Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> What Does Tech Excellence Look Like? by Martin Fowler [1]. He talks about process, how to organize teams to deliver tech products. Amazing talk.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/Avs70dZ3Vlk](https://youtu.be/Avs70dZ3Vlk)</comment>


James Hong: On going (NOT) Free... - <AUTHOR> http://james.hotornot.com/2007/09/on-going-not-free.html

<comment><USER2> Something sounds fishy:

"Every dating site i know and talk to tells me they are dealing with the same issue. Markus at plentyoffish seems to be doing a good job of fighting it, but tells me it gets harder and harder every month to maintain."

If Markus can deal with it as a one man team, how does James and his crew of hackers not have the resources to figure it out?

<comment><USER3> Markus also had the benefit of a lot of lead time-- he had several years of growth where the spammers hadn't evolved to their current level of effectiveness, and while his site wasn't as big a target, so a lower eradication rate while he developed his solution still wouldn't affect the majority of his user base.

Hot or Not was instantly a huge target, and coming up with a workable solution overnight to a problem of that scale is not easily done, no matter what the headcount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see why we should be hard on him for this.

However, if the other sites continue to explode and hotornot sinks into obscurity, he's free game.</comment>


Gwynne Shotwell: SpaceX's Plan to Fly You Across the Globe in 30 Minutes [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.ted.com/talks/gwynne_shotwell_spacex_s_plan_to_fly_you_across_the_globe_in_30_minutes <comment><USER2> Rocket based travel will never ever ever happen on a widespread scale simply because of the G forces involved. Passengers on an airliner will begin feeling uncomfortable at around 1.2 G's and > 20 degrees of bank angle. The thought of subjecting regular paying passengers to 3+ G's and a full 360 degrees of pitch/roll is absurd. It could definitely be a niche thing for people that are physically fit, but this just isn't the way to go for high speed transportation. More traditional airframes and scramjets are far more likely to make hypersonic travel a reality.

<comment><USER3> If John Glenn could do a Shuttle flight at 77, I suspect you're overstating the difficulties here. People voluntarily subject themselves to 3+ Gs and 360 degrees pitch/roll at amusement parks daily, with fairly minimal levels of physical fitness being required.

<comment><USER4> If the full 30 minute flight is like a roller coaster, I would be green by the time we got there and probably have a full puke bag. But I'd still prefer that to a 12 hr long haul flight in coach.

<comment><USER5> If you could afford flying on a rocket, I bet you can also afford flying first-class. Would that alter your preference?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The main thing I'm thinking of is noise pollution. You think living near an airport is loud? I cannot even imagine what living near a BFR spaceport would be like. For coastal cities maybe it would be worth it to build a landing pad on an ocean platform some miles out to sea, but what about for cities like Atlanta or Beijing? There's nowhere around them to build that isn't already a suburb.

<comment><USER3> I'd expect a city like Atlanta to be served by an off-shore landing zone, with high speed rail (hyperloop!) as the connection.

<comment><USER7> Atlanta is very open to running public transit lanes into the area and land acq is cheap OTP. /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think SpaceX should just sell this service to military clients. The other comments here are talking about noise pollution, G-forces, bank angles, and other negative downsides of the service. However, if you have a bunch of active-duty, trained personnel who need to get across the globe ASAP, this is something I could see the military paying for. Moreover, most bases are not directly next to large population centers, which helps with the noise pollution argument.

</comment><comment><USER9> As a business model I think SpaceX should be a manufacturer and not in the transportation business akin to Boeing or Airbus. There is a ton of logistics involved in transporting people globally. Of course there is the safety issues as well.

<comment><USER10> >> safety issues as well.

And vomit. 4+G on launch. Freefall during cruise. 5+ G on reentry. Give me the first class ticket on a BA flight any day.

<comment><USER11> That sounds amazing actually. As of today, I'd consider a few minutes of micro gravity to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. If that ever becomes something you can experience for the price of an airline ticket, I'd consider the ride itself to be worth the price of admission all on its own.

Obviously not for everyone, but you don't really need to be able to service _everyone_ to be profitable.

<comment><USER12> You can do it today for the price of a reduced-gravity aircraft ticket (~$5,000, [https://www.gozerog.com](https://www.gozerog.com))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Betting against Elon Musk is historically unprofitable but if there was one of those bets saying that SpaceX will never actually field this other than for PR purposes then I'd probably take it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm glad Gwynne is talking about this rather than Elon as I always take what Elon says with a large grain of "execution" salt (as in sure you can do that but not when you think you can).

Things will be very different when BFRs are flying regularly. BFRs imply full reusability, and full reusability implies a short 'cycle' time, which implies a much greater earth to orbit capacity, with implies a greater supply and more reliability to orbit, which implies that it stops being crazy to require that you have three or four launches in a single year to get all of your "stuff" into orbit.

The logistics of space launch are still crazy. You can launch two rockets in a weekend using two launch pads but you can't yet launch multiple rockets a week from the _same_ launch pad.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think a major point that isn't being talked enough about in public (although I'm sure people in SpaceX have considered it before coming up with numbers) with the "point-to-point" transport system is simple demand-supply economics. Sure, let's say they can run 10 100-person flights per day from New York to Shanghai but do that many people even want to travel that route on that particular day?

<comment><USER16> More speculation here, I don't have any knowledge on the matter, but...

If the flight time drops from 12 hours to 30 minutes, and prices are in the same ballpark of $2,000, then there would be more demand.

The execs could all be in Shanghai for the board meeting and some of them could be back in NYC for dinner.

<comment><USER17> Not so, due to time zones. Although I fully realize that if you can rocket out, meet, and rocket back, and go to sleep in the same time zone you woke up in, it would be a very significant development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is going to be big with the crowd that has jumbo jets as a personal airplane.[1]

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-747-8-vip-private- jet-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-747-8-vip-private-jet-2016-6)

</comment><comment><USER19> How do you tell the difference between commercial scheduled rocket flights and incoming ICBM's?

<comment><USER11> The same way you tell the difference between commercial scheduled airline flights incoming kamikaze pilots?

<comment><USER7> Assume that there aren't commercial scheduled airline flights going straight through a warzone?

<comment><USER11> Assume there aren't commercial scheduled spaceline flights taking off from nuclear missile silos.

<comment><USER7> I haven't heard of missile defense systems that are capable of determining the origin of an ICBM while deciding if it should try and take it out.

<comment><USER20> Infrared boost phase detectors on satellites have been around since the 60s. The US and Russian detection systems, at least, certainly know the origin of any ICBMs. There's not many parties that don't have that data and also have counter-measures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What would be the environmental impact of ubiquitous rocket launches for business travel?

<comment><USER22> Not too huge. This person[1] did some math and found that a BFR trip across the world should take 40% to 240% as much carbon as a regular plane flight. For short trips this would be worse, though, because a plane's range goes up almost linearly with fuel use while a rocket's goes up much faster than linearly.

Rockets that use solid boosters like the Space Shuttle, SLS, or Atlas V do a good amount of ozone damage as they go up but the ozone damage from cryogenic propellants of the sort that a BFR uses is pretty small.

[1][https://www.quora.com/Elon-Musk-suggested-that-the-SpaceX- BF...](https://www.quora.com/Elon-Musk-suggested-that-the-SpaceX-BFR-could-be- used-for-30-minute-flights-to-the-other-side-of-the-world-at-the-price-of-an- economy-flight-What-would-be-the-carbon-footprint-per-passenger-equivalent- and-how-would-it-compare-to-jet-travel)

<comment><USER23> Also I'm not sure where SpaceX gets its methane from. If it's from above- surface sources wouldn't its net carbon contribution essentially be zero?

<comment><USER24> Did a little googling. Methane is primarily obtained from natural gas fields which are below ground. Atmospheric concentrations are relatively low (on order of parts per billion) although it is still an important greenhouse gas (30x more potent than CO2 per ton). There's a lot of ongoing research into generating CH4 from CO2 using renewable energy but it's relatively energy intensive to date.

<comment><USER21> So there's noise pollution on a grand scale, it depends on natural gas extraction or a breakthrough in electrolysis, and it will produce CO2 when burned in flight. Great. It will also cost a fortune, and even SST isn't viable, yet somehow this will be?

I could not be more skeptical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does that mean no food, no snacks during the flight? That sucks.

<comment><USER26> There would be neither the time nor the inclination for food service. A non- trivial percentage of passengers will be dealing with nausea during the thankfully brief 0g float.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> SpaceX is promising something that is feasibly decades away?

Do people still believe in Elon? Or have we figured out these are advertisements.

<comment><USER28> He's not promising it. Despite the optimistic language, its a somewhat- realistic dream that he'd _like_ to do and plans to work on. At least that seems obvious to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> >This is the only time I've out-visioned Elon ... _I_ want to meet other people in other solar systems.

You're not out-visioning Elon; it's a petty attempt at one-upmanship. It just doesn't seem genuine. I want to meet people in other Superclusters. Now she's been out-visioned!

<comment><USER30> Employee #7 at SpaceX didn't you hear? Relax, they're on the same team.

<comment><USER31> And a really interesting life story. I like how she randomly ended up in the job:

[https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/roc...](https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/rocket- maam.html)

> Four years into the job, Shotwell had lunch with a co-worker who had just > joined the then-startup company SpaceX. They walked by the cubicle of CEO > Elon Musk. "I said, 'Oh, Elon, nice to meet you. You really need a new > business developer,'" Shotwell recalls. "It just popped out. I was bad. It > was very rude."

> Or just bold enough to capture Musk's attention. He called her later that > day in 2002 and recruited her to be vice president of business development, > his seventh employee. She wrestled with the decision. "The history of > startup rocket companies isn't exactly great," explains Hughes, SpaceX > senior vice president and general counsel. "This was not necessarily the > safest play."</comment></comment></comment>


Snap Inc. (NYSE:SNAP) - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ASNAP <comment><AUTHOR> No pricing data there yet but should show up in about 15 minutes. Looks like a 40% pop so far.

Any betters on maintaining that for the following?

\- End of day

\- End of month

\- End of year

\- End of three years

</comment><comment><USER2> Opened at 24, and it's been bouncing around in the 24.50-25 range right now, nothing too exciting.</comment>


Crowd-sourcing a JavaScript Web App Book - <AUTHOR> http://alexmaccaw.co.uk/posts/2010/10/26/crowdsourcing_book.html

<comment><USER2> Are there any specific JS tools in mind? node.js, Express, js_model, backbone?

<comment><USER2> Sorry, didn't read blog post before.</comment></comment>


Man and man's best friend have both been experiencing declines in sperm quality - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/mar-9-2019-science-of-awe-blue-whales-and-sonar-chromosomes-and-sleep-and-more-1.5047142/man-and-man-s-best-friend-have-both-been-experiencing-declines-in-sperm-quality-1.5047150 <comment><USER2> Maybe it's for the best.

</comment><comment><USER3> Man or men?</comment>


Ask HN: How to build a social network site? - <AUTHOR>

The requirements to build a social network with photo sharing.<p>The website is going to be very minimal and simple <comment><USER2> Well start will building a user registration and login panel. Then a way to upload pictures to your server. Then a way to share a user's pictures.

Then.. be VERY VERY VERY good at marketing and sell your idea.

Good luck. You'll need it.

</comment><comment><USER3> yeah...I'm going to go ahead and say this won't work out well. You'll need a little more detail and a lot more research.</comment>


World's first human head transplant a success - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/11/17/worlds-first-human-head-transplant-successfully-carried/ <comment><USER2> So no full transplant on animals has been successful yet? Why start with humans?</comment>


Radiohead New Album Sets Aside 'Pay What You Want' Model - <AUTHOR> http://thekingoflimbs.com/

<comment><USER2> The Radiohead "pay what you want" model was a self-admitted publicity stunt. Fans paid whatever they decided to pay and received untagged, 160kbps MP3s. To quote Jonny Greenwood, "I don't know, we talked about it and we just wanted to make it a bit better than iTunes, which it is, so that's kind of good enough, really. It's never going to be CD quality, because that's what CD does."

And so many went on to buy the CD version, and some bought the deluxe edition, with a second disc of exclusive tracks -- which were only exclusive until they were later released as B-sides.

You can look at it as either a way for the band to accept tips from their fans, or more cynically, you can look at it as double or triple-dipping. Regardless, Radiohead weren't looking to pioneer some new business model when they did the pay-what-you-want In Rainbows download. They didn't share any information about their experiment with other artists.

<comment><AUTHOR> According to the below Times article (Dec 2007 - a month later), 62% paid zero and 12% accounted for more than 52% of revenue. Average price paid was $6 globally. US average price was $8.05; outside the US was $4.64.

[http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/th...](http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article2817679.ece)

Article also quotes Fred Wilson: "This shows pretty conclusively that the majority of music consumers feel that digital recorded music should be free and is not worth paying for."

As for me, I paid zero. And then bought the vinyl a few months later.

<comment><USER3> The data from Radiohead's experiment is pretty interesting. There is one thing that they did poorly though. Consider the person who downloads the album for $0.00 because they want to hear the music before deciding how much they are willing to pay for it. Radiohead's website did not allow that person to go back and give money after the initial download. The only way to pay any money in that case, was to download the album a 2nd time using a 2nd email address (couldn't download twice with the same email) and include a $$ value for the 2nd download.

Credit me with 2 downloads, one for $0.00 and one for $5.00. If a lot of people did that, it would inflate the total number of downloads and reduce the average paid. I wonder how many people did something similar?

<comment><USER4> this new website has a problem, too.

        I'm afraid you card payment was not sucessful.
        You may wish to try again or contact us with the details below.
        OrderNumber TKOL1-345345345345345345353
        Error details: 7: Transaction declined..

i tried twice, then got an email saying

         If you have placed more than one order in error, please be assured your email has now  been logged and the refund will be made over the next few days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> However, they have kept the self-created-leak model. They have, quite successfully, prevented this album from being known about until they chose to tell people, and allowed the album to launch under their own terms.

The way I see it the pricing is the least important point here.

<comment><USER6> Can you please explain what differnece this makes , in a digital world , where once a digital copy is sold it can be almost instantly availble around the world for free ?

<comment><USER5> Of course.

If you create something you want it to be available to people who pay for your work. Paying customers and people who pirate leaked albums are separate groups (though there is significant overlap). I should imagine to most people they'd rather that their paying customers got access first, and arranging your own surprise release enforces this, as well as creating a feel of excitement around a release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Radiohead is experimenting with the best model. Good for them. They've got the cash to burn to pivot and try something new. They may not be sharing their data with other bands (nee competition), but that's OK because they'll push everyone else in a similar direction if it looks that they are onto something.

</comment><comment><USER8> They made at least £4.8 million which is not bad for the "pay what you want" model. Of course you have to be a famous band to even try this.

Average selling price was £4, and only 30% of people opted to pay. They get to keep 100% of their royalties, whereas most band get a minuscule fraction of the album price in royalties.

</comment><comment><USER9> Business models are re-usable, publicity stunts aren't. Guess which one In Rainbows was.

</comment><comment><USER10> Making part of your art piece intentionally slowly degrading seems like a strange choice. I guess that part of our culture won't last for generations to come.

</comment><comment><USER11> The people who didn't pay for In Rainbows are just going to pirate it anyway, but they save on bandwidth, I suppose.

<comment><USER12> I'm sure that's true for a lot of people, but I think there were probably a lot of people who thought of it as "try before you buy". This mentality certainly applies to some percentage of those who would have pirated it, but I think there are plenty of people who saw this as a free sample.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> $9 is (about 30 cents) cheaper than ¢7 and £6 in case people in europe are trying to save some pennies.

<comment><USER14> That's the cent sign. It's close, but not quite, the euro sign: € (on my keyboard: right alt + 5)</comment></comment>


Discovery of a 'holy grail' with the invention of universal computer memory - <AUTHOR> https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/-discovery-of-a-holy-grail-with-the-invention-of-universal-computer-memory <comment><USER2> This is utterly brilliant! (The generalized pattern is that you have two devices, one which trades off feature X for feature Y, the other which trades off feature Y for feature X... now find (or create!) the currently non- existent device in the middle of the spectra, which balances features X and Y...) This article makes a LOT of sense if you understand how DRAM and FLASH implement memory, but with different underlying phenomena of physics -- well this could be looked at as a quest to find a harmonious point between both sets of different physical phenomena (using both, or some third derived law for the end product)... I wish you a lot of luck in that quest!</comment>


Open source deep learning models that programmers can download and run first try - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/samdeeplearning/The-Terrible-Deep-Learning-List <comment><USER2> There isnt really any math to deep learning other than the concept of a derivative which is taught in high school calculus. The reason deep learning papers seem mathy is people take network architectures and various elementary operations on them and try to express them symbolically in latex using summations and indexing-hell. For example the easy concept of "updating all the neurons in one layer based on the neurons in the previous layer and connecting weights" is expressed as matrix-vector multiplication for not really any apparent reason other than it is technically correct and makes for slicker notation, and I guess makes it easier to use APIs that compute gradients for you. Deep learning however is broadly an experimental science, which in many ways is the opposite of math as traditionally envisioned, in which great insights follow deductively from prior great insights. If you ask a basic question like "why should use 4 layers instead of 3?" there is no answer other than "4 works better". Similarly with gradient descent versus random search in weight space. There are many problem domains where random search is as good as any known hill-climbing heuristic search (like gradient descent). Why is GD so effective when learning image classifiers expressed as stacked weight sums? Who knows.

<comment><USER3> Using matrices to perform the calculations is an optimization over doing a bunch of for loops. This vectorization results in faster code within higher level languages and on certain hardware platforms (SIMD). It's nothing to do with "slicker notation", although having written gradient descent with for loops and matrix operations, the vectorized version is simpler and cleaner to read in my opinion.

<comment><USER4> He's not complaining about using vectorization in code. The problem is papers and even explanations targeted at non-experts, often use obfuscated math in place of clear explanations. I've complained about this before here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953530)

Mathematical notation is basically a programming language. A programming language with weird symbols you can't type to search for, single letter variable names for everything, and no comments. And it's written by programmers that are obsessed with fitting everything into a simple line and making it as small as possible, no matter how difficult it is to read. Any programmer understands this is incredibly bad practice. And even if parse every step and perfectly follow _what_ the code is doing, without explanation, it's pretty difficult to figure out _why_.

<comment><USER3> OK, I see what you're saying. I think you have the same issue with "real" programming languages too. If you compare some very concise Clojure or Scala code with the equivalent in Java, it can be quite hard to understand if you're not very familiar with the language. But I wouldn't necessarily say it's "incredibly bad practice". A Scala programmer can write concise and elegant code that to another Scala programmer is actually faster to understand because of that conciseness. Whereas the same code written with for loops and class method calls and all the boilerplate in Java would take more studying to filter out the low level constructions.

It's about the level of abstraction. And yeah if you don't understand the notation or syntax at the level of abstraction you're studying, it will be very hard.

(FWIW I find Scala code quite hard to understand sometimes, but I also find the more I know about the language, the more comprehensible it gets).

<comment><USER4> It's not necessarily the conciseness that's a problem. Using foreach instead of a full for loop is one thing. What I'm complaining about is code in place of an explanation. E.g. imagine coming across some nasty piece of code like this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overview_of_the_code)

It doesn't matter how familiar you are with the language. Without an explanation of what the hell is going on, just looking at the code is useless.

<comment><USER3> Now we're talking about documentation. You are correct, no code is conpletely self documenting. But that Quake code is very low level, the opposite of what I think the grandparent doesn't like (very high level abstract notation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would say that this title is misleading. A lot of what is presented there needs a strong grasp of deep learning(and the other underlying concepts behind them.), without which all you'll do is load the examples on Xcode and run them.

Moreover, I would probably encourage people to read examples of Tensorflow or Caffe2 running on iOS rather than something like Forge. Forge is an interesting project but won't really help you if you don't have a clue about MPS or Deep Learning.

<comment><USER6> The original title, which is also the title of the repo, was much more accurate. The author mentions these are models to download and start playing with right away, not a set of repositories to help you learn deep learning.

<comment><USER7> OK, we've updated the title from the (slightly edited) repo description of "Examples to get started with Deep Learning without learning any of the math" to this phrase from the description.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a bad idea to learn deep learning without learning the math.

<comment><USER9> I disagree, now prove your point.

<comment><USER8> Your deep learning models don't always work as expected. In such cases you need to debug it. Understanding how models works internally is required for debugging them.

<comment><USER10> I would wager that a lot of people who "do deep learning" have absolutely no idea about the models they're using.

Hyperparameter optimisation is basically a fudge right now - you try everything and see what works. Even the research groups who came up with the standard network stacks, like VGG, basically lucked out and found an architecture that worked, then tried several variants and found one that worked better. DL papers are full of handwaving speculation about why particular networks perform better than others, but right now it's just that: highly educated speculation.

This isn't limited to deep learning. If you want to try any kind of machine learning, it's totally reasonable to throw different fitting functions at your problem to see which one works best. Unless you have an unusually clear problem category, it's rarely possible to say at the outset that "This problem would best be solved with method <X>". A counter here would be that if you need to classify images, you should almost certainly use a convnet.

You need _some_ understanding about why things might be going wrong, e.g. your loss isn't moving -> crank up the learning rate. You're seeing nans? Probably your learning rate is too high. But that doesn't really need any serious maths to understand. You can get by quite well by figuring out empirical rules.

I'm not arguing that you _shouldn 't_ learn the maths, it's a wise idea to, but many people use deep learning models without knowing how backpropagation works for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Gosh I wish this existed for Python.

<comment><USER12> Could you clarify? Several of the examples are Python projects (with and without Tensorflow), and others are apps consuming models that probably came from Tensorflow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So sad to see the divide between iOS and Android platforms.

Half of this stuff I can't run.</comment>


The Painting Behind the Door - <AUTHOR> https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/de-kooning-art-theft <comment><USER2> Fascinating story.

Unfortunately -- as is all too common now -- the page would be perfectly presentable with plain HTML but the unnecessary Javascript makes it all but unusable. Zooming the photos on mobile causes half the page to go blank, there's some kind of floating icon at the bottom that covers the text, and the page refuses to load at all without Javascript. Some VP of design must be exceedingly proud of himself/herself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Holy mackerel... nearly 20k words! Just be aware this is a rather deep rabbit hole. :)

<comment><USER4> And I suppose that the art has its audience.</comment></comment>


We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/5-minutes-with-mariana-mazzucato/ <comment><USER2> > When Google received funding for its algorithm from the National Science > Foundation (NSF), is it right that after it earned billions nothing went > back to the NSF

Serious mental gymnastics.

Page and Brin doing research with NSF grants isn't even remotely the same thing as Google, their future company, getting a check directly from the government.

Page and Brin produced publicly available research with NSF money. They started a company based on that public research. That company created untold billions of dollars of value out of thin air. Taxes are paid out of those new dollars, some of which go to fund the NSF.

This is exactly how it's supposed to work.

<comment><USER3> >> Taxes are paid out of those new dollars

Interestingly, here in Belgium, the press often states that Google pay his taxes as requested by the law. And that Google have some very expert accountant who read the law in suach a way that those taxes are close to zero.

I'm afraid Google doesn't pay his taxes like we, the tax payers, think it should...

Of course, that's totally proof-less, but well, I've heard that quite often (cf. intérêts notionnels)...

<comment><USER4> Since when is Google a he? Perhaps it is some quirk of your language that makes the direct translation take masculine form?

Edit: Sorry if this came off as rude, was not intended.

<comment><USER5> Instead of just criticising, maybe you could suggest how parent should improve? I'm always very confused about what personal pronoun to use for organisations or companies.

<comment><USER6> The singular impersonal "it" when talking about Google as a corporate entity (its component personnel would likely be "Googlers"). So "Google pays its taxes" and "Google doesn't pay its taxes".

<comment><USER5> Isn't "they" used sometimes as well? At least it's frequently used for "police"...

<comment><USER7> You would use "they" to refer to the class of people who are police but "it" to refer to organizations like a police department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Economists think this will happen via tax (from the jobs created, and from the profits of the companies), yet so many of the companies that receive such benefits from state funding, bring their jobs elsewhere, and of course we know they also pay very little tax."

He makes it sound like the USA would be just as well off if big tech companies weren't here.

The US government is basically a ~15% shareholder in all US companies due to salary and other taxes. If they can invest in technology research and build more US companies, then the US government earns a net profit.

I would like to see a breakdown for a major technology company to see what percentage of their revenue goes to income tax withholding, and then see how much government funding went into helping that company come to life.

Edits:

1\. Number adjustment

2\. By "income tax witholding" I mean the income tax that the employees pay. If 50% of revenue goes to salaries, and 20% of salaries go to income tax witholding, then 10% of a company's revenue goes to income tax.

<comment><USER9> remember that time GE paid basically 0% in taxes? the 30% number is only in theory (there is the salary breakdown but I don't think 30% is the number that ends up hitting)

<comment><USER10> GE paid 0% tax because the US govt decided to subsidize certain things that it wanted (mostly green energy related things), and implement that subsidy through the tax code via tax deductions and tax credits (because direct subsidies are politically unpalatable). GE promptly went and did exactly what the government wanted, which was invest in those nice expensive things, up to the point where all their taxes were wiped out.

If your beef is that the US govt shouldn't subsidize things via the tax code, then that's a separate issue. If your beef is that GE should pay nonzero taxes, then you should view it as "GE paid X% taxes, and then did things it did not want to do unsubsidized in order to earn back -X% taxes as a reward." In which case, GE did pay taxes. They just then took advantage of an opportunity to earn back those taxes in exchange for investing in green energy related things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The title of this piece is terrible, and detracts from what is actually a thoughtful discussion.

Mazzucato points out how the government is actually good at funding very high risk work, with a low chance of pay off (think DARPA research in the US).

She does say the sentence used in the title, but the context is very important:

 _What this means is that we have socialized the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards. This dynamic is one of the key drivers of increasing inequality. Because innovation today builds on innovation tomorrow, the 'capture' can be very large. This would not be the case if innovation were just a random walk. Policy makers must think very hard how to make value creation activities (done by all the collective actors in the innovation game) rewarded above value extraction activities (in this sense capital gains taxes are way too low). And since the booty from the latter can be very large, redirecting incentives and rewards towards the value creators is essential. The problem is that some of the 'extractors' like to sell themselves as the creators._

Her argument appears to be that public funds need to be directed into areas that have a chance of "industry transformation", which may create job or new (tax paying) industries in the country that funded them.

Here argument about public funding of Google and Apple is this:

 _For every Internet there are many Concordes or Solyndras. Yet this is also true for private venture capital (VC). But while private VC is then able to use the profits from the 1 out of 10 successes to fund the 9 losses, the state has not been allowed to reap a return. Economists think this will happen via tax (from the jobs created, and from the profits of the companies), yet so many of the companies that receive such benefits from state funding, bring their jobs elsewhere, and of course we know they also pay very little tax._

There is possibly a valid point here. Corporate tax minimisation by offshoring profits is a real challenge to the tax system.

I don't think she makes any real suggestion for how to solve the problem, though (Retaining a share of IP rights won't work, because companies can easily disassociate profits from the IP that generated them, meaning that any return-on-profits-generated scheme will fail. See Hollywood Accounting,[1] which does a similar thing in the film world)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting)

<comment><USER12> Mazzucato provides no real evidence the government is good at funding commercially viable innovation. If you look into the details the two examples she offers were more blind luck than thoughtful investment.

While it's easier to make the case for basic research the governments attempts to sponsor commercial innovation have almost always ended in failure or turned into subsidies for politically connected companies and industries. A good case study was the $600 Flat Panel Display Initative in the 1990s. It's a good bet something similar is currently happening in the various green initiatives.

She is actually correct about these programs socializing risk and privatizing reward. Stanford got the Google shares from research funded by NSF and Continental Illinois got the Apple shares from the SBIC investment guaranteed by SBA.*

However this is the one role government has a unique advantage. And this is a good thing - think NIH, NASA, NSF, etc but also pretty much every social safety net program. Of course she (being quite left) is actually making the case for increase government ownership of public companies or at least greater taxation and license fees.

*-You could argue the U.S. got some this back when that bank failed a few year later in the largest bank failure in US history - until WaMu surpassed it in 2008. Although the $44 million from Apple shares was insignificant compared to the billions in bankruptcy costs. BTW-The Continental Illinois failure is where "too big to fail" was coined.

<comment><USER13> _Mazzucato provides no real evidence the government is good at funding commercially viable innovation._

She does. Just not here. The piece _is_ called "Five minutes with..."; her arguments that government funds commercially viable innovation are easily found.

I suppose the most obvious commercially viable innovation funded by governments (both directly and through various defence department funds) was computing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the author is pointing to a problem but not correctly identifying what the problem is. The problem is deeper.

If the problem were that we have socialized risk of innovation but privatized the rewards, that wouldn't really be a problem. It's a good thing to incentivize innovation.

The real problem is that we _don 't_ incentivize innovation.

Instead, we incentivize investment. People who already have money to invest take on small calculated percentages of risk to make back large amounts of money. Frequently the money investors are investing isn't even their own, and they are paid a significant salary to do so, meaning they actually take on _none_ of the risk.

The negative results of this are twofold:

1\. Often investors don't invest in innovation. It's equally profitable to invest in number-twiddling schemes that provide no benefit to anyone except the investor, and often that's easier.

2\. We speak of companies as if they are single entities. But the reality is that executives and shareholders and of a company are the beneficiaries of any innovation within a company, while innovation typically comes from workers with technical expertise who are typically paid a relatively limited salary perhaps with some minimal stock options.

The way around this problem is typically to get into a company early enough that the line between technical worker and executive is blurred. But that avoids only the problems with lack of reward--it actually exacerbates the risk problem because early commitment to a company is a high-risk endeavor.

In the end, I think that a lot of innovators don't innovate for money anyway-- I personally would rather see something I make change the world than make a lot of money off an idea that doesn't make any difference (or makes things worse!). As long as I have enough to live I'm okay. But it would be nice if we stopped pretending that our distribution of wealth is at all meritocratic.

<comment><USER15> This!

I sure got that as the takeaway. Public investments targeted at innovation we've identified as important, or worth it, whatever should be increased.

There is another aspect to this as well. Check out this history of PDX area Tektronix: [http://www.opb.org/television/programs/oregonexperience/segm...](http://www.opb.org/television/programs/oregonexperience/segment/the- spirit-of-tek-/)

Between Tek, Intel, and a couple others, the area was transformed into something we call "silicon forest" and it spawned a ton of great companies, many of which are in business today.

It was a very interesting mix of private and public investments in education and investment support. Spin offs, not competitive with Tek, got Tek support while ramping up. Colleges offered targeted programs for people to get educated, companies did the same.

The founders got very wealthy, but so did a lot of other people.

We need more of this kind of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We've all seen quite clearly in recent years that governments regularly socialize risk with bailouts of supporters and favorites. The worst part is the way they tip their hand in advance (e.g., The Greenspan Put [1]) incentivizing the the most reckless and morally hazardous behavior.

But the article does not aim at this real problem. Rather it's just a basket of plausible sounding but totally unsubstantiated claims and deliberate ignorance of inconvenient facts. For example, we're supposed to view China's giant investments "environmentally friendly technologies" as destined for success. We won't question the competence of the government that has so recently built several cities (yes whole cities, yes plural) which are completely empty while peasants subsist in garbage heaps on their outskirts.

Polemicals like this equate corporatism and cronyism with capitalism and free markets. Then with the straw man destroyed, it's not hard to guess what the solution will be.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspan_put](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspan_put)

</comment><comment><USER17> Best quote in the piece:

 _Because innovation today builds on innovation tomorrow... Policy makers must think very hard how to make value creation activities (done by all the collective actors in the innovation game) rewarded above value extraction activities (in this sense capital gains taxes are way too low)._

Peter Thiel's book talks about this, and on the one hand it is of course very good strategy, yet it's also quite sad and pathetic, because the principle he advocates is that you should focus on _capturing a market, rather than creating value._

OP is saying, if this is a logical choice for entrepreneurs to make, then policy makers have done a very bad job at structuring incentives. It would make more sense if policy set up incentives which encouraged _creating_ value over _capturing_ it.

</comment><comment><USER18> This also seems to be a child of a wider process by which losses tend to be socialized and profits tend to be privatized. Apparently, the system "works" because nearly all the wealth of the planet is in the hands of something like 1% of the population, while the debt, well...

Another aspect is the speed at which profit is made. At one end there is education, for example, which is an exceedingly bad investment in financial terms because it is very slow and very uncertain. At the other end there is pure trading and seed/startup investment, with profit goals of, what, 25% per year.

Who would finance education? Certainly not a financial investor in his right mind.

</comment><comment><USER19> Another political theorist, Albena Azmanova calls this aggregative capitalism. An interview here: [http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/1099/tues-22415-post-...](http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/1099/tues-22415-post- neoliberal-capitalism) and an essay here : [http://www.academia.edu/11034347/The_Crisis_of_the_Crisis_of...](http://www.academia.edu/11034347/The_Crisis_of_the_Crisis_of_Capitalism)

A summary from [http://events.newschool.edu/event/politics_talk_albena_azman...](http://events.newschool.edu/event/politics_talk_albena_azmanova_the_crisis_of_capitalism_and_the_state- _more_powerful_less_responsible_invariably_legitimate#.VP0_MZQ2f0M)

> A key feature of the new modality is the renewal of the state's > redistributive function, with an altered logic of distribution, and a > simultaneous increase in the state's administrative power and a decrease in > its authority - a process that has failed to trigger a legitimacy crisis of > the socio-political system, despite the recent confluence of financial, > economic, and social crises. And no wonder society accepts the pain with > equanimity, Professor Azmanova will argue, as the very social contract in > Western democracies has been recast, thus breathing new life into > capitalism.

</comment><comment><USER20> Better title would be when the "modern capitalism is rewarding value extraction over value creation" argument. Think twitter, starting with "do good" argument attracting devs when they need them, then shutting them out later. Who benefits the value of the IPOS? the public?

</comment><comment><USER21> Socialised risk and privatised reward is how government should work. Universal health care is a good example: I am the most obvious benefactor of my own good health, but society also benefits from having healthy citizens.

Revenue generation is only the goal of government so that it can support its citizens.

<comment><USER13> _Socialised risk and privatised reward is how government should work._

Banks take (less than they used to, since some legislation was brought back) insane risks because they know Joe public will cover disastrous losses when it goes wrong, and the bankers can keep the massive profits when they get lucky. Socialised risk, private profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The author's argument is presented better and in more detail here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9168693](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9168693)

</comment><comment><USER23> > Where are Xerox Park and Bell Labs today?

Bell labs was financed because AT&T had a monopoly status on landlines; whatever the costs, AT&T could just raise fees for a cent and cover all expenses. AT&T lost its monopoly so it could no longer pay for Bell labs.

so this monopoly status was good for Bell Labs, but it also covered up the many gross inefficiencies of a monopoly body and it did limit competition - and growth.

> I believe the green economy merits much more funding than it is currently > receiving by government

I suspect that this is a value based judgment.

Who is to know if the next growth period will rather be based on nano technology, or maybe will be based of artificial intelligence? I guess that civil servants are in a bad position to make such judgments, because they bear little personal responsibility for their decisions.

If one looks at the internet boom, then one can discern many stages here:

\- first was the fundamental research that explored the subject of packet switching networks; this was funded by the US military \- next was the gradual development of networking technology, which took some ten-fifteen years. Here there were many actors, part of them from research and part from industry \- next came the first boom-bust cycle of the nineteens; whatever one thinks of it, it helped to build the required networking infrastructure for wider adoption and it helped to create many technologies that were important for the next stage. \- next came the present growth based on targeted advertising / private sector surveillance based on social networks.

No one actor could have directed this process; public sector did facilitate basic research, it created the prerequisites for growth, but actual growth was still several steps away from that; at any of these stages it could have been stopped by some misguided policy decision.

Prof. Mazzucato seems to underestimate the risks that entrepreneurs had to take during this process; Research financed by the public sector is a prerequisite for growth, but state dirigims would not have led to it either;

Dirigism in France created the minitel network, but that is not quite the internet of today.

</comment><comment><USER24> There is way to socialize the rewards of innovation. It is called taxation. Why US allows such wide tax evasion is whole other qustion.

<comment><USER25> The us has some of the highest tax compliance rates in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Mazzucato gave an interesting talk [1] about this to the Long Now Foundation back in March 2014.

[1] [http://longnow.org/seminars/02014/mar/24/entrepreneurial- sta...](http://longnow.org/seminars/02014/mar/24/entrepreneurial-state- debunking-private-vs-public-sector-myths/)

<comment><USER27> She also has a book, "The Entrepreneurial State".

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> She just described one of the main benefits of having a state. It allows people to flourish. Of course, excluding obvious scenarios of nefarious uses of public money for personal profit.

The state creates an environment that allows individuals to make profit in a safe way (contracts, violence, laws, etc). An underlying bit of information that is ignored is that the individual profiting means that we all profit, in small and not necessarily measurable ways. And sure why not, why can't the public be the one to bear the risk in the examples stated? It does for everything else. Isn't this the "collective" way?

And I have seen this line of thinking elsewhere, particularly when discussing the merits of having a state at all. The idea that somehow we "owe" the state for all these nice things it gives us _beyond_ what we already pay in personal taxes.

"Go live in Somalia", they would tell me, if you don't like paying taxes.

</comment><comment><USER29> Do subsidized projects such as Tesla earn any returns for the government?

<comment><USER30> Yes, but with low margins. The $465m DOE loan extended to Tesla was repaid, almost a decade before the maturity date, with an effective interest rate of 2.6% (approx $12m).

<comment><USER31> Presumably, there is also the public good of having more electric vehicles, which was the rationale for such subsidies in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I so very much hate socialism. The state, with the money it took from all of us through taxes is presented as a benefactor because it gives small amounts of those money back to research. And she wants the state to have more share from successful research.

The state, any state, is a very bad administrator of funds, because the so called state are basically a bunch of people spending other peoples money on things that they dont understand and they dont really care about. What they care about is building their own public image with those money in order to be reelected.

I'd feel much more confortable in having to pay lower taxes and let the private investors do the investment, because VCS actually care about how their money are spent.

<comment><USER33> I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies that have no idea what they are doing carelessly spending other people's money on creating the space age, the Internet age, and the age of genomics respectively.

I don't believe for a second that private investment would have done these earlier or better if the greedy government had stolen less tax money from you.

edit: downvotes yay! Please enjoy using the Internet to show your distain for giving credit for revolutionary federally-funded technology projects.

<comment><USER25> >I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies... I don't believe for a second that private investment would have done these earlier.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

Interestingly, one of your examples, genomics, is exactly contradicted by Celera. At the time of inception the human genome project was slated to take 20 years! (We'd only be halfway done with it now). Say what you want about their idiotic and immoral business model - patenting and licensing human genes - the "private arm" of the human genomics project pushed for shotgun sequencing and got the genome sequenced in 3 years; and the hapmap shortly thereafter.

<comment><USER34> > "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary > depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

The author met that they've benefited in the sense that we _all_ have benefited.

I very much doubt that there are many people in the world who have directly benefited (i.e., received grants from) all of NASA, the NIH, and DARPA.

<comment><USER25> Even if the benefit is indirect, it's still hard to see how alternatives are possible, even when the evidence is right there in front of you. Did you even know we eradicated two diseases without the NIH (Smallpox, eliminated in the US by 1897, long before the NIH existed) - and Polio, eliminated through the private nonprofit March of Dimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Are we re-inventing "Tragedy of the commons" principle, which is as old as social inequality itself?

</comment><comment><USER36> The state needs to do only one thing, don't disturb private initiatives

</comment><comment><USER37> The article is a lot better than the title! (I only skimmed, rather than read it though.) People should read it. I agree with a ton there.

But the article's author has a huge blind spot - if you search the article for "tax", you will see just a couple of occurrences, and the author basically dismisses the mechanism. It's almost as though the author had no idea how the state even gets money - the author just thinks the state's role in innovation is underplayed.

That may be true, but the size of the state depends (obviously) on the size of the economy. It's obvious that if the state invests in innovation that causes a 1000x rise in productivity, hugely increasing the size of the economy, then the state also becomes larger, through the usual mechanisms.

Taxes are how anything is socialized - the author almost behaves as though the state's money comes out of nowhere.

Another good example of applying the title incorrectly would be public education. People generally go to elementary and high school for free. They can then go off to work, sometimes even founding companies, which they could never do if they're illiterate. You could consider education a "risk" on these entrepreneurs: not everyone who becomes literate can create a ton of value in private enterprise, either as a founder or someone working for a good salary at a company; but nobody needed to take a risk on these people in elementary school (with 10 years+ until payoff), the state does it. In fact it's mandatory.[1]

So could we say, "We have socialized the risks of education but privatized the rewards?" (in that you're a free person who is now educated.) Well, yes. But who pays for all that public schooling - everyone does. The author perhaps fails to see the relationship between a state causing an increase in society's private benefits - and the fact that that the state is in a position to do so due to the latter.

All the state is, is a percentage of the economy, which is public. It has a good and important role - but that role comes from being a percentage. The Thatcher quote is appropriate: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money to spend." That never happens if the state remains 20%-30% of the economy. The size of the economy can simply increase indefinitely.

It's not possible (which may surprise the author) for this to happen in a way that doesn't cause the state to also increase in size. So while I agree with the main contention, it bears pointing out that it is a two-way street: private enterprise (and private citizens) get 'free' public goods from state spending, that they don't have to pay for. But the state gets a 'free' percentage of all private enterprise (and private earnings) - in fact, set at whatever it wants. The state can literally tax whatever level it wants and in whatever ways it wants.

So it is, in fact, a two-way street.

[1] see compulsory education - since the 1800's, "Fines were imposed on parents who did not send their children to school and the government took the power to take children away from their parents and apprentice them to others if government officials decided that the parents were "unfit to have the children educated properly"."

<comment><USER38> On compulsory education:

If you agree with John Taylor Gatto, you could argue that the purpose of universal education was never to provide children with opportunities to learn how to make a living (apprenticeships rules date from the middle ages, and every other human society solves this problem somehow), but to condition them to blind obedience and dullness... for the direct benefit of the government (in the age of Napoleonic Wars, you needed lots and lots of idiot sheep that would literally march towards the enemy lines and shoot each other at point blank range) and indirectly to the nascent class of industrialist who needed a new kind of workers who would perform the same micro task over and over again with no regard for the total process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Please don't tell me this central planning fad is coming back. The last time people were infatuated with the planned society 200 million people died.

</comment><comment><USER40> i use that exact same phrase every time anyone tries to include me on a discussion about tipping. (and then promptly leave said discussion)

<comment><USER41> Care to elaborate? I don't quite follow.

<comment><USER40> restaurant owner pass the same risk of failure to the servers (no client, no sales, no food on your plate end of month) in exchange of no extra benefit (if restaurant goes really well, they will probably have to add more servers, keeping the larger profit for owner, but cutting your tips in half, hence, server has no benefit if restaurant is an overnight success)</comment></comment></comment>


The Guy Who Says He Owns 50% Of Facebook Just Filed A Boatload Of New Evidence - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-lawsuit-paul-ceglia-new-evidence-2011-4

<comment><USER2> The only thing i don't understand is why this big law company got into that thing, i mean they have to know if this is just bullshit and this would harm their reputation.

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of the comments on this and other submissions blow this off as another lame attempt. But DLA Piper is not rookie law firm and if they actually are as confident as they say they are in this case, it is going to be interesting to watch.

<comment><USER4> Has a law firm ever _not_ bragged about how confident they are that they'll win?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> An email is just a text file. It could have been saved for all that time, or written yesterday. In the context of an outstanding accusation of forgery, more easily-forged documents have no evidential value.

<comment><USER2> A friend of Mark from this time could easily say if this is his writing style or not.

<comment><USER6> Mark's style could also be forged with a bit of frequency analysis so I'm not sure it proves anything (although it's admittedly unlikely).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> previously submitted at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2436064></comment>


Heroku databases and tools outages - <AUTHOR> https://status.heroku.com/ <comment><USER2> This was the email our team received:

Our monitoring app has been unable to reach your database (name) since at 2018-05-31 21:57:34 UTC. This is likely due to an underlying hardware or network failure and not something caused by your application.

We're attempting to bring it back online automatically. If we can't, we'll page an engineer to help.

When your database is available again, performance may be temporarily reduced while Postgres rebuilds its cache through normal usage.</comment>


Ask HN: What makes you not want to work with a developer? - <AUTHOR> A big one for me is otherwise smart people who immediately start bashing/complaining about a language/framework that they just learned or aren't familiar with. A lot of times they make mistakes due to not knowing it well and end up putting the blame on the language/framework.
I once worked for a small startup doing React development. One day we hired a new developer who came from an Angular shop. Literally on day one he was questioning why we weren't using Angular and suggesting that it might be easier to just rewrite from scratch. This guy complained for the next couple weeks and was super bitter towards using React despite the fact that most of his problems were caused by not understanding React well enough.
I guess it boils down to: just because you're used to something doesn't mean its better. <comment><USER2> A lot of things, my experience is based on working in startups: 1\. Suggesting silly changes in CR - instead of A you could have used B. So what? I used A, let's keep it that way, time is money. 2\. Long discussions in CR 3\. Too much thinking like a programmer. I'm not coding, because I love it(although I like it), I'm coding, because business needs it... 4\. Asking for estimates, when we both know that estimates in this situation are impossible to predict. 5\. Shitty written tickets. I don't know the app well enough yet, so one sentence tickets won't help me much. 6\. Too much obsession over some technology. Everything has some good and bad sides, so stop selling it, especially when no one is paying you to do that. 7\. Also, I dislike when you can't get a simple answer to your question, but you get funny looks that you don't know the answer yet.

<comment><USER3> Oh yes, so often the CR process becomes a hassle. Somebody positions themselves at the door as some sort of guard, and harasses everybody going through. So often just to feel like they're the boss or something.

My son just quit a startup because that had become epidemic. Couldn't get emergency code committed; couldn't meet (artificial) deadlines for demos and shows; every choice yammered over for esoteric reasons.

I suggest to everyone: when you make a comment in CR, also approve the commit. Trust the engineer on the other end to do what is necessary and responsible. If that become a problem, address it then. It seems like the minimum in professional respect.

<comment> UK-Al05 I don't understand why people hate CR.

You're a professional you should be able to defend your code, and explain your reasoning. If you can't, you need to change it, and you'll improve at the same time.

I mean most changes in code review only take 5 minutes to rectify, so I often don't buy the time argument.

If you getting bit architectural change problems in your code review, you obviously didn't collaborate with the team very well... People should roughly know what your approach is before the CR even arrives at their door

<comment><USER2> I do think that code changes take more than 5 minutes, why? As a person, who pushed the code: 1\. I have to read the comments 2\. Decide if they are right/it's worth a hassle 3\. Sometimes you have to reach out to the author of the comment to clarify some things. 4\. Change your branch 5\. Change your (thinking) context 6\. Apply stuff 7\. Push stuff 8\. Notify the person that it's done. Many times it's more than 5mins, more like 10/15mins+

I don't hate CR. Someone below explained it better than me, that different people see the code differently. And you should respect that someone wrote it that way and not try to force your way upon them.

> If you getting bit architectural change problems in your code review, you > obviously didn't collaborate with the team very well... People should > roughly know what your approach is before the CR even arrives at their door

I agree with it a lot. I think that would solve a lot of problems, but not necessarily the small ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think complaining about new stuff is part of some people's "process."

Meaning they hate/complain, work through their frustration, and once they're quiet they're also happy. I think it is much more common than people realize, many just don't leave their comfort zones.

There is a difference however between being internally frustrated and hating the [new thing] and being toxic to everyone else. Shows immaturity, and can often be mitigated by having a polite sit-down and discussing it.

Reminds me of the expression: "You can only change yourself no one else." Which would have me consider what can I do as a coworker to help this new employee fit in and to generate less friction. Not because you caused it, but because you may have the power to mitigate it.

</comment><comment><USER5> From a PM perspective:

1) Developers who don't challenge mine or customer decisions and then complain afterwards that what we did was stupid and he had known better all along.

2) Related: Developers who answer every question with "no" or "that's impossible" even though with a slight variation it would be possible or attaining the goal would be possible in another way he knows about.

<comment><USER6> I see 1) quite a bit, and notice that I'm guilty of it as well. I think it applies copiously to both product and code decisions and I always wonder why that is.

I think it fundamentally boils down to insecurity - only by convincing yourself that your decisions are the correct ones, even if it's given the generous advantage of hindsight, can you be assured that you're as valuable as the people who made the initial ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had this issue with a developer once: We were at a hackaton, and I made a quick-and-dirty feature (we had less than 6 hours left). The other developer on our team got pissed because the code "sucked" and spend a full hour refactoring it...

While this is an extreme, I think every developer is a perfectionist in one area or another. This can be a disadvantage when you're working in highly unpredictable environments (read: business) and where a simple quick-and-dirty MVP will do the job.

So their tendency to be a perfectionist (in situations where this is NOT the optimal mindset) is my biggest struggle when working with developers.

<comment><USER8> I find there's a spectrum of developers, from the

* must be perfect

to

* the code is ugly and works. Ship it.

I find that there's a good tension between the two, but that context is really important. Certainly in the hackathon situation the refactor seems like a foolish choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Developers who make lots of broken things, then never fix or maintain them, always wanting to take the new interesting thing and make a general mess of it, while other people are cleaning up their previous messes. Many times these developers feel that testing their own code, or fixing their own bugs or doing certain things are "below" them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Bad personal hygiene.

Toxic attitude, _especially_ if they try to infect me with it.

Too loud/talkative. If I'm in a cube farm next to you, and you're loud enough to interrupt my concentration, and it happens all the time, I'm not going to be able to be very productive.

On the other hand, too _little_ communication is also a problem. If I need information from a coworker, they need to be forthcoming with that information, in a reasonably timely fashion, in a reasonably clear way.

</comment><comment><USER11> \- Vocal fry - It grates on me so much it's hard to concentrate.

\- Bashing the existing codebase immediately. You should at least have enough time to discover why things were done a certain way before trying to suggest improvements.

\- Adding significant changes without consulting ANYONE. One time this guys was brought on and decided all by himself to convert everything to Typescript and dockerize the app. Major red flag.

\- Being offended at code reviews.

\- Bad hygiene. If you smell like ass, please don't come into the office.

\- When they assume too much prior knowledge and don't explain things explicitly. Like drawing blood from a god damn stone. Very frustrating. You don't want this person to be in charge of onboarding you.

<comment><USER12> While I agree with all of these, one employee _ought_ to be able to add typescript incrementally, or write a Dockerfile... Those are pretty straight- forward, incremental changes. I've seen entire organizations sit and bite their nails when someone says "Hey, mind if I write a Dockerfile for this app?". Same thing with types - while I regularly get into debates about typescript versus flowtype - I very rarely add a type-comment (still valid JS!) without a lot of hand-wringing over "maybe one day we'll all sit down and do this RIGHT... until then, no progress on this, okay?".

<comment><USER13> I also agree w/ you on this one.

I'd like OP to expand on why that's a red flag. Dockerization and using TypeScript seem pretty straightforward and logical additions to me.

Also, if they're only additions, I wouldn't consider them significant changes.

Using TypeScript can be a significant change but Dockerization? That seems pretty standalone isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I call it the sports team problem. I don't know how to fix it. We've been fixing the same set of problems over and over for decades on the front end and there still isn't a good solution. So everyone engages cognitive dissonance to justify why their favorite sports team--err framework--is qualitatively better.

</comment><comment><USER15> The worst dev I ever worked with was overly negative, complained about everything, was indirect and passive aggressive, and was dramatic over the smallest things. Specifically they would know what an issue was and who was responsible before the fact, yet would cry afterwards and exaggerate the effect.

Some examples:

Talking about issues they had seen to a dev that they knew was responsible in a "This isn't good, how did this get here and from whom" type manner, even though they already knew who and what was responsible.

Digging through newly broken tests, determining that they were the result of update payload configs not being changed in the tests, and then proclaiming "Now all tests are untrustworthy and thus useless".

Waiting until after features/architectural decisions were implemented to point out flaws and provide solutions "If only we had used X this wouldn't have happened."

Acting as if the product either was in a precarious position or that the users/BA's/PO's were clueless and cause it to fail soon.

</comment><comment><USER16> The tendency to instantly formulate an answer to every question and a solution to every problem, and express it with the phrase "just do X".

<comment><USER17> What is bad about that

<comment><USER18> It's a sign of being a know-it-all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Designer here. I spend most of the days with the product owners taking their desires for the web app. They sometimes even like to specify button labels to correspond to language they use in business operations.

Then comes the dev. He changes buttons labels even because he doesn't agree with what the product owners — the paying clients — want. He even tries to rewrite our user stories to fit what he wants to do. He doesn't ask what the client's goals are, he just tries to change the stories to what he wants to develop.

He has a general lack of respect for his colleagues and the clients.

</comment><comment><USER20> Having strong opinions yet... basically not knowing what they're talking about.

</comment><comment><USER21> Only person i ever had difficulties with would ask me to explain him something then cut me off mid sentence, come up with some wrong assumptions and critize and then not let you explain why his concerns were wrong before he got into some defensive mode and stop the conversation with either that he dident want to discuss about it or dident care about it.... really fustrating. Often it would be solving Exactly What he was concerned about but it just never came to a full sentence before he turned it to some kind of hostility or other times it was just done another way that he wasent used to or dident see the full picture.

</comment><comment><USER22> Getting blocked. A few years ago I worked with a team who would hit a minor roadblock and just completely stop producing code. There would be a lot of energy spent on emails, ticket updates, creation of new issues, and theoretical and academic discussions on the issue. In reality we were building websites that had a short shelf life and not sending people to the moon. For a time I spent some of my energy to unblock them until I realized that this didn't actually solve the root cause.

</comment><comment><USER23> Asking questions about things that could be easily Googled.

</comment><comment><USER24> > _What makes you not want to work with a developer?_

Right of the bat, if that developer isn't kazinator, demerit points are copiously applied. Alone is best.

</comment><comment><USER25> Dogmatism.

<comment><USER18> Yep, and narcissism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bad manners or bullying behaviour, or being an asshole are the main things. After that not being able to code, no attention to detail.

</comment><comment><USER27> a developer's addiction to initialisms and acronyms puts a huge drag on any meaningful conversations related to the product

</comment><comment><USER28> Oh hell where do I start?

some stories that bump up in my mind: (Initially I wrote 3 paragraphs but it was quite therapeutic so I kept going)

1) I was working in a company I co-founded and was the tech lead (wrote most of the codebase). After some time we had our product deployed and the team (mostly juniors) were quite comfortable with the stack. I was invited to participate in a very interesting project (personally) and had to move to France for a year or so. After some months, the CEO wanted to grow some new features. I couldn't work because of not having time and legal terms of the current contract. I suggested hiring a senior dev to lead the new features. They hired a brilliant guy (technically speaking) and all went well (in terms of budget and deployment). After finishing the project there and not wanting to stay in France, I asked to come back to my company (I still had lots of shares) and both CEO and team were very pleased with my return. The new lead was not. Comprehensible. I was really trying to not step in his feet and work mainly as Ops and R&D, letting him do the Dev part. Äfter a while some strange things started to happen:

* I lost merge and push permissions to the repositories without prior warning. * He started to CR my code and overwrite with his 'corrections' after office hours. It started with dumb stuff such as whitespace/identation and ended with major rewrites. * He started to profile my code and compare to his own version that he had done in the weekend. ( code that should be run once a week in a cron, should be correct, not fast) * started to convince people that I was slacking off when I went out for lunch earlier or something like that. * He tried to insinuate that I was interested in one of the programmers sexually. (In that moment, the CEO had to investigate this) (I wasn't doing anything wrong) (Later, some coworked showed private slack messages of him being extremely biased on finding bugs and errors on females code (or code that was wrongly commited in the name of females)) * And the last drop was him putting his own copyright header on EVERY SINGLE FILE in EVERY SINGLE REPO of the organization (I admit that I laughed when I saw the .gitignore and travis files with copyright). Probably scripted. When called out on this, tried to sue the company saying that we stole his code. In court we showed the git history and all was settled.

TLDR: Very smart people can be very mean and dumb when afraid.

2) Leading a 4 person team (me + 4) on writing the backend for a load intensive project. We wrote everything in 6 months. Tested, optimized, clean code. I was very happy. Close to launch date, we had a meeting with business and frontend to show the state of the project. During my 2 hour presentation, the frontend lead was coding furiously in his laptop. When I ended, he got up and asked why we took so long, if he could make an mvp in node in 2 hours, then demonstrating it working. I believe that I spent close to 2 minutes speechless just staring him wondering how he could just be so cynical. The business guys were in a mix of baffled about how genius this guy was and kind of pissed off with me. I then explained about testing, deploying in scale, performance, etc but for them it was just techie bla bla bla... very frustrating.

TLDR: when you are working in a project, work with the team not against it, please. let's focus on having the best product.

3) New company, working on building backend pipeline for intensive data analysis. That jerk from 2) was hired as 'culture lead front end' or something like that. His job was to give lectures on trendy frameworks and how they were amazing, buying beer (???) and making the team tight together (ok, but wtf). It started with hoodies and cups (ok), then going out for pizza or beers (ok too), then hackathons from time to time (ok, but didnt like pressure to going to them) (It would be better if it was paid time or the code was Open Source or nothing work related). But then he started to make some college frat stuff: going to clubs, pressuring the younger and nerdier guys to pick up women, then most of frontend (15 guys) started to use the same style of haircut and clothes. When I found out that they had done that zuckerberg thing of rating women of the company, I sent a company wide e-mail denouncing it (it was a company private repository and made during a company hackathon). The CEO wasn't very happy with my vigilante attitude. The backend team was very nice, still friends with them.

TLDR: please leave college level douchbaggery in college.

4) Working on the energy industry, doing network protocols. Knowing shit about electronics. Had a quite tight schedule (6 months aprox). From time to time, I needed the electronics team to test the protocols, give me some feedbacks, you know, working with me... They did test but it took them 2 weeks aprox. for every iteration. No answers/messages from the team until they finished testing. I couldn't know if they didn't received the email, if they ignored it, if they scheduled it for some day... I sent lots of emails and called and everything, just ghosting... I complained a lot with their lead and later with the CEO. The answer I got was always that they had stronger priorities. And that I was responsible for that working, not them. Since the protocol was written for the in-house electronics, I had to have their feedback. Their lead living in germany wasn't helping either, since I was being called during night (like 1-3 am) to do 'briefing meetings'. The pay was very good, only thing that made me stay until launch.

TLDR: Maybe I am programmer/computer-scientist/agile and not an engineer/waterfall. But ghosting is so mean. Like, so mean.

5) Current job(CTO and co-founder of a small startup): For heaven sake I don't have any major complaints: Guy next to me don't stop shaking his leg and making sounds with his hands and overreacting when something works or do not work. The UX dev has this habit of just saying loud 'hey guys have you seen X????' And starts to talk about X for 20 min straight. Junior devs asking questions before I can even take my headphones out, making me ask them to repeat the question and totally breaking my flow. Considering asking for a private office ( not sure if possible).

TLDR: Thank current team for being so nice. We have in our 20 person team people from work 1) and 3). The CEO is the same of the company 1).

<comment><USER29> Very relatable.

I laughed with number 5 because I'm a leg shaker, but I can't break that habit. Those things are minor and maybe not even something to complain about.

For the other cases, like 2. It's hard to deal with people like that, even after reading "Dealing with people you can't stand" which helped, but it is yet another effort you have to make yourself with unpredictable results.</comment></comment>


New years resolutions - <AUTHOR> http://jtoy.net/2009/12/31/new-years-resolutions.html

<comment><USER2> This book about sleep has pretty good reviews: [http://www.amazon.com/Promise- Sleep-Medicine-Connection-Happ...](http://www.amazon.com/Promise-Sleep- Medicine-Connection-Happiness/dp/0440509017/), I'm going to buy it.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, I'm ordering the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not a huge fan of new year resolutions. If you feel something isn't right with your life, don't wait, change it now. Have a happy new year HN.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know this isn't exactly HN related, but I was hoping someone could help me with the sleep deprivation problem

<comment><USER4> Discipline in getting up, IsoCort three times daily (for Adrenal Fatigue), and Somatomax (active ingredient is GABA which stimulates HGH production and is a light sedative which helps with going to sleep when taken right before bedtime).

Links:

<http://www.modernherbalist.com/products/isocort.html>

[http://www.amazon.com/MuscleMaster-hitech30-Hi-Tech- Somatoma...](http://www.amazon.com/MuscleMaster-hitech30-Hi-Tech-Somatomax- servings/dp/B000XWQ62G)

Somatomax can be researched more if you need, I am not a reseller or anything - just a _very_ happy user. It has had no adverse side effects. I can only take a quarter of a cup of it though (I sleep deeply and have abundant energy all day); the full suggested serving size makes me feel too sedated in the morning.

Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> btw, where do you put an ebook for sale when it's ready? I mean, what's the best place to sell it in terms of getting as much readers as you possibly can?

<comment><USER2> Oh, and if you need a co-author, I'll be glad to discuss that. Just in case we both want to write about the same thing the same way.

<comment><USER5> I'd like to get a book out on insomnia but then I'd prefer to read an MD myself. Otherwise I want to write something about modelling biological neural networks or balancing robotics pitched to the beginning hobbyist (me).

<comment><AUTHOR> hi, can you guys email me so we can talk about this.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Alphabet exec says self-driving cars 'have gone through a lot of hype' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/23/alphabet-exec-admits-google-overhyped-self-driving-cars.html <comment><USER2> I often wonder if all these projections about self driving, VR, and before that, 3D printing, are essentially wish fulfillment for and from a biased audience. I'd _want_ to say that self driving cars are just around the corner, because that's the future I want to live in.

In that case, I wonder what it says about our present reality. The need to make such gloriously optimistic projections about self driving cars essentially indicates that driving isn't fun to a lot of people (ergo, car makers are making boring cars), or that commuting is too unpleasant (ergo, city planners have been slacking)

<comment><USER3> I don't see VR and 3D printing as wish fulfillment. While they're both relatively niche (from my consumerist perspective), they do fulfill roles.

VR is good for therapeutic immersive reasons, for example [1]. And 3D printing, well, shooting rockets into the stratosphere, for example [2].

IMO VR and 3D printing are real, albeit niche. Self-driving cars aren't fully there yet.

[1] [https://www.geekwire.com/2018/snowworld-melts-away-pain- burn...](https://www.geekwire.com/2018/snowworld-melts-away-pain-burn- patients-using-virtual-reality-snowballs/)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSAB2KNgVso](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSAB2KNgVso)

<comment><USER4> I'd still say VR and 3D printing are (historically) overhyped. Within their respective niches, they're very effective technologies. But there's also this idea they're going to change the consumer landscape, because everyone's going to have one in their home, and use it all the time.

e.g., my experience with consumer-grade 3D printing is that it still kind of sucks. It makes home fabrication marginally more convenient than it was without 3D printing, and a lot more aggravating. Even with the rise of gig economy 3D printing services, which have made me a lot happier by removing the hassle of actually operating a 3D printer and giving me access to much better equipment than I'd ever buy for myself, I find that the best executed prints that I order still require significant manual finishing time. It's still just an extremely far cry from the "You'll never need stuff shipped to you because you can just print it at home" hype that surrounded the technology 5 or 10 years back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FWIW Here is my anecdotal experience. I have be driving a Tesla Model 3 for 1 year now. I don't have their Full Self Driving package but had added on Autopilot (adaptive cruise control plus lane keeping). 75% of my commute (and lot more on trips) is the car driving itself. I'm of course ready to take over any moment but with all the help from the sensors it is definitely much safer than depending on my senses alone. Over the months the self driving has become more natural, reliable and safer. Over the next several years it will only keep getting better. It has a huge positive impact on reducing driver fatigue.

I know that the topic at hand is about L5 fully autonomous, but wanted to share that though robotaxis are still some ways out, big benefits to personal driving is already here. From here things will rapidly evolve towards the ideal state.

<comment><USER6> What do you still do manually?

An important concept pointed out in these conversations before is that human- in-the-loop driving is a moving target. That is, it's possible we may never get to the point of fully automated driving because we may discover that the safest method is humans doing some small fraction, and automated systems doing the rest. Since we have partial automation now, and will continue to in the future, we're not asking "When will automated systems replace human drivers?" but "When will fully automated systems replace humans using partially automated systems?" Because we're constantly improving the partially automated systems, we're constantly raising the bar that a fully automated system needs to meet.

<comment><USER7> > What do you still do manually?

If there is no car in front of you, stop and start at lights and intersections. Turn (while with FSD package it takes highway ramps automatically, it's not reliable on any complex highway intersection). In heavy traffic, you have to change lanes manually, automatic system is not aggressive enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In 2013 Google said it would have autonomous cars by 2018

In 2017 Google said the cars would be available in months according to the article.

Last year Elon Musk said there would be 1mm robo taxis by the end of 2020.

These corporations leverage the public's lack of understanding to spin a tale to investors and the market. Then, this tale got co-opted by politicians like Andrew Yang who say 4 million truckers will be out of work in 5-10 years, so we need to vote for him + UBI to protect us from the threat of AI in the future.

The view I take is that planes have pilots for a variety of reasons, many of which are not related directly to controlling a plane's path. We have 30 years of data on flight and flights have fewer inputs to analyze, yet we still keep pilots around because of the added sense of security and the utility pilots serve on edge cases.

I think self driving cars will be very similar and the future where no one drives probably will not exist for a long time.

Another thing I find interesting, the retort most bring to driverless cars is that they will prevent needless deaths, but say for example America has 40,000 deaths due to car crashes per year, and 20,000 are preventable, but autonomous vehicles malfunctioning causes 10,000 deaths. So a net result of 30,000 deaths with autonomous cars. In terms of death the result is positive, but now you are relinquishing control over your experience. Someone with excellent driving skills, who never drinks and drives, and who follows the speed limit, faces a way lower risk of death driving. However, self driving cars introduce new risks to that individual, and for that reason I do not I believe the optimal combination for drivers will be the same as for pilots: machinery + individual control.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, Google did have autonomous cars by 2018, including fully driveless ones, and available to select public users.

So in that sense, they didn't lie, but the scale of the roll out has been much smaller and slower than what most people expected. I don't think Google specifically made comments about the scale. Elon on the otherhand did mention big numbers, which is a different story.

<comment><USER8> Thats a good point, you're right Google does have at least some version of autonomous

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Self driving is way over hyped and lots of smart people bought into it. A few years ago I kept commenting about it not being around the corner. A few people compared my comments to "Less space than nomad."

We've done the same to AI, what someone called AI a decade ago has been reinvented as AGI. We are doing the same to self-driving cars. "What we really meant by self-driving is self-driving in perfect conditions and normal intersections. You're thinking of autonomous self-driving or Level X self driving." All I've seen is driver assist tech improve.

<comment><USER11> _A few people compared my comments to "Less space than nomad."_

That's because some people should think harder about their comparisons before they verbalize them. The quoted comment poo-pooed an existing product that you could buy with a mere trip to one's local Apple retailer.

Poo-pooing the hype of something that hasn't even been invented yet? To take take the opposite side of that argument with any fervor strikes me as arguing for the sake of it. I mean, until I can ride in one, we could go on all day about when they're likely to appear, couldn't we?

<comment><USER12> > _That 's because some people should think harder about their comparisons > before they verbalize them. The quoted comment poo-pooed an existing product > that you could buy with a mere trip to one's local Apple retailer._

cmdrtaco was also criticizing the product as it existed at the time, not the product it would evolve into which, in retrospect, made his criticism seem ridiculous. He was criticizing the first revision which had poor connectivity (firewire only) and little storage (5GB on launch, 10GB later.) The fourth revision, the one that actually became a run-away success, had 20-60GB of storage and was the first to have full USB support.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_pe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do a lot of this stuff, and have friends who did their PhD theses on different engineering challenges in self-driving cars.

Everybody agrees we'll figure out autonomous cars sooner rather than later, but nobody thought a 2020 timetable was going to happen. It's undeniable that we've made huge advances since the first DARPA challenge, but there's a long way to go before we get them to be sufficiently robust.

<comment><USER14> 30 years

<comment><USER13> That'd be my guess too. I'm not sure if we'd be able to do 100% of off highway driving, but I imagine we'll be able to go cross country by then.

<comment><USER15> The joke is that it has always been, and will always be, 30 years until it's here.

Also true for other things such robot assistants etc.

<comment><USER16> Timescales: [https://xkcd.com/678/](https://xkcd.com/678/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What I wonder is how much of self-driving cars failure to deliver on earlier timelines and roadmaps is attributable to AI. If it is will we see similar blowback in other AI-related endeavors and yet another cooling of AI as has befallen all past surges in AI progress?

My understanding is its not the sensor or control technology to blame for the pace of progress which makes me think AI isn't as capable of learning the extremely complicated task of driving as expected.

<comment> murph-almighty > If it is will we see similar blowback in other AI-related endeavors and yet > another cooling of AI as has befallen all past surges in AI progress?

Anecdotal: I've noticed a lot of talk about ML/AI at my place of work is very hand wavey and talked about by business analysts who don't know what they're talking about. My friends at other places of work see this too.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a large-scale loss of faith in AI simply because too many people tried to half-assedly leverage "using AI" for a promotion.

<comment><USER18> I did the Andrew Ng course because even technical people were talking about it in a really hand wavy way.

I feel that even the names 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'Machine Learning' were chosen as a marketing ploy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> (Apologies to anyone who's heard this before.)

The self-driving car (or "auto-auto") is a kind of sci-fi fetish.

What I want, and what could be built today I think, is a self-driving golf cart, covered in nerf and airbags, that doesn't go any faster than five or ten mph. It can do things like take seniors to and from the pharmacy or doctor appointments safely.

</comment><comment><USER20> What I don't understand about self-driving cars is that once all cars are 'self-driving' enabled then there won't be a need for the complicated AI and computer vision work since if all cars have the tech might as well just have a standard where they are constantly communicating their position with each other (add signs and traffic lights to the mix). The challenge then would be to how to efficiently route all cars simultaneously. I have the opinion that all this investment in the long run will be discarded and will only be useful in the transition period where roads are shared by humans and algorithms. Thoughts? Is this future vision shared by people involved in the self-driving world?

<comment><USER21> It can take decades for a competent company to migrate database systems. What you're describing is migrating _every car on the road, everywhere_ to self driving/communication tech. That will take 50-75+ years IMO.

<comment><USER20> True, you could minimize the requirements of self-driving systems by making license plates carry obligatory modules that transmit information to self- driving cars. The train of though is that this is an area where working together might have a bigger pay-off.

<comment><USER6> Those modules will sometimes stop working, and then you're back to having the solve something that looks a lot like the current problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is one of those unintentionally hilarious headlines.

<comment><USER23> It used to be funnier... it changed between the time I saw the headline and clicked on the link. For the curious, it used to read: "Waymo says self- driving cars have been overhyped."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> ...by Waymo, among others!

<comment><USER25> I think Tesla ultimately wins this battle. They have the real-time driving conditions and reactions being reported for likely every tricky intersection in the U.S.

That's a big competitive advantage compared to Waymo's simulations and paid drivers.

<comment><USER26> Tesla certainly has a lot of real world data on conditions and human behavior. It remains to be seen if the sensors deployed on their customers' vehicles are sufficient to the task of self-driving, however. And if they're not, that data gathering may not turn out to be very useful. Given that they don't have a system that can avoid stationary firetrucks or gore points, I think it's fair to say Tesla haven't figured out the requirements yet. There's a meta question about the privacy aspects of the data gathering and if customers have provided meaningful consent.

At least Waymo usually gets rearended by other cars as a result of being timid (except for the time they ran into a bus by being courageous and assuming the bus would move).

<comment><USER27> TIL: [https://2qibqm39xjt6q46gf1rwo2g1-wpengine.netdna- ssl.com/wp-...](https://2qibqm39xjt6q46gf1rwo2g1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/08/web1_160808_EDH_GoreStreetG_S.jpg) (A graphic defining what a "gore point" is.) This graphic is from [https://www.heraldnet.com/news/dont-cross-the-gore-point- whe...](https://www.heraldnet.com/news/dont-cross-the-gore-point-when-merging- onto-the-interstate/) , although at least in my browser was shrunk and hard to read.

I actually thought for a moment that 'gore point' was a dark joke about places that Teslas tend to hit with their autopilots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Five years out"

<comment><USER29> I can't find that text in the article. Who are you quoting?

<comment><USER30> It's a reference to the general claim about self driving cars, super batteries that make solar competitive, etc. these things are always just 5 years away forever.

<comment><USER29> It's best not to use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20quotation%20marks%20quoting&sort=byDate&type=comment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Don't be a slave to the money then.</comment>