AI and Robotics in Agriculture in Japan [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/vod/rising/20170608/ <comment><USER3> I often laugh about that soon miniaturization of electronics and soon mechanics too, we'll be so proud of our new little swarms of silicon insects. Then someone will have the genius idea to make them env. friendly, even biodegradable, and feed on local nutrient; and to provide self sustained optimizations, make them exchange heuristic atom that we'd call genes. Greetings, humans, welcome to nature. You just learned to speak to it.

ps: I heard there were tiny leaf cutting quadcopters on the market in Europe.

<comment><USER4> I used to dislike nature because technology seemed cooler. Metal beats flesh, right?

But at some point I realised this: nature _is_ technology. It's a super- advanced nanotech that is not of our design, and which we can't control... _yet_.

Our current solutions may seem better, but that's only because they're crude attempts at directly optimizing for narrow set of goals. Planes may be faster than birds, but they don't self-heal, self-fuel, and don't do centimetre- precision maneuvering in a complex environment.

Nowadays I believe that our technology has a lot to learn and steal from nature - e.g. materials, energy-efficiency, self-replication. Better metal will look more and more like flesh.

<comment><USER3> Basically we agree. I see "tech" as anthropological hubris mostly. We overcome our own limited understanding through the ages and each time we felt great. Dismissing the beauty of everything around us. When you think about how even a fly is amazing, or an insect, so minuscule, so thin.

At the end we'll only get to understand our own world and own bias. Then we may reconsider the meaning of life and our cultures.

<comment><USER4> I thought we agree until this comment :). I don't see tech as hubris _at all_. I see it as what makes humans interesting.

For me, since the dawn of human age, we've been mostly taking baby steps, and only in the last two or three decades we've entered puberty. There's still a lot for us to learn, and nature is a constant reminder of that.\

For me, the fly is not amazing just because it's a fly - it's amazing because it shows how many things we have not learned... yet. It's a constant reminder that we're nowhere near the peak of what's possible, and a constant encouragement to try and scale that peak.

<comment><USER5> I'm speaking as someone who makes a living with technology, and I have a vested, material interest in keeping this status quo. I make a differentiation between knowledge and wisdom.

We can learn a lot from nature -- in the sense that we can learn a lot of knowledge. And you are right, we are nowhere near the peak. Maybe I am reading into your words too much, but it feels like there is a lot of enthusiasm you have for technology. That resonates with me.

However, I agree with the other guy -- it is hubris. How I get there has to do with wisdom not being normative. We might be able to gain a lot of knowledge, but we have not been gaining much wisdom.

There are other frames I can get into -- for example, Eisler's "Chalce and Blade", Mander's "In the Absence of the Sacred", Mazis's "Trickster, Magician, and Grieving Man". I think we very much have an arrogance which comes with technology, in our attitudes around it and what we want to do with it, and the many consequences around how we use and abuse technology.

For me, a fly is not just amazing because it shows how much knowledge we have yet to learn about a fly. To use the language of mystics: there is wisdom in _being_ the fly, one that is non-obvious.

<comment><USER3> I could add so system theory on how insect perceive the world in great detail yet a bit different than us (bertalanffy did research on the "render period" of insects). IT's not really "mystique", more a holistic view on things. It's an insect, it's a pile or bio mechanic organic goo, it's quite intelligent, it's beautiful to watch, it's similar to us, it's part of the whole ecosystem.

But the thing is, the more I know about the universe, the less I want to "know". Or at least the less I want to turn into application, business and all that; which in this is case is often hubris, ignorance (selling things hidden behind marketing talk and shiney package), for the purpose of being the best, owning a market, "advancing" the world (when most people need more basic things but alas).

<comment><USER5> You could, but that would not be what I meant by shifting consciousness. I mean modifying or altering consciousness such that one experiences the world from that view point, and in doing so, also understand how that experiencing relates to the world.

The latter part assumes a "consciousness as first principle" rather than as an emergent property of matter -- that is, why would consciousness configure itself and experience in this particular way ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Japan is by far the world leader in one of the most important tech revolutions in the coming decade, the robotics revolution.

<comment><USER7> That's not true. Agricultural robotics and automation are certainly more advanced in America and have improving for a long time. Drones with spectral cameras to examine and map plant health and irrigation levels, and to spot- spray pesticides, automated gps tractors and tools, collaborative augmented reality- nothing new in the US or Europe. It's said a lot, but Japanese robotics is somewhat myopic. IMO mostly it's due to the corporate structures in Japan: huge companies like Honda can pour tons of funding into ASIMO for 4 decades, but their goals are too narrow to make up for broad, investigative research. Plus, culture in Japan is a tangible _force_ , and the awareness of societal problems is so high it actually impedes pure research. They are so focused on their aging population and the automation of labor that the large majority of research is geared towards those problems in one way or another. The US has the same problem- we focus on military use over everything else, but we do it just a little less than Japan.

You typically hear this sentiment (Japan is the best at robotics) wrt humanoid robotics, especially ASIMO[1]. ASIMO is basically just a really smooth suite of soft skills. Facial recognition, voice, HRI, and consumer-friendly hardware. The hard skills underneath are extremely highly optimized but fundamentally weak and outdated by over 20 years. ASIMO runs on the same hardware and algorithms from the 90s except for batteries, computer speed and sensor accuracy. In the US we have been extremely inventive with hardware design- eg all-plastic mass-manufacture BAXTER, or ATLAS, which is largely hydraulic. The newest generations of ATLAS have hydraulic actuators integrated into the frame.

ASIMO and most japanese robots use a variation on ZMP walking methods, which has the characteristic high-knee, ankle-heavy look. It's extremely inefficient and unstable. Russian robots use this too. Other robots in the US, Europe and even in China use much more efficient, flexible methods separated by a couple generations of new algorithms. Take Cassie[2] from OSU's dynamic robotics lab. Pretty clearly far ahead of anything in Japan in stability, speed, power[3] and efficiency, built by grad students from scratch. Compact series elastic actuators with HZD algorithms.

Japanese robots are meant to look perfect. Russian robots are meant to look terrifying. American robots are meant to explore new algorithms or technologies. European robots are mostly meant to build cars.

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

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is4JZqhAy-M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is4JZqhAy-M)

[3]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWVci9qS7Ds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWVci9qS7Ds)

<comment><USER8> Then there's the Google debacle. Google bought Boston Dynamics, Schaft, and some other robotic startups in 2013, and they were seldom heard from again. The companies that had customers, such as Bot and Dolly, lost them. For a while, the industry assumed Google had the Next Big Thing in the works, but after a few years, it came out that Google's robotics effort had collapsed. That was a real disappointment.

Boston Dynamics's hydraulic technology is just too heavy and bulky. Big Dog was impressive, but it took $120 million to get it working as the Legged Squad Support System. Then the USMC rejected it as not useful in combat. Atlas version 1 was basically a Big Dog mod. Version 2 is better, but still weighs 150Kg.

What you want in an actuator is a spring with adjustable spring constant, neutral point, and damping factor. Muscles are like that. You can do that pneumatically, and that's been done at CWRU, but a compressed air supply is needed. Series elastic actuators are a research tool for faking muscle-like motion. They're a good way to let a motor with a high gear ratio handle a shock load, but they're inefficient; there's no energy recovery. Humans recover over half the energy in running as elastic storage in muscles. (Cheetahs, around 90%) Ideally, you'd like a direct-drive electric motor, which some SCARA robots have used. They're large-diameter devices, though. Schaft used liquid-cooled electric motors and didn't gear them down too much, which worked well. Their humanoid was a great piece of engineering. Electric linear actuators (real linear, not screw drives) once seemed promising but didn't work out well.

(I used to work on control algorithms for legged robots. A key insight there is that slip control dominates; priorities are traction control, then balance, then goal. Once you get off a flat surface, slip control becomes more important.)

<comment><USER9> Agreed about the disappointment in Google robotics. So in your opinion what will be the best available technology for robot actuators in 5-10 years?

I've recently become much more interested in robotics and I'm trying to figure out the best way to approach the field. I don't have much hardware experience so at the moment I'm thinking about training neural nets for robot control in simulation. I'm also looking for meetup groups or other ways to connect with like-minded people (in the SV area). Any advice for a dev/ML person looking to get into robotics?

<comment><USER7> If you can manage to be impressive with computer vision, that'll go a long way. The problems in that space are intense but some are solvable with NN. Recognition and things.

Most of the movement problems don't work that well with NN, afaik. I think they've been applied to avoiding singularities but if you wanted to use a NN to optimize movement, you'd have to simulate all the sets of movement first to train it. Hard ask, and people in robotics tend to be interested in abilities rather than optimization although of course they come hand in hand.

If you have the math background to understand the algorithms you can learn the cutting edge papers and implement those, then work on them. It isn't exactly simple, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Microsoft is working on this too: [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/project/farmbeats-i...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/project/farmbeats-iot-agriculture/) Saw it demonstrated at a tech event last night in DC.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm interested in using Technology in Agriculture. Anyone have any interesting links?

This is what I'm working on: [http://www.kokonaut.com](http://www.kokonaut.com)

<comment><USER12> That looks cool. What part of that project are you responsible for?

<comment><USER11> It's currently the Industrial Designer and I.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone summarize the submission? It just says "Video not available" for me.

<comment><USER14> It's basically a PR piece for a Japanese company. Shows a spraying drone, a drone on wheels that can show you a video of how well your asparagus is growing, and a drone collecting images of onion fields, that can be analyzed by AI for detection of a specific type of fungus, with questionable accuracy. I didn't see anything that would justify the 30 minutes wasted watching the video.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. All of the examples shown were basically, "and then we put a camera on this drone, isn't that cool?" I was hoping for technology at the caliber of those LED greenhouses, or at least as good as that tensorflow cucumber sorter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That link is borken.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think robots are cool, but it is a bit depressing that a big driver for their development is that the japanese want to keep immigrants out... makes me a bit hesitant to wish them luck with it.

<comment><USER18> Contrary to perception, open immigration is unfair to the weakest and poorest in a society.

I live in India. My country has 300M people living in acute poverty - <USER2> than $1/day.

These are the people who would likely benefit most from immigrating to a developed country with better healthcare and opportunities.

Yet:

1\. These people would be liabilities in a developed nation since they have no transferable skills apart from manual labor. Most can't even read or write.

2\. In 99% of cases, these people wouldn't even know anything about immigration, refugee status, etc.

Open immigration essentially helps people who already have the knowledge and means to immigrate. These are _not_ the poorest and most in-need.

The Indian immigrants moving to America or Europe can have perfectly okay lives in India. I don't begrudge them for moving, but for western people to assume a philanthropic stance for taking them in is wrong. You aren't helping the poorest; you're helping the "doing okay" segment of the population.

<comment><USER19> Being able to do manual labour is still enough of a desirable skill on its own, and yes, hordes of the poor from the Indian subcontinent emigrate (albeit on a temporary contractual basis). The outflow of dirt-poor Indian farming villages to Gulf construction projects has been a phenomenon for decades now.

<comment><USER18> The people emigrating aren't the poorest of the poor. The gulf workers you talk about are mostly from India's most developed state (Kerala), are educated (or at least, literate), and have access to decent healthcare.

The people I'm talking about are from states where 40% of the population lives below poverty line and the literacy rate is still at 60%.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


California debuts 'digital' license plates - <AUTHOR> http://amp.sacbee.com/news/local/transportation/back-seat-driver/article211828814.html <comment><USER2> Let me get this out there first. If they are not already equipped with GPS, they will be. They will then be used to track your speed and give you speeding tickets automatically. They will also be used for per-mile taxing purposes. Eventually, access to the best roads will be auctioned off, so that in the name of "traffic management", the highest bidders will be given access to Rhodes first, making it even harder for the poor to get by in California.

<comment><USER3> Do you have anything at all to back up your claims? Because I could just as easily say:

"Let me get this out there first. If they don't already allow custom images to be displayed, they will. They will then display gifs and moving images. They will also get wifi and LTE connections. Eventually, full movies will be streamed on these license plates, making it even harder for me to avoid spoilers for the avengers."

<comment><USER2> Fine if you don't believe me. I pray I am wrong. Reason to write this: I'm an American. The American government never just steps when it can overstep. California is the most taxed state in the country and spends like a banana republic. They want more more more, and they will get it. Once they iron the kinks out, it will spread to other states. Probably Washington, Oregon, and New York on that order.

<comment><USER4> All via private contractors, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As much as I love tech, things like this make me hate this industry. All that technology seems to be used for these days is to collect more data, chip a little more at your badly bruised privacy, track you, and overall make everything more square, rigid, and controlling.

At first computers were designed to empower and free you and now it's all being turned on its head and the computers control you. This is terrible. Please, everyone, keep the free spirit alive, even if it's by doing something as small as sharing your code on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it would be really cool to have cars driving without visible license plates. They would just look better that way. Not to mention if the car is in an accident we could automatically record the plate to track down hit and run drivers. Usually a pedestrian or cyclist that is hit isn't able to see and memorize the plate. A lot of people in California already have radio transponders for toll roads, this wouldn't be much different than that anyhow.

Then again though, there are plenty of horrible things you could do with this tech too. Mostly, it is the same as what they are already doing with plate readers. Tracking the innocent and guilty alike...

</comment><comment><USER7> This seems like something that should be blocked by California's own proposed privacy legislation...

Also, who on earth would choose this over a plate of screen-printed metal for $699 with a monthly fee...?

<comment><USER8> Not sure why any _sane_ person would want them (and why taxpayers would allow Sacramento to purchase those for their own fleet), but the same people who bought Juiceros or stand in line for the latest iPhone would snap these up.</comment></comment>


Windows Certificate Manager does not display the complete trust list - <AUTHOR> http://hexatomium.github.io/2015/08/29/why-is-windows/ <comment><USER2> You can also use certutil to grab all the trusted root certificates from the Windows Update server:

        certutil -generateSSTFromWU roots.sst

Then open roots.sst (which defaults to viewing in certmgr) and it will show the whole lot. Or use certutil -syncWithWU to get all the certs individually.

Alternatively: download [http://ctldl.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/t...](http://ctldl.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/authrootstl.cab) [1], extract the authroot.stl file (which is in PKCS#7 format), use 'certutil -dump' to list all the subject key identifiers therein, and then download them from the same location as authrootstl.cab by appending ".crt" to the identifier.

Windows is not lying about anything, you just need to look in the right place.

Also, if you want to examine the CTL list that Windows is currently using - which should be identical to the one above unless it's brand new or there has been a problem downloading it - this will extract it from the registry:

        powershell -Command "[IO.File]::WriteAllBytes('authroot-local.stl',(Get-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SystemCertificates\AuthRoot\AutoUpdate').EncodedCtl)"

Then use 'certinfo -dump' or whatever you like, it's exactly the same format as the downloaded authroot.stl. This is the same registry data that the OP's CTLInfo tool examines.

[1] as specified in [https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/kb/2677070](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2677070)

<comment><USER3> The bigger takeaway from this is with a system like this (fully managed by Windows Updates).. how can you remove certificates _you_ don't trust?

Latest documentation for this seems to be for IE 5. I sure as hell like to run dkpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates every once in a while after some roots get compromised and don't trust Microsoft to be on the ball.

<comment><USER2> It can be added to the disallowed certificate store, which takes precedence over any trusted stores.

For example, using the root discussed in the article:

1\. Download the root cert from [http://ctldl.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/t...](http://ctldl.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/22fdd0b7fda24e0dac492ca0aca67b6a1fe3f766.crt) (or save it from the browser's certificate viewer)

2\. Open certmgr and import it into 'Untrusted Certificates'.

(This just adds it for the current user's store. Could also import into the computer store by running mmc, adding the Certificates snap-in, and specifying 'Computer account' as the target.)

3\. Restart browser. Go to [https://certplusrootcag1-test.opentrust.com/](https://certplusrootcag1-test.opentrust.com/) \- it should say the certificate is revoked.

This only works for browsers like IE and Chrome, that use the Windows certificate store. Firefox has its own so would have to be done separately.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! While I still find this kind of backwards at least something like this exists.

<comment><USER4> Hmm, I think it's a very elegant design, probably built to _precisely_ address the problem you asked about. Update server manages whitelist, user/admin manages blacklist, which wins. Nice!

<comment><USER3> I prefer the situation on Linux where I don't have the certificate at all rather than getting the certificate and having to mark it untrusted.

Edit: I'm referring to configuring the package as ca-certificates is installed or via dpkg-reconfigure

<comment><USER5> Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't several distros come with pre-packaged root CAs?

<comment><USER6> I think the idea the parent is trying to express is that if the Linux distro (and OS X in this situation) comes with the root certificate trusted by default via ca_root_nss/ca-bundle or whatever the packager decides to name it they can disable it before even connecting to the internet, and if the certificate is not trusted by default then they don't need to worry about it magically getting trusted in the future outside of the simple fact of updating the root certificate store blindly without inspecting it.

Microsoft's approach means that the user would have to go find the certificate on the internet and blacklist it explicitly, which allows a small window where the computer is vulnerable to some kind of attack involving a certificate signed by the unwanted authority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One feature of Windows is defaulting to not showing messy complexity to the user. The other feature is defaulting to backward compatibility. Combined, this means that Windows often has more than two data stores for some aggregate feature [e.g. web browser security, software configuration etc.] as new versions of Windows implement these features in more robust ways.

So yeah there are two or more places where certificates are stored. Typical users only care about the abstraction of web security so that's what Windows surfaces. Application developers should choose the new store for new applications. Existing applications can use the old method. System administrators and security consultants should make themselves familiar with all the documentation and double their rates.

Bloggers, however, are still free to write linkbait headlines using the Windows bashing meme.

<comment><USER8> The problem with your argument is that this is an administrative GUI that isn't even normally presented to end users unless you search for it or know how MMC snap-ins work. It is a power-user interface by all measure.

And while Microsoft does simplify UIs for end users, they don't typically do the same for administrative content (just look at anything in the Admin Tools, or MMC snap-ins, no sugar coating there).

Your argument about backwards compatibility is at best confusing. What does the data stores utilised have to do with UI representations of the same? I can name numerous examples where things changed behind the scenes and the UI was just updated to support it (e.g. Disk Manager now supports ESP, and exFat, same UI, ConHost now supports Powershell, same UI, Defrag now supports Trim for SSDs, same UI, etc).

> So yeah there are two or more places where certificates are stored. Typical > users only care about the abstraction of web security so that's what Windows > surfaces.

No, it doesn't. As the blogpost clearly shows it doesn't "surface" all root CAs usable by websites.

> Application developers should choose the new store for new applications. > Existing applications can use the old method.

Huh? What do application developers have to do with this? I don't see the connection. This isn't talking about the custom root CAs you may install, it is talking about Microsoft's list of preinstalled ones.

> System administrators and security consultants should make themselves > familiar with all the documentation and double their rates.

Please link to the documentation about this on Microsoft's site.

> Bloggers, however, are still free to write linkbait headlines using the > Windows bashing meme.

Aside from the word "lying" (which is emotive), the title is largely accurate. Windows does mislead about installed trusted root CAs. And nothing you've said in this apologist answer has come close to addressing that, you're just dancing around it.

<comment><USER9> Please don't call commenters "apologists" on HN.

<comment><USER10> While I agree that UnoriginalGuy's post could have been phrased in a more neutral manner, the post he was replying to referred to the article as "linkbait" based on a "Windows bashing meme." Is that a neutral phrasing? Given that the article was revealing new information to most of the people here, I strongly disagree that the article is "linkbait."

I think you are personalizing the debate in exactly the way you are supposedly trying to avoid. Let's debate the facts, not hurt feelings. Nobody has been rude here (at least in the few posts I read). There is nothing wrong with calling someone an apologist, as long as it is done in a respectful way and not just to get a rise out of someone. We don't need to shrink the space for debate here any more than it already has been.

<comment><USER9> Totally fair point. I'm not invested in the debate so much as the word "apologist" sets me off.

<comment><USER11> How could that word possibly set you off? It's a common word in the English language, and couldn't possibly be offensive by any stretch of the word.

> a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial.

Is it just me, or are the majority of online communities that I visit becoming overrun with people that get offended by the slightest amount of bold or confrontational behavior?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Windows isn't lying. Microsoft openly lists what certificates Windows includes on their site. The fact the root certificate store on your machine only lists certificates it actually contains is to be expected.

This is just a UI failure.

<comment><USER13> But there's a difference between looking at the list of root certificates that Microsoft say Windows trusts and looking at the list of root certificates that Windows trusts.

<comment><USER14> Only if the two lists differ, _that_ would actually be noteworthy. Currently it's just a blatantly clickbait title.

<comment><USER13> If it changes and you haven't taken the software update yet the lists will differ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you're interested in seeing new roots, Microsoft has started posting all updates to the cabfpub mailing list:

[https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2015-August/005847.htm...](https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2015-August/005847.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> What seems to be happening with Windows is that Microsoft is making the machine more a slave of their services with each new release. It's as if they're trying to catch up with Chromebooks, which are totally slaved to Google. Especially since Windows 10 is free with ads. Treating the local certificate store as a cache to the main certificate store at Microsoft HQ is consistent with this.

How difficult it is to hijack the link between the local and remote certificate stores? That's a potential attack surface. It's not hard-coded; it's a registry key (Software\Microsoft\SystemCertificates\AuthRoot\AutoUpdate). The default URL is "ctldl.windowsupdate.com".

So what protects that domain from being hijacked via DNS poisoning? It ought to have a valid SSL cert, right? Well, no. Go to "[https://ctldl.windowsupdate.com/"](https://ctldl.windowsupdate.com/"):

        ctldl.windowsupdate.com uses an invalid security certificate.

        The certificate is only valid for the following names:
        a248.e.akamai.net, *.akamaihd.net, *.akamaihd-staging.net,
        *.akamaized.net, *.akamaized-staging.net
        (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

Uh oh. Am I missing something, or are root certs downloaded over an unsecured channel?

<comment><USER2> They are transmitted over an unencrypted channel, but the CTL files themselves (authroot.stl and disallowedcert.stl) are signed by Microsoft so it's fine. Any modification in transit can be detected and presumably will cause them not to be updated.

<comment><USER16> So an attacker could return an old "disallowedcert.stl" to re-activate a revoked cert?

<comment><USER2> It would be interesting to try. There's a sequence number in the CTL which could prevent this type of attack, but I don't know if it's actually checked against that which is currently stored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't the first question to ask "Can I trust Windows?" (and the answer "no", for all the obvious reasons)?

</comment><comment><USER18> Is this really true? When I navigate to [https://certplusrootcag1-test.opentrust.com/](https://certplusrootcag1-test.opentrust.com/) I see the root certificate is "Certplus Root CA G1", not "OpenTrust Root CA G1"...

<comment><USER19> It is "CertplusRoot CA G1" in my system too. This CA was added recently ([http://www.infoworld.com/article/2941594/security/microsoft-...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/2941594/security/microsoft- quietly-pushes-17-new-trusted-root-certificates-to-all-windows-systems.html)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The Edge browser doesn't display certificate data at all. This has been discussed on the CAB forum mailing list recently.

</comment><comment><USER20>
        CTLInfo is the result of a few sleepless nights spent
        understanding and reverse engineering some of the CTL
        obscure format

I wonder what the reason is to use a userunfriendly system like Windows and then spend hours and hours fighting it?

No matter how much time you put in, you will never win against an OS that is working against your interests.

<comment><USER21> 1) Because MSFT provides great corporate support for desktops. Keyword: great. Not good. Great.

2) Because people are used to it.

3) Because Office products are the de facto standard, and they run best on windows.

I could go on, but you get the point.

<comment><USER22> Everyone talks about how great the alternatives for office are. Buy they are good. Not great. Even office word online is better than Google docs.

<comment><USER23> What is "better" about MS word than google docs? The only reason I see to use word is if you're using files from 1999 that don't work anywhere else.

Google docs is a much simpler system, especially for places like schools because of the "cloud" nature of it. Google docs has all the features the average person needs.

MSWord is for specialty cases, google docs and the open alternatives are for everyone else.

I'm about to earn a masters degree and I've never needed to use MS word. Double spacing, page numbers, and aligning text work in just about every processor. I've rarely received a word document from a professor that used advanced features of word, they're always poorly formatted.

<comment><USER24> In my experience, Docs can't even reliably align the cursor with the position between characters (problem described here[1], except my zoom is at 100% already).

Thankfully all my documents have very light formatting, so I can just write in Vim and then upload them.

[1] [http://www.podiohelp.com/google-docs-cursor- misaligned/](http://www.podiohelp.com/google-docs-cursor-misaligned/)

<comment><USER25> I get this as well, and I have another problem. I usually work in Word but one company wants things in Google Docs. OK, I create the document in Word in Times Roman and paste it into Google Docs.... which converts it into Arial.

If I copy something else from the same Word document into the same Google Doc, then Google keeps it in Times. How does that work?

Is there a "smart paste" feature I've missed?

<comment><USER26> [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms649013\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

<comment><USER25> Sorry if I'm being thick, but I'm using the same clipboard to paste between the same two documents, so I still don't see why GDocs should interpret them differently....

I can try clearing the clipboard between pastes: would that make a difference?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Since when did anyone trust Windows/Microsoft/closed source software, anyway?

Did I miss anything?</comment>


Android Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Bearded-Hen/Android-Bootstrap

<comment><USER2> One thing that I like about Android is that developers can choose to minimally style buttons and similar UI elements and these differences will be applied to whatever the base _device_ theme is.

This means that users will get a consistent user experience throughout various applications and won't have to run around trying to figure out what's a button and what's a text input.

Sadly, this project essentially destroys all of that work and something tells me it won't work correctly on the most customized devices (like the old Motorola RAZR running 2.3 for example).

Nice idea but I don't think it makes much sense in it's current state.

<comment><USER3> Following UX/UI patterns make sense, but not design - especially if you plan to be cross platform.

<comment><USER4> What's the logic here? If you're cross platform, _most_ people are most likely not going to be using your app on more than one platform, so there's little to be gained from a "consistent experience across platforms" angle. It's rare that the same person or team is doing both iOS and Android development, and the languages and layout methods are different anyway, so there's little to be gained on the development side in terms of reuse. Maybe it makes sense if you only have one "mobile PM" who handles both, but this seems shortsighted considering how quickly the platforms change and, especially on Android, how many devices and carrier customized builds you need to test on.

I suppose it makes sense from a branding perspective, but any designer worth their weight should be able to come up with a distinctive branded experience that doesn't revamp the entire, default, builtin experience on the device.

<comment><USER2> I can see where he's coming from, my company is actually at fault on this exact point.

The initial target was iOS and then clients requested Android compatibility as well. Designs for iOS are completed and implemented and are then re-used for Android. The excuse is 'consistent user experience' but really they just don't want to do the same job twice for a platform that generally has less usage and provides less profit (in our case at least).

I took matters into my own hands and there are noticeable differences between the two applications. There was of course some backlash (I flat out refused to put a 'back' button on the action bar for example or move the sliding menu to the right side) but in general the look and feel is consistent across the two platforms.

That doesn't (and won't) stop me from using native controls such as text inputs and dialogs that users on Android are quite familiar with.

In case someone has no clue what the hell I'm talking about I'd be happy to share some screenshots via pm.

<comment><USER4> _Designs for iOS are completed and implemented and are then re-used for Android. The excuse is 'consistent user experience' but really they just don't want to do the same job twice_

Yeah, this is a sign of a bad PM, who doesn't understand the market or mobile ecosystem enough to realize that the targets are completely different.

On the other hand, if the interface was designed to be completely unique and skirted all the specifics of the deployment platform, in an attempt to be branded or for reuse of designs, that's reasonable. Often, however, it is obvious that the design was optimized for another platform than the one you're using it on. "Custom back button" on Android, indeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I too am faced with the "custom back button" on Android. I just smile and carry on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool project!

Unfortunate naming collision with Donn Felker's [http://www.androidbootstrap.com/](http://www.androidbootstrap.com/) though :(

<comment><USER6> Having not clicked through, I upvoted thinking this discussion was about what you mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why would one implement this instead of using Android's builtin widgets? Android apps have always felt better to me when they use the UI recommended in the Android style guide.

<comment><USER8> This is for mobile HTML 5 development. If one was using the native implementation, there would be no need for this as you have pointed out.

This could be a good use case for sites that have a "mobile version" but don't want to/need to mimic the full android look but get close.

EDIT: I am definitely wrong on this (didn't read the docs careful enough). Thanks for the correction on this everyone.

<comment><USER9> I don't think Android Bootstrap has anything to do with HTML5. It's a set of themes for native Android apps duplicating the style of Twitter Bootstrap.

<comment><AUTHOR> And it actually look very good. ([https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5727009/screenshot-13841...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5727009/screenshot-1384122081508.png))

<comment><USER10> I really can't differentiate between Disabled buttons and Rounded buttons. There would also be very little differentiation between the a basic button with no icon (because there isn't a good icon for everything) and the text input. Android design guidelines and 'language' is very different, and people expect the apps the buttosn to have some depth and clarity because of it. I, personally, would hate to have any of the apps that I use move to this style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Success button with an Apple logo... nicely played ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> I was looking for something exactly as this. Say, you want to building a quick-quick app for quick.com, supposedly native. This might actually work.

</comment><comment><USER13> no point having bootstrap for android since android API already have method for different platform version detection</comment>


Google Experimental Search - Keyboard Shortcuts - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/experimental/#BetaShortcuts <comment><USER2> I still prefer vimperator <http://vimperator.org/> in firefox and vimlike smoozie [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/donnjgnmaheadpip...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/donnjgnmaheadpiphiedimcjpiefdnnj) in google chrome as I can navigate any page with just the keyboard.

<comment><USER3> You may also want to take a look at vimium for google chrome. I prefer it a little more than vimlike smoozie.

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgn...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb)

This made my switch to chrome from firefox much easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been using this for a long time. It could be great, but it's pretty limited. There doesn't seem to be a way to open a link in a new tab, or to get to the next page of results, so you still have to go back and forth from keyboard to mouse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I am finding the same thing. Why wouldn't they include those two items I don't understand... kind of makes it useless after testing it for a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool be pretty usefull. Is it just me or is the Key choice a bit weird? I find J for next and K for previous confusing. Would have expected it to be other way round.

<comment><USER6> Ya, those are vi standards. Wish they would at least support emacs p,n versions as well, as that's what I've remapped my gmail to. (and also what most unix's support by default in shells etc..)

Kind of weird that the vi standard is what has stuck with Google, anybody have an explanation apart from just the first peeps who did it being vi junkies?

<comment><USER7> Bram Molenaar (author of Vim) works at Google, that might have something to do with it.

Also the "accessible view" seems to have n and p as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Trump Attacks Amazon, Saying It Does Not Pay Enough Taxes - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/us/politics/trump-amazon-taxes.html <comment><USER2> In his own words that makes them smart, right?

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-taxes- smart/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-taxes-smart/)

<comment><USER3> Yes, which makes the Gov dumb for letting them get away with it. That's why he became president, to fix dumb things (in his opinion) in government.

<comment><USER4> So he's combatting the wealthy paying too little in taxes by giving major tax breaks to the wealthy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As long as they play within the rules, fair game. If Trump doesn't like the rules, don't single out a company, change the game.

<comment><USER6> What rules though?

If they're not turning a profit there's no income tax owed.

Just because he lacks the ability to understand slightly complex concepts doesn't make them "unfair".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm most impressed by his accusation of Amazon using the USPS as their "delivery boy".

Seriously, this guy could have had a great career in standup. It's a great loss for the country.

<comment><USER8> Made even funnier by the fact that parcels are one of the few places USPS actually makes money and has growing revenue.

I've been hearing this argument (Amazon is abusing the USPS) from a ton of my far-right family / acquaintances and I'm sure these claims will just amplify it.

With that said, if USPS really isn't making money on the parcels from Amazon they can and should raise their rates. And if doing that makes them no longer competitive with UPS and Fedex than so be it. That's how markets work. In the private sector it is usually illegal to sell for less than your cost to undercut competitors.

An interesting analysis: [https://www.vox.com/2017/12/29/16830128/amazon- trump-twitter...](https://www.vox.com/2017/12/29/16830128/amazon-trump- twitter-postal-service-feud)

Another interesting article that says the post office loses money on Amazon because of the capital expenditure required to ship packages. But it strikes me that eventually that cost will be paid for:

[https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/for-every-amazon- package-...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/for-every-amazon-package-it- delivers-the-postal-service-loses-146)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> After literally just cutting their fucking tax rate.

<comment><USER10> Those two aren't mutually exclusive - if your aim would be to target that company specifically, changing the federal corporate tax rate would be a poor way of achieving it.

What is more pertinent is how much tax they pay on overseas income and how much they repatriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wrong country and maybe wrong company.

Apple pays so few taxes in Germany – approximated 2,8% taxes on their earnings – that the public is totally pissed (but it is for incomprehensible reasons legal). World wide Apple made ~62 billion dollar last year, but paid only ~25 million tax in Germany (0,2% of the total). At the same time they sell a lot of products here, this is so wrong. I guess Amazon is not better, but the real sinner is Apple.

<comment><USER12> Most resources say they make ~25-30 billion a year in revenue in Europe, and the idea that Germany makes up the majority of said revenue is a bit silly.

Did they pay taxes on the revenue they made in Germany? If so, I'm not sure what your problem is with them? Are you saying that they, a company that owes nothing to Germany, given it wasn't helped by the country at all really in terms of benefits, talent or monetarily, should have to subsidize a country based on the fact that they're successful in other markets?

If every country had that kind of a notion towards taxing, Apple would have less than 1M in profit after paying everyone taxes based on global earnings.

<comment><USER13> > Did they pay taxes on the products they sold in Germany?

VAT is a tax paid by the consumer, not vendor or manufacturer.

<comment><USER12> Corporate tax exists in Germany,which is what I was inferring to - although I did use unfortunate wording. I'll edit that a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My understanding was that Amazon, until recently, intentionally hasn't turned any profit. You don't have to pay taxes if you don't make any money...

<comment><USER15> Which is one reason why the high-revenue/low-profit growth strategy is so good. It feels similar to me how in chess you sacrifice pieces to capture control of the center of the board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You could argue that part of Amazon's success has been due to its helping customers evade state sales taxes. However, Trump has often talked about loosening libel laws because he thinks he is unfairly attacked by the press, and he dislikes the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos. I don't trust Trump's objectivity on this issue, to put it mildly.

<comment><USER17> This is all about the Washington Post. If it starts publishing a pro-Trump narrative he will back off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The fastest way to make a person publicly change their opinion about something is to have Trump state that opinion.

</comment><comment><USER19> That just makes Amazon "smart".

</comment><comment><USER20> Checkout financials

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/financials?p=AMZN](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/financials?p=AMZN)

Please look at profitability. Who says Amazon doesn't make a profit?

</comment><comment><USER21> Fair game.</comment>


OKR and goal examples for great Engineering Managers - <AUTHOR> https://soapboxhq.com/goal-examples/engineering/engineering-manager <comment><AUTHOR> We put together over 180+ OKR & Goal examples across every role in tech.

These are specific to Engineering Managers including contributions from The Managing Dev.

If you'd like to contribute your own goal examples, feel free to fill out the form here: [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeeKlCAQhnRyV9nIL_k...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeeKlCAQhnRyV9nIL_ke57_iy9qgGvEVc6gd87B20M961kXAQ/viewform)</comment>


Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4062/125/

<comment><USER2> _Given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that "weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society."_

As much as I'd like the paper's conclusion to be valid, it appears to ignore the fact that creating salable creative products has become _much_ easier and cheaper in recent years. Practically every computer sold today comes with an audio mixer and video editor.

All we can conclude is that weaker copyright protection has not offset the positive effects of technology on creative output.

<comment><USER3> Well, has not _completely_ offset...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find table 6 in the paper to be quite astonishing. (uploaded here for those who don't want to download the paper: <http://imgur.com/OU3Qk.png> )

In average only about 15% of an artist income seems to derive directly from recordings. If this is a general rule for well established artists they should all release their music absolutely for free and invest their energies in concerts instead.

<comment><USER5> It's also interesting that the outliers -- the artists who derive most of their income from recordings -- tend to be rappers. Eminem, Jay-Z, Linkin Park (A little bit of a stretch, but close enough for me), and Brian "Baby" Williams are the ones that jump out at me.

This would imply that, rationally, rappers should be more concerned about copyright, and people like Billy Joel and Neil Diamond shouldn't care one bit.

<comment><USER6> I'd guess that they can reach a lot of people through recordings that wouldn't go to their concerts, presumably because of how white people are scared of black males. Probably not as many people are scared of Billy Joel fans.

<comment><USER7> Maybe it's an issue of fear, but I doubt it; probably a combination of cultural stigma (thinking it is "weird" for a white person to go to a rap concert) and relative wealth of the target markets (concerts are much more expensive than albums, especially when you include travel costs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you like this subject check out the book "The Lever of Riches" which is an in-depth study of the issue:

[http://www.amazon.com/Lever-Riches-Technological- Creativity-...](http://www.amazon.com/Lever-Riches-Technological-Creativity- Economic/dp/0195074777/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245282231&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER9> Slightly misleading headline. This isn't a "Harvard study." It's a draft paper that reviews prior research on copyrights.

</comment><comment><USER10> In this case, I might even agree with the conclusion, but it's easy to be misled by something like this. "Study finds x has benefited society" sounds all scientific and objective, so it's easy to forget to ask, "What do you mean by 'benefited society'?"

</comment><comment><USER11> The authors of this article were one of the first to challenge the early claims about the effects of file sharing. Years later, many other economists have followed suit (including the study funded by Industry Canada). This latest paper does a nice job of expanding the discussion, by using the data to examine incentives for creativity and the effects on aggregate creator and industry income.

<comment><USER2> Why post an almost-exact copy of the blog's closing paragraph?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Web Host? I'm so much into cloud that I am clueless now. - <AUTHOR>

I am working for a very small website for someone I know and they're looking for a web host.
For the past few years, all I do is run work on cloud instances and servers that I really have no idea who are good web hosts for small websites anymore. Just the good old shared web hosting.
My needs: - A web server (obviously) - Email server - Be able to run Rake (I will use Sinatra for a small part)
What is a good, reliable and cheap web hosting company?
(Please not GoDaddy. That's all I get when I do Google searches). <comment><USER2> <http://www.webfaction.com/>

<comment><USER3> I have been using them too for more than a year with no problems. If you're looking for a VPS I have had many with <http://afterburst.com> and recommend them as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I built my startup to help answer this question. <http://reviewsignal.com>

It's aggregating and analyzing the opinions people are sharing about many of the big guys on social media. So you can see the results of over 40,000 opinions about GoDaddy (not good) and many of their competitors. Take a look at the 'Compare' page to get a more full list. I hope that helps you in your search.

If you have any feedback please let me know.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://hostrum.com/> gets you secure server + SendGrid-powered email deliveries included (+ daily offsite complete backups included)

</comment><comment><USER6> If PaaS can fit your needs, my best advice is <http://www.clever- cloud.com/en/>.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like <http://www.edis.at/en/home/>

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been using ramnode for a while and feel pretty confident in recommending them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Linode: 20$ pm DigitalOcean: 5$ pm

</comment><comment><USER10> www.hartserver.net/hosting/shared/

Disclaimer: that's my hosting business. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> \- Do you have email server? \- Can I SSH into the hosting? \- Will you run out of business in the next year or so :)?

<comment><USER10> All shared packages come with unlimited POP3/IMAP mailboxes. You will have an SMTP server too. SSH is available but requires identification faxing/emailing over to us so we can activate.

We've been here for 9 years already, so hopefully we should be around for at least another 9! ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. What kind of identification? So can I install Ruby and Sinatra?

<comment><USER10> Identification? As in how long we've been around?

We've got Ruby already installed and we offer Ruby on Rails so Sinatra should be okay to install. Obviously on the shared platform anything considered highly intensive or anything which will require ports opening won't be allowed. You'll need a VPS for that.

We do a full 30-day money back guarantee on all shared web hosting packages if something doesn't suit your needs.

<comment><AUTHOR> You said you need identification from me..

<comment><USER10> Oh sorry, yes, for SSH access. We'd need a photographic ID scan (driving licence or passport) plus a scan of a recent utility bill for SSH activation on shared hosting accounts. That isn't required for VPSes or dedicated servers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Your iPhone Is Secretly Tracking Everywhere You Go, Here's How to Turn It Off - <AUTHOR> http://www.iphonehacks.com/2016/10/how-to-turn-off-hidden-feature-iphone-secretly-tracking-everywhere-you-go.html <comment><USER2> This is not new. Been in the OS at least since iOS 8, maybe iOS 7. It's also not hidden... it's part of the system services listed.

Sensational headline.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope these are stored only on the iPhone as Apple claims and not in their servers

</comment><comment><USER4> Google Maps weirded me out the other day...it asked if there is a handicap- accessible entrance to a strip club near my place.

I'll have to go back and check.</comment>


This city just rolled out America's fastest Internet service yet - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/09/09/this-city-just-rolled-out-americas-fastest-internet-service-yet/ <comment><USER2> I mean it's still $400/mo, which only institutions would need to, and 10GBps is pretty fast. That's basically downloading a DVD in 4 seconds. Given that DVDs are streaming on netflix, it's likely too fast to need for residential use.

<comment><USER3> Institutions and residents are not mutually exclusive. An apartment block could benefit from adding the service included in the rent.</comment></comment>


Writing a Simple Persistent Key-Value Store in Go - <AUTHOR> https://www.opsdash.com/blog/persistent-key-value-store-golang.html <comment> T-A Or you could just use [https://github.com/syndtr/goleveldb](https://github.com/syndtr/goleveldb)</comment>


Automatic categorization of text is a core tool now - awinter-py https://abe-winter.github.io/2019/01/01/nlp-18.html <comment><AUTHOR> What changed was pretrained word embeddings like fasttext and GloVe. These embeddings drastically reduce the complexity of text classification problems, and reduce the amount of data you need to produce a high quality text classifier a great deal, and in that 2 year span, understanding of how to leverage them spread far enough to reach applications like this.

The world has been sleeping on leveraging NLP, given the incredible amount corporations spend paying people to read and summarize text (answering questions like "How many people are having a bad search experience?", etc). The recent leaps in NLP make for many opportunities, and many products are coming to market that allow even non-technical folks to train and utilize text classifiers. If you're thinking about getting into NLP, now is definitely the time to do it.

Source: founded taggit.io

</comment><comment><USER2> > I was fascinated and disturbed by the duplex conversation agent demo G > posted on their blog this summer.

Duplex gave me shivers. Enough that I ended up wondering what would happen if I logically extrapolated from that: [http://chir.ag/201812180030](http://chir.ag/201812180030)

The thing that worries me is not strong AI or evil-AI but rather the selective use of AI by humans who choose to create/remove barriers that were unthinkable just a few years ago. AI doesn't need to actually be intelligent, just pass off as close enough to an average stranger.

<comment><USER3> >Duplex gave me shivers. Enough that I ended up wondering what would happen if I logically extrapolated from that: [http://chir.ag/201812180030](http://chir.ag/201812180030)

The scary part is that a large subset of people here will read that as a instruction manual and not a warning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just recently I used a pre-trained language model to generate philosophy which was similar to my favourite philosophers. I think what impressed me was that given my small dataset of 5k quotes, the model ended up generating some really good quotes. Plus I trained it in just a couple of hours, not knowing much about NLP before. Here's my tutorial [https://towardsdatascience.com/generating-new-ideas-for- mach...](https://towardsdatascience.com/generating-new-ideas-for-machine- learning-projects-through-machine-learning-ce3fee50ec2)

<comment><USER5> Curious if have you tried more traditional generative models on these data sets. It seems a even a higher order Markov or a higher order hidden Markov would perform comparably. Stochastic grammars that allow recursion would be even better.

With a small corpus these would run into similar difficulties but would likely perform much better than RNN/CNNs trained on the same corpus. Regardless of whether you use NN or something else your approch is the right one: start with model trained on a larger but similar corpus and then use the smaller one to modify the transition probabilities.

Leaving out the "Deep" stuff will shed popular clicks on your post, probably a lot, but would get the job done with less cumulative effort. Important if for some reason you cannot use third party models. The stochastic grammars I mentioned are a lot less fiddly to train than __* to vec

<comment><USER4> I agree that an n-grams approach coupled with beam search may also give similar results. I did that project for fun and learning about language modeling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who works on synthetic data[1], NLP[2], and a boat load of other deep learning for production systems (and have for a few years) — the tools are available now.

Two years ago the deep learning frameworks were difficult to use. At one point I even hacked together a CNN using background subtraction function in OpenCV at one point to simplify my code. I remember coding up a neural network in OpenCL and it took a couple months to verify it worked correctly (several years ago).

Now, I want to write a blog series on text classification (should be out in a couple days) and the actual coding takes 20 minutes, runs way faster and is 20 lines of code.

Neural networks are approachable, research is moving faster than most can keep up, and the accuracy of models is

As mentioned in the article, there's also pre-trained models, but IMO that's less important. It's the ease of access that's really the killer.

[1] [https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont- necessarily...](https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont-necessarily- need-data-for-data-science-48d7bf503074)

[2] [https://hnprofile.com](https://hnprofile.com)

<comment><USER7> Would you mind saying a little more about the tools you like? I have a problem that I'm hoping might be tractable, but it's a little odd, so I'm looking for things to check out.

(The specific problem is having a lot of tuples of (lat, lon, placename) and I want to build something that can canonicalize all of the placenames. It's different enough from common ML problems that I'm not sure where to start.)

<comment><USER8> your problem sounds like [https://developers.google.com/places/place- id](https://developers.google.com/places/place-id)

<comment><USER7> Yes, except that I'm doing it for a class of places that isn't covered by any open dataset I've found. What I have is a lot of data on ship movements, which includes destination strings hand-entered by sailors (mostly merchant marine sailors). The data is messy, and many of the strings can be obscure.

For example, consider this guide for Tokyo's ports: [https://www.kaiho.mlit.go.jp/03kanku/h22houkaisei/sozai/guid...](https://www.kaiho.mlit.go.jp/03kanku/h22houkaisei/sozai/guide3_e.pdf)

This one happens to be well documented, but most don't seem to be, and in any case many of the port labels in the movement data bear a somewhat hazy relationship to official labels.

I could do it all manually, of course: look at the data, figure out where ships stop, collect all the labels they apply, build a regex pachinko machine. But I'm wondering if I can bootstrap my way to a good text location classifier.

<comment><USER9> There are two approaches I can think of, depending on your gut about your data set.

If single or minimal-word phrases are enough (e.g. 'kws' 'kei' 'hei' 'keih' etc), something like word2vec. Except instead of training to predict distance between words, you're generating an embedding between words and ports.

If more complex modeling is required (e.g. 'tokyo tuesday kei then chiba'), something like LSTM [1].

The lat-long data you'd want to squish into a closest-port training set via geospacial math. Haven't done anything in the space, but I'd imagine chewing through lat-long legs and computing closest-approach distances to various ports (that is, to canonical port lat-long). Optimized for computation and space. Probably compressed down into a "visit / not-visit" binary feature. Might take awhile, but the math seems straightforward for this bit.

[1] [http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding- LSTMs/](http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Data/ML guy here, also founder of frame.ai -- we're a NYC-based startup that helps customer-facing team categorize and analyze their conversations.

There are a lot of factors contributing to widespread adoption of NLP -- certainly the availability of great tools like PyTorch/Keras, SpaCy, and Gensim, and more broadly growing technical competence and awareness among teams that traditionally handle text.

But the single biggest factor is that people are generating massively more purpose-driven text in interactive channels. A generation that grew up texting their friends is becoming core consumers and workers in every industry. People drop text in team chat, in project management tickets and pull requests, when contacting support, and more. Plus, we break our text into meaningful snippets and add our own metadata to make them more readable (and usable) for other people. Language and tools are co-evolving very rapidly in ways that make them more accessible.

As a human-and-organization-augmentation nerd, I'm incredibly excited. We are seeing so much more about how groups of people self-organize than we ever used to, and at the same time that our tools are starting to become capable of understanding us in the ways that we communicate most conveniently.

</comment><comment><USER11> I hope I'm not misunderstanding the comparison, but for me the takeaway seems to be: make the users job easier. That has always been what we're trying to do, hasn't it? Stop forcing them to enter _so_ _much_ _data_ by hand, manually. It's tiring for them. They don't want to do it. They will do what they can to avoid it. They will make mistakes or enter random data just to get it done. Using "ML" or whatever to classify things automatically is generally "good enough" and makes everyone much happier. Except the execs that seems to always want "perfect data" to analyze. Hopefully as we get better and better tools to do this (and it seems even simple categorization is usually sufficient, anyway), we will stop forcing people to do this stuff.

And I hate to pick at specific points that are more cursory to the article, but I can't help myself:

> Duplex feels like an extension of the gig economy; this is about college > grads not wanting to waste their time negotiating with grunts.

I understand the sentiment here, but I don't think that's what's happening here. If there were a better way to do this sort of thing without "hacking" the human interaction I think we'd do it. I think Duplex has come about because many companies still insist on wasting everyone's time by forcing people to make time-consuming phone calls to perform very simple tasks. I don't think is about helping college grads not have to interact with "grunts".

</comment><comment><USER12> "Does deep learning help?"

I think that Jeremy Howard's results with FastAI do strongly suggest that deep learning helps. Specifically, it can be very quick to train a language model with your own data... so quick that he doesn't even bother starting with pre- trained weights.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would like to see topic classification applied to message forums, such as Hacker News, so that I could stop manually bookmarking and tagging. Algolia is indexing and offering search capabilities and ought to take the lead on this. If they don't, they may be disrupted by a provider who does.

<comment><USER14> (I'm an Algolia employee) We don't plan to add classification but would love to partner with anyone willing to work on it, providing them with access to GH repositories and/or API tokens. Let us know through our support channels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there any companies working on personalized text categorization?

</comment><comment><USER16> That could be the core of a very nice search engine.</comment>


Elon Musk starts a tunnel boring company, because of slow traffic - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/17/elon-musk-might-start-a-literal-boring-company-to-tunnel-under-traffic/?ncid=rss <comment><USER2> Title should be "Elon Musk tweets about starting a tunnel boring company because of slow traffic"</comment>


Not So Anonymous: Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox Tightens Identity Requirement - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/05/30/not-so-anonymous-bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox-tightens-identity-requirement/ <comment><USER2> The anonymity aspect of bitcoin has always been overplayed. It's possible to be anonymous, but you'd have to work at it. And the transactions themselves are in the public record forever, so you've got to _never_ slip up, even years later. Good luck.

The most interesting news today was the interview by American Banker with the head of FinCen. The questions are pretty probing, and they get some interesting answers.

[http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/178_104/fincen- chief-q-...](http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/178_104/fincen-chief-q-and- a-what-we-expect-from-digital-currency- firms-1059485-1.html?zkPrintable=1&nopagination=1)

<comment><USER3> I've always found that interesting. Sometimes you look at a dollar and think "where has this been?" - with bitcoin you can answer that question as far back as "who created this money" (to various degrees of pleasure or dismay.)

<comment><USER4> In most cases the question makes no sense, as bitcoins do not have identity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not really a surprise. If MtGox expects to survive as a business (if it can at all), then it will need to start tightening up the rules or else it will suffer the fate of not following regulation.

</comment><comment><USER6> After the big Mt. Gox hack in 2011, in order to get my funds out, I had to send a photocopy of my ID to be verified (pretty sure there were other mechanisms, but that one seemed the one with the least friction). I'm a bit surprised that there's any expectation of anonymity with Bitcoin if you're not 100% non-fiat.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think every journalist willing to write about bitcoin should know by now that mtgox security or anonymity issues has nothing to do with Bitcoin (I mean who is at Forbes and doesn't do his homework ?). This is another article that proves Forbes is clearly lobbying against Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is intended to be an anonymous decentralized solution for buying and selling stuff, you shouldn't be exchanging it for fiat money in the first place, but if you want to do so, of course you can, but then that's your own problem, not bitcoin's.

Forbes clearly doesn't want bitcoin to make it. They are saying it loud and clear by writing misleading articles.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what fraction of (1) the trade traffic, and (2) Bitcoin asset ownership cares deeply about the anonymity aspect of bitcoin.

As a corollary, I wonder what fraction of each would stop using bitcoin as a result.

<comment><USER9> I think those that use Mt Gox aren't so concerned with anonymity. They've had some level of verification for a couple of years.

For those that are concerned with it, they use other means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sending an identity card (including social security number), proof or residence, and lots of personal details was not enough yet? Didn't have to do any of this on Bitcoin-central, that's why I don't use gox anymore.

</comment><comment><USER11> There's still no substitute for cash when you need true anonymity. How long till cash is made illegal?

<comment><USER12> Large amounts of cash are already either non-anonymous or illegal in most of western world - i.e., prove and record your identity along the cash deal, or else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sigh. MtGox != Bitcoin. It's so painful to the community and cause to perpetuate this sad meme. I for one welcome whatever might make MtGox more reliable until someone else competent comes along.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure the other exchanges will soon follow suit. Since MtGox is responsible most of the bitcoin trades it might as well be Bitcoin.

<comment><USER15> Even if MtGox handled 100% of USD-BTC trades, it is still not Bitcoin. Many more transactions are happening on Blockchain that has nothing to do with MtGox or any other currency exchange.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: EchoCactus – An Audio Based Forum - <AUTHOR> https://echocactus.com/ <comment><USER2> i dont get it. i was hoping it would be akin to a forum like reddit except the medium of communication would be audio. seems like instead, its just ringtones.</comment>


Show HN: Lang – Internationalize in under 10 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.langapi.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! I'm Peter, co-founder of Lang.

The majority of the world isn't English speaking, but most web apps are served only in English. This is because it's difficult and time consuming to internationalize apps. We've built translation infrastructure that works out- of-the-box. With Lang, it's easy to internationalize your site with human translators and instantly reach a global audience.

Our getting started guide is here: [https://medium.com/@peterlzhou/lang-api- is-live-9a9c5273ef41](https://medium.com/@peterlzhou/lang-api-is- live-9a9c5273ef41) . We've been in a closed alpha with three SF-based companies for the last month and are excited to open up to a larger group of people! Talk to us at firstname.lastname@example.com.

Shoutout to our team – Eric Yu, Abhi Sivaprasad, Klaire Tan, and Shreya Dixit!

<comment><USER2> Nice work guys!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How do you solve the context problem?

A lot of poorly translated software suffers from translations that obviously lack context. This is especially common with labels for UI elements like buttons and menu items.

A lot of AWS suffers from that -- for example, the AWS Lambda interface is translated so poorly to German in some places that I had to switch to English to understand what the options are supposed to do.

For example, there was a permission setting labelled "öffnen", (which is a verb and means "to open") when the correct translation would have been "öffentlich" (public).

Or in another case, the command "Exit" (as in leave the program) was translated as "Ausfahrt" (as in a highway exit).

Mistakes like that make it cery hard to use localized software. How do you suppose you can fix that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. Next week we're rolling out the ability to attach context to translation requests, which means sending descriptions and pictures of the requested translation to the translator. Would that solve the issue, or is there something else we could do to address this problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your pricing page says "Upfront Pricing. Pay for what you need." and the basic plan ($149/month) on that page includes "Unlimited Human Translations".

Do those phrases mean that you don't charge a per-word fee for humans to translate your customers' strings?

<comment><AUTHOR> You pay $149 a month for access to human translators with our tool. Human translations have a per-word-per-language cost, and we're proud to have partnered with Gengo (which did the translations for Facebook), who has pretty much the cheapest translations on the market.

We've updated the pricing page to be more upfront about this :)

<comment><USER4> "We've updated the pricing page to be more upfront about this :)"

I just reloaded the page, and don't see the updates. Those two phrases are still there, and there's no mention of per-word fees.

Some other feedback:

1\. It's unclear whether your platform uses translation memory to ensure that people don't pay to translate the same thing twice. Consider calling that out on your pricing page.

2\. How does your offer differ from those of Transifex and Startling?</comment></comment></comment>


The Pragmatic Bookshelf – 40% Off for #DayAgainstDRM - <AUTHOR> http://media.pragprog.com/newsletters/2017-07-10.html <comment><USER2> Unfortunate that this doesn't apply to "The Pragmatic Programmer". Still, very cool show of support against DRM.</comment>


Virtual retina display projects directly onto retina with laser - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_retinal_display

<comment><USER2> I was really hoping this would be a link to someone who had developed one or had at least made great strides towards developing one.

I want to buy one today, hook it up to my phone, and have an overlay on top of the world I see. I'm sure I'm not alone.</comment>


Why Silicon Valley Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Returning Home - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/why-silicon-valley-immigrant-entrepreneurs-are-returning-home

<comment><USER2> There also one more thing to add here: H1B workers also contribute to Social Security and Medicare taxes and most of them do not get those back because they leave.

</comment><comment><USER3> How did this get posted twice? I thought HN catches the same URL being posted again <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2294268></comment>


Show HN:  - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/chrisgannon/details/BWpWZd/ <comment><USER2> HN eat the emojis, to avoid unnecessary use of them to highlight submission. Perhaps you can change the title to "Hamburger Slider"

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't edit it now</comment></comment>


Org-brain – mind-mapping for org-mode - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Kungsgeten/org-brain <comment><USER2> This was interesting because I've used an OWL ontology to create a business functional model of a complicated platform. The tool WebProtege was very helpful.

An ontology has more structure than a mind map, and you can apply reasoners to them. It was useful for me, but it undermined a layer of obfuscating abstractions some of the technologists had created as a firewall between themselves and the rest of the org, so I lost traction for being politically tone deaf.

Mind maps are easy to dismiss because they are a unifying abstraction created by someone's point of view, which must compete with every other point of view in the org. Once you model it, it implies responsibility, accountability, and that can disrupt the relationships that people have invested in.

The act of documenting something well also adds newly competent stakeholders to decisions, which has the consequence that it dilutes authority in the org.

In this way, mind maps can get a reputation for being naive technology solution to a problem that isn't actually a problem, because the nebulous relationships they expose in fact already work for someone. The helpful guy with the mind map just doesn't 'get it'.

Personally, I look forward to ontologies becoming more common in orgs, as they are immensely powerful for getting everyone aligned on a body of knowledge - assuming that's what one is aiming for.

<comment><USER3> > Personally, I look forward to ontologies becoming more common in orgs, as > they are immensely powerful for getting everyone aligned on a body of > knowledge - assuming that's what one is aiming for.

The Big Hedge Fund Bridgewater uses decision-making assistants in their common tooling. I assume that ontologies come part and parcel with that package, considering that "alignment" and cohesion is one of their key motives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always thought of mind maps as spatially confused trees, and Org already does trees very well. This package introduces the "friends" concept -- is that the fundamental difference between trees and mind maps?

<comment><USER5> Org-brain allows me to have more than one parent. For example, I have a list of books I've read and reviewed (for personal use). When I started using org- brain I added author entries as parents; for comics I can do author and artists. So in the tree it looks like

* Read Books

\-- Book Title

       Review

* Authors

\-- Author Name

\-- Author Name 2

* Artists

\-- Artist Name

But in org-brain I can connect all of these in a logical way so I can jump through it quickly.

</comment></comment><comment> Whil- I'd say mindmapping is an inferior term for describing org-brain even. Concept mapping is better. But that term is also already taken for something else. Org-brain and thebrain provide another organizational system. It's closer to graph databases (but more restricted with only three kinds of relations). The way it mimics our natural way of thinking about stuff is really helpful. Few tools help us easily capture those relations. Often we're stuck with pure hierarchical systems (such as mindmaps or folder structures). So I look forward to seeing this org-mode add-on evolve and truly hope that this way of organizing information gets more widespread. And covered in more tools and on more platforms.

Double thumbs up to Kungsgeten!

</comment><comment><USER6> Does it support more than one brain? I can't tell.

The ultimate that I've found so far is Flying Logic (flyinglogic.com).

\- directed acyclic graph structure

\- boolean logic (both AND and OR) and truth-value tracking

\- multiple documents

\- automatic layout (like graphviz/dot)

\- python import/export api

Flying Logic is nice but it's expensive and non-collaborative.

I'm not sure what exists that is a next step up from that. Maybe owl/rdf stuff?

I generally think this entire field is basically sort of addled, and we're just waiting for software to catch up to brains. Our brains aren't hierarchical, they're graph-based. But since our physical world is hierarchical, there's this impedance mismatch and most of our software (todo lists, outliners, mindmaps) makes the wrong call by forcing us into tree-based structures.

Try representing a recipe's instructions accurately in something like OmniOutliner, OmniFocus, or org-mode. Meaning, where blocking steps accurately block their dependencies. You can't do it. But you can with a DAG.

As another example, you can't even represent a simple argument in anything less than a DAG. It's like a compiler.

1\. Socrates is a man (axiom)

2\. All men are mortal (axiom)

3\. Socrates is mortal (1, 2)

4\. All mortals will die (axiom)

5\. All mortals must eat (axiom)

6\. Socrates will die (3, 4)

7\. Socrates must eat (3, 5)

You can't represent those dependencies in an outline, nor in most mind-mapping apps (since most of them don't allow a child to have multiple parents).

Gantt charts _can_ represent those relationships, but if you only care about the graph structure and the dependency relationships, why be saddled with a huge project management application? And, most of them can't handle OR relationships anyway.

Graphviz/dot is decades old and isn't collaborative. But at least it's DAG with good layout.

Free-form "just draw any edge to any node!" apps aren't all that great either, not without automatic layout, not without respecting any logical relationships indicated by the edges.

<comment><USER7> org-brain doesn't support more than one brain out of the box. In practice though you can have two folders (one for each brain) and change the path which org-brain uses, and thus activating one of your other brains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi! I'm the author of org-brain. I'm happy to see there's an interest for it. There's a screencast of me explaining it, which might give a better overview than the documentation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EGOwfWok5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EGOwfWok5s)

</comment><comment><USER8> FWIW this reminds me of my iOS app Mindscope which is more visual but has the same core concept of zoomable hierarchies. Kind of a mix of Workflowy and Scapple. [http://www.mindscopeapp.com](http://www.mindscopeapp.com)

<comment><USER9> That looks pretty good. I'm pretty happy with scrapple on my Mac, and have been looking for something similar on iOS. Thanks!

My desire would be the same but with writing via stylus (Apple pencil specifically) instead of typing.

I take very free form notes during meetings and brainstorming and such via pencil and go back after to make a more coherent list.

For me, free form really needs a more direct analog input. Plus I can doodle at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been using org-brain since a few weeks after its release when it was posted on Reddit. It was basically the tool I had been waiting for, combining the significant amount of knowledge I've built up in random files and org-mode outlines, but able to connect them in meaningful ways. If you jump back and forth between org-mode and brain there is some manual maintenance, but it's been worthwhile. Great tool.

<comment><USER10> I've been a Markdown guy for a long time now, and despite being a long-time Emacs user, I've never really taken the time to learn org-mode.

There was a post from 2014 that was on the homepage last week [0], and it got me _really_ interested in org-mode + ssh sessions.

I keep a daily log in Markdown, as well as a list of tasks that I'm tracking, and the ability to seamlessly describe _and_ execute code locally or remotely was incredibly enticing.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16559004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16559004)

<comment><USER11> I've also been a long time Emacs+Org mode user, and while I was aware of babel and the ability to tangle literate programming documents, it simply never occurred to me that I could execute those snippets in-place and manipulate the results in-place like an ipython/jupyter/mathematica notebook.

I had the same reaction to that post, and I'm really excited to get more familiar with it, as it makes a great addition to some of the work I'm doing now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have made extensive use of org-mode for many years, and I keep trying to get into org-brain as a way to really have a "digital brain" \-- I use org-mode to implement my own horrible version of GTD, to great success. I have tried to start using org-brain many times, but it never works.

I think there's something about having to externalize everything I know that confounds me. I wish org-brain could scan my brain and spit out something I could start working on.

<comment><USER5> Depending on how you use org mode (if you are creating IDs for everything), org-brain can scan it and spit out something. You can take an existing outline and turn it into a brain and start adding relationships.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hello, I'm Harlan, the founder of TheBrain. Thanks for all the interesting feedback here.

We're pleased to give anyone who mentions Hacker News a 20% discount for the next week. To get the discount, just call us or use the chat system on TheBrain.com and ask for the Hacker News discount. (FYI, there is also a free version that is quite capable and never expires.)

<comment><USER14> Any relationship between TheBrain and org-brain, other than concept?

Curiously, I'd just run across Jerry Michalski's mind-mapping via Doug Rushkoff's _Present Shock_ a couple of days ago.

<comment><USER13> No relationship, I hadn't actually heard of it until just a few days ago. The author of org-brain states "It is heavily inspired by a piece of software called The Brain".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a useful package and one way in which to build a personal wiki with references to Org notes files and vice-versa. There can be a bit of a performance hit when the personal wiki grows to be quite large as the files are searched and indexed when performing visualization mode, but perhaps with additional popularity there would be people willing to tackle that enhancement.

</comment><comment><USER16> thebrain.com is cool. Thank you for sharing!

<comment><USER17> Been around for a while too, TheBrain is an interesting program. Probably ahead of its time.

I hope it's eventually open-sourced as I hope they've got loyal long-term enterprise customers to keep paying for support contracts and it would greatly expand the user-base.

<comment><USER16> Funny, I just used their chat to ask them to open source. Might be cool to integrate with Google drive the way they have with colab.research.google.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Surprised by how few good omnigraffle clones are out there. Markdown to tree in js as slides feels like a tractable space</comment>


California license plates might go digital, show ads - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100621/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_techbit_electronic_license_plates;_ylt=Ai1gpy3oXLxMa9aEBCXdk9AjtBAF;_ylu=X3oDMTM5ZzRwcTEzBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwNjIxL3VzX3RlY190ZWNoYml0X2VsZWN0cm9uaWNfbGljZW5zZV9wbGF0ZXMEY3BvcwMyBHBvcwM0BHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA2NhbGlmbGljZW5zZQ--

<comment><USER2> Serious question: shouldn't the owner of the vehicle be allowed to receive a share of the profits?

At the end of the day, the liability associated with these "ads" falls on whom: the state or vehicle's owner?

Mind you, I think this is the most retarded idea ever.

<comment><USER3> No, the DMV will claim the plates are their property. Currently the plate is just a way to ID yourself, like the Driver's Licence.

Legislation like this will change things, and the DMV will declare they own the licence plate, the same way Microsoft claims they actually own the Xbox in your living room.

<comment><USER4> You are right, and I don't know why you were downvoted: this is the claim that would be made, and it would be asserted as the reason you are not allowed to take your blue-on-white license plate and repaint it to be hot pink on lime green (at least, not while it's mounted to your vehicle).

However, I don't think this idea will go anywhere, since it potentially creates all sorts of first-amendment issues - you love coke but your plate keeps showing ads for Pepsi, as it were; as DMV is a state agency they are subject to constitutional limitations, and as the owner/occupant of a vehicle people are inevitably going to associate any license plate messages with you, so forcing you advertise something you don't like (or indeed to advertise at all) is arguably an infringement on your freedom of speech.

I'm all for creativity and lateral thinking, but I think this is a really, really stupid idea - it's straight out of _Idiocracy_. The sad irony is that while the idea is a suggestion for balancing the state budget, it's taking up resources being proposed and debated in the legislature, and if it passes it will take up resources in the conduct of feasibility studies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "In emergencies, the plates could be used to broadcast Amber Alerts"

Classic...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_children_%28reasoning%2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_children_%28reasoning%29)

<comment><USER6> Or if there is an alert out to stop your car, they can switch it to start flashing, etc.

Seems like a bit of technology would need to be developed to make this cost effective (assuming some sort mobile data is needed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How long before someone hacks this to flip off the other drivers in style?

This is definitely one of the least thought out proposals I've heard in a while. At least when it gets completely subverted, it will only embarrass those responsible rather than introducing catastrophic data loss as with the proposed Internet Kill Switch.

[flick switch] "FUCK... YOU... FUCK... YOU"

</comment><comment><USER8> Moveover, can the lawyers amongst us murmur aloud the state of regulation in the 'physically' mobile advertising market? Such as how alternating 'windowshade' ads atop pickup trucks differ from location targeted LED/LCD signs in Taxi roofboxes in the eyes of 'The Law'? Shouldn't the DMV/NHTSB already have a stance on this?

It seems with the advent of large format E-Ink displays, plastering the back of a Semi-trailer with a 4x8 'film', a solar panel+battery pack, a camera and an friendly mobile OS - one could collect CPM based on all sorts of things. Weather, type of vehicle(s) trailing, number of passengers, distance behind, 'txt trivia' for Corporate 'points', and so on. All without being much of a nuisance to passers by..

Alternatively, what fines should be imposed for more 'rogue' implementations? High enough to offset any potential gain? Will that stifle stranger, consumer driven things from happening? If and when you start offering CPM kickbacks to the cellphone bills of those in the Donk/Lowrider/SUV 'urban crowd' that cruise nightly around impressionable youth with multiple large, externally visible LCDs showing everything from Pr0n [1], local rap promo videos, and Blue Clues. One needs only a phone with a 'video out' capacity and creating a local Pandora'esque App playing 'underground' music could be fed by cheap embedded servers placed outside of bars, sports venues, and less scrupulous places. As 'data package' prices reamin high, and smarter phones trickle down....public hotspots (and exploitation) that _don't_ connect to the internet make sense.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, as Soccer Mom's queue in line to pick up their children? While immoral to a degree, the unused LCDs in the back of a ML450 (or schoolbus) could serve ads, school updates, etc. No one is moving and it's usually on private land. No one can really regulate that. Right?

I already dread billboard obscured sunsets on the drive home, I am of the opinion (electric) roadside advertising should be regulated to some degree and a more public discourse on how 'public' land is used. Hopefully someone soon will do a study strapping eye tracking software to a large set of drivers to measure how disorienting erratic light from advertising and other sources can be. Someone will die (<blink> tag induced seizure?), much fuss will be made, and a law 'in honor of XYZ' will pass and perhaps something will be done about it.

:shrug:

[1] [http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v100/n2/999/LR100n...](http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v100/n2/999/LR100n2Wilson.pdf)

<comment><USER9> I'm reminded of a quote of David Ogilvy, of the ad agency Ogilvy and Mather:

"As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motorcycles, chopping down posters by the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Interested advertisers would contract directly with the DMV"

Me: hi, I'd like to purchase some ads

DMV Guy: Please complete form LPA17 and get in _that_ line

</comment><comment><USER11> I know that billboards and many other things already distract drivers, but another distraction that encourages them to get too close to be safe seems plain idiotic.

</comment><comment><USER12> So now, even when the robber's car stops, the security cameras won't be able to get a clear image of the tag number. Awesome.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> as if there aren't enough distractions on the road already.

</comment><comment><USER13> Further new ways of creating disruptive easy advertising that doesn't do much to make people really want the product.

I can't quite imagine what the senator was imagining this to turn out as

<comment><USER14> > I can't quite imagine what the senator was imagining this to turn out as

A campaign donation from the company that wants to sell them, I would imagine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reading the title, I thought they might be doing something smart, perhaps using RFID tags or something similar to cut down on plate manufacturing costs and to make the registration renewal process more streamlined.

Nope, it turns out they're just trying to commoditize plate real estate. For a state that makes it a illegal to have a cell phone against your ear while driving, I don't see this passing. Then again, they are $19 billion in debt.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh god _facepalm_</comment>