Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-25/alphabet-s-self-driving-cars-to-get-their-first-real-riders <comment><USER2> Am I the only one feeling the press + big tech narrative of "driverless vehicles = safety" is way ahead of itself? OK, "driver error is blamed for 94% of crashes", but what is the validation strategy to show where driverless cars can quantifiably improve? In 2016, Philip Koopman of CMU discusses that there are non-trivial engineering challenges of achieving safety in NHTSA Level 4 vehicle automation: [https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman16_sae_autono...](https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman16_sae_autonomous_validation.pdf)

If we are building the safest transportation system, what role do driverless vehicles play? Wouldn't that be the narrative that actually saves the most lives?

<comment><USER3> Imagine ransomware infecting your car that gives you 30 minutes to pay or you'll be rammed into a tree at 90mph. I don't care about any contrived and well-funded narratives about how unthinking, unfeeling, driverless cars will somehow save lives. No thanks, I'd rather take my chances continuing to share roads with human drivers who are careful because they fear their own death just as much as I do.

<comment> loup-vaillant The correct answer to that is very simple, and very expensive: just make correct software.

Such malware are only possible because the targeted system has vulnerabilities to begin with. One just has to ensure the absence of such vulnerabilities, possibly using machine checked proofs.

One obvious approach is to properly isolate the driving software and sensors from external input.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, let's just ask the engineers who are solving one of the toughest robotics problems ever to rewrite the entire house of cards that is their technology stack _without any vulnerabilities_.

Of course even machine checked proofs will have trouble finding vulnerabilities that creep in during the specifications stage or exist in the realm of hardware.

How do you isolate your sensors from external input and expect to do anything?

<comment><USER5> It's not as if embedded systems work the same way as the jumbled mess of technology that web servers use. It's perfectly possible to firewall off core system functions into a separate network and separate individual processors for each function. Existing vehicles today have already a strict hardware firewall between the CAN bus[1] and the IVI[2] system to prevent bugs in the more vulnerable and less strictly designed IVI software from sending data that disrupts safety-critical systems.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In- car_entertainment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-car_entertainment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is Waymo clear about what the end goal is? I can't tell if they plan to launch an Uber like service, or a direct-to-consumer lease type service, or just to be suppliers (whole vehicles, components like lidar, software) to companies like Uber. Or maybe they are leaving all of that undecided for now?

I'm not sure this rider trial thing strongly signals any of them. You would want real world end-customer experiences regardless, I would think.

<comment><USER7> I wonder this about autonomous cars in general from any company. They're cool tech and in Europe, they can really help solve several last leg problems and cut down on car ownership (I really don't think people should be able to own self driving cars. They really need airplane style maintenance for sensors and companies need to work together so all fleets have the latest safety and security updates).

However I don't really like hearing about tax money going into these projects. At least in America, self driving cars won't solve gridlock. It will be 15 ~ 30 years before we can have autonomous car only highways, and even then, self driving cars don't even touch the capacity of a real train based mass transit network. Singapore has had self driving trains for years (it's a much easier problem) and London is automating more of their lines.

Self driving cars are cool tech, but they're not going to solve grid lock or many of the major transport problems we face today:

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not- sol...](http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the- transportation-problem/)

<comment><USER8> Haven't really thought about the safety and maintenance part of this before. If people own their self-driving cars I suppose there's also a chance they can opt-out of software updates, which would potentially be very dangerous. I do believe that the autonomous car future will have room for owned vehicles, but at this stage I don't think any of us really know how it will shake out.

<comment><USER6> I assume a lease program with baked in maintenance costs and a lockout if maintenance is skipped would suffice.

Edit: And I assume the car could drive itself to preventive maintenance appointments if it's something that can't be done OTA.

<comment><USER9> Or just decertify outdated systems.

I guess "DRM" for self driving cars is something people will complain about, but for vehicles that have controls it doesn't seem real horrible to have an autonomous system do a check to see if it is still licensed.

There could be an emergency override if the person that needed the vehicle didn't know how to drive, an override that automatically issued a fixit ticket.

<comment><USER10> The thing is that today the average age of cars on the road is something like ten years. Many people don't and many people can't afford to buy new vehicles. They may not have the money to deal with that fixit ticket which probably has to be handled by a licensed service station with a lot of fancy equipment.

So, if all this comes to pass, you'll end up with a system where the wealthy lease or ride-share their self-driving cars while the plebes are stuck with trying to keep their manually driven clunkers running.

<comment><USER9> Sure, I was talking about addressing a particular safety issue with autonomous vehicles, not trying to solve economic inequality.

<comment><USER10> However, if autonomous vehicles are just for the wealthy end of society whether directly or by way of limo and taxi services, they're not going to be particularly welcomed by everyone else (aka the majority of voters).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there really a race to build self-driving cars? It seems that Waymo is eons ahead of everyone else.

<comment><USER12> I have a lot of respect for Waymo's approach to this.

While Tesla and Uber have both just recklessly (imo) jumped in and started setting loose self driving cars and making bold claims, Google/Waymo has really taken a slow and measured approach and given great care to making sure their cars are actually safe.

<comment><USER13> Killing a few extra people today to bring self driving cars to market faster could actually save more lives in total. I have much more respect for Tesla for shipping something.

<comment><USER14> > Killing a few extra people today to bring self driving cars to market faster > could actually save more lives in total. I have much more respect for Tesla > for shipping something.

There's no evidence to suggest that is the case. If anything, Tesla has made it more dangerous to assume that it's safe and falsely autonomous.

When you create new drugs, the FDA definitely doesn't look to kindly on people who think like Silicon Valley. "Killing people is product testing" won't fly in pharmaceuticals.

I'm glad that we don't have people like you designing drugs for the masses!

<comment><USER13> What's the equivalent of animal trials for autonomous vehicles? Closed-circuit tests?

Is there any evidence that these companies haven't gone through closed circuit tests and passed before testing in public roads?

The next step in drug trials is, in fact, testing on humans and some do suffer serious injury or death. I don't think there's any way around it and the greater good of having a pharmaceutical industry at all outweighs those unfortunate incidents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> TLDR:

* People can apply to use/borrow a Waymo vehicle (RX450 or Pacifica) for some period of time.

* "as part of this early trial, there will be a test driver in each vehicle monitoring the rides at all times."

* Limited to Phoenix metro area for the time being.

* You apply here: [https://waymo.com/apply/](https://waymo.com/apply/)

* Waymo will be adding 500 more of the Pacifica minivans for this program.

<comment><USER16> Interesting that they only let you borrow for now. Will car ownership be killed with self-driving cars? Will Waymo let you actually buy and own a car that isn't network connected and fully yours? Seeing how value extraction works in today's enterprise, i.e. via rent-seeking, I'm guessing we're headed to not owning cars any more.

<comment><USER17> > Will car ownership be killed with self-driving cars?

Probably. It seems way more convenient and efficient to be able to summon a car to any location on demand than to have just one car that you use for everything.

No more parking, no more refueling, no more vehicle maintenance; just push a button and a car shows up within minutes (or in some cases, seconds) to pick you up, and step out of the vehicle when you reach your destination. Want a specific model or paint color? It's just a couple taps on your phone away. Car breaks down and needs a tow? Replacement gets summoned automatically, and the car company credits a couple bucks to your account for the inconvenience.

If that kind of service becomes available at a reasonable price point, I suspect it won't be long before car ownership becomes much less common.

<comment><USER18> How do you solve the issue of extreme demand M-F at 8am and 5pm and low demand any other time?

<comment><USER17> Same way any other business that has brief periods of high demand (electric companies, ISPs, restaurants, etc) does; you anticipate the demand and make sure you have enough capacity available at those times to meet it.

With a self-driving car fleet there are probably lots of other little tricks you can do too, like offer discounts for sharing a vehicle with another passenger, or use machine learning to predict what locations will have the highest demand during particular parts of the day and move portions of the fleet to cover those areas.

<comment><USER19> My non-ML prediction of which locations will have the biggest demand in Seattle:

People on the West Side who want to get to the East Side, and people on the East Side who want to get to the West Side. (You'd figure that maybe optimizing this would bring more value to society then making a car drive itself...) 8am-9am, 4pm-6pm. You don't need ML to figure this out - just look at a Google Maps traffic heatmap in rush hour.

Carpools, vanpools, already exist. For some reason, though, the vast majority of the cars parked on the freeway are single-occupant vehicles. I can't imagine why people aren't keen on sharing their vehicle with a stranger, or pay triple surge pricing to get home when it starts raining.

This community is highly opposed to relying on web services that they don't control... Yet it is perfectly OK with ditching their car, and instead relying on a car-on-demand service to get to and from work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Self-driving cars have been in the development phase for so long, I'm really excited to see them start rolling out in these beta tests.

I'm curious what sort of unconsidered edge cases they'll find out in the real world. I'm sure test passengers are much more "disciplined" than real world ones.

</comment><comment><USER21> I would like to see little leased pod cars which trundle around at the local speed within a certain range, and have the ability to go to a Bus Lane (I presume the bus is dead), and join a Magnetic Track of sort where they go 200 miles an hour.

That would be pretty amazing. Why they are sticking shit all over 2 ton vehicles? If they are solving Fuel and Emissions and Driver, can't they just take the final step of a revolution? I am pretty sure governments would be throwing notes at it.

<comment><USER22> Hyperloop One is working on this. Small self driving cubicles drive around the city and pop into larger pods that go 700 mph in the Hyperloop between cities.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fze5spdN3nU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fze5spdN3nU)

<comment><USER23> Seems a bit gimmicky (it's the hyperloop after all). If the self-driving car is the vehicular equivalent of a hot desk, why not just exit it and walk into the hyperloop pod, instead of transporting tonnes of weight of interchangeable self-driving car? Then just hop into a different one that's waiting at the other end.

<comment><USER22> Disclaimer: I'm starting a job at Hyperloop soon, but haven't actually been told anything about the hardware yet (I'm joining as a software dev), so this is all not-NDA-violating speculation:

I believe the cars are also pressure vessels and life support systems. My student team looked into this side of the problem last year, and making the entire ~40 ft long Hyperloop pod a pressure vessel is really tricky. The two competing forces are the obvious premium on extra mass, and the need for a large opening to load cargo into the pods.

Dealing with all the "human compatibility" problems at the scale of the cars lets you use much smaller pressure vessels (lighter), and makes loading unpressurized cargo drop dead easy.

The other big benefit is that loading the Hyperloop pods is really difficult. You'd ideally like to be launching a pod into the tube every 30 seconds or less, to get the best return on your infrastructure investment. Achieving that by walking people right up to the 40 ft vehicles and having them all file in like a commercial flight is just about impossible. With mobile sub-pods you can have a far smaller station, and just load sub-pods as they arrive into the next departing pod.

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the inside info - interesting.

<comment><USER22> Speculation - not inside info. Again, I haven't been told anything about this aspect of the system yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So now what do we tell our kids? "Don't get into a van even when nobody is driving it." ? :-)

I think it is great that they are getting additional exposure to nominally real world users here. However, I'm not exactly sure what they are learning in user behaviors. Is it "Can we make a less expensive livery service?" or is it "How freaked out do people get in self driving cars?" or is it something else?

I went to a conference last week where there were several talks that were pretty critical of self driving 'hype' given the HLS[1] issues and the ability to inexpensively 'spoof' the AI[2] to see something that isn't actually there (road signs being particularly vulnerable). It left me thinking I might be more optimistic about the technology than I should be.

[1] "Health, Life, Safety" the general basket of things that are super critical to minimizing injury and death.

[2] [https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/3/13507542/facial- recogniti...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/3/13507542/facial-recognition- glasses-trick-impersonate-fool) \-- on Facial Recognition but sign recognition has the same problem.

</comment><comment><USER25> After seeing the movie Logan, I was curious if the movie was taking a jab at the autonomous vehicle trend by portraying them as a danger to ma & pa drivers on the highway. It showed a crowded highway full of shipping containers pushing a truck hauling horses off the road. It seems the message was not that the technology can't be courteous, but that once it's accepted, corporations will abuse the roads to help their bottom line. It makes me wonder if that is a valid concern.

<comment><USER26> By all accounts, autonomous vehicles will be much safer than human drivers. Companies will be sued up the ass if they program their vehicles to take risks and end up killing people.

<comment><USER27> Only if it can be proven. That's why vehicle firmware should be open source, so the public can know exactly what kind of risks they take.

<comment><USER28> I'm curious, under this train of thought, vehicle hardware should also be open source, right?

<comment><USER27> It's a lot harder to hide weirdness in mechanical things. Because of that I don't think hardware needs to be open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How will self-driving cars affect society? Trying to wrap my head around the bigger picture.

<comment><USER30> My fear is MORE urban sprawl, which is even MORE miles of highways to pave and care for, and MORE pollution in the short term until we get very eco friendly powered electric cars.

Commutes are one of the only things that seem to limit urban sprawl.

<comment><USER31> There is an advantage to electric cars here though. If you don't need to wait while the vehicle charges electric vehicles are a lot more attractive even with relatively small batteries.

<comment><USER32> Electric cars just pollute upstream, and even with solar, that does not seem like a solved problem just yet.

<comment><USER33> Yes, there are still issues with electricity generation. Expressing this as _just pollute upstream_ ignores or dismisses the efficiency improvements of large scale power generation over per-vehicle internal combustion engines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wish they deployed this in Mountain View. I see like 20 of these a day going around aimlessly. I'd sign up as a customer!

<comment><USER35> Too easy for a competitor to hop on and get casual intel, maybe?

<comment><USER36> GM, Apple, and Uber are all testing in the Phoenix metro area, so I don't think that's valid - more likely good wide roads, weather, and regulatory environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is an important step for testing, and I'm surprised that this is being spun as a move towards commercialization.

As of right now, waymo has only been doing what could metaphorically be called unit testing. That is, they test the cars behavior in very controlled but unrealistic environments, looking for very specific responses. The accident rate that they've incurred is likely ridiculously skewed: they've been driving in good weather, on meaningless routes (not chosen by destination, but by route features), at relatively safe times of day, at slow speeds, and they've been doing it extremely cautiously with engineers ready to take over in a moments notice.

This is exactly what they should have been doing, but politically it is misleading. Most human drivers, given those same constraints, would also do extremely well and way better than average. They've done well, but we have little basis for comparison with the average driver.

This is the first step towards integration testing. They get to see how the cars behavior integrates together across various scenarios that are much closer to real life. They are driving on actual routes that real people travel on...routes that aren't chosen in order to test a specific behavior.

Accident rates _are going to go up_. That's a good thing...its a move towards the things humans find more difficult too. We should, however, expect slowing progress to level 4 autonomy. This is typical of system capability growth; exponential in the beginning, asymptotic near the end. People that are rushing this are out of line; akin to immediate commercializations of lab rat successes. Give them time.

<comment><USER38> > they test the cars in very controlled but unrealistic environments

Are you sure about this? Google has had self-driving cars in Austin for years and I'm pretty sure there's never a good time to be driving here.

<comment><USER37> Pretty damn sure. Even if an engineer drives his normal car to work, hops in a waymo car, and drives 9-5, and then drives a normal car back home, they've already constructed a scenario that is heavily time-weighted towards lighter than human-representative traffic experiences. Even small biases that you don't even think are meaningful can have a big impact on outcomes.

But it doesn't stop there. Google hasn't tested snow at all. I'd be surprised if their testing locations represented rainy weather that is representative for more than 10% of the US. They don't test freeways, and by extension, do not test onramps and offramps. In California, they don't even go over 25 mph. Under those conditions they have been ostensibly pretty good at not _causing_ accidents, but how good are they at avoiding accidents that are not their fault? This means accidents caused by other drivers _and_ acts of god. Safety is far more than just causality.

But more importantly, their miles traveled very easily exclude small snippets of time where an engineer takes over, but still counts the rest of the journey where the computer did fine. How representative is that? How good are humans when we let jesus take the wheel the moment driving gets slightly complicated? If a human overrides the computer only 1% of the time, that could still be anywhere from _1% to 100% of trips_ with at least one human override.

It's very easy to catastrophically mislead yourself when working with averages [0]. Statisticians and Economists go through absolutely absurd lengths to make comparisons robust. Even if we had access to 100% of the data on Waymo's self driving cars, I don't know a single statistician that would be comfortable making a comparison to extremely coarsely aggregated data on human driving. Only through extensive testing in situations that are representative of how humans (and not just test engineers) drive will we be able to conclude that one is safer than the other. And that's why Phoenix is important to Waymo.

[0] [https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=the...](https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=the+problem+with+averages&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I dream with the day that humans riding vehicles will be forbidden by law unless the driver would prove the need for human driving. So many deaths would be avoided.

<comment><USER40> have you thought the consequences of that?

No I'm very serious: we are unable to protect smart TVs. Networked smart cars (because let's be real - Google and co. would want to monetize this with Uber- like services, Ads in cars etc.) are a magnitude more likely to be hacked by both the state actors and rogue individuals (altho I don't see why we make this distinction...both are criminal acts).

The worst that can happen if your smart tv is hacked, is that they can listen and maybe watch you in your living room. If your car is hacked, they can probably kill you and hurt others while they are at it. If this happens on a large scale, it's extremely dangerous.

So while I have no problems with self driving in itself (or with Google for that matter of fact), I have a problem with banning human driving cars on the road without a viable (non-intrusive) alternative.

<comment><USER41> We are not "unable" to protect smart TVs. If anyone gave a shit those things would be locked down tighter than a bank vault, but we don't, so they aren't.

But, as evidenced by terrorism paranoia, people _do_ care about their personal safety--perhaps excessively and irrationally so. Security in a networked self- driving car won't be treated as an afterthought, if nothing else because of the massive legal liability.

<comment><USER42> > We are not "unable" to protect smart TVs. If anyone gave a shit those things > would be locked down tighter than a bank vault, but we don't, so they > aren't.

Every year, every major browser and major OS gets cracked in Pwn2Own. The cost of these zero-days is going up thanks to good security practices like sandboxing in Chrome et al., but they still happen. Every. Single. Year. Think about that for a second.

The fact is, we can't write secure software, especially secure _networked_ software. I can't imagine writing secure software for cars using current best practices---let alone imagine car manufacturers doing that. To solve this, we'll need (in addition to everything we're doing now) something along the lines of Rust to prevent these sorts of bugs. And even then, it's likely that the net effect will be similar to sandboxing: the cost of an attack will go up, but not enough to prevent random individuals (let alone larger organizations) from finding zero-day security vulnerabilities on a regular basis.

It's extremely important not to be cavalier about this security risk. The combination of zero-days and self-driving cars is a scary one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> When your opponents do not play by the rules, you win. Glad to see Google is making some strides.

</comment><comment><USER44> I had nightmares about self driving cars as a child. Am I the only one who thinks self driving cars are scary!?

</comment><comment><USER45> Glad to see Phoenix getting some love.

</comment><comment><USER46> I find it smart that Waymo waited until the snowbirds left to start this. It will be comical when the blue hairs come back next winter and smoke a few of these self-driving cars.... or vice versa. Obviously I don't want anyone to get hurt, but... it is going to happen.

<comment><USER47> Considering Waymo's vehicles drive much like stereotypical blue hairs (slooooow and cautious) I think everything will work out fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> That the author even uses Uber as a rival to Weymo demonstrates their lack of awareness in the industry.

<comment><USER29> How so?

<comment><USER49> Because Uber is ride sharing that is getting into self-driving vehicles, their money comes from the rides we take. Alphabet (Google) Is literally just testing and developing their own self-driving car technology. As far as we know they have no business model, yet.

<comment><USER50> Uber is also getting their pants sued off by Google for selling self driving car trade secrets. A suit that Uber is more than likely going to lose.

<comment><USER51> s/selling/stealing/ (or maybe buying?); Levandowski allegedly stole data when he left Google, and brought it to Otto, which is now owned by Uber.

<comment><USER52> I guess except that it's not about some stolen files, but rather about people. Uber has the guy who built the Google's self driver tech, which is what really matters.

<comment><USER51> bhhaskin's post said Uber was selling secrets, which is definitely NOT the case; I don't think I've heard anyone accusing them of that.

<comment><USER50> You haven't heard the allegations that Uber approached Levandowski while still at Google to start Otto so Uber could buy them later?

<comment><USER51> I'm still not sure how that would involve uber in _selling_ secrets; still sounds like buying to me.

<comment><USER53> One implies the other, so in this unholy pedantic discussion, a winning move is to point out that being involved in selling is the same as being involved in buying.

Another tact: Otto is accused of being involved in selling secrets. Uber bought Otto. Otto is now Uber. Therefore, Uber is accused of being involved in selling secrets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Google's car clearly isn't going to work in the real world (can it follow detour signs? Get out of the way of emergency vehicles? Understand a cop directing traffic?). Why is Google pretending otherwise? Why are they doing this?

<comment><USER38> Google's car can already read the hand signals from bicyclists[0]. They have logged literally millions of miles of safe driving. They really aren't "pretending".

However, there are different classifications[1] of autonomous vehicles. Google's car is currently somewhere around level 3. It's true nobody has a level 4 car yet.

[0] [https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/05/google-autonomous- cars-c...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/05/google-autonomous-cars-cyclist- friendly/) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification)</comment></comment>


SQL databases come up with algorithms you'd never have dreamed of (2017) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTPGW1PNy_Y <comment><USER2> So in 20 years we've gone from vilifying SQL statements in code, witch-hunted folks who did this and instead invented and propped up clunky ORM implementations, ignored sage advice on the famous "object-relational impedance mismatch" (which the author claims he doesn't "believe" exists - it's not a choice btw) and now, after 20 years of agent orange in the bloody Vietnam of Computer Science, we are presenting why SQL was better all along - showing off windowing functions as examples? This is irony that took 20 years to sink in.

Am I understanding this guy's presentation correctly? (I left around the 20 min mark of the 50 min presentation).

<comment><USER3> I dunno. I think there is quite a lot of us that have consistently expressed the stupidity that is wrapping a powerful query language in a mediocre, limited, buggy, half baked, shoe horned into OO shit what was I saying?

Oh yea, ORM.

I've always veiwed it as a legitimate (though always over engineered) solution to wrap some repetitive database operations in a consistent manner.

The biggest issue with ORM isn't the solution they came up with, half baked and buggy as they are, but the problem they are actually employeed to "solve": developers afraid of SQL. Whether they can't write it, can't learn it, or just straight hate the string representation in their code, it's the main reason people sign on for ORM.

Then they prop it up with all manner of baseless reasoning.

Theb there is the leakyness. ORMs are usually quite fluid in their language, they make it easy to represent the database in code. The only issue is that it isn't there. It's a separate thing. When you see database code it should be obvious and very far away from business logic. What does ORM do? Mix it all up On purpose. Have fun with all the mocks.

<comment><USER4> > the problem they are actually employeed to "solve": developers afraid of > SQL. Whether they can't write it, can't learn it, or just straight hate the > string representation in their code, it's the main reason people sign on for > ORM.

This sounds awfully like a straw man. I've worked on several projects that used an ORM, and it was never because developers couldn't write SQL.

ORMs solve a real problem: SQL isn't composable. That's it.

Sooner or later, every non-trivial program needs to compose arbitrary pieces of one query with arbitrary pieces of another, so you'll either use an ORM (i.e., native data structures instead of raw strings), or essentially write your own ad-hoc one.

It has nothing to do with lack of ability. The staunchest ORM advocate I've worked with was also the first to pull out the debugger and single-step the MySQL driver to track down a bug (that one was nasty -- it was indeed in the driver).

I use an HTML generator, and a compiler, too, and it's not because I'm "afraid" of assembly language or that I "can't learn" HTML. These abstractions have real value.

<comment><USER5> > ORMs solve a real problem: SQL isn't composable. That's it.

How so? I've always found the opposite. I can build up a compilex query referencing many tables in SQL without impediment but am unable to do the same with an ORM.

<comment><USER6> OP means combining two different queries or clauses into a bigger query/clause

You cannot easily "modify" a sql statement.

There are type-safe DSLs in certain languages (if they have an expressive enough type system) that let you do this, but they are uncommon

<comment><USER7> You could use views. Although personally I dislike adding this layer of obfuscation. Generally devs are very underskilled in SQL (relative to it's importance) and ORMs hiding the SQL IMO is one of the reasons why.

There is great value in having the entire SQL easily visible in your source code. If there is a performance issue with a specific query my app is running, I can very quickly pull it out and into a database IDE and see what's going on using the more detailed tools available (REPL, execution plan/statistics usage analysis etc).

If the query is composed from a bunch of ORM function calls, I have to step through the program to first generate it.

Reducing friction around debugging allows your devs to become more capable in fixing things or making them work better, and SQL is no exception to that.

<comment><USER8> Views are not a layer of obfuscation. They are a layer of abstraction...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This talk didn't hook me, but then again, it looks like it's aimed at developers who jumped on the NoSQL bandwagon and now need to be told why SQL is clever.

I feel that much of what we do with map, reduce, sort and filter on arrays in modern JS is similar to SQL. Unfortunately, there is no query optimisation, because that would break your procedural code.

What I'd like to see more of is domain-specific languages embedded in general- purpose languages, like React with JSX, or just a better bridge between the two. We have these two worlds of in-memory data structures on one side, and databases on the other, that we keep separate. NoSQL was an attempt at bringing them together, but it put far too little emphasis on complex queries and filters.

It would be nice if we could just define data structures and their relations once and not have to do it again. It would be nice if foreign keys neatly mapped to object references in OOP and everything stayed live, so if you change a reference, that happens instantly in the database too, unless you wrap it in a transaction block.

Now pull this off while still retaining the ability to open an SQL REPL to test out statements, or manipulate field definitions.

I think that's what everyone wants, really. A seamless way for code to interact with data on all levels, with no perceptible boundary once you've opened a session to your DB server.

<comment><USER3> Look up some of the old YouTube vids on datomic / rich Hickey.

"Database as a value" had me jaw dropping and then crying most of the way through..

<comment><USER10> +1 for "Database as a Value", this talk changed my world

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At around 22:10, the speaker summarises equivalencies between common SQL clauses (SELECT, GROUP BY, etc.) and what Java 8 calls a "stream API" (map, collect, etc.). [https://blog.jooq.org/2015/08/13/common-sql-clauses-and- thei...](https://blog.jooq.org/2015/08/13/common-sql-clauses-and-their- equivalents-in-java-8-streams/)

Neat. I hadn't thought of it that way before.

<comment><USER12> I teach most (dynamic) functional programming constructs by starting with SQL.

Python comprehensions, etc. are mostly just SQL -- likewise most languages where "map" is part of the collections API.

SQL motivates the utility of functional programming for data-oriented applications.

<comment><USER13> Have you got any material online to look at? I am curious to see the sort of stuff you are talking about ("Python comprehensions, etc. are mostly just SQL" doesn't make a lot of sense to me right now. I see them as an inline for loop).

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't compare a comprehension to a loop because a loop doesn't typically have an output. If a loop does produce an output it's through side effects. List comprehensions are the same as maps, and generator comprehension even more so, as they can compose functions not values.

And a map can be the same as a projection as found in sql.

<comment><USER15> Loops in lisp would like a word with you. :)

The difference is that many languages have constructs that weren't value producing. It is why some have the ternary operator, but lisp just had if statements.

So, to that end, most loops do produce a value. And there are several common ways they do it. In many languages, you have to give the details of how they work. In some, you can only those details and the building if the output is a bit more declarative.

<comment><USER14> I was coming from the Lisp perspective! Or at least Clojure...

Maybe it's a language issue. I would say a 'loop' has a jump and a condition. So that's 'for', 'while' and 'do' in C, JS, Python, Pascal, Java...

Lots of languages including Lisp have recursion, maps etc but I wouldn't call that looping. Clojure even has TCO recursion but it only returns one value, not a sequence (unless you accumulate the whole thing)

<comment><USER15> But even the LOOP macro has returned values for a long time. It isn't even hard to see how the new stream/collect API if Java is just approaching what LOOP has been doing for decades.

<comment><USER16> Java's streams implement the same idea as Common Lisp's streams, which were supposed to be more Common Lisp-like replacement for LOOP (eg. composable and with syntax that does not involve string comparison of symbols). That idea was droped from the final ANSI standard.

<comment><USER17> SERIES, not streams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A very good way to understand the fact "class are for encapsulating behaviour, not data". But we don't learn until we fall.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have strong .net background with mostly pretty legacy code and I'm amazed that this talk is so "wow" for some people. Till this point I wasn't aware people has such problems like described in this talk. Maybe I'm just getting old, but SQL was my first idea to solve problem. I think for most reporting related tasks simple SQL will do. I think some people just get caught in their bubble and forgot the basics: choosing right tool for a task. Of course SQL has its issues: e.g. it is problematic to test it and to manage db model changes (code first aproach wins there, hands down), but for data extensive tasks it is the way to go. This whole talk just remind me some of legacy code I was investigating one time, where developer just though he can implement everythin on his own better than standard library. Probably you need some distance when looking on particular problem to see more just "how I would just loop through all this data an calculate this".

</comment><comment><USER20> May be the topic of talk should be how to compare apples and oranges for half of time in the talk.

<comment><USER21> Yes that's what this talk is about.

A lot of people recognise apples and oranges for what they are. The talk is meaningless to those people.

A lot of _other_ people don't / can't make the distinction (yet). For those people, the talk is an eye opener.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'll save ppl some time:

* first 20 mins: Writing a contrived report query that's easy in SQL is easy in SQL.

* but: most _real_ reports require many different fields collated into many parts of say a pdf or xls. Once you take this into account writing custom code to do the entire report is often the only way to do it. :<

* you often can't do some of what the author suggests bc in a "real" org you have db zealots that only allow access to their precious through stored procs and a surprisingly large number of meetings

* trying to do some non-trivial where clauses? Not in SQL - so you have to use an external lang. I call this "Works in my presentation" syndrome.

* he acts surprised that a lang that uses a db through a SQL api can't be as fast/efficient/terse as a system that uses SQL and has direct access to the db/storage.

Stopped after that.

PS Seems like a funny guy tho - liked his style! :>

<comment><USER21> "Funny guy" here.

Can't comment on db zealots. It must suck when that happens.

But disagree entirely on your other parts. Haven't run into such cases yet, wrote all my reports in SQL (and something like XSLT for presentation logic). I've mainly used Oracle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is quite possibly the best talk I've ever seen. No joke.

<comment><USER24> I'm liking it so far as well - I enjoy SQL though

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One of the biggest problems with embedding SQL directly into your application is the dreaded vendor lock in. In my experience each RDBMS vendor supports its own special flavor of SQL. Once you've baked that flavor into your code base it becomes non-trivial to change your SQL backend if necessary. From what I understand Amazon has spent years trying to untangle the rats nest of embedded Oracle SQL dependencies within its codebase so it can extract itself from Oracle vendor lock in. So before you bake that SQL string into your code think carefully about what SQL functionality you are using and ask yourself if its representation is specific to your current RDBMS vendor.

<comment><USER26> Pure ANSI SQL gets you 90% of what most apps need and is portable between MSSQL and Postgres. MySQL/MariaDB are far less ANSI-SQL-compliant, but usually only function calls change when porting.

Nobody sane uses oracle for new development.

If you chose to code your app to MongoDB or Dynamo or whatever you are 100% locked in unless you do a rewrite of your whole data access layer.

To top it off, in the real world you'll still need a separate SQL DB for reporting and analytics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I really do think a lot of ORM use is because devs are afraid to use SQL or at least afraid of how others devs might use it. This is true whether devs want to admit it or not.

That said, SQL doesn't lend itself to easy composability and you can end up with "4000 line monsters" if you really tried to put as much business logic into the query as possible.

Is anyone working on SQL extensions, ORM, or new 4th Gen language that could actually support something like 4000 lines of SQL in a maintainable way?

<comment><USER28> > [...] and you can end up with "4000 line monsters" if you really tried to > put as much business logic into the query as possible.

In my experience so far, this has usually been the actual problem. If you are not actively trying to "cleanly" separate your business logic from your storage, you tend to end up maintaining a mess. People correctly identify the problems with the mess, but incorrectly attribute it to SQL instead of architectural problems. So they switch to an ORM and wonder why it doesn't improve anything a little while later.

And that's not to say it is easy to come up with a useful way to interface between storage and the business logic -- on the contrary. It's just that the naive approach (strongly coupling the two everywhere) is kind of a worst-case scenario. Also, there are certainly situations where ORMs are very useful; it's just that a messily integrated ORM isn't any better than messily integrated SQL.

The thing is: Your business logic needs to be provided with ways of triggering certain operations (along with certain guarantees). I haven't seen cases where a single operation would take 4000 lines of "interesting" SQL though (ignoring very long lists of columns :) ). So, if the SQL is hard to maintain: Is this a problem of the SQL, or is this a byproduct of unclear (or ever changing) interface requirements? Sometimes, taking a couple of steps back and considering alternative approaches can yield much better results than optimizing a "wrong" solution.

(I guess this could be considered a form of the "X Y Problem": [http://xyproblem.info/](http://xyproblem.info/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> SQL feels opaque, and its syntax is one of a particular kind (can't remember how it's called), which makes it difficult to learn and understand how it's parsed, because it's not very well compartmentalized. If the language was better structured like other programming languages are, that'd be better, and jooq looks like something that should be standard across all languages.

Usually when I'm using any technology, being able to understand how it works is my most important priority, because it prevents me from using it improperly. I have a hard time understanding what those "algorithms" really are after all. I heard that databases engines use backtracking, but I'm not really sure that's what it is talked about here. Maybe databases don't use BT?

Using another language that parses every time you do something doesn't feel very fast. It is fast for many applications, but I don't think it is for all of them.

In the end, it's the same old combat, either choose peak performance or development delays with good enough performance.

Although I have to admit that for GIS (geographic information system), databases with embedded R-trees and other things are very much welcome, since implementing those algorithms from the ground up is way too hard.

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure that parsing is going to be a bottleneck when you consider that DBMS read from the disk.

<comment><USER31> Prepared statements would not have been invented if parsing and checking was not a significant issue.

<comment><USER32> The main point of prepared statements is that expensively optimized query execution plans can be re-used, including incorporating things learned from data patterns by previous queries. I've never considered them to be a crutch on parsing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> reminds me of the presentations coming out of the .NET world in 2005 after they launched LINQ. Nearly identical points being made.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is SQL no longer featured as part of most Comp Sci/IS courses any more?

<comment><USER35> It was for mine (2006-2010), but significantly more limited than you'd expect. It was essentially bare minimum, focused on theory, and could be summarized as "SELECT .. FROM .. INNER JOIN .. WHERE .."

Most of the focus was on things like database normalization instead of practical usage. I recall upon starting my first job, a co-worker gave me a crash course in what exactly a LEFT JOIN was (though at this point it had been ~3 years since the college database course, which had been so lackluster I hadn't used one during those years).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Pretty funny talk, but also informative.

</comment><comment><USER37> The problem with SQL is that SQL that works today will be too slow tomorrow. Fixing it involves trying to please the query planner, all while making your query less and less comprehensible.

As a contrasting example, the experience you get with ElasticSearch is that queries have predictable performance even as your data changes. In that way it's much, much nicer. On the other hand, you lose joins, which is a huge downside.

<comment><USER38> Butcher a SQL adapter over Elastic output and call it a day.

<comment><USER39> [https://github.com/NLPchina/elasticsearch- sql/](https://github.com/NLPchina/elasticsearch-sql/)

[https://www.elastic.co/products/stack/elasticsearch- sql](https://www.elastic.co/products/stack/elasticsearch-sql)</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Online Store Down ahead of WWDC 2012 Keynote - <AUTHOR> http://store.apple.com/

<comment><USER2> I assume there isn't a technical reason for Apple to take the store down every time they launch a big new project, do they just do it for dramatic effect?

<comment><USER3> Must be dramatic effect.</comment></comment>


CAP and Google Spanner: the survival of eventual consistency  - <AUTHOR> https://www.arangodb.org/2014/02/05/cap-google-spanner-survival-eventual-consistency

<comment><USER2> In networks there'll always be failures.

So I think it's still necessary to deal with the problem of your distributed database becoming partly disconnected and partition.

And as long as there is consistency (though eventual) in case of such severe problem I personally could live with it. Better than staying available by all means but having to fix up inconsistencies and vex clients.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good arguments, I like in particular the insight that different business circumstances call for different database designs, and different compromises between consistency and availability. Google is of course a different player than most others on this planet.</comment>


OS X Lion Allows Running Multiple Copies on the Same Machine (Virtualization) - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/01/os-x-lion-allows-running-multiple-copies-on-the-same-machine-virtualization/

<comment><USER2> With 29$ for what used to be called a "family pack" and a permissive license regarding virtualisation, it almost seems like Apple is taking a very different position regarding the Mac OS. That it's a way to sell Macs, not to make more money.

</comment><comment><USER3> This would be useful, but even on my hdd I haven't the room. Features like this are why we need ssd+hdd (unless they expect it for 500gb ssd macbook pro and mac pros only).</comment>


Rails and Node and Client-Side MVC Oh My - <AUTHOR>

The options are limitless. I'm a software developer with a very limited background in web development (think Assembly, VHDL, C/C++, Python). With technologies floating around like Rails, Node/Express, Angular/Ember/Backbone, the entry into building web apps is daunting. What would you recommend and why to getting started (best resources, easy to find mentors, great open source environment, etc)? I'm very interested in finding the lowest barrier of entry into web development for the sake of building my own web applications (hobby, and eventually more). What I'm not interested at this time is looking at "what's the better technology and why" or "X will pay the most when you're good". With the technologies of today, if you were to start today, what would you recommend to a newcomer. Thanks for your help HN! <comment><USER2> I was in a sort of similar position a few months back and did the EDX.org Software as a Service course with the end goal of learning Rails. I was able to complete the set work and pass with a good grade, but Rails never really clicked for me (I think partially because Ruby felt so different to what I was used to).

I put it to the side for a while, then recently decided to try again. This time I spent a little time getting used to Ruby (via codecademy.com and a few small personal projects), then doing the Hartl tutorial. What worked best for me was taking intermittent breaks in the tutorial to go off and implement something on my own from scratch.

For example, after chapter 3 I created a basic, one-page app [1]. Later in the tutorial, I made a pretty terrible To-Do list app [2] that nonetheless helped me finally understand MVC. After finishing the tutorial I signed up to codeschool.com and did a couple of the Ruby, Rails and testing tracks just to revise what I'd been learning.

I'm still a complete beginner, but I'm thoroughly enjoying working with Rails now and am making good progress working on a much bigger project.

* [1] [http://jayrobin-yield-calculator.herokuapp.com/](http://jayrobin-yield-calculator.herokuapp.com/) * [2] [http://jayrobin-todo.herokuapp.com/](http://jayrobin-todo.herokuapp.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's the biggest key, to implement what you learn. I think now I have a good idea of smaller projects I want to work on, with a bigger project in mind. This was a great motivator. I never felt like I could finish a small app after chapter 3. I'll definitely have to go back and think through it this time around. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> When I say a 'basic, one-page app' I just mean a controller serving static content (i.e. not even any models), which is the main topic of Hartl ch3. The point was really to try creating _anything_ from scratch - starting with a newly generated rails project, creating the controller, setting up the routes, developing the page, all the way to actually deploying it on Heroku. It may not be pretty and it may be just a single page, but it was a fantastic feeling to actually build something of my own from nothing in Rails and see it live.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Writing web apps involves wrangling a lot of warty technologies. If you try to grapple with them all simultaneously, it's going to feel like a quagmire. You should try to limit the number of unknowns and leverage the thing you know, Python, in order to start getting some positive reinforcement from success as soon as possible. So do the Django tutorial: [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/)

Then explore some commonly used Django apps (the Django term for reusable modules) at [https://www.djangopackages.com](https://www.djangopackages.com) and make something simple. Add easy user accounts with [https://github.com/bread-and-pepper/django-userena](https://github.com/bread- and-pepper/django-userena) or [https://github.com/pinax/django-user- accounts](https://github.com/pinax/django-user-accounts).

Other people may point out that Django isn't the best framework, and they will be correct, but I don't think that matters right now as much as working in a language you already know. If you said you already knew Ruby, my answer would be different.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I do agree that Django will probably be the best way to get into web app development. I do have some Ruby experience, so I might go back and tackle Sinatra first then Rails. But you make a very good point. The first time I looked at the Django project docs they didn't seem very friendly, but I think with the extra time I have now this might not be such a bad idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was in your shoes about 6 months ago (experienced non-web developer, looking to expand my skill-set) and went with Rails. I took the Michael Hartl tutorial (highly recommend it), viewed some Railscasts and haven't looked back. I'm hoping to do a Show HN with my first side project rather shortly (I realize 6 months is a long time, but with a family and a job, I'm happy if I get 5 hours a week to work on it).

If I had to do it again, I wouldn't change my choice of technology. You can debate forever which technology is "best", but one cannot debate that the support system for learning Rails is tremendous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response! I think one of the best lines of advice I've seen online was on Quora: "The language and technologies you learn are not the most important bit when it comes to becoming a programmer. When friends ask me whether they should learn Ruby or Python I respond by asking "Which language do more of your friends know?"" I think that's what keeps bringing me back to Rails, the support around it. I have the same problem as you, trying to find more than 5 hours a week to stick to reading Hartl's book. I think now that I have more time I'll try and go back through the book. Did you have any help with mentors along the way?

<comment><USER4> I was very impressed with Hartl's tutorial. Having tried many tutorials (for other technologies in the past), his was one of the best-written and most engaging. The fact that I completed it, including all the extra assignments, is a testament to how engaging it really is.

I can't say I've had a mentor yet, other than StackOverflow and random blog postings. I still consider myself a Rails n00b, but building a functioning web application in Rails is extremely easy. Doing it well and quickly, is probably something that will require more experience and mentorship.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm completely okay with moving from where I am to "complete n00b" :). I've always heard great things about Hartl's book, just never had the chance to sit through and keep going through it more than 1 chapter a week. Did you go through all the videos as well? Did you tackle TDD and git along the way?

<comment><USER4> I only did the online version of the "book", so I don't know if we're talking about the same thing. I wasn't aware of there being videos, so no, I haven't seen those, but I have viewed numerous Railscasts since completing Hartl's initial introduction and those are invaluable too.

During the tutorial, I faithfully followed almost everything presented, including the extra work (e.g. using Postgres instead of MySQL so that the dev environment matches production more closely). This included TDD and Git. Git has been fairly painless because I have used Mercurial before and they are quite similar.

With my side project, that I started right after completing the tutorial, I initially used TDD extensively, for the basics of the model, but once the foundation was laid, I can't say that I have kept my test coverage up. I assume my story is not uncommon in that respect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My suggestion would be to go with Sinatra over Rails initially. You could potentially go with Node/Express instead, but picking up async javascript simultaneously may be a bit of a burden. Actually if you know Python, Flask may be the best place to start.

Picking up a heavyweight framework like Rails while simultaneously trying to understand web development is probably going to be very overwhelming. I'd only recommend jumping straight to Rails if you have significant experience with another similar Web Framework and understand at least the basics of Ruby.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is fantastic advice. I've never thought about looking into Sinatra first. I'll definitely be checking out resources for this. Anything you'd recommend before I start my search?

<comment><USER5> It maybe a bit outdated, but you can check out the net tuts tutorial here: [http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ruby/singing-with- sinatra/](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ruby/singing-with-sinatra/)

To understand Sinatra, it's best to start with understanding Rack. Railscasts Pro has a good video on it. [http://railscasts.com/episodes/317-rack-app-from- scratch](http://railscasts.com/episodes/317-rack-app-from-scratch)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like a good time to join railscasts. Might have to look into Padrino now. Thanks for the info. From a quick search, I couldn't find anything more recent than 2 years old for Sinatra, so net tuts might have to do. Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> go to hackreactor.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I would absolutely love to try out hackreactor.com or devbootcamp. The problem is moving and leaving my job, which is something I'm not willing to do right now. I am taking a look at bloc.io, but I want to try the book route again before I drop $5k.</comment></comment>


How Git shows the patriarchal nature of the software industry - <AUTHOR> http://megan.geek.nz/how-git-shows-the-patriarchal-nature-of-the-software-industry/

<comment><USER2> I don't mean to be insensitive about the poster's situation, but it would just seem to me that if you're going through with the long and dramatic process of changing your gender that the commit behavior of a common source code control system would be the least of your considerations.

Men may not change names as often as women, but they certainly change email addresses, job titles, and other affiliations. This creates very similar practical considerations, not just with SCCS, but with mailing list archives, web archives, and most every other form of electronic record.

This poster seems to have an issue with the static and un-malleable nature of the written past in general.

<comment><USER3> That's true, and I think assigning malice to this situation is unfounded. But maybe this is a problem worth solving?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the stupidest thing you'll read today. Commits are cryptographically signed, which is why you can't change details on them. Its a feature. Get over it. Math isn't patriarchal.

<comment><USER3> Come on, don't reject it so flippantly. Sure, for the case of a woman getting married and taking a new last name, I doubt it's that big of a deal - you can change your name for future commits, but your old name will exist for historical commits. However, there _are_ cases where you might not want your former name around (transgender, or even something like privacy / witness protection). Right now, these folk _are_ being sort of excluded (however inadvertently) and it's worth discussing ways to fix that.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Node.js apps personal showcase - <AUTHOR> http://node.stagas.com

<comment><USER2> Well done! Your sensible soccer multiplayer clone is pretty neat. If you polish that enough to make it play properly, I can see quite a lot of people getting hooked! Congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it, SWOS, is by far the best game ever, IMHO. That's the prototype there, the actual multiplayer is under development and it's looking good. It's quite tricky getting multiplayer right for such a fast paced game with physics and all but it'll be done. And of course will be open source when it's done so everyone can contribute perfecting it.</comment></comment>


Cryo - pickle for JavaScript (serialize functions, object references, etc.) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hunterloftis/cryo

<comment><USER2> As somebody who remembers the (Python) Pickle Wars of Yore, this is not a great idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm definitely going to put a disclaimer on the readme... "generally, if you are using this to solve a problem, you should come up with a better way to solve the problem."

However, sometimes - especially for quick and dirty stuff - this sort of freezing can be super useful. Also, it can work exactly like extended JSON, as it will store 'undefined' and 'Infinity' and will correctly dereference objects back into the same object (instead of multiple copies of the same data), etc.</comment></comment>


Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Sues YouTube over Bitcoin Giveaway Scams - <AUTHOR> https://www.coindesk.com/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-sues-youtube-over-bitcoin-giveaway-scams <comment><USER2> It doesn't seem likely that this case will get past Section 230, which may be an argument to further chip away at it's broad immunity from liability. YouTube _shouldn 't_ be allowed to profit from Wozniak's likeness in scams.</comment>


Show HN: My free React on Rails 5 course - <AUTHOR> https://learnetto.com/users/hrishio/courses/the-free-react-on-rails-5-course <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, I've recently created this new free course on React specifically for Ruby on Rails developers.

I'd like to get some feedback and see how I can improve it.

If you've got a few minutes, you can get the course here - [https://learnetto.com/users/hrishio/courses/the-free- react-o...](https://learnetto.com/users/hrishio/courses/the-free-react-on- rails-5-course)

If you have any thoughts on the landing page as well, that'd be great. Does it make sense? Is it clear what the course will teach you?

Thank you!</comment>


TLSF: Memory allocator for real time embedded systems - <AUTHOR> http://www.gii.upv.es/tlsf/ <comment><USER2> That's interesting. Are there many instances where you would prefer malloc during real-time processing compared to pre-allocated arrays? I used FreeRTOS' heap_4.c [0] to run malloc-based test code on systems without native malloc, but I wouldn't consider using it post-initialization [and only used it in test code], so I didn't really care about performance.

[0] [https://www.freertos.org/a00111.html](https://www.freertos.org/a00111.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't Uber use UDP instead of TCP? - <AUTHOR> India has very bad mobile cell coverage and mobile tower/data congestion.
I remember playing Subspace (one of the first multiplayer internet games and now called Continuum) in mid 90's with a 14.4kbps modem and my ISP used a satellite link which delivered 850ms to server. It felt 10x more usable then Uber.
It's pretty easy to make your own error/sequence checking for UDP.
So what's the drawback of not using UDP? <comment><USER2> > It's pretty easy to make your own error/sequence checking for UDP.

At which point you've just re-invented TCP - and likely without the 30 years of weird/odd edge condition handling that TCP currently contains.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with TCP is that it abstracts data delivery as a reliable ordered stream. Because of this, if a packet is lost, TCP has to stop and wait for that packet to be resent. This interrupts the steady stream of packets because more recent packets must wait in a queue until the resent packet arrives, so the packets may be presented in order.

Found something interesting here [http://gafferongames.com/networking-for- game-programmers/rel...](http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game- programmers/reliability-and-flow-control/)

<comment><USER2> How do you plan for your magic "easy" error/sequence checking for UDP system to be able to avoid this TCP issue?

In order to "error check" it will need to ask for retransmits of packets with errors (which will interrupt the steady flow).

In order to sequence check it will also have to request retransmits of missing packets (which will interrupt the steady flow, and here you'll get the same queue wait incurred by more recent packets while the retransmit occurs so you can reassemble the original sequence).</comment></comment></comment>


Huffington Post: Peter Thiel (former Paypal CEO) Is Simply Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-p-angel/peter-theil-20-under-20-_b_1580621.html

<comment><USER2> Though I somewhat agree with the premise, the author ruins all credibility with the statement 'such a decision is akin to buying a lottery ticket because somebody else just won a million-dollar prize'.

The success of a business is not a random event. It is a matter of learning and applying that learning to the development of a business.

University is not a necessity nor the only road to business success, and that is what Theil is proving. If a University education was an actual requirement, there wouldn't be so many successful business people without university degrees.

Where I think 20 under 20 fails is that the 20 entrepreneurs seem to feel that if they fail, they can always just go back to University. That isn't truly in the spirit of what Theil is trying to prove. But only time will tell how well it all works out.</comment>


Ask HN: Should corona.com be dedicated to information about the corona virus? - sahin-boydas <comment><AUTHOR> Do you own it? If not then it's moot. If so, then just put a link to a trusted source (I wish I could say the CDC, but...). I don't think it's worthwhile to try hosting information and sponsoring it with beer, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER2> Corona is the beer brand. Coronavirus is the disease. Different things.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why?</comment>


Living and working abroad (Stack Exchange site proposal) - <AUTHOR> http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/56567/living-and-working-abroad <comment><AUTHOR> Just opened it, could use some support! :-)</comment>


SpritePad - Create and edit css sprites - <AUTHOR> http://spritepad.wearekiss.com/ <comment><USER2> Ok, it's awesome, but auto alignment is probably most important feature there, I understand why it's premium, but you could give a chance to try this.

Also move "guided tour" option on a visible place, I discovered myself that I need to do, and dropped an image to the canvas, and after 5 minutes, when I was starting to write this comment I found where "tour" is.

It's cool, but developers probably will love desktop version of this and cross-platform of course. There nice though.

Good luck with service.</comment>


Ask HN: Logging infra usefulness on public cloud - <AUTHOR> Dev/Sec/Ops here. Small-sized MSP using GCP & AWS across multi-cloud regions, and using AWS CloudWatch & CloudTrail logs, Stackdriver for logging, alerting, errors, etc. We're finding limited usefulness of this logging infrastructure. Wondering if its just me!<p>As DevOps, I really find StackDriver logging UI not much useful to scroll through. For one thing, it is really slow. Secondly, I find service name & service acronyms very annoying. Not just StackDriver, but AWS too.<p>- Other than debugging, what purpose do logging serve?<p>- What are some tools that you use to dice & slice logging data to make some meaning?<p>- How do you extract actual errors while alerting? <comment><USER2> Metrics can only get you so far. The primary method you have to contextualize what was going on when, and to correlate that with other events, is through logging. Metrics are always just a point in time, on a single given system. Metrics slice the cake vertically, but if you want a horizontal view across multiple systems, you need to integrate your logs.

Only by unifying your logging into your monitoring system and actively aggregating that information, can you start to get a complete picture of what is going on.

New Relic has been doing some good work in this space, and integrating logging information to their system is their single biggest area of growth right now.</comment>


OS-Agnostic Kernel Level Anti-Virus for Embedded Devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511331/startup-offers-to-protect-printers-phones-and-other-devices-from-hackers/

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://gizmodo.com/5986960/meet-the-symbiote-the-ironclad- ad...](http://gizmodo.com/5986960/meet-the-symbiote-the-ironclad-adaptable- future-of-antivirus-protection)

Another discussion on the same topic, however it is more editorialized and I am always hesitant to post Gawker content on HN.</comment>


The fall of the meritocracy - <AUTHOR> http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/09/fall-meritocracy/ <comment><USER3> Even without the author's counterargument the assertion that one's genetics is an unfair advantage strikes me as absurd. Your genetics is not something you've got, but literally a part of what you _are_. Questioning whether one deserves to be oneself is like asking what's north of the North Pole - <USER2> because you can put these words together in a sentence doesn't mean it it makes any sense. Furthermore, intelligence is not a "good" in itself. You earn ("deserve") goods by being useful to others. If a "gifted" individual invents a technology that makes life more comfortable for the unintelligent, does he not deserve a reward regardless of what enabled him to do so?

On a different note, I don't understand how anyone can consider equality of outcome desirable, regardless of whether it's achievable or not. If your outcome is guaranteed to be equal to that of others then it by definition doesn't depend on your own choices. If it's not the ultimate unhuman antiutopian existence I don't know what is.

<comment><USER4> "does he not deserve a reward regardless of what enabled him to do so"

No. Why would that be the case? In your moral framework that equates moral desert with technological progression, sure. But not in mine, where technological progression is antithetical to social progression.

Ok, that was pretty facetious (especially the last sentence); there's utility in rewarding progress, but as another commenter mentioned, fairness is entirely subjective.

<comment><USER5> if we insist on everybody getting the same share, no matter what, then the smart one doesnt have incentive to make progress and the lazy one simply stops trying. that'd be disaster (isnt that communism?)

the good gene is like a natural lottery. do you insist your neighbor to share his lottery money with you because he does nothing to get that money? because he's lucky, he may share with you 10%, but never share 50-50

<comment><USER6> Actually you'll find there are cultures around the globe where you are expected to share _more_ than 50% if you receive a windfall... The less than 50% thing is very much a western world phenomenon; and a US one in particular.

<comment><USER5> yeah, but in tribes or backward society, with agriculture or hunter-gatherer ..

it's kinda hard to compare between these two kinds of society, people deal with very different things everyday

<comment><USER6> You'll find that gift cultures exist today that have long since stopped being agrarian; the Philippines and Thailand come to mind. In the big cities the gift culture is still alive and well. It is quite a different culture to the predominately protestant individualistic society that is America though.[0]

[0] [http://www.researchgate.net/publication/31914331_J._Henrich_...](http://www.researchgate.net/publication/31914331_J._Henrich__R._Boyd__S._Bowles__C._Camerer__E._Fehr__H._Gintis_%28eds.%29_Foundations_of_Human_Sociality_Economic_Experiment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Meritocracy is a very quaint goal. There is so much value in our societies produced by capital that cannot be attributed to work or decision-making of some living person - such as machinery, know-how (technological and organizational), land, natural resources, organic products.

Most people, if they would be paid based on merit, couldn't survive in our society, because they produce so little of value on its own.

Fighting for "meritocracy" therefore becomes fight for attribution, how big piece of resulting pie you deserve. But this deserve has not much to do with merit of your work, it has to do with your ability to fight for it, imperfect information, and kindness of other people.

<comment><USER8> So how about we spend a few minutes trying to solve those problems rather than just throwing up our hands?

A sufficiently low-friction market already resolves a lot of the attribution issues, and we're already seeing that happen - as transaction costs shrink it becomes more and more practical to outsource more of a business. What if it reached the point where every company was <50 people - small enough that everyone knew everyone? Or even the point where everyone was a freelancer?

Externalities are of course a thing. But technology is improving to the point where we can track them and build them into the market. What if e.g. for every gram of pollution, you were charged in real time?

<comment><USER9>
      > *sufficiently low-friction market*

.. drives the rate of profit to zero at all points along the value chain, _except_ where there is a monopoly or "rent" that can extract all the value. Example: San Francisco is a system for moving money from venture capital to real estate.

<comment><USER7> Exactly! 15 years ago, I was interested in economics. Since I originally studied physics, and I couldn't help noticing that some very simple examples are missing from the economic textbooks, namely how to build the macroeconomic model (aggregate functions) from the microeconomic ones.

One very simple example is to have two markets, one between producer and distributor and another between distributor and consumer. It turns out, there is no "rule" as to what the distributor's cut should be. Any margin is possible! It depends on relative negotiation positions of all parties.

So, to say (sufficiently) free markets are the answer is pretty much as no answer at all..

<comment><USER8> If the distributor's cut becomes too large then some producers will switch to become distributors, and vice versa.

<comment><USER7> That may happen, but it doesn't answer the question what the cut will be. I don't think there is an answer, since as GP pointed out, in free market, both margins should approach 0, so the ratio can be anything in that limit.

This also raises a question, if no one can make a profit, why should people want free market? Basically, free market promises subsistence wages to workers.

And what about consumers switching to distributors? That's the problem, you (wrongly) see economy as having two parts - one part producers, another part consumers (and so presumably you put distributors together with producers), but it really isn't like that, it's cyclic. You can't always hammer it into some supply-demand model (that's actually what makes the example interesting!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Among other things, the author presents the argument that a more efficient meritocracy will exacerbate the fact that we don't all have the same genetic endowments, and these endowments are subject to hereditary capture to a similar degree that wealth is. Furthermore, future technologies will allow the wealthy to simply buy permanent genetic advantages for their descendants.

Just as a universal basic income is presented as one antidote to wealth inequality, the idea of universal genetic enhancement is presented, specifically of intelligence (whatever that is). If we assume it's a fait accompli that members of our elites will pursue genetic enhancement of intelligence for their children or themselves, what are the strongest consequentialist objections to the idea of free, universally-provided genetic enhancement, assuming such therapies are actually effective, practical, and safe?

One obvious objection is of a "Brave New World" variety: we have yet no idea how systematic selection to increase "g" (or any trait, for that matter), could stunt or enhance other traits, deplete valuable kinds of cognitive diversity we can't yet measure, or twist our values in some immeasurable and negative way.

Worse still, it's easy to imagine government scientists in more authoritarian societies stumbling on allele combinations that enhanced political docility, consumption-oriented behavior, thriftiness, and so on, and selecting for those in the next generation to solve demographic, economic, or political problems.

On the flip side of that fear is the hope that we could select for propensities that help us solve the daunting list of global co-ordination problems that now face us, climate change and dangerous AI being the two most generic ones. The consequences of failure there are so dire that we may even have reason to see such enhancement as necessary -- the equivalent of a species-level adrenaline shot to get us through an existential crisis.

And what if we could make ourselves less dishonest, manipulative, cynical, and tribalistic? What if we could design our values to be different from what they are, to be what we wished they were? That's much scarier for me, for reasons that are harder to explain. And it mirrors a bit the problems of building an self-enhancing AI that doesn't "diverge to evil".

I'm sure there's a rich seam of blogosphere material out there on these topics, maybe even some academic papers, would be very interested if someone is willing to share some links to specific arguments or discussions.

<comment><USER8> I don't have a specific post in mind, but if you're interested in this kind of thing then I highly recommend [http://slatestarcodex.com](http://slatestarcodex.com)

<comment><USER11> I've often heard that about website. What is it? Who writes it?

<comment><USER12> A psychiatrist that goes by pen name Scott Alexander, also known as Yvain on Less Wrong. He wrote quite a lot of insightful articles over the year; here's one reference[0].

My favourite work of his is Meditations on Moloch[1] - quite long but very good post about how various coordination problems make the world look the way it was, and how it may evolve in the future.

[0] - [http://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott- alexand...](http://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/)

[1] - [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

<comment><USER10> I read SSC's Moloch essay a while back -- I ended up missing two Strange Loop talks because I got so into it! He has some really fantastic essays.

It's a small part of Moloch but one idea that really stuck with me was that many of our defining societal threats and challenges are ultimately coordination problems, game theoretic tragedies. The Achilles heel of humanity it seems.

<comment><USER12> (Past my edit window so submitting as another comment.)

Also, listen to this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et-E4WWcbeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et-E4WWcbeE).

You'll never be reading that post in the same internal voice again. :).

<comment><USER10> Hehe awesome thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > "In The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life > (1994), Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray argue—pretty convincingly"

Anyone care to comment on that? I thought that taking "The Bell Curve" seriously was a big red flag?

<comment><USER14> >I thought that taking "The Bell Curve" seriously was a big red flag?

To whom? Certainly not to most scientists..

<comment><USER13> We're referring to a particular book of that title. Some consider it to be racist bunk, e.g. [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve)

Follow links from there and the idea that "most scientists" agree with that book looks like a big stretch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If the failures of meritocracy and elitism interest you, I highly recommend reading "Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy" by Chris Hayes, who currently works for MSNBC. Aaron Swartz wrote a wonderful review on CrookedTimber: [http://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/18/guest-review-by-aaron- sw...](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/18/guest-review-by-aaron-swartz-chris- hayes-the-twilight-of-the-elites/)

</comment><comment><USER16> The author uses a raft of terms he doesn't bother to define -- "top university", "prestigious occupation", "social status", and so on, so much that it makes the article meaningless.

IQ, and all the other "objective" measures he leaves as an exercise to the reader to define, mostly measure how well-adapted a person is to society such as it currently works right now.

If you believe we've arrived at the society we have now due to "human nature" or some other kind of natural settling, and not, to just pick one alternate hypothesis, an unimaginable amount of violence and plunder carried out across the globe over the last few centuries, then the conclusions in this article make sense.

Otherwise, it probably has some holes.

<comment><USER17> I think the basic premise of the article is completely sound: in a meeitocratic society, the inequality increases approximately to the degree that IQ is inherited.

<comment><USER18> Is there reliable evidence that the IQ is inherited in quantities that actually matter? I know it's a popular premise, but this article takes it to sure-shot levels.

<comment><USER19> [http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-67-2-130.pdf](http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-67-2-130.pdf)

It seems very thoroughly accepted - among researchers who have studied the subject. The popular press produces a lot of articles downplaying the subject. For example, if a study shows that IQ is likely the result of thousands of genes combined rather than just one or two, there will be ten articles the next day saying "scientists unable to find genetic basis for IQ" and "IQ not genetic."

<comment><USER18> No, what I mean is that there are genetic factors that aren't necessarily hereditary, or even hereditary but not within the immediate offspring. E.g. my son has the same birthmark as my mother but I don't. Same for a number of Mendelian trait diseases.

I am not questioning that IQ might well be a genetic factor, just wondering if there are any conclusive studies that it's directly inherited. Because the study you linked is very open-ended on this, and this has been core premise for the article discussed.

<comment><USER20> > No, what I mean is that there are genetic factors that aren't necessarily > hereditary, or even hereditary but not within the immediate offspring. E.g. > my son has the same birthmark as my mother but I don't. Same for a number of > Mendelian trait diseases.

This is not genetic but not "necessarily hereditary", this is hereditary, but requiring a combination of inherited "things" to manifest. (The typical simple case of "Mendelian trait diseases" to which this applies are recessive traits, which require inheriting a copy of the gene from each parent to manifest.)

IQ, not being a binary trait, doesn't work the same way, and probably (even to the extent it is genetic) the product of isn't a single, simple genetic trait of any kind, but influenced by a number of different genes. And, also, influenced by lots of environmental factors (and it may turn out that the _way_ in which some of those environmental factors contribute depends on which combination of genetic factors are present.)

<comment><USER18> > This is not genetic but not "necessarily hereditary", this is hereditary, > but requiring a combination of inherited "things" to manifest.

Down syndrome is a result of genetic expression but is not a hereditary trait. General, normal human features (like having 5 fingers on each arm and feet) are also genetic but so universal it makes no point describing them as "hereditary".

> IQ, not being a binary trait, doesn't work the same way, and probably (even > to the extent it is genetic) the product of isn't a single, simple genetic > trait of any kind, but influenced by a number of different genes.

If it's a function of thousand features as been suggested, this makes the odds for direct trait inheritance not particularly good, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reverse this:

 _" (b) creating opportunities for those born on the wrong side of the tracks, so if you start with very little that doesn't mean you'll end up with very little, or that your children will"_

And you see immediately why meritocracy is a sham. No one wants their stupid and lazy kids to end up "with little", and the rich have the means to ensure this happens.

Of course, like many things to do with rich vs poor, this applies on the national scale too. And generally not even those on the wrong side of the tracks think that people on the wrong side of the border, regardless of merit, should be allowed to cross it to get a better life.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Meritocracy" is one of those odd words that was defined to have one meaning and now appears to be generally used to mean almost the exact opposite - perhaps worth reading this article from the chap who coined the term in the 1950s:

[http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment)

<comment><USER23> Not coincidentally, The author of your article is the father of the author of the OP. I don't think the definition has shifted so much as the intent behind the word (negative to positive).

<comment><USER24> Meritocracy still has purely negative connotations among those who study society, and positive connotations among politicians or corporations who wish to justify their current practices. You won't hear the word "meritocracy" mentioned by sociologists or historians as anything but a joke, or, if they're patient, as a starting point of a dystopia.

<comment><USER25> Of course, it has to be noted that academics lean left, and sociologists overwhelmingly so.

See, e.g., [http://www.criticalreview.com/2004/pdfs/cardiff_klein.pdf](http://www.criticalreview.com/2004/pdfs/cardiff_klein.pdf).

<comment><USER24> Right, and did you know that most climatologists are overwhelmingly climate- change believers?! That's just so unfair. Where are all the climate-change- denier climatologists, creationist biologists and libertarian sociologists, I wonder?

<comment><USER25> Comparing sociology to biology in particular ends up unflattering for the former. Biology is a lot more obviously successful than sociology. Sociology has so far failed to produce its equivalent to evidence-based medicine and whenever treatments it has tried to design for social illnesses have not delivered.

I don't think sociology is completely hopeless but given its track record so far I would sooner expect intelligence (and empathy, willpower, etc.) augmentation to cure whatever problems plague society than any attempt at "institutional change".

<comment><USER24> Sociology is not an applied discipline and most certainly doesn't prescribe "institutional change". I would sooner expect "solutions" from people who bother to study the system they seek to change rather than those who don't and cast aspersions on those who do.

But speaking of track records, I think that the record of those who have called for "institutional change" and got us civil rights, education and healthcare is far better than that of so-called scientists who have favored "applied artificial Darwinism" and advocated for eugenics programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I find it ironic that people who believe they possess an inordinate amount of intelligence so often fail to notice how limited is its capacity for solving actual human problems. Or perhaps it is not ironic at all, because every man with delusion of grandeur -- intelligent or not -- would think that it is the qualities that he possess would one day make him a member of the ruling class, or falling short of that -- a superhero.

Luckily, we who have studied computer science and know a thing or two about completeness and complexity and therefore the limits of reason, can easily call the bluff. After all, when human beings are concerned a solution to a problem may involve nothing more than swaying the minds of people, something people with high intelligence often seem comically unable to do.

So while I could easily think of a few qualities humanity is in urgent need of more than intelligence — charisma, empathy, good looks and a sense of humor — I believe that this particular piece would have been much better if the author's eugenics plan had been in effect prior to his birth.

<comment><USER14> >when human beings are concerned a solution to a problem may involve nothing more than swaying the minds of people, something people with high intelligence often seem comically unable to do.

So you're advocating that we select for charismatic, persuasive people of average intelligence? Seems like a rather short-sighted plan, considering this would describe most used car salesmen.

<comment><USER24> I advocate nothing of the sort, just note that it is just as likely to work as the author's "plan", which (like most texts, really) is more of a testament to his personal psychological issues than to his reasoning abilities. Do we have a good reason to believe a society made of used-car salesmen would be worse than that made of Aspy scientists? :) If I advocate anything, it is that we base our social policies on careful study of actual society rather than a simplification made for people who are unable or unwilling to grasp the complexities of the human condition.

<comment><USER14> Nice response. A society of used car salesmen would probably be better in most ways actually. The current global IQ is 95, I think. This makes me personally believe that having a very large demographic of 'average' people is fairly stabilizing, for various reasons. If some technology came out that did raise the global IQ to 110 or 120, I suspect things would become chaotic and self- destructive in short order. That's not to say it won't happen though, progress marches on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _In Coming Apart, Charles Murray estimates that there will always be 14 per cent of children in the top 5 per cent of the IQ distribution curve who are the offspring of parents with below-average IQs. Admittedly, that's not much when you consider that the remaining 86 per cent will have parents with above- average IQs,_

It really makes me wonder about the author IQ.

<comment><USER27> Why?

<comment><USER26> Because it's stupidly wrong. He misses the possibility for average people to have high IQ children. The sentence parses as : 14% high IQ children are from lower IQ couples, 0% are from average IQ couple, 86% are from high IQ couple...

It also dismisses the existence of mismatched IQ couples, and highly intelligent men with a hot air head isn't unheard off, and nowadays women have their toy boys too...

<comment><USER27> In probability , the fraction of the population at exactly 50%ile is approximately 0.

<comment><USER26> It's prose. When you say someone is of average height, you usually mean within a standard deviation of average, not that the person is exactly the locale appropriate average height... At best that sentence is very poorly worded, at worst the author is a shining example of regression to the mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Reassuring to learn that the word 'meritocracy' originally came from satire and not from serious proponents

<comment><USER29> The phrase "big bang" also started as satire, but I don't think any serious scientist would argue the concept is bad.

Arguments from etymology aren't productive.

<comment><USER28> Oh I know that (I study linguistics!). It's just amusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Similar discussion about this in reference to:

[http://www.salon.com/2015/08/09/meritocracy_is_a_massive_lie...](http://www.salon.com/2015/08/09/meritocracy_is_a_massive_lie_race_inheritance_and_the_the_truth_about_the_rigged_american_dream/)

</comment><comment><USER31> There are more factors at work here than genetics. Imagine how much pressure would be put on the child who has been selected (at great expense) from 100 embryos as "most likely to succeed"!

</comment><comment><USER32> > The left loathes the concept of IQ

Sorry. Nope. Too much other stuff to read to be giving time to an article that employs such a fallacious and/or naive opening to be bothered.

Sorry if I'm wrong, but this has immediately marked itself out as a propaganda piece, and I note it has been deservedly flagged.

Next ... !

</comment><comment><USER33> Starts trollish. Does it get less so?

<comment><USER34> He finishes up with A Modest Proposal.

Edit: Oh no! I am getting downvoted by HN users who didn't get the reference and/or have completely no idea what I believe with regard to the issues at hand in the article.

<comment><USER24> I think the whole piece is satirical, but the satire is either too vague and lacks all humor, and so ends up being more disturbing than thought provoking or funny (which I can only assume was the author's intent). I'm afraid some people might take this joke seriously. In fact, I'm afraid the joke must be lost on anyone not familiar with the "scientific" social Darwinist writings of the 1920s and '30s which this piece clearly tries to emulate. A promo piece for "The Man in the High Castle", perhaps?

<comment><USER17> Why would it be satire?

<comment><USER24> Well, like I said, it's not very good satire, but I figured it must be satirizing one of two things:

1\. The kind of writing you can find in some blogs popular among certain people who publish writings in favor of "reason" but whose reason or curiosity does not extend to the workings of actual people. They are either blind to the strong irrational forces motivating them, or aware and afraid of them and wish to be rid of them, as "reason" (at least their interpretation of it) is something that they feel they can cope with. They then propose solutions to solve society's problems provided that society was made of point-mass people and somehow displayed tractable dynamics. I call this kind of writing "spherical-cow sociology". What these people really want is a recognition of their own abilities and their own rise to power, something they feel they've been unjustly denied and rightfully deserve. This is a modern manifestation of the comic-book heroes of the 1930s-'60s, all created by people who felt powerless. Unlike those comic-book writers, the contributions of the contemporary group are questionable, as the models of society they come up with serve their own particular psychological needs and lack the mass-appeal of Superman.

2\. The kind of writing popular in the 1920s and '30s by social Darwinists who actually were curious about real people and knowledgeable about the workings of society, but were seeking moral justification for their continued subjugation of others. These were people who were already in power (i.e. they felt sufficiently empowered), but felt pangs of guilt regarding their treatment of others, which they wanted to sweep away.

The giveaway is the laser-focused emphasis on intelligence and material benefits, simplified-ad-absurdum models that appeal to the limited thought of those in the first group, and the suggestion of eugenics, a popular choice among those in the second.

<comment><USER35> Compare it to the tone of the rest of the articles on the site. The top link right now, for example, mentions that climate change predicted by "warmists" is a lie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> He's really keen to paint "liberals" as genetics denialists. I have never met or heard of...well, anyone who claims that mental ability is 100% based on environment; I'm sure there's someone, but they don't have a lot of company. Of course it's not 100% based on genetics, either; it's been clear for quite a while that nature and nurture both play a role.

So, yeah, I'm thinking troll. That or "articulate nutcase." But probably troll.

<comment><USER37> I have certainly heard "liberals" dispute sexual dimorphism in humans based purely on ideological concerns. Some people tend to overcompensate when it comes to common biases. This also goes hand-in-hand with the thinking that the disenfranchised can't be racist/sexist/bigots by definition.

<comment><USER36> So, even while looking out for those flaws, you still can't testify to _any_ liberals holding the specific position that the article ascribes to _all_ of them?

That does seem to suggest that the basic premise is flawed.</comment></comment></comment>


R.I.P. MP3 - tefo-mohapi https://www.iafrikan.com/2017/05/19/r-i-p-mp3/ <comment><AUTHOR> MP3 is now free of patent issues. It is exactly the inverse of dying. The whole story line about MP3 dying is a PR push by Fraunhofer now that they will not longer make money by licencing their patents.

<comment> tefo-mohapi True</comment></comment>


GitHub CEO discussed 'evolving' position on China in private all-hands meeting - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/10/20908713/github-ceo-china-transcript-leak-microsoft <comment><USER2> As these things are naturally going, it is a matter of months before github is blocked and a clone set up. The threat to the matrix is too big otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER3> That must be a super awkward meeting for the H1B employees.</comment>