Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter - <AUTHOR> https://sendwrite.com/sopa/ <comment><USER3> Although I applaud the efforts here, as a former staffer and intern for a congressman, I hate to be the bearer of bad news...

The truth is my job as an intern, as was the job of all other interns that I met while in DC, was to take constituent calls and also open constituent mail. However, no information was ever actually relayed to the congressmen. We had a formatted response to each and every issue that the House could possibly vote on. Everything from internet poker, to any issue you could imagine. We would print out (and alter if necessary) the response to tailor it to the individual that called, emailed, or wrote a physical letter. The congressman's signature was stamped at the bottom of the letter and sent back to the constituent, giving the allusion of due diligence on the congressman's part.

I was extremely surprised and disappointed at the same time at how commonplace this was. Pretty much every intern I asked about it went through the same drill. It's just another thing about our government and "representative democracy" that really irked me. So whenever I see ads urging people to call or write their congressman, I think back to this and realize further how powerless we really are.

The best way to exert influence over your congressman is to donate lots of money and become a memorable name that can get in contact with the actual representative him/herself. Hell, that's how I got the internship. This is one of the reasons I sympathize with the OWS movement.

<comment><USER4> Wallawe: Do you think this on-line petition system is useful? Instead of going through a congressman, one could go through the White House?

[https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/how-why/terms- partic...](https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/how-why/terms- participation)

<comment><USER5> This wasn't addressed to me but I thought I'd comment.

The We The People petitions, I believe, are there to make the people believe they are making an impact in policy by signing one. Most, if not every, response from the White House has been a generic, basically meaningless response from an unknown staffer.

Case in point: [https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/we- demand-v...](https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/we-demand-vapid- condescending-meaningless-politically-safe-response-petition/gCZfn86x)

Notice how this petition has been signed by more people than most of the others...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was briefly skeptical, but on reflection, I like this for three reasons:

First, email just doesn't work for contacting Congress. They get entirely too much, and it's entirely too easy to get lost in the pile. It's the preferred means of communication for most of us on HN, but it's just not effective outside our industry. Phone is better, but there's nothing quite like flooding someone's office with paper to convey the will of the electorate.

Second, SendWrite is one of the companies that would be hurt by the bill - being able to generate volume like this shows the reach and effectiveness of their lobbying efforts. Sacks of cash are the backup currency of Congress - Votes are still the coin of the realm.

Finally, you guys are putting your cash on the line for this - that's a powerful statement, and I applaud you for doing so.

<comment><USER7> Email works better, actually. All of Congress uses web forms that categorize and route the messages directly to their CRM systems. So it is easy for them to tally and respond. Mail, on the other hand, has to get irradiated for bioterror and takes 4-6 weeks to arrive. The letters are made brittle and staff dislike handling them, and they have to be typed or scanned into the office CRM.

<comment><USER8> Congress uses multipliers to figure out how predictive each piece of communication is (ie, how likely it is that a certain piece of communication will result in a change in voting behavior).

I don't remember the exact numbers, but the hierarchy goes (in descending order): in-person visit to DC office, in-person visit to local office, physical handwritten letter, physical typed letter, phone call, email. The multiplier attached to email is close to zero.

(The exact method varies by congressman/senator, but the relative rankings are the same throughout).

<comment><USER9> If this is real, it's a great example of why this kind of government is way overdue.

millions of people affected by some law, _0.01

one retired guy pissed of by something minor, but that happens to live close by, _700

<comment><USER8> Not exactly. The person would have to be a constituent, so he would live no further than any other people in the district.

You could make a statement about wealth and lobbying, but to be honest, those are considered in a different category anyway.

It's actually rather accurate. If someone takes the time to write a handwritten letter and mail it, it means a lot more than just clicking a DemandProgress button that has all of your personal information pre-populated. The Internet lowers the cost (effort) of communication, but on the other hand, the non-material cost is a way of showing that the issue is important to you.

<comment><USER9> "in-person visit to DC office" at the top of the list

<comment><USER8> Yes, but only constituents' opinions are relevant, and all constituents must live within the district.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to send people to this site, but I worry people who have never heard of the bill won't know what is going on. Can you embed the explanation video or point to or something?

Edit: I see you just did. Thx! I just linked to it on DuckDuckGo as well as donated and sent my letter. Thanks again.

<comment><USER11> How insane is it that you have 12k karma, have no problem commenting on js, ruby, jquery, mongo or even css... but you're worried about people not understanding this bill.

NOT a comment about you, epi08, but just commentary about what matters.

If you haven't called your congressperson about this, then you don't care.

period.

<comment><USER12> Putting a notice on a site trafficked by 10's of thousands per day like DDG is a lot more powerful than calling...

Everyone with a site, please do this. I've put it on PadMapper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's the problem: after the 2001 anthrax scare, all mail sent to Congress has become incredibly delayed (on the order of weeks) while it gets tested and radiated. What some lobbying campaigns have done to get around this is send mass faxes to congressional offices overnight. It's like having access to someone else's office printer and that person has 1/538th of control over the federal government.

The takeaway is, unless these letters are hand delivered, I doubt theyll reach their intended recipients in time.

<comment><USER14> This is the second or third time I've read the problem of postal mail to congresspeople in these comments. I really like what SendWrite is doing here, but what riordan and others have said here rings true to me. Are they going to get my mail weeks after it mattered?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a great idea. I'm sending in mail through this. Not everyone has the luxury of literally stopping by in person, but this is a fantastic alternative.

I love this, though I've held back on commenting on SOPA until now. One of the frequent comments on SOPA I see is that the original founders behind the internet believed it should be free and unregulated. While I agree, once you introduce capitalism to the internet, as most companies have, you cannot let it be entirely unregulated. What is happening in the internet now is the same process that occurred directly after the industrial revolution - first there were completely unregulated, grievous abuses in the industry. The entertainment industry is attempting to regulate the flow of information and "capital" in the same way the government had to go "trust buster" on the industrial sectors in the last two centuries.

However, while this is all good and well, as the side video explains, they already have protocols for doing this. They don't _need_ any more methods of stopping piracy and the like. They should shift their attention to different ways of raising capital and earning revenue. The system they have isn't working, but erring on the side of regulation instead of erring on the side of libertarianism is _still_ erring. There needs to be a comfortable balance, and SOPA does not make such a balance - it tips the scales in favor of the entertainment industry, and that is the last sector of the United States the internet should be supervised and moderated by.

</comment><comment><USER16> I know this doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of happening, but I wager if Google, Facebook, etc. were to shut down their websites for an entire day-- or even part of a day--that congress would get the picture. Give the entire Internet a blank page stating simply and concisely what is at stake. Just imagine the deluge of calls.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is great action on the part of SendWrite.

One suggestion: since you ask for the sender's home address anyway, why not use that to scrape the contactcongress website to automatically fill in their representatives?

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to do that. We wanted to get this out the door quickly. If it is popular we'll see about improving the UI. Thanks!

<comment><USER6> Sunlight Labs has an API that'll do it by zip code: <http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Sunlight_Congress_API/>

They've got libraries for Ruby, Python, and even PHP, and the interface is drop-dead simple. Definitely worth a look - I'm baking them into one of my projects right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> This could have saved us a lot of time. Thanks!

<comment><USER8> This is amazing. Some years ago, I wanted to build a site that did essentially the same thing (but for a different issue), and this API either didn't exist or wasn't complete/accurate enough. It's remarkable how much power the web has to effect political change - seems like we're only seeing the beginning of it.

...that is, unless SOPA passes, in which case this may be as good as it gets....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just a bit of advice from back when I was sending letters over the DMCA.

If your congressman is supporting the bill, don't bother. My Senator at the time was Fritz Hollings; came from a poor district, so he was dependent on a lot of outside contributions. I recall Disney being one of his largest contributors. I received a response 3 months after it passed that more or less told me I was a enemy of commerce. I won't lie, I was a little shocked to get back such a pointed letter when I was as courteous and respectful as possible.

I learned my lesson from that one. You can send a letter to anyone and generally it is a great idea, but if they get a dime from your position's opposition, it is just pissing in the wind. It's just business.

</comment><comment><USER19> Really nice of you to have made this free. I would have paid! I wouldn't have sent this if not for sendwrite, just because the cost for me to type, print, stamp, and mail an envelope is too high.

<comment><USER20> _I would have paid!_

For those who have yet to do it, I should point out that there is a PayPal donate button to support this effort that you are shown after submission of your entry. Send cards to all your representatives, then send those nice folk a couple of bucks to cover the postage at least.

<comment><USER21> I actually signed up for SendWrite before, but didn't really want to spend money on sending letters from the internet.

However, I've now donated $5 because of the selfless thing they are doing. Thanks to everyone at SendWrite for doing this, hopefully it will help!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does any advocacy group (EFF, etc) have info on who the key swing/undecided/"marginal" votes are?

Knowing that we could try and focus dissemination of this to people in those districts.

<comment><USER23> You do mention "focus dissemination of this to people in those districts", and that is key, because unless a Representative/Senator is the head of a committee, an email/letter/etc., from outside of their district is completely discarded.

Also, if you are not registered to vote, your comment goes in the waste bin, too. Trust me, I know plenty of people who work or have worked in various legislative bodies, and the _first_ thing they do when they get contacted by a "constituent" is check to see if they are registered to vote in their district. If not, then the message falls on deaf ears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Upvote this on Reddit for more volume: [http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsendwrite.com...](http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsendwrite.com%2Fsopa%2F)

</comment><comment><USER25> hi all, as a chinese, let me explain what's the situation in China. maybe you already know we have a similar censorship system called GFW(the Great FireWall of China).

when the government don't want we to see the truth of something, or something may be a threat to them,they will ban it incruely, sometimes they even do it in the name of "for the children" or "for the harmony society" or give their version of totally-bullshit "truth".

besides the baning of website, they also have some people take salaries from government and speak for the government in every forum when scandals of government officials burn out.and when scandals burns out government also send orders to every website, every press to stop talk and publishing on the scandals, the reason they give is "for the harmony of society" or "don't be mislead by the media in US and Euro" :D

what's more almost every big website/application in china has employees either hired by government or hired by website/software-company to censor the users' activities, including QQ(biggest IM in china, just like MSN), Youku & Tudou(biggest two video site, like youtube), renren(biggest SNS in china, like facebook), baidu(biggest search engine in china, like google).if you said something bad to the government, your words must be deleted, what was worse, there used to be 2 men chatting using QQ, and the owner of QQ--Tencent Compang --give their chats record to the police ACTIVELY, and the result is the 2 men was sent to prison.

so if you allow your congress to pass SOPA, you know what would happen to you all.

</comment><comment><USER26> I absolutely love the idea. I cant remember where I read it or heard it, but physical letters do get much more attention. Nothing against SendWrite, but I think even more attention can be gained via distinctive-looking enveloped letters that need to be cut open and unfolded. A stack of similar-looking postcards will have an impact in terms of volume, but will likely be sorted into a bin and never read. If you have the time and have extra company logo-ed envelopes, please consider sending one by hand as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Just to clarify, SendWrite letters are mailed in an envelope, so each one will need to be opened. Also we deliberately didn't use a pre-written letter as a template. The result is that the letters we have received are very unique.

<comment><USER27> Damnit! Great idea, but I HATE it when on-screen text is not user-selectable. I want to take your on-screen address and put it on my own envelope. GRRRRRRR!!

Great idea, though. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sent.

From my letter:

H.R.3261, the 'Stop Online Piracy Act', is going to be the Volstead Act of the 21st Century. Like Prohibition, creating draconian laws like these to stop online piracy is going to do two things: 1) destroy respectable businesses that thrive on user-generated content and 2) drastically increase the number of pirates online by expanding its definition, and in doing so, massively expand online piracy. SOPA will literally create a generation of internet bootleggers.

</comment><comment><USER29> Thanks for a great tool.

A suggestion: I'd like to be able to send a letter to all of my representatives and senators at once, instead of having to fill out the form multiple times.

<comment><USER30> that might get expensive for SendWrite...

<comment><USER31> Sendwrite's normal charge for 20 cards is $39.80. I sent three cards (two Senators, 1 representative), and donated to cover at least that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is great. What's the cashflow situation here - how many donations will you/do you need (I'm aware this is obviously demand dependent, but I'm just intrigued about the general situation)

</comment><comment><USER33> Great idea! I hope everyone uses this service as soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER34> Its really great of you guys to offer this service on your own dime - <USER2> you. Its also very shrewd marketing, and I hope it pays off for you.

</comment><comment><USER35> Thanks for this. I wrote my letter and probably wouldn't have done so without the help of this website. This is one of the first times that a bill has come up that I feel so strongly against. If this thing becomes law, we'll all refer to the internet "before" and "after" this moment. I certainly hope it never comes to be.

</comment><comment><USER36> Have always wondered if an online service for political mailings like this couldn't introduce some randomness to the opening, key statements and closing (Sincerely, Regards, etc) and varying the layout and style so they don't look too much like they were cranked out with the push of a button.

</comment><comment><USER37> Thanks guys! I donated a small amount, hopefully it will pay for my letters.

</comment><comment><USER38> Donated, tweeted, emailed, sent the letter, etc. Cole is a baller.

</comment><comment><USER39> Looks great, but I can't set an international return address without a state. I'm a registered voter in the US, but haven't been a resident for a long time.

Guess I'll just email my rep.

</comment><comment><USER40> Perhaps someone can change the facebook link at the top to a share or a recommend link. Those show up in feeds whereas likes only show up on your wall.

</comment><comment><USER41> My Congressman and Senator here in Massachusettsmust understand the ramifications of this bill and protect the individual's citizen from corporate and government control of the internet. They must be educated and read up on this abrogation of civil rights and government protected and constitutionally guaranteed free speech and discourse. Dan Osterman, Boston

</comment><comment><USER42> The names in the DropDownList Control are invisible in IE8: <http://imgur.com/7UIbT>

</comment><comment><USER43> > Don't know who is your local representative?

I believe that should read "Don't know who your local representative is?", no?

</comment><comment><USER44> Nice work guys. Thank you for doing this.

</comment><comment><USER45> I just submitted my letters to my representatives (and donated, thanks Cole!)

To hit up your reps with different communication channels, <http://www.contactingthecongress.org> has voice, fax, and web forms.

</comment><comment><USER46> Not that I don't want to support you guys for doing something awesome like this, but I wish the "Like" button showed appropriate meta-content on my facebook wall, instead of just a generic description of SendWrite. Also, donated. :)

</comment><comment><USER47> I sent mine off a bit ago, thanks a ton for doing this. Here's to making a difference.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is awesome, but the bill will be on the House floor tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER49> Great idea, just sent letters to both of my Senators.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is this when they slip in another bill that does something even worse? While we are inundated with the news of this bill?

</comment><comment><USER51> Is this a one off website or based on some framework? This seems like a very powerfully general purpose advocacy tool.

</comment><comment><USER52> Very great for sendwrite to do this. Not only will it protect their business, but it's a great marketing tool.

</comment><comment><USER53> Thank you for making this a free letter.

</comment><comment><USER54> Thanks for this =)

</comment><comment><USER55> Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER56> There's also Apple's new Cards app. I'm going through my cat pictures now.

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm impressed. SendWrite is doing good while promoting themselves and it makes an awesome first impression. I never thought of using them before. I never even visited the site, just heard of them and generally got the idea of what they do. I think I may use them now! I'm actually looking for an excuse!

</comment><comment><USER58> If you are really serious about taking a stand on this bill, then the most impact will achieved by going to the source of it, not Congress... unless you have more to offer Congress' incumbents and the nation's economy than the industry source does.

They are a very important constituent.

If a large number of consumers stopped purchasing a certain entertainment company's products for one day, would it have a noticeable impact on their revenues? How about a week? A month?

The industry claims it's losing business to pirates. While it's probably true to some extent, it is speculative and nearly impossible to measure accurately. How many of the consumers of pirated content were never consumers of paid content to begin with?

The products this industry sells are not life necessities.

In summary, a branded entertainment "hunger strike" by actual existing, paid customers. This would cause real loss. And, if it's a noticeable loss, it would send a very strong message.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER59> Just completed/sent a letter via your link and donated afterwords (and I rarely donate). Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER60> Filled out one for each of my representatives and senators, and also made a small donation. I may not be able to do much, but I'll be damned if I don't do anything.</comment>


Introducing Ark: A Consensus Algorithm For TokuMX and MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://www.tokutek.com/2014/07/introducing-ark-a-consensus-algorithm-for-tokumx-and-mongodb/ <comment><USER2> Does Tokutek intend to patent this consensus algorithm? If there's any possibility at all - I'm asking because of your track record - we're legally better off not reading about it at all, which is sad.

<comment><USER3> It won't be patented. We hope others find it helpful and consider implementing it in similar systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a TLA+ or Coq model available for this?

<comment><USER3> No, none of us know how to use those. :(

If you're interested in building one and you have experience with them, get in touch and we can work through it together. I think the biggest challenge would be modeling the semantics of write concern, but I'm not that familiar with proof assistants, maybe that isn't too hard.

<comment><USER5> It looks like you've read the Call Me Maybe series of posts over at aphyr.com. He tests a number of distributed systems (Mongo, Riak, Cassandra, etc) and their behavior under network partitions and _almost all of them fuck up and lose data_. A summary of results can be found at [1].

Amazon has used a TLA+ model for their distributed systems and found _a bunch of bugs_ [2].

Seriously, everybody fucks this up. Please please learn a model checker and check your algorithm.

[1] In the "Summary of Jepsen Test Results" section: [http://blog.foundationdb.com/call-me-maybe-foundationdb- vs-j...](http://blog.foundationdb.com/call-me-maybe-foundationdb-vs-jepsen)

[2] [https://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/tla/a...](https://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/tla/amazon.html)

<comment><USER3> We are working on several ways to prove to ourselves and the community that what we have is correct. The most important is obviously testing. We have tests that demonstrate the problems we found, and Ark passes those tests. Publishing this explanation and soliciting feedback is another.

We have run Jepsen and have not been able to get it to show data loss in TokuMX. The problems it found in MongoDB were already fixed in other ways in earlier versions of TokuMX, but we're trying to get Jepsen to demonstrate the other problems we've found.

Model checking may be another way we can prove correctness, but since Ark is so similar to Raft, I think the Raft model in TLA+[1] is probably sufficient. Anyway, we'd also need a proof that the model is equivalent to the implementation, and I don't know of a way to do that, so I think functional tests are more important.

In any case, we'll look in to using a model checker, and any help would be greatly appreciated. If you're interested, feel free to email me.

[1]: [https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/~ongaro/raft.tla](https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/~ongaro/raft.tla)

<comment><USER6> If you don't know how to use a model checker you have no business creating a distributed algorithm. Either implement someone else's or do it right. The world has enough broken distributed algorithms and we really don't need any more. Either you are using Raft and you can depend on its proofs and just do the work to ensure that the model is implemented correctly or you are using something different and you need to write the proofs and models.

The casual attitude that most people show when building these algorithms mind blowing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting -- sounds like once implemented, you could leverage the consensus algorithm to implement atomic multi-document/multi-table transactions too?

<comment><USER3> Multi-document and multi-collection transactions are already a part of TokuMX[1]. Since commit of the oplog insert is atomic together with the actual operation's changes to documents, atomicity is also guaranteed in replication. Atomicity and MVCC in a sharded system is something we're working on, but it's unrelated to Raft/Ark.

Ark is just about making replication as a whole trustworthy. The jepsen post on MongoDB[2] shows MongoDB losing data even with majority write concern, which if used properly, is _supposed_ to make MongoDB a CP system. But because of the design flaws in the election algorithm, you can't rely on it perfectly. The changes we made in Ark fix the election algorithm to make majority write concern actually able to guarantee data safety, so you can treat it as a fully CP system.

[1]: [http://docs.tokutek.com/tokumx/tokumx- transactions.html](http://docs.tokutek.com/tokumx/tokumx-transactions.html)

[2]: [http://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe- mongodb](http://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb)

<comment><USER5> _Ark is just about making replication as a whole trustworthy._

Then you need a formal model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe this is officially one name too many matching /ar[ck]/

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark#Technology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark#Technology)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc#Computing_and_gaming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc#Computing_and_gaming)</comment>


United States Files Complaint Against Oracle Alleging Contract Fraud - <AUTHOR> http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/July/10-civ-873.html

<comment><AUTHOR> From the release:

Under the contract, GSA used Oracle's disclosures about its commercial sales practices to negotiate the minimum discounts for government agencies who bought Oracle software. The contract required Oracle to update GSA when commercial discounts improved and extend the same improved discounts to government customers. The suit contends that Oracle misrepresented its true commercial sales practices, ultimately leading to government customers receiving deals far inferior to those Oracle gave commercial customers.</comment>


Don't Be Evil: Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers - <AUTHOR> https://logicmag.io/03-dont-be-evil/ <comment><USER2> This is one of the more insightful and interesting reads posted on HN.

I took issue with the statement that Apple have always cynically coopted counterculture and utopian motifs. Then I thought about it for a second.

Getting people pumped up about Apple using utopian imagery and counterculture suggestions _was_ always cynical. It just happened to work very effectively on me in the 80s, and may very well have fuelled a lot of my early life's optimism. In particular my faith that certain tech/companies were inherently good. I was certainly a big fan of Apple for many years.

If that naivety hadn't already faded significantly, this may have been a more severe reaction, than ... Hey wait!? ... Oh right!

Obviously Steve had already exploited and cheated Woz on a number of occasions before the formative Mac 1984 Ads (which made a deep impression on me at the time.) So it's not that much of a reach to say they are somewhat cynical.

Jobs is a very interesting person, specifically because I think he bought a lot of his own bullshit. Possibly his LSD experience was something which led to deep understanding of humans and interpersonal politics, which may have led to him developing his reality distortions field... Who knows. He may also have developed the classic [1]Acid Jesus Messianic complex and as a result we have the enigma we are left with in the public memory of Jobs. Millions who believe he was an agent of change and a tech god. While many many, who look deeper at the man think he's quite the piece of (edit for politeness) work.

Speculation on this is ultimately pointless... but it's something I muse about myself.

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_complex](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_complex)

<comment><USER3> > _Obviously Steve had already exploited and cheated Woz on a number of > occasions before the formative Mac 1984 Ads (which made a deep impression on > me at the time.) So it 's not that much of a reach to say they are somewhat > cynical._

Sure, but do you know how many bona fide members of the counterculture themselves exploited and back-stabbed others, especially for petty power politics and fame/recognition? It's not like the counterculture didn't have a fair share of BS itself, or cynical people (Leary comes to mind, or take Jerry Rubin).

A large for-profit non-private company (as opposed to some small co-op or something) with revolutionary/hippie/counter-culture mottos that otherwise operates fine within capitalism was always gonna be BS in that aspect.

> _Millions who believe he was an agent of change and a tech god. While many > many, who look deeper at the man think he 's quite the piece of (edit for > politeness) work._

Those two things are not necessarily at odds. It's some particular Americanism (or protestantism relic?) to believe agents of change, national heroes, great historic figures etc, must also be good, altruistic and warm people.

<comment><USER2> > do you know how many bona fide members of the counterculture themselves > exploited and back-stabbed others, especially for petty power politics and > fame/recognition?

I do, and fair point.

> It's some particular Americanism (or protestantism relic?) to believe agents > of change, national heroes, great historic figures etc, must also be good, > altruistic and warm people

I don't think it's a Protestant relic, it's more of a general simplistic perspective that there are through and through good people.

But still I agree it's unrealistic to think this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He's completely missed what changed everything - advertising-supported services.

Before Google/Doubleclick, computing was about selling hardware, software, and service to people who used them. After Google bought Doubleclick, computing became about selling users to advertisers. The user is the product, not the customer. This totally changed the balance of power.

It's really a bit late to be worried about 1960s counterculture. That was half a century ago. Think of Silicon Valley culture as Mad Men 2.0, instead.

<comment><USER5> This a million times.

It's not a coincidence that the focus in UI design also shifted at the same time, in the post-dotcom-bubble years.

Software user interfaces used to be designed for users. Desktop software didn't try to make you send an endless stream of personal data and content to the vendor, or trick you into using it again as soon as possible.

Today's software is designed with an advertising mentality. Instead of customers and human interface guidelines, there are eyeballs and creatives. Previously it would have been a scandal if a software package sent all your keypresses to the vendor's server, but today everything is tracked and monitored. Most designers don't give a shit about things like accessibility because they fundamentally understand software as something more akin to a billboard or centerfold ad.

Meanwhile usage of the word "product" creeps to replace "software". To me, it strongly carries the connotation that consumer-facing software design is turning into the process of developing ways to surreptitiously extract value from the user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Infrastructure is not political" is part of the canon here on HN as well. Bitcoin, as one of many examples, is often touted as being "neutral", or "unbiased" (in comparison to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy).

The same sort of argument is gaining steam around discriminatory decisions by AI or "Big Data" systems: "It's an algorithm! It cannot be biased. Technology is neutral!"

<comment><USER7> It's never the infrastructure or the algorithm or the data that is political. It's the people using that infrastructure, algorithm or data in their decision-making who are responsible.

When a machine learning model determines that according to the available data, blacks are more likely to default on loans, it's not unfairly biased against blacks. It is merely reflecting that the world is unfairly biased against blacks.

The fault inevitably lies with the decision-makers who look at an algorithmic prediction and decide to maximize their profit. Because they confuse what _is_ with what _ought to be_.

<comment><USER3> > _It 's never the infrastructure or the algorithm or the data that is > political. It's the people using that infrastructure, algorithm or data in > their decision-making who are responsible._

I don't believe that. In a sense, it's like the classic NRA defense, that guns don't kill people, etc.

In reality, certain technologies also come with specific tendencies -- ascribed in their very design and formulation.

In the very least, certain technologies within specific societal contexts tend to have specific outcomes. Which makes placing the blame to "people using that infrastructure" problematic, because those people also operate within that societal context, and are influenced by it, they are not totally free agents.

<comment><USER7> Yes, guns don't kill people without pulling the trigger. That doesn't mean that everyone else is without responsibility. Obviously there would be no guns to shoot if nobody sold them. There would be no guns to sell if nobody made them. And so on.

I didn't mean to put all the blame on the users of the infrastructure. Actually I was thinking about the case where the user is involved in creating the infrastructure in the first place, and then pulls the "It's an algorithm!" excuse.

If the infrastructure is made available for someone else to use, then part of the blame for abuse also lies with the person who decided to let them use it. But even in that case it's not the infrastructure that is the problem, it is the lack of access control and accountability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The first bit about communes reminded me of The Tyranny of Structurelessness [0]. It has far reaching corollaries.

[0] [http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

</comment><comment><USER9> The "anti-political" part is probably the most pertinent to modern tech thought. People repeat it here as well - the idea that any kind of specification or statistic is just cold and hard, and there are no lenses.

What I wonder more is: is it a product of the "build it" mentality like Turner says, or is it manipulated by money men with an interest is maintaining the status quo by silencing dissent as non-scientific?

<comment><USER6> In my experience, engineers tend to fetishise the sciences to a degree even scientists don't. Physics and math are among the most influential, and their biggest successes were build on _reductionism_ , or the ability to split large problems into smaller, manageable units. The first instinct is not to immediately solve a problem, but to reduce its size. They also seek axioms, i.e. simple, universal truths from which to build larger solutions.

This approach quickly turns into frustration: people behave irrationally, for example, which turns economics from an offspring of mathematics into something more akin to applied psychology. Laws fail to live up to a standard of "plain meaning", because the myriad conflicts of life are to nuanced to be exhaustively captured in simple language. That's where the distrust of the legal system, as well as "smart contracts" come from.

It's interesting to compare engineers and scientists in this regard: the most successful scientists tend to have a vast appreciation of culture beyond their field of study. Richard Feynman, for example, excelled in music and painting, and became a bestselling author.

<comment><USER10> I think it comes from not really having a grasp of a lot of the real BS involved in science, which you can really only know from first or secondhand experience. A lot of the magic and awe I found in science was beaten out of me by having close friends and partners who were lab techs, doctoral students, postdocs, etc.

I really hope knowledge of how the scientific process works in practice becomes more common among engineers though, it's very frustrating when someone takes a study as being the word of god, and you can't convince them otherwise, because science. Like some 3-4 years ago there was some lab claiming to be on the cusp of having a real cold fusion prototype, and people just buy in because they want it to be true, and the lab had written a paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Why is the tech industry so young? And why does it put such a premium on > youth?

Because the young are more naive, blind to the things written in this article, and they happily follow the dystopian agenda of big companies.

</comment><comment><USER12> The lines about engineers I find to be odd. I don't believe that an entire culture could think that way, yet the author states that the news is a out of context problem for these firms. Engineers don't actually think like that as this article claims it to be, right?

<comment><USER13> Based on my limited experience, most of the good engineers I know measure and care about quantifiable things like latency, throughput etc. They generally tend to get frustrated with fuzzy things like accuracy. (Data) Scientists, on the other hand, seem to be much more happier dealing with things like accuracy. "Ethicalness", however, nobody seems to care about measuring.

<comment><USER14> > "Ethicalness", however, nobody seems to care about measuring.

I would add that it is not entirely their job. After all, all the stakeholders have a primary goal, the infrastructure engineer will maximise infrastructure metrics, the VC their own and so do regulators, who society does need, even in our angelic brogrammer society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To me, Burning man sounds like a weird cross between a frat-house initiation ceremony and a hippie festival.

Sounds like a toxic environment to me.

</comment><comment><USER16> >It seems that tech companies also prefer the deregulatory approach when it comes to what content to allow on their platforms. Their default is laissez- faire—to not interfere with what people can post.

This is quickly changing for the worse. Twitter verification has become a badge of approval. Facebook and Twitter try to enforce rules beyond what is legal and illegal and do so wildly inconsistently. I see a lot of it happening with "right-leaning" people, but I have also seen complaints with "left- leaning" people as well.

They need to get back to this instead of trying so hard to police what is allowed to be said.

<comment><USER17> > trying so hard to police what is allowed to be said.

Eh. They feel responsible for people doing bad things with what they've made. Closest simplified analogy I'm coming up with is: Imagine you run a gigantic, crowded open-mic, and someone gets up and starts shouting "Fire!" when there isn't one. You would probably want to prevent that, cuz it's breaking this thing you made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why not greet Google and facebook with message "don't be evil?" ??

Do anybody care about the fact that they psychologically lead users to multiple tests and use you like a lab rat ? While limiting freedom of speech???

Oh, please</comment>


Ask HN: WILL ANYONE GET PUNISHED FOR THIS HIDEOUS CRIME? - <AUTHOR>

Aaron Swartz was being bullied and cornered by DoJ and other entities for doing something which was correct and not a crime.
He was trying to fix something which was obviously a fault made by those who made the laws and tried to restrict access to something which belonged to every member of the society (like Aaron) and he had the right to use it in anyway possible.
But I do not see any action by DoJ for what happened to Aaron. People involved in trying to incriminate him obviously abused the power given to them. Overpunishing and cornering someone based on any law is an abuse of law itself. And I think such an act should be punishable.
People involved in slapping 35years of imprisonment for something which was not even a crime should be brought to justice. Its wrong what they have done. They went totally overboard with this law. I believe such an act should be punishable on grounds of mental torture. <comment><USER2> No.</comment>


Blogs with great writing? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to have a few RSS feeds sent to my Kindle (via kindlefeeder.com if you're curious) but I can't think of blogs that consistently have articles on the longer side that are worth reading. I'm really just interested in reading things that are well-written and fascinating, and not news. I don't want to be kept up to date, just engaged with something that hasn't been thrown together haphazardly.<p>Any thoughts on what's worth checking out? <comment><USER2> I'd suggest <http://www.aldaily.com/> which aggregates very good editorials and reviews from some of the best newspapers magazines and blogs online.

</comment><comment><USER3> Derek Sivers's blog, <http://sivers.org/blog>

</comment><comment><USER4> I've found J.D. Roth's personal finance blog to be one of the more well- written and interesting blogs around: <http://www.getrichslowly.org>

</comment><comment><USER5> Sean Platt @ <http://writerdad.com> is an AMAZING writer, however the blogs focus may not be your cup of tea.

</comment><comment><USER6> Clay Johnson's InfoVegan is quickly becoming one of my favorites: <http://infovegan.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Don't know what kinds of blogs you are looking for, but my friends over at www.superprofundo.com write some pretty interesting stuff.</comment>


Algorithm efficiency comes from problem information - <AUTHOR> http://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/algorithm-efficiency-comes-problem-information/ <comment><USER2> Yes, but... that somewhat misses the point of machine "learning"! Maybe the author is being somewhat facetious when making an overly broad interpretation of an important point.

When one wants to use the best ML model "in production" (after all the exploration is done and dusted), or when there is a "domain expert" who can specify the right biases to encode into the algorithm (i.e. problem information), the point made in the post is very valid.

Often, however, the point of using ML is to tease out some property that is not apparent previously. In that case, the hope is to use some class of algorithms (eg: neural networks) with the right general biases (eg: convolutional layers and RELU activations, or share the first few layers of VGG) so that it can pull out the appropriate aspects from the problem specification that _you did not know to ask for_.

From this perspective, the challenge lies in the 'No Free Lunch' theorem which implies that unless you known enough about the problem to indirectly encode the correct biases (eg: In the case of image classification -- choosing neural networks, convolutions, etc. rather than a decision tree) you can never win the game.

<comment><USER3> I'm going to quibble with your last point. A decision tree can, absolutely classify images. Depending on exactly how you specify the problem it can do so exactly as well as a neural network. It would just either be a lot less space efficient.

No free lunch isn't about choosing the right biases, it says that a single model cannot solve every problem. And in fact any solver will have accuracy equivalent to chance when averaged across all problems. Here's an example:

There are four possible one bit to one bit functions, I and ~ (the identity and inverse functions), as well as T and F (True and False). If you create a truth table for all four of those functions:

        func  input  output
        I     0    | 0
        I     1    | 1
        ~     0    | 1
        ~     1    | 0
        T     0    | 1
        T     1    | 1
        F     0    | 0
        F     1    | 0

You'll notice that the output column contains an equal number of one bits and zero bits. This is true for any input size on binary functions, and in general if you extend the definition from "one bits and zero bits" to "equal number of each possible output class" it is true for functions of any output size.

That's what the No Free Lunch theorem states: that across _all_ possible functions in your space, you can do no better than chance, because for any function F that you approximate exactly, I can define a function "!F" (or in a non-binary space, a family of functions) which you are exactly 0% accurate on. This is true no matter the algorithm or assumptions you choose.

Similarly, I can define a classification algorithm that has no implicit assumptions about what I am classifying, other than that it can be classified, but still achieves 100% accuracy on any specific problem I apply it to:

For every possible input in your function space, get the ground truth label from some external function, throw those all into a mapping (a very, very large mapping) and then just look up the input in the mapping when requested.

For image classification, this means a mapping of all possible NxN images to a boolean: "Contains dog". You might even, as an optimization make this more space efficient by picking certain pixels that are more impactful and looking at them first, so that you don't have to store every image. That sounds an awful lot like a decision tree ;)

Tl'dr: 'No Free Lunch' has nothing to do with the efficiency of the encoding, but instead with the ability to have a perfect agent that can solve every problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The ideas behind the post are gold. I have blogged about group-by strategies and one of the key themes is that the more you know about the inputs the more you can optimize your algorithms (see [https://www.codementor.io/zhuojiadai/an-empirical-study- of-g...](https://www.codementor.io/zhuojiadai/an-empirical-study-of-group-by- strategies-in-julia-dagnosell))

</comment><comment><USER5> >What does my algorithm know about my problem?

I've phrased the same idea as "what regularity of the problem space is my algorithm exploiting?" A good first question to demistify any purported fast algorithm.

<comment><USER6> I've been thinking of this prior knowledge as "domain reduction", or even "dimensionality reduction". The more I know about the problem, the more of the space I can just remove from the search before I start. In high dimensional spaces, each dimension removed can be loosely/conceptually like an order of magnitude.

I like your phrase too, as there are classes of knowledge about a problem that don't necessarily reduce the domain, depending on how you look at it, but can still be exploited.

<comment><USER7> My pet phrasing is more like: each bit of domain knowledge I have lets me cut the problem space in half.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I made essentially this argument in the thread for the google announcement about beating stockfish and was down voted mercilessly.

I think neural nets and deep learning systems are misunderstood so profoundly because humans are bad at many kinds of reasoning and the explanation of the neural net being "smart" is so psychologically appealing.

</comment><comment><USER9> > _In fact, you can show that solving a linear systems has to have O(n^3) as a > lower bound_

Where did the author get this idea? It can be done more efficiently than that: [https://mathoverflow.net/a/52557/40272](https://mathoverflow.net/a/52557/40272)

<comment><USER10> I think you are misreading the answers; it states the well-known fact that matrix multiplication and inversion can be done is less than O(n³) but it does not say this about solving linear systems. If you read through the material referenced in the answers it seems that O(n³) is indeed a lower bound and actually hard to obtain in practice.

<comment><USER11> You can compute the inverse of a matrix A in asymptotically the same amount of time as you can multiply two matrices. You can also Cholesky factorise in that amount of time, and compute T^(-1) A where T is (upper or lower) triangular in that amount of time. You invert by A^(-1) = (A^T A)^(-1) A^T, the latter computed by Cholesky and two triangular solves. You Cholesky and do triangular solves by divide-and-conquer.

So no, the article is wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I made a mistake. Gaussian elimination is O(n^3), but there are general algorithms which are as fast (or slow, depending on how you look at it) as the current complexity bound for matrix multiplication which is O(n^{2.737}). Not the end of the world, I corrected the article. Reference:

[http://theory.epfl.ch/vishnoi/CargeseLectures.pdf](http://theory.epfl.ch/vishnoi/CargeseLectures.pdf)

Still, the point stands that you'd never want to actually solve a large system "the generic way" unless you really have to (i.e. you cannot identify a structure for which you have a faster algorithm).

<comment><USER11> It looks like you also turned the rest of your post into a link.

The best currently known exponent for square matrix multiplication is around 2.3728; Wikipedia's page on matrix multiplication has a reference.

<comment><AUTHOR> >However, the constant coefficient hidden by the Big O notation is so large that these algorithms are only worthwhile for matrices that are too large to handle on present-day computers.

No wonder I never heard about these. I updated it for correctness (and fixed the link, ugh) but yeah, these are details I'd hope to not dwell on in the post since for all intents and purposes you'd still never want to do the worst fallback unless you have to.

<comment><USER11> Yep. (Largely) irrelevant in practice. But the gap between what we can do and what lower bounds we can prove is very large indeed for many matrix operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Alternately, you could say that more information allows you to recognize that you're faced with a _different problem_ , one which is more-specific and may have a more-efficient solution.

The outermost, most -general, and least-tractable problem being "Do what's needed for whatever."

<comment><USER13> Yes. And it is interesting that general neural networks can't really solve that one. The closest thing to a solution we have for it is the human animal -- and it is still a pretty specific beast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > However, while these features matter, most decent implementations of the > same algorithm tend to get quite close in efficiency to each other (probably > <3x if everyone is using a performant enough programming language or > constructs).

No, I don't think this is even close for most problems. Neural networks, maybe, but they're an unusually simple case where everyone uses similar, largely GPU accelerated code.

<comment><AUTHOR> At least in scientific computing this applies. And note I say most decent implementations, so I assume you took it to a language without performance issues like C/Fortran/Rust/Julia/Go/etc. and got rid of temporary allocations, made sure you looped in the correct ordering, etc. After you do all of that, for mathematical and scientific problems you tend to hit a wall. [BLAS libraries tend to be within that range of each other]([https://github.com/barche/julia-blas- benchmarks/blob/master/...](https://github.com/barche/julia-blas- benchmarks/blob/master/BenchmarkResults.ipynb)), which pretty much directly means that regression, linear classification, etc. libraries are all going to be within this amount. Different differential equations solvers which are sufficiently optimized with the same algorithm tend to be within that amount from each other. Neural network libraries tend to be within that amount from each other. General optimization algorithms over a large class of problems tend to be the same. That doesn't mean it's not a worthy enterprise to keep making the "general fallbacks" better, indeed this helps everyone.

If you're looking to make your machine learning software faster, writing a new piece of fundamental GPU code to beat cuDNN could possibly be faster but probably won't get you very far. But changing your model to better match the data could make the problem orders of magnitude easier.

<comment><USER14> You can't prove the effect of "temporary arrays, choice of language, and parallelism" and "pointer indirection, cache efficiency, and SIMD vectorization" don't matter unless you compare one thing that does those things to another thing that doesn't.

BLAS libraries are all within the range of each other because they all store memory in basically the same way, do indirection in basically the same way, care for the cache in basically the same way and do SIMD in basically the same way.

As soon as you step out of those prebuilt blocks and build your own function over squares of numbers, you're going to be losing far more than a factor of 3 until you understand how to handle these issues.

<comment><USER15> >You can't prove the effect of "temporary arrays, choice of language, and parallelism" and "pointer indirection, cache efficiency, and SIMD vectorization" don't matter unless you compare one thing that does those things to another thing that doesn't.

I think he said the exact opposite. He's basically saying algorithmic time complexity matters (and therefore identifying your problem class matters, since you might get a more efficient algorithm out of it) since you can only get so far with the generic algorithm, however good your implementation is.

<comment><USER14> The argument is symmetric; once you've tuned the algorithm the only way to get >10x speedups is by working with those low-level things.

 _Both_ the broad-strokes algorithm and the fine details are responsible for huge performance differences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Another example of this is found in comparing generic MCMC methods to HMC. The former work for discrete or continuous parameters while the latter requires a gradient. Regardless of how fast a generic MCMC implementation is, the HMC method is asymptotically faster, so for some problem sizes the language or low level optimizations are irrelevant.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you invest money? - <AUTHOR> I know nothing about investment,but I've noticed a lot of HNers know quite a bit on how to invest money wisely so I thought I would ask for any guidance you have to offer. Any starting point would help, I am open to traditional or cryptocurrency investment (trading bots?).
I've been learning how little is guaranteed to last in life. Although I have a great job (infosec), some long term financial security and independence seems wise.
Thanks in advance for any wisdom shared. <comment><USER2> > "cryptocurrency investment"

Cryptocurrency is not an 'investment' \-- it is a gamble. Which is fine if that is what you are looking for.

Since you say you "know nothing about investment" then a reasonable place to begin might be here: [https://www.bogleheads.org/](https://www.bogleheads.org/)

Top left will be a "new to investing -> start here" link to get you started.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I guess I the fact that you "buy low,sell high" in cryptocurrencies made me think it was an investment. I knew people that had good ROI with trading bots. I will read up on that link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The safest way (although, without the imaginary bombastic returns show in the movies) is putting you money in an Index fund. Bare in mind, this is a long term commitment. Investing in general IS a long term commitment. Another option, I am currently doing, but it is with moderate to high risk is to invest in Bond funds. Usually the banks offer their clients a choice of such funds, Vanguard as well. Here the return usually is a bit higher, although you have to have a very high trust towards the manager of the fund (unfortunately for the banks, those managing these funds a clerks... needless to say). With patience and intelligent choices, the returns will accumulate with time. With a proper knowledge and education, one could try also stock investment... but to succeed, and to protect yourself from high loses, you really need to know what you are doing, to know where to look for and what to look for in a company, to be really, really PICKY... and at last to actually buy stocks. Stocks also require a lot of patience and big balls! Forget about stocks if you can't sleep when the market swings down, of if you have butterflies in your stomach when it swings up. There are a lot of good books which are a good start. I recommend also to read some of the numerous notes of one of the greatest in the field: Warren Buffett. That all said, all the rest of the financial operations, which people do without the proper education, knowledge or with expectation of luck and the next big swing of the market up, is called speculation. It like gambling... in a long rung the house always wins!

</comment><comment><USER4> Vanguard and forget it.

[https://ritholtz.com/2014/02/the-best-investment-advice- youl...](https://ritholtz.com/2014/02/the-best-investment-advice-youll-never- get-2/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks,I heard of index funds but didn't know what Vanguard was. Skimmed through the article,very insightful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would recommend the book [https://www.amazon.com/Will-Teach-You-Be- Rich/dp/0761147489](https://www.amazon.com/Will-Teach-You-Be- Rich/dp/0761147489) (don't read the title of the book :))</comment>


VistaFilm founder on how to get his iphone app on top 25 in app store - <AUTHOR> http://asable.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=1347

<comment><USER2> Your link is hosed. try [http://asable.com/2010/06/asable-com-interview-of- josh-korno...](http://asable.com/2010/06/asable-com-interview-of-josh-kornoff- founder-of-vistafilm/)</comment>


Show HN: I created a map of a market - <AUTHOR> http://demo.relato.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Curious for people's feedback. This is a prototype and isn't really useful yet. It is up to the point where a lot of exposure to sales operations/demand generation/sales strategy people will result in something fruitful. Some urls that show different aspects:

[http://demo.relato.io/public/segment/customers_circle#map](http://demo.relato.io/public/segment/customers_circle#map) [http://demo.relato.io/public/segment/competitors_circle#map](http://demo.relato.io/public/segment/competitors_circle#map) [http://demo.relato.io/public/segment/cluster_3_box#map](http://demo.relato.io/public/segment/cluster_3_box#map)

[http://demo.relato.io/public/cloudera.com](http://demo.relato.io/public/cloudera.com) [http://demo.relato.io/public/cloudera.com#logoscope](http://demo.relato.io/public/cloudera.com#logoscope) [http://demo.relato.io/public/cloudera.com#datatable](http://demo.relato.io/public/cloudera.com#datatable) [http://demo.relato.io/public/cloudera.com#cartography](http://demo.relato.io/public/cloudera.com#cartography)</comment>


How ScummVM's unpaid coders kept adventure gaming alive - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/01/maniac-tentacle-mindbenders-of-atlantis-how-scummvm-kept-adventure-gaming-alive.ars

<comment><USER2> Kept adventure gaming alive? There have been plenty of great adventure games since 2001, but this article was mostly about life support...

(It's also always worth mentioning the continuing interactive fiction, the precursor for adventure games. <http://pr-if.org/play/> is a good starting place.)</comment>


Why Smart People are Particularly Vulnerable to Propaganda - <AUTHOR> http://brooklynoptimist.com/2012/11/14/why-smart-people-are-particularly-vulnerable-to-right-wing-propaganda/

<comment><USER2> This post doesn't really say anything about why 'Smart People are Particularly Vulnerable to Propaganda'. It alludes to Fox news using brainwashing techniques and theoretically shady use of 'experts' to alter a persons beliefs.

Many 'documentaries' (left and right) use brainwashing techniques with different levels of success. Look at Zeitgeist as an example. They use a process similar to how the Koreans brainwashed American POWs in the late 1950s.

This article doesn't expand on that, and just targets Fox (though a well deserved target I believe, I don't get Fox here in Australia) and right-wing conservatives, who at this point are a fairly easy target I think.</comment>


XKCD Substitutions Chrome extension - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions/jkgogmboalmaijfgfhfepckdgjeopfhk?hl=en&gl=001 <comment><USER2> Developers should be careful with extensions like these.

Another popular one (switch "cloud" to "butt") has resulted in me finding image embeds from "buttfront.net" (and broken images) in page sources on a couple of popular websites.

<comment><USER3> You could say those images are up in the butt.

<comment><USER4> I say "what what?" in the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Randall must have one of the shortest travel times from expressing an idea (through his comics) to someone making that idea a reality (this, geohashing, etc.).

<comment><USER6> He's the only person I know of that can program using stick figures

<comment><USER7> cueball, megan, and black-hat guy: an entertaining visual programming language

Legions of xkcd fans: collectively a "sufficiently smart compiler"? an "eager- to-please interpreter"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So much information about atomic cats: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors)

EDIT: Dammit! Just saw the alt text on the original... ah well, great minds and all that...

<comment><USER9> In case anyone else is interested in reading the alt text: [http://xkcd.com/1288](http://xkcd.com/1288)

<comment><USER10> Unless everyone stopped the image from loading, you are reading the title text. Sorry for nitpicking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those who don't use Chrome and prefer "on demand news fun" check out this bookmarklet [http://geeksta.net/tools/make-reading-news-fun- bookmarklet/](http://geeksta.net/tools/make-reading-news-fun-bookmarklet/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Already serving me headlines that make more sense than the originals:

"If you believe Elf-Lord Lindsey Graham is actually a lizard, you're among friends—12 million of them."

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/03/fringe- fact...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/03/fringe-factor- lizard-people-rule-the-world.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Another one of these substitution extensions...

[https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to- butt](https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt)

<comment><USER14> Oh, this one is perfect. It makes a lot of links posted to HN much more interesting than they originally are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> keyboard -> leopard is another one that caught me out ages ago. Makes things funny every now and then but also messes up your idea of the names for various keyboard config files.

<comment><USER16> Your comment really confused me until I viewed source, apparently this plugin also silently does the keyboard > leopard swap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> According to a new study, smartphone users are allegedly 10 times more likely to rebuild their car in space than users of google glass. Witnesses could not be reached for comment.

<comment><USER11> According to a Tumblr post, Pokédex users are kinda probably 10 times more likely to avenge their cat in spaaace than users of virtual boy. these dudes I know is guilty and everyone knows it..

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was just thinking of building a javascript snippet for that XKCD, but you beat me to it. Looks like reading the news is going to get waaaay more interesting....

</comment><comment><USER18> When I saw that xkcd I knew how I'll be spending my free time over the weekend. I should've known that someone on HN will forestall me.

</comment><comment><USER19> I made a Bookmarklet implementation: [http://www.buyog.com/code/post/i-made-a- thing-news-fixr](http://www.buyog.com/code/post/i-made-a-thing-news-fixr)

</comment><comment><USER20> Am I the only person looking at this and cringing and thinking "It's xkcd, not XKCD god damn it"

<comment><USER11> Randall himself states that all upper case is an okay alternative, whereas "Xkcd" is frowned upon [http://xkcd.com/about/](http://xkcd.com/about/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how many people here planned to do this. Thank you and congratulations on the speed.

</comment><comment><USER22> implemented in javascript:

[https://gist.github.com/jiaaro/7372006](https://gist.github.com/jiaaro/7372006)

<comment><USER23> There's a native way to avoid that recursion.

      var snap = document.evaluate('//text()', document, null, XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null );
      for (var i=0;i<snap.snapshotLength;i++){t=snap.snapshotItem(i);t.textContent = replace(t.textContent);}

Also, the regexps would probably be better like /\belection\b/gi, to avoid eg reelection->reeating contest.

<comment><USER24> I think a reeating contest sounds . . . challenging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Phew, this guys a quick-draw-mcgraw.

</comment><comment><USER26> RIP, Homestar Runner.</comment>


The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cluetrain.com/?platform=hootsuite <comment><USER2> I enjoyed and took plenty from the Cluetrain when I read it in 2004, my final year as an undergrad in Australia. It resonated for me as a kid who loved the web for it's freedoms and the disconnect from mainstream commercial interests in the 90s. I could see what lay ahead.

It remains on the list of books I still recommend people. Not because it can be applied directly in it's entirety today, but rather because it captures a time and a place. I still feel there are still plenty of insights to take away.

I'm also reminded of HSTs closing passage to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

...

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave."

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high- water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Who know's what we'll think of influential books of recent years (of the top of my head: the Lean Startup or Rework, which I also love), in 2025.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for bringing Cluetrain up, and for the HST comparison.

When we wrote Cluetrain, I am sure we felt the same "sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world" as did HST in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (We certainly wrote Cluetrain with the same high degree of hyperbole.) And I know the tech counterculture of the late '90s is as gone today as the '60s were when HST wrote Fear and Loathing.

The main difference is what we were hyperbolic about: the Internet: a hacker invention that put everything and everybody in the world a functional distance apart of zero, or close enough, at costs that veered in the same direction. It was clear that this genie would not go back in the bottle of business-as- usual, but it was hard making sense of it. So we tried.

It's still hard. That's why last year David Weinberger and I wrote an addendum to Cluetrain called New Clues: [http://newclues.cluetrain.com/](http://newclues.cluetrain.com/) . It's no less hyperbolic than the original, but at least it's more current. (FWIW, I also visit the zero-distance thing here: [https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2016/02/03/the-giant- zero-2/.](https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2016/02/03/the-giant-zero-2/.))

Over the years lots of people have credited Cluetrain with influencing them, including countless marketers who totally misunderstood or ignored what we meant by "Markets are conversations," "Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy" and "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it." Thousands of books now mention the word "cluetrain" as well — a word that didn't exist before 1999, and still gets tweeted at least daily. Does either fact do any good? I think so, but we might need to wait another couple generations to know.

To me the most troubling error in Cluetrain is not any of its 95 numbered clues but in the one that comes above all of them and rarely gets quoted, perhaps because it's a .gif and not copy-able text. It says, "we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it."

It's a great line, and I believe it will come true in the fullness of time and tech. But in fact our reach did not exceed corporate grasp then, and still doesn't today. In the 17 years that have passed since we wrote Cluetrain, much of the Internet's commons has been enclosed in the walled gardens of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google and the rest. Closed silos have also proved far more attractive to both hackers and users than many of us would like. (For more on that, see [http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/giving-silos-their- due](http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/giving-silos-their-due) .)

But the geology of the Net hasn't changed. TCP/IP is still there. So is the absence of distance it creates in our midst, and the sense of possibility it opens up. Without that sense, none of us, nor our our many forms of conversation-based cooperation, would be here.

What really matters is that there is work to do. That's it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here are their updates -> [http://newclues.cluetrain.com/](http://newclues.cluetrain.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The declaration right in the title that they, the enlightened ones, are condescending to offer "clues" to the clueless (us, their benighted readers), and proclamation that their opinion piece is a "manifesto" tells me that the writers are a little too invested in the campus radical romance of heroic revolutionaries standing above the peasants preaching their utopian vision for me to care much about their talk about hyperlinks subverting hierarchy and such silliness.

That doesn't mean it's all wrong. There are some good comments in TCM. It's just that I find collections of simpler articles combining charts of data over time with admitted speculations about what it might mean and, if so, what the implications could be, to be far more useful and, yes, "enlightening" than any "manifesto" I've ever seen.

<comment><USER6> Hi, I'm one of the authors. I can certainly see why you'd take it as condescending. At the time, it was generally taken in the sense that we meant it: we were trying to articulate what Web users understood but the media and most businesses weren't getting.

Remember that in 1999, the Web wasn't as mainstream, and many users felt that being on the Web was a special experience. There was an "us vs. them" feeling, where the "us" were people enthusiastic about the Web and excited about how it was (we thought) transforming our lives, our culture, and our institutions. So the clues were absolutely not for our readers who, we assumed, were part of the Web "us," but for the media and businesses who weren't on the Web or weren't part of the Web culture, and who yet were attempting to impose their understanding upon it.

Now the Web has become such an accepted part of everyone's lives in our culture that it doesn't feel nearly as much like Us vs. Them. I think that explains why the Manifesto now reads as condescending, whereas at the time it was taken (at least by the readers who liked it) as an articulation of what they already felt.

<comment><USER7> Hello David,

We've never met, but I know Doc and Chris.

I bought around 20 copies of TCM for friends and co-workers. Some got it, some didn't.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for spreading the ideas, gonzo. Good to meet you now, these many years later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That text is now more than 15 years old. In those 15 years, has it actually made a damn bit of difference? To anything? Anywhere?

I mean, it's cool and all. But is it more than that?

<comment><USER9> No. We lost.

<comment><USER10> But how could they lose?! Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy! The triumphal tone throughout indicates there's clearly no stopping the cluetrain; it's obviously inevitable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _74\. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it._

Ooh, a factual assertion. And proven to be false, too.

The rest of the manifesto is just as silly. Open your company's internal discussions to the public, which has become smarter due to the rise of social media? Hahaha!

<comment><USER12> It may be an overreaching assertion. But do you seriously think that the way advertising channels lose effectiveness and die out is sustainable? We're really good at gradually learning to ignore the meaningless noise, that's why entrenched brands market to kids. I think that an interpretation of that shorthand could be: that we see through fake authenticity, that we're repulsed by condescending approaches, that we will work towards keeping top down advertising out of our conversations, and that we will, as always, eventually just learn to ignore it. Those things are proven to be true, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The comments identifying the parts that Cluetrain got "wrong" and the ones stating it "failed" prove only one thing to me...

TCM didn't fail, we did. All of the Cluetrain Manifesto could have been "right," and might have "succeeded" if we hadn't let the centralized and antiquated powers that be have their way.

TCM wasn't meant to be a solution, it was meant to point out (very early on) something we all know...

When a truly groundbreaking idea like the Internet comes along, there will always be power structures and people who want to turn it into a tool to further centralize and increase their power.

So, we failed. The book did its job, or we wouldn't be discussing how "wrong" it is today.

</comment><comment><USER14> I always preferred the Hughtrain manifesto:

[http://gapingvoid.com/blog/2004/06/27/the- hughtrain/](http://gapingvoid.com/blog/2004/06/27/the-hughtrain/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Been a while since I looked at this, I was surprised how silly much of it seems today. "Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy", "Markets are conversations", The community of discourse _is_ the market", yuck.

Ironically, this is really a rant about the tone of marketing (which has since changed btw), but the tone of this is rather cringe-worthy.

<comment><USER6> I'm one of the authors. Yes, much of it seems silly. But the fundamental point was that the Internet is a social space, and that is still true. At the time, that was not obvious to most of the media or businesses.

In addition, markets are far far far more conversational than they were before the Net.

But, yes, in 1999 we did not predict the degree of recentralization and corruption that would occur.

<comment><USER2> Should we be looking to halt or divert that trend of centralisation ? If so, do you have any thoughts on how?

On my less optimistic days it sure does feel like a lost battle.

<comment><USER6> Sure we should be trying to halt it! How? That's tough. We've got economies of scale and the network effect working against us. But there's a lot going on in a lot of places trying to address this. I'm no expert, but it's a topic of great interest at the Berkman Center (where I'm a senior researcher), e.g. AmberLink.org and Perma.cc. Tim Berners-Lee has the Solid project ([http://www.csail.mit.edu/solid_mastercard_gift](http://www.csail.mit.edu/solid_mastercard_gift)). BitCoin and especially the BlockChain tech underneath it offer some hope. The W3C WebID ([https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebID](https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebID)) initiative could help decentralize authentication. There's no shortage of projects underway. But the forces of centralization are well-entrenched, powerful, and often offer great user experiences.

I share your less than optimistic fears. But one of the hopeful things about the Net is that large centralized players can co-exist with decentralized sites and services. The long tail does not get the attention that the short head does (by its very nature), but there will always (?) be lots of creative work and lots of meaningful connections being made there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The point about the human voice, in this context here, makes me think of voice as a part of design, and the function of "copywriting."

I think of the typical landing pages for most SaaS-type offerings. I might be particularly jaded, but I'm also the target audience for a lot of them: I'm a professional developer who buys such subscriptions, and I'm also a small business founder.

Nearly all of the marketing aimed at me in these roles fails to convince me, and causes despair and distrust in exactly the way that this manifesto seems to outline—so just from this anecdotal subjective feeling, I have a hunch that if you're trying to market to people likely to read Hacker News, this text is valuable.

Like, when you decide to decorate your site footer with the text "MADE WITH LOVE IN SAN FRANCISCO", you're replacing your human voice with a robotic cliché, and the same effect emanates from most of the marketing copy I see.

Also, when you offer a service that you expect me to rely on for my business, and you fail to communicate in an open and clear way about what your company is up to, I agree exactly with the manifesto.

For a recent example, people have been wanting some kind of threaded response system in Slack. The company Slack has said over and over again that they're "working on it" for over a year. They're not willing to reveal anything more than this vague indication that it's somewhere in their pile of post-its. Here's the Twitter thread:

[https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/578575540594020353](https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/578575540594020353)

The enthusiastic "We hear you!" and the pseudo-friendly emojis, over and over again like a refrain... If Slack were an open source project, this style of communication would be ridiculous. It's condescending. (Though in the same way that Slack's general presentation is condescending, so +1 for consistency.)

So these points from the manifesto are very relevant:

> _However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive > companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively > preventing these conversations from intersecting._

> _This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies._

> _Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is > usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings > false — and often is._

What if Slack's external communication could give this following type of message, instead, for example?

> "Hey. I'm a product manager at Slack. I see lots of people want this > feature. I see why: conversations can often become cluttered when topics > intersect. Of course, we want Slack to be as useful as possible. So, can we > decide on a minimal implementation that we could implement fairly quickly, > and still give plenty of value? For example, do you think nested threading > is necessary, or is one level enough? I mean, we have the team / channel > hierarchy, and we see value in limiting the nesting complexity. I asked > @designerperson to produce a mockup of the possible interface, and she > should have them done within a few days. But just so you all know, we're > working hard on [these 5 features] and this comes after those in priority. > You can look at our public Trello board to get some insight into how we're > coming along."

To me, that kind of message would be almost a pivotal event in corporate history, and the Cluetrain Manifesto explains why.</comment>


Lulz decided to unleash the kraken on two ex-colaboratours  - <AUTHOR> http://cyberkooltour.blogspot.com/2011/06/lulz-decided-to-unleash-kraken-on-two.html

<comment><USER2> Stop posting any doxing. Thanks.</comment>


The GovtOS Show - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2016/02/28/the-govtos-show/ <comment><USER2> "Further, I find it hard to believe that President Obama — a professor of Constitutional Law — doesn't recognize that backdooring US technology is inconsistent with his duty to protect our Constitution."

He's had 7 years to change the behavior of the Executive Branch in regards to our rights versus how the departments operate and he hasn't done it. He either doesn't believe in his duty to protect the US Constitution or regard any of this as violating it.

<comment><USER3> Another possibility that we are forced to consider is that the Executive is not as unitary as it looks; There is likely severe coalition-building and politics even within the Oval Office itself, such that even a Constitutional scholar with good intentions could not realistically and singlehandedly deliver on actions that would seem to be well within the scope of her powers.

<comment><USER4> My insight into this was by reading (listening to) the very long book by Robert Gates called Duty. It described goings-on at the Department of Defense during his time there and showed that even for this slice of government, decisions were never clear cut, the factions many, and opinions numerous. Even for something as clear cut (in retrospect) as the mission to get Bin Laden was debated extensively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that Gassee does not fully appreciate the impact of the independence of U.S. law enforcement and judiciary.

Now that it's a court case, it _might not be possible_ for it to be "delicately guided into a marsh of hearings and commissions". Its fate as a court case will be determined by judges, who generally have no interest in careful political management.

If the Justice Department loses, they can choose not to appeal, sure. But that decision will have to come from within Justice. As far as I know, it is illegal for the president to interfere with a criminal investigation.

If Apple loses, they will appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Ultimately the only thing that can short circuit the process now, is Congress.

Maybe that's why the FBI did what they did. As things stood until this case, the default was that companies did not have to help. Congress would have to pass a law to force them to. But if the FBI wins this case, the opposite will be true: Congress would have to pass a law to limit the forced helping.

Betting on Congress is never a good idea, especially these days. So whoever is happiest to ask Congress to the least, often wins. The FBI is betting that there is a chance to flip the script.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting to tie this to Scalia's death, as Gassée mentions in the article.

"There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all." -- Antonin Scalia

The Supreme Court will stay in its new state for a while at least, and we may see more cases like this pushed hard during the interim wherever he was a key holder of a viewpoint.

On GovtOS I can imagine the next request after this software would be a version only for senior US officials that can't be broken by the GovtOS tool. I would find that a very frustrating and annoying request if I were designing software at Apple or Google.</comment>


These guys got a YC interview. Problems solved: None. - <AUTHOR>

I am not saying that their app is boring, but still, it doesn't solve any problem as such. And I wonder why they would need mentoring / funding for this kind of product.<p>http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/23a9cy/we_got_a_yc_interview_heres_our_pitch/ <comment><USER2> I had no difficulty in seeing what the value was. Maybe you need to work on your presentation and articulate the use cases as clearly as they did.</comment>


The most revolutionary thing about self-driving cars is distributed computing - <AUTHOR> https://mesosphere.com/blog/2017/06/19/the-most-revolutionary-thing-about-self-driving-cars-isn-t-what-you-think/ <comment><USER2> So the most revolutionary thing about self-driving cars is onboard computing? I guess that is the case if you happen to be a blog for a company who specializes in that, but for everyone else the most revolutionary thing is still the huge advances in computer vision and scene understanding via deep learning...

</comment><comment><USER3> Self-driving cars don't really need to talk to "the cloud" much, if at all. They need some map data, and they might contribute to map data. They can use some traffic data, and can contribute to traffic data, which needs about as much data as Waze. None of this is real-time; it can be seconds or minutes behind.

Transmitting all the car's imagery to servers is an R&D activity. Google downloads all that from their vehicles to train their machine learning systems, but training is an offline process. Production vehicles might occasionally upload "interesting" imagery they didn't recognize, or data from situations where there was trouble, but there's no need to upload it all.

<comment><USER4> How do 2 cars cruise 60 mph through a 4 way stop without talking with each other.

<comment><USER5> That's a bit different from talking to "the cloud" as the parent poster was talking about. Cars will be using a short range radio technology like DSRC (5.9ghz band) to communicate locally. The FCC and DOT are already pushing mandates to have cars equipped with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can we get this clickbait title changed? I even skimmed the article and I still don't know what "the most revolutionary thing about self-driving cars" is supposed to be.

<comment><USER7> I've taken a crack at it, but if anyone suggests a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, and using language from the article itself), we can change it again.

<comment><USER8> How about: The most revolutionary thing about self-driving cars is the underlying digital technology

FTA: "the true transformation isn't the car, but the underlying digital technology"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No, the most revolutionary thing is the freedom from police harassment it will lead to. Self driving cars will obey all local traffic laws to reach certification and deny the police a power the abuse which is the right to use a traffic stop pretextually. As in, stop you for speeding or running a light to regardless if that was his real intent.

See [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/2017/06/16/how-self-driving-cars-could-determine-the-future-of- policing/) for a better explanation than I can ever make. Think about it, the abuse that can happen to minorities and poorer elements of society will be much more difficult to execute. Even stealing from people under forfeiture laws will be much more difficult if the officer cannot find a valid reason to stop you for his otherwise invalid purpose

<comment><USER3> _" (Cops) can follow self-driving cars all day but won't be able to pull them over."_

Yes, that's going to be interesting. I'm waiting for an event when some small- town sheriff pulls over a Waymo self-driving car without justification, and Waymo shows up in court with lawyers, full imagery, LIDAR scans, GPS info, a complete video reconstruction of the event, and the browsing history of the sheriff.

<comment><USER10> For now they still have trouble staying in their lane, I don't see any lack of reasons to pull them over, in fact I'd love to see them taken off the roads entirely until such bugs have been ironed out. Public roads are not the place to beta test software.

<comment><USER3> Tesla's system is quite good at lane-keeping where there are clear lane lines. Their problem is ramming into stationary obstacles in lane.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but 'where there are clear lane lines' is exactly the problem. I know plenty of places where there are no clear lane lines. If every one of those is an accident waiting to happen then we first should invest in some kind of minimal level road markings. And even then you'll have plenty of exceptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I didn't miscalculate then 4TB/8h is about 150MB/s. That's quite a bit but I can't really say that's a shocking amount of image data to process.

<comment><USER2> Is there an actual source for that number at all? Intel did a marketing blog post [0] where they said 4TB per 1.5HR, but without any actual explanation of it, and since then a bunch of posts started using "per 8 hours".

I'm cautious of this number because the camera and sensor feeds are very often reduced heavily in resolution and then passed for processing, so if they are considering raw uncompressed sensor streams then that's not really representative of the theoretical stored size of the data or the size of the data actually processed.

[0]: [https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/self-driving-cars- big-...](https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/self-driving-cars-big-meaning- behind-one-number-4-terabytes/)

<comment><USER3> In practice, far less data is saved. Tesla's production "Autopilot" saves and uploads 15 frames when there's an "interesting event", according to the NTSB report of a Tesla crash. (There's no imagery of the event where the vehicle plowed under a semitrailer, because Tesla's autopilot didn't detect anything that required braking before or during the crash.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this post should be renamed to something like "The Self-Driving Car's Impact On Edge Computing." I thought that the most revolutionary thing about self-driving cars would be the economic impact and resulting cultural changes, which weren't really addressed in the article...

</comment><comment><USER4> Can't wait to see "wanna cry" at 60 MPH.

<comment><USER13> Previously all you had to worry about with your car was someone cutting your breaks or stuffing some prawns in your A/C, but with "driverless" cars you need to suddenly be concerned about Russian teenagers making you drive off a cliff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is Mesos somehow used to deploy and orchestrate software in driverless cars?</comment>


Microsoft makes in profit what Google makes in revenue - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/10/26/facebook_aside.html

<comment><USER2> That it does, on the whole.

For the business units that directly compete with Google, how does it perform?

Much of that profitability are the cashcows that are Windows and Office.

<comment><USER3> ie the things that are dying out...

In time the O/S will be pretty irrelevant - like desktop software.</comment></comment>


Thirty Seconds of Code Acquires Python, PHP and Angular - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/30-seconds/30-seconds-of-code <comment><AUTHOR> It's 30 seconds but HN won't let me.</comment>


Lifestyle Inflation: How Following Others Will Leave You Broke - <AUTHOR> https://mindsandmindfulness.quora.com/Conspicuous-Consumption-and-Lifestyle-Inflation-How-Following-Others-Will-Leave-You-Broke?share=1 <comment><USER2> Reduce Advertising Exposure

This is key.

Don't pay for cable TV, don't watch network TV. If you must watch TV, watch Ad-free programming, or get rid of your TV.

Write the Direct Marketing Association and get you (And your spouse) off mailing lists.

Add your phone numbers to the do not call list.

Be careful who you share your name, phone number and address with, and if need be, change your middle initial so you can track bad players.

Call companies which hound you with constant offers to upgrade and tell them to stop as you view it as harrasment and will take your business elsewhere if it continues.

If everyone did this, America may go into a depression for a while as the economy reconfigures itself, but the outcome for every citizen would be much, much better.</comment>