl?

<comment><USER9> I've never understood people's fascination with replacing glibc. There's almost never anything to gain- and glibc has the advantage of being really, really well tested.

<comment><USER27> "I've never understood people's fascination about SpaceX. There's almost nothing to gain- and Russian Proton has the advantage of being really, really well tested."

On a serious note: the primary disadvantage of glibc is that it's really, really hard to change (and build times are slow). While it's already here, sometimes you want to port it to a new platform or a new ABI, and the adventure begins.

<comment><USER9> As someone who tried to port code in the early days of Bionic, I am filled with grumbles.

And glibc hasn't been slow for a year or two, since they defenestrated Ulrich Drepper.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Secret Knock Detecting Door Lock - <AUTHOR> http://grathio.com/ How many times have you seen a secret hideout with a secret knock?  It's a staple of cheesy dramas, Saturday afternoon movies, and tree houses throughout the world. Now it's real. <comment><USER2> dup. but under a different source URL.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924237></comment>


Switch: Save money wisely - <AUTHOR> http://www.getswitch.co/

<comment><USER2> The fact this got 8 upvotes so quickly (in 2 minutes) is super suspicious. Especially since it doesn't really say what it does and it just sounds like a goal-keeping service.

Anyone mind explaining to me what it's about?

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't literally save money.. Always spend it halfway trough.. What kinda gamification we are talking about.?

</comment><comment><USER4> Save money when not drinking coffee ?

</comment><comment><USER5> it seems like a gamified way of saving money, well-thought.

</comment><comment><USER6> Save my money</comment>


Tech Ops at Occupy Wall Street is looking for developers - <AUTHOR> http://tech.nycga.net/2012/01/13/tech-ops-newsletter-edition-1/

<comment><USER2> Mildly surprised that there are no infosec roles listed there...</comment>


What Do Animals See in the Mirror? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/what-do-animals-see-in-the-mirror/516348/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> One of the weirdest cognitive experiences in my life (as a drug non-user) was when I walked through a very crowded, dimly-lit bar and suddenly came face to face with a person who, when I tried to pass him, kept moving to the same side that I tried to pass on. It took me probably 3 seconds to realize it was a mirror and that I was trying to pass myself (meanwhile, one of the employees who was sitting next to the mirror was giggling loudly while profusely apologizing for doing so; not my proudest moment).

The cognitive weirdness was that during those 3-4 seconds, I genuinely did not recognize the person as being myself. It was a kind of out-of-body experience.

<comment><USER3> Try just staring at yourself in the mirror for 10-20 minutes. It is a very strange, disorienting experience, almost like a dissociative drug.

<comment> david-given Here is a thing which, once I've told you, you'll never stop noticing:

Your reflection is _always_ staring you fixedly in the eye.

<comment><USER2> I remember realizing, as a kid, that if you could see someone's eyes, then -- like if you're trying to hide -- _they could also see yours_. Mind blown, at the time.

<comment><USER4> If the enemy is in firing range, so are you.

<comment><USER5> Tracer rounds work in both directions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There was a distinctly unsettling paper[1] a couple of years ago which found evidence that _ants_ could recognize themselves in a mirror, which is _really_ not a result you'd expect from something (ab)used as a "sentience test". I've seen very little followup on this; does anyone know how it's been received?

[1] [http://www.journalofscience.net/File_Folder/521-532(jos).pdf](http://www.journalofscience.net/File_Folder/521-532\(jos\).pdf)

<comment><USER7> For me, the most unsettling part is that everybody points a lot of good reasons for this test indicating self-awareness, but then as soon as ants pass it, everybody just decides the test wasn't any good to start with.

<comment><USER8> It's practically a trope in cognitive science and artificial intelligence that there's an implicit assumption we have that it's only intelligence/self- awareness/consciousness if only a human can do it. So we devise these tests, later find out an animal/program can do it, and then decide "oh, that's not _really_ intelligence/self-awareness/consciousness anyway."

<comment><USER9> It assumes that the notion of self is a complicated thing. My theory has always be the opposite. I think the notion of self is the most simple, most basic thing of all, like the smallest dot possible in a gigantic space. Anything, no matter how primitive, can have it. I don't think it requires thoughts or analysis. "I am" is very simple, it's us that try to make it complicated, wrapping it into more complex concepts like "what", "when", "where", "who", "purpose" or "quality".

In that sense it's not a surprise that even small creatures can realize "this is me". It's a leap from "I am", but not a huge one. And more related to the ability of sense organs than the size of the brain.

<comment><USER10> I will be surprised if rocks don't have this kind of "smallest dot". They have no self, but the content of their awareness is also empty, so it perfectly matches them.

I think that idea of "self" is meaningless if there's no machinery capable of explicitly representing parts of its own state and operations. There's no single "smallest dot", but sequence of coevolving systems and representations of the system in itself.

<comment><USER9> You are making it complicated again. The system and representation of the system is a wrapper. It's a construction of a mind wanting to make sense of things, categorize and organize. "I am" is much more basic than that. It's the the concept of being and be aware of it. It does not include description, representation, comparison or context.

There is even the possibility that "I am" can exist without a mind. We can't prove it though, since proving requires a mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Someone apparently did a similar test based on a dog's sense of smell instead of its sight, and it did pass that one:

[https://phys.org/news/2015-12-dogs-animals- conscience.html](https://phys.org/news/2015-12-dogs-animals-conscience.html)

So perhaps other animal species may pass similar tests modified for senses they use more than sight.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wiping the mark on its own body may be just a form of empathy. For example, when you see someone's yawning, you yawn yourself. Or when you see someone's hurt, you literally may feel hurt yourself (there were studies showing that same brain areas are activated when you're OR somebody's else are in pain, laugh or else).

<comment><USER13> Empathy is exactly where my thoughts led when trying to see how robust these tests really are. Watching the embedded video though, I think there's a strong case that elephants are definitively shown to understand that what's in the mirror is really them. Notice how the shot of one elephant shows that it has turned away from the mirror _intent_ on washing away the mark around its own eye. It seems to knock down the empathy argument.

An interesting aspect of the mirror test is what happens with multiple animals. Presumably it's well established that various types of animals recognize each other—that they associate identities with others. So when two bonobos (say) show up in front of a large mirror, surely they will recognize that one of the bonobos they're seeing in the mirror is the same as they one at its side. Bonobos and other apes are convincingly argued to be able to understand what's going on, so not that revealing. But what about dogs, for example, which certainly have some concept of identity in others, but somehow seem to fail the mirror test? And what about cross-species recognition? A dog seeing a familiar cat or human?

A more convincing mirror test, I think, would be if you can silently introduce another animal to appear behind the one being tested. An animal that takes note of a predator or prey in the mirror (or opponent or friend) and then turns around to respond accordingly _surely_ understands the implications of what's going on in the mirror.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This assumes that eye is the only sensory mechanism to measure if an organism is self aware or not. Looking at snimal kingdom we already know different animals rely on other senses more than eyes. So perhaps not the best way to measure self awareness. Besides we know kids upto certain age also fail this test, which means is it possible this is an acquired skill?

</comment><comment><USER15> One thing the study didn't mention (or that I missed) was the _familiarity_ of those animals with actual mirrors? I know that nearly all the cats and dogs I have known in my life have freaked out majorly when they first see themselves in a mirror, but it doesn't take them very long to figure out that the reflection is OK and become comfortable with it.

Perhaps they 'learn' that (a) it is themselves, rather than another animal, or (b) they just figure because their reflection hasn't attacked them, it is harmless, or (c) The reflection is not responding as another cat/dog would to aggressive and friendly behaviours and should be ignored? Intriguing.

<comment><USER16> The image also has no smell or sound associated with it. In a human's life, it would be like smelling something familiar, but not seeing or hearing anything. You'd conclude it was just the wind, whatever, and move on. Whatever the mystery might be, you _know_ it's not that familiar thing, because you'd see that.

A dog's sense of smell is like that for them, in the way that sight is for us.

<comment><USER17> I don't know much about brains so this might be a nonsense question, but how sure are we that dogs experience human emotions and that the behavior we associate with human emotions isn't something dogs evolved to take advantage of us? Or is that the same thing as human emotions?

<comment><USER16> No one knows what another person, never mind another animal experiences. It's all a matter of inference, and testing which yields consistent results. Dogs certainly appear to be both very aware of the human emotional state, and to have their own emotional landscape. That said, I wouldn't say that they're "human emotions". They're dogs... they're very different, but different and "less" are not the same thing.

As for your last point, if that's the case, would that be "taking advantage"? At some point, if the behavior is mutual and mutually beneficial, and no one can tell the difference between sincere altruism and some fundamentally selfish motive... does it matter?

Ironically I will say that the view you're considering at the end, when applies to humans is called "cynicism" from the ancient Greek "Kynikos" which meant "Dog-like". This is Cynic, in the philosophical sense, not the pejorative by the way... the belief that people act out of their own self- interest; even charity is done because it makes us feel good.

The counter-argument being, "And?"

<comment><USER18> >No one knows what another person, never mind another animal experiences.

The word "know" has many different meanings, so it depends which one you are using, and for what purpose. For many practical purposes we often can know perfectly well a good deal of what another person is experiencing. So for instance when we see someone walk up to a door and open it, we know that they saw the door, thought it would be desirable to walk through it, and knew how to open it.

<comment><USER19> His point still stands that inference is what allows you to make a good guess as to what's going on in another being's mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Dogs fail this test, but I knew somebody who said that after putting a cone on his dog at the vet, the dog ran up their stairs to the bedroom with the mirror and used it to examine the cone from multiple angles.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know if my cat recognizes herself in the mirror, but she definitely understands how mirrors work, and enjoys using the reflection. For example, even when she can look at me, she sometimes likes looking at my reflection in the mirror with me behind her as I hold a ball. She tracks the ball in the mirror, and when I throw it, she uses the reflection to locate it. She succeeds every time.

</comment><comment><USER22> See also: The Lacan Mirror Stage, a 20th-century area of post-Freudian philosophical discussion that tangentially led to behavioral studies of humans and animals and their sense of "self", including the kids of studies mentioned in the OP.

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

</comment><comment><USER23> Peacocks will attack their reflections. In the side of your new car, for example :( So they presumably think that they're _other_ peacocks.

<comment><USER24> Or they may disagree with your choice of brand.

<comment><USER25> Or jealousy with its looks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Also very interesting, the concept of the antagonistic other. Meaning, almost every animal has some escape reflexes, and interprets certain signals as a foe approaching (fast flickering rippling motions, like cloth). But some can anticipate the foes thoughts and avoid dangerous situations.

</comment><comment><USER27> This doesn't seem to address lack of caring?

I think I'd just have assumed babies/infants didn't care that their face was dirty or whatever, rather than jumping to 'they don't recognise themselves'. No reason not to extend that to animals?

</comment><comment><USER28> Isn't there a risk that they feel the paint in their face?

</comment><comment><USER29> The researchers appear to assume the subject knows what they look like, so a mark should be notable.

Seems a dubious assumption in some cases.

</comment><comment><USER30> xD

</comment><comment><USER31> A fun question - why does a mirror swap left and right, but not up and down?

<comment><USER32> The mirror doesn't do the swapping - _you_ do. If you hold a piece of paper so you can read it, you have to turn it around to show it to a mirror. Did you turn it up/down? The mirror shows it upside down. Did you turn it left/right? The mirror shows it reversed left/right.

When we interact with other people, they are normally rotated horizontally from us, not vertically, so rotating a paper horizontally is appropriate to give them the same view of the object we have. If we typically met face to face with a vertical rotation - one of us standing on his head, but right hands both on the same side, we would think a vertical rotation was the appropriate thing to do to show a paper to someone else, and would wonder why mirrors showed things upside down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My cat utterly ignores the TV. Until one day it was a show with a lot of barking dogs on it, the cat got very interested in it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Another animal without accompanying confirmations through other sensory channels, so they are confused and does not act as in the presence of a real animal.

There is no question that they see "themselves". Animals have no such concept since self-awareness (and concepts per se) _require_ abstract reasoning which in turn _require_ a language capacity by corresponding brain machinery, which is not present (not yet evolved).

To be precise, animals do have aggregated representation of a sensory input, which we might call a concept, so they recognize things and other animals, but no _abstract_ concepts detached from perceptions and referentiable by sound- labels or words, which requires specialized brain circuitry.

Nothing to see here.

<comment><USER19> I can be self-aware without any words in my mind. Self-awareness does not depend on language; if anything it's the other way around.

Edit: I also have a vague memory of knowing of my own existence before having the words to express it.</comment></comment>