Blood of world's oldest woman hints at limits of life - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25458-blood-of-worlds-oldest-woman-hints-at-limits-of-life <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this, I thought it was fascinating research. This sentence in particular was a surprise to me:

It's estimated that we're born with around 20,000 blood stem cells, and at any one time, around 1000 are simultaneously active to replenish blood.

I was surprised the number was so low. Interesting to think this relatively small number of little factories has to sustain us throughout life.

<comment><USER3> That is a low number, but not the only example of limited resources in our systems.

Dopamine neurons in the brain are essential for normal functioning. Parkinson's develops when dopamine neurons die off with age or due to other injury (toxins, trauma, etc.). It takes only a 15% loss of these irreplaceable cells for the condition to begin to show up.

In contrast to the cortex of the brain with its 100's of millions of neurons, we are born with only 250K dopamine cells which are never regenerated.

That's a narrow margin to rely on, we skate on very thin ice throughout our lives. Nature is the staunchest conservative and doesn't throw away the things that work. Our bodies still retain the archaic mechanisms of the earliest multicellular organisms in our brains and bodies.

Looks like blood forming tissues are similarly following Nature's way.

<comment><USER4> Good evolution and good engineering principles are at odds.

In engineering an idea that has been found to work in one place gets adapted in another. Also you often build reliability through adding layers of redundancy.

Evolution has no straightforward way for good ideas to be identified and reapplied to another system. It has to evolve again. Also if you have two fully redundant systems, there is nothing to stop deleterious mutations from disrupting one of them. The end result is that one of the redundant systems will become unreliable, and then the other one gets maintained by selection pressure. (This is also why creatures that live in a cave eventually become blind, and parasites lose their ability to use now unnecessary body parts. There is no engineering reason why this would happen, but is a natural result of selection pressures being eliminated.)

<comment><USER5> "Good evolution" is essentially devoting the maximum amount of (usually very limited) resources towards successful procreation and rearing offspring.

Hence the "features" or "redundancy" which would otherwise consume resources and not significantly affect procreation chances (like your cave example) eventually get selected against and disappear.

"Good Engineering" on the other hand usually devotes additional resources to redundancy, fault-tolerances, which do not necessarily offer a competitive advantage in procreation.

<comment><USER6> > "Good evolution" is essentially devoting the maximum amount of (usually very > limited) resources towards successful procreation and rearing offspring.

It's not that simple. If producing the maximum amount of offspring were the goal, populations of a species would quickly collapse. It's also a poor principle to explain social behavior and organisms living in hives or strictly hierarchically procreating groups.

A much better model principle would be, that evolution optimizes for maximum probability of the _offspring_ to successfully procreate. By adding this layer of indirection a lot more of what we can observe in biology can be explained with less presumptions (Occam's Razor).

<comment><USER5> That does sound like a better way to explain it.

My post was just layman speculation, as I'm not a biologist/ecologist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now the real question is: when are the telomeres rebuilt?

Because every individual started with one single cell, from a father and mother cells that also underwent cell division

Hence at some point in time these telomeres get rebuilt/replenished.

<comment><USER8> Telomeres are lengthened in women when their eggs are made, while still in their mother's wombs. Men are constantly lengthening telomeres in the cells that form sperm. This is one reason why children of older men tend to live longer. Of course, this benefit only really comes from fathers in their late twenties, because otherwise other paterrnal-age-related pathologies can outweigh the benefits.

<comment><USER9> I wasn't aware of a higher paternal age ever being a good thing. Are there papers or articles on this? What's the "sweet spot" before genetic mutations in the germ line become a problem?

<comment><USER10> I'm hoping it's some time after 36 for no particular reason...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It helps to think about the basics when talking about telomere length and cell behavior.

1) Telomeres shorten with each cell division in ordinary somatic cells. When they get too short, cells self-destruct or stop dividing. So average telomere length in tissue is a function of cell division rates.

2) Stem cells support their associated tissue type by providing new cells with long telomeres. Thus average telomere length is also a function of cell replacement rates.

3) Average telomere length is at present usually measured in white blood cells. The rates of division and replacement here are tied in to many factors, including general health, autoimmunity, infection, state of the thymus, and so on and so forth. It would probably be better to use another tissue, such as skin, but that isn't the way things worked out in practice.

So telomere length is far removed from first causes in aging - it is largely a marker, largely of stem cell function in most tissues, but in immune cells with their varying rates of division according to circumstances, also a marker of all sorts of other unrelated or partly related things.

If telomere length is globally extended, you have cells that can divide more often without the need for stem cell support, and you also have more energetic stem cells. But those cells dividing more often are more damaged on average. This may or may not be important enough to do bad things such as raise cancer risk significantly in our species: more data needed.

</comment><comment><USER12> Blood storage for autologous transfusion has apparently already been a thing for a while[1] and has been indicated to be effective in animal experiments[2], but as far as I can tell, no provider is willing to store it for more than about 20 years (and what is stored may not in fact contain stem cells, but rather only something that spurs the existing ones into activity). My general impression is that the medical community's moral gut reaction is unfavourable towards the idea.

[1] [http://www.bloodbook.com/storage.html](http://www.bloodbook.com/storage.html) [2] [https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329831-400-young- bl...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329831-400-young-blood-to-be- used-in-ultimate-rejuvenation-trial/)

<comment><USER13> i believe that foreverlabs[0] is a startup that aims to do what you are suggesting

[0] [http://www.foreverlabs.co/](http://www.foreverlabs.co/)

<comment><USER12> Looks interesting. Unfortunately, I'm not sure my prior probability that a random startup would survive for sufficiently long to be of use to future me is sufficiently high to justify whatever cost their services would come at...

<comment><USER14> It never hurts to send them an email and ask them what the price of their services is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IIRC there was a doctor posting in other threads about his bone-marrow stem cell banking startup. My understanding was that these stem cells were stored when young, and could be multiplied in a lab environment and then re-injected therapeutically (to cure MS or arthritis or whatever). Would these kind of banked stem cells (say, banked in one's early or late twenties) also potentially assist with life extension?

<comment><USER16> Or might you have problems because now you have fewer stem cells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does this mean that people who give blood are losing valuable stem cells and wont live as long?

<comment><USER18> There aren't really stem cells floating around in the blood. The donation would likely still impose some cost on the stem cells though (I doubt anybody has much of a handle on that cost).

There is some evidence that frequent blood donors live longer than occasional donors. Being healthy is a selection criteria for blood donation, so it can be hard to study the impact.

[http://sciencenordic.com/frequent-blood-donors-live- longer](http://sciencenordic.com/frequent-blood-donors-live-longer)

<comment><USER17> Interesting. I looks like there are Peripheral Blood Stem cells, as opposed to those in your bone marrow.

[http://www.bloodjournal.org/content/bloodjournal/98/10/2900....](http://www.bloodjournal.org/content/bloodjournal/98/10/2900.full.pdf?sso- checked=true)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hmmm.

From an engineering perspective what are the MTBFs for the various human components; are a dearth of White blood cells a prime reason for aging and death?

Great progress has been made in genetics surely one could read the DNA of a few thousand cells and have an extremely strong confidence of what the unmutated DNA for a person once was.

And from this you could make new white blood cells et voila.

This all seems rather Blade Runnery. Mind you there would be societal problems with people who can live much older: slowing of cultural evolution, career blocking, and monopolising property; we've got that now but it would get worse.

I'm worried about the Brexiters kicking out the metric system;that and fascist tyranny.

<comment><USER11> From an engineering point of view, there has been some work on the application of reliability theory to aging, though not to the point where your question can be answered using this approach:

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

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20469937](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20469937)

Immune system aging is an important component of age-related frailty, and probably also accounts for the rising number of senescent cells and higher cancer risk. It isn't as simple as a dearth of cells, however. It is more of a complex configuration/whole-system failure in which rate of cell replacement is just one variable contributing to the bad state endpoint. See for example:

[https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/12/when-and-how- doe...](https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/12/when-and-how-does-the- decay-of-your-immune-system/)

[https://longevityandhealthspan.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...](https://longevityandhealthspan.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2046-2395-2-8)

<comment><USER20> From an engineering point of view, this article is an oversimplification. Check out [http://www.sens.org](http://www.sens.org) for a more comprehensive and sophisticated approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does this mean donating blood reduces your lifespan?

<comment><USER22> The opposite.

Having a blood transfusion from someone younger than you will increase longevity.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/may/04/young- blood-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/may/04/young-blood- reverse-ageing-mice-studies)

So it pays to be a vampire!

<comment><USER23> how long before the rich start exploiting this?

<comment><USER24> Or how long have they been...

<comment><USER25> I believe the term is vampires. That concept has been around for quite a long long time...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If stem cells are finite & small in number. And you have some removed to be preserved for later life... Then maybe you will have problems due to having fewer stem cells?

</comment><comment><USER20> Stem cells are a part of it, but there is much more to it. For a realistic, comprehensive, and much more informed approach to aging research, see [http://www.sens.org](http://www.sens.org).

<comment><USER26> They aren't engaged in general, "aging," research actually, DeGray has stated he's interested in life-extension technology, to the extent that it might be possible. Their goal, as stated on the website you just linked to, is as follows:

> Our goal is to help build the industry that will cure the diseases of aging.

I'm not saying you're wrong...I just think there's some confusion online as to what they really are trying to do. They don't research aging in general, which would imply they are a University Body whose sole function is research for the purpose of research...they are specifically attempting to create a kind of science, which may or may not be valid, by funding certain types of research done by recognized research institutions, with the hope that evidence will support what they believe to be true...sort of like how the Koch brothers fund all sorts of research hoping to poke all sorts of holes and nuances into the accepted version of how climate change is understood. They may very well come up with something interesting, informed, and comprehensive...but that does not mean that they are being realistic. In research you don't get to choose whether your hypothesis is realistic or not...you just sort of go out into the woods and start picking things up and seeing whether what you think the laws of nature are...really are true...but you could be completely wrong and you might find nothing. You don't get to choose whether you catch a fish...you may come back to shore with zero fish after fishing for 50 years...or 100 years...or an infinite number of years.

<comment><USER11> SENS isn't new science. It is a synthesis of existing evidence for what causes aging and age-related disease, pulled in from many branches of medical research. The original contributions are the high level view of damage repair as the guiding basis for treatment, plus specific plans for how to address these causes.

I don't think you can say it's wrong in wholesale at this point, given where things stand. The mainstream position in the aging research community is that aging is caused by an accumulation of damage.

Senescent cell clearance has been on the SENS agenda since day one, with plenty of evidence to back it as a cause of aging from the past decades of research. Life extension has been demonstrated in mice through senescent cell clearance. There are two funded startups moving senescent cell clearance therapies to the clinic.

You'll also find it hard to argue against the proposition that amyloid causes specific age-related conditions. E.g. amyloid beta in Alzheimer's disease, transthyretin amyloid in heart disease. These are very mainstream concerns.

Similarly, there are few objections to the idea that declining stem cell function is a cause of aging, and plenty of evidence to show that restoring stem cell activity is beneficial.

And so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So luck is the key. If your mutations are good you live a long healthy life.

<comment><USER28> We knew that long before this study. It's true of everything, not just longevity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Vitamin D derived from sunshine notably UVB reduces the shrinkage of the telomeres.

<comment><USER29> Does dietary vitamin D not have the same effect?

<comment><USER30> The source matters because there are two common types of vitamin D: D2 and D3. Sunlight lets you produce D3, while supplements are typically D2.

In food that's been fortified, it will probably have D2, while food that has natural vitamin D (like fatty fish) will probably have D3.

Although the two forms are metabolized through different mechanisms, the difference is negligible for most people. However, for some people (depending on genetics, diet, or lifestyle), supplemental Vitamin D2 will not be an adequate replacement for Vitamin D3.

[0] [http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/4/694.full](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/4/694.full)

<comment><USER31> Vitamin d3 supplements seem widely available.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Welcome to the new Dropbox - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com <comment><AUTHOR> Blog post: [https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2017/10/creative-energy- ke...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2017/10/creative-energy-keep-it- flowing/)

Brand page: [https://dropbox.design/](https://dropbox.design/)

</comment><comment><USER2> redesign:

1) add some scrolling effects

2) sections with large gifs, header, & txt on the side</comment>


Sony's Next-Gen Developer Framework to Be Based on GNUstep and Objective-C - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/11/24/snap <comment><USER2> An excerpt from the official announcement made earlier, and currently also on the front page. I'd downvote if I could.

<comment><USER3> And, incidentally, where I found the aforementioned link.</comment></comment>


"Without Haste, Without Fear. We Will Conquer the World" - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/00bb2890-5c54-11de-aea3-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><USER2> Joseph Needham did gather a lot of interesting source material from ancient Chinese literature on developments in science and technology in China. I studied Chinese and sinology as his lengthy book series was published, and have read many hundreds of pages of his books. The general view of the historians of China whom I know best is that Needham did a fair amount of axe- grinding with his primary sources to prove ideological points and bolster his theory of history that other historical sources would not support. The primary historical literature in Chinese (literary Chinese) is VAST--the usual statement is that ancient Chinese literature outnumbers all other ancient literature from all other world cultures combined in word count by a considerable margin.

What I find most disappointing in Needham's work is his too Marxist explanation for what historians of technology think is what is most remarkable about the historical comparison between China and the West. Until the late Western middle ages, China was plainly ahead of the West in technology, and arguably very much ahead in science. Historians of technology refer to the West in those days as having "precocious technology" that couldn't be explained at all by Western science of that day. But as the Western middle ages gave way to the Renaissance, there was an explosive growth of science in the West, and ever since the West has been ahead of China in both science and technology, for reasons that I don't think Needham explains adequately. And of course the development of political freedom in the West in the same period has very much been world-leading all that while.

<comment><USER3> The west is still ahead of China in both Science and Technology, but they're moving fast and we're slowing down.

I would not be surprised if in another four or five decades the situation is going to be reversed.

China has it's problems, but it has one thing that the west does not have, which is the power to make very bold decisions and to realize them. No such thing as turf wars between parties or coalition building to dilute any plans.

<comment><USER4> But what if the bold decisions are idiotic and destructive?

Turf wars and parties seem to be what gave Europe its advantage, as the grandparent states the rise of freedom was concurrent with the rise in technology. So perhaps more distributed competitive decision making results in better outcomes, and the reason you stated will be precisely the reason China will not achieve its potential.

[EDIT: Corrected incongruent verb tenses in last sentence.]

<comment><USER3> There is a 'stereotypical' China, the communist country which just like Russia is soon going to implode and there is the real China, a very large country with a set of unique challenges and a very large amount of energy to try to overcome those challenges.

Modern China is not to be compared with the country that it was 30 (or even 20) years ago, it is evolving rapidly and it has a very good shot at becoming the dominant power in the next couple of decades.

It is by no means a certainty, but while western politics are centered around special interest groups and their lobbyists China is working very hard at becoming if not top dog then at least an equal.

A friend of mine has just emigrated to China and the stories he tells me about life there and the level of economic and social change in the last 10 years alone are almost incredible. If they can keep that up they will be very powerful indeed.

<comment><USER2> _western politics are centered around special interest groups_

Currently internal politics in China is centered around a much smaller segment of the country's population. The masses and their concerns are largely ignored. I don't think that is good for the future of China, as the future is with the masses.

<comment><USER5> "If there is hope, it lies with the proles." -- Winston Smith, in George Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-Four_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice article.

One note:

> ... [The new National Library] has at its centre what looks like a vast > opencast mine, hundreds of feet deep, with scholars and readers at rows of > desks on every level, hemmed in by walls of volumes.

That sounded incredibly impressive, until I found pictures:

[http://images2.sina.com/english/china/2008/0909/U99P200T1D18...](http://images2.sina.com/english/china/2008/0909/U99P200T1D185180F8DT20080909070804.jpg)

[http://www.architecture- page.com/assets/images/content/prj_k...](http://www.architecture- page.com/assets/images/content/prj_ksp_nati/3.jpg)

I think he exaggerates a bit.

<comment><USER7> Those look like artistic renderings, from before it opened - not pictures.

I don't doubt it's much more impressive in person, also.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps, but it pretty clearly is _not_ "hundreds of feet deep".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Communism set China back so much. The Cultural Revolution and one-child policy especially. This is a country with a tradition of great scientists, statesmen, inventors, engineers, traders, and so on - and they suppressed it all for... what exactly? Forced labor camps so that everyone is equal, except for the Party leaders who are more equal? If China had even a semblance of classical liberalism, human rights, and free trade, they'd probably be the strongest nation in the world. Lots of natural resources, a large population, strong family ties and loyalty, and an unreal work ethic.

That said, the one child policy hurt the country _a lot_. Countries where the old outnumber the young vastly tend to go in heavy decline, and that's going to bite China pretty hard in the coming years. Also, the male:female ratio is getting to a crazy point. Historically, wars break out when the men outnumber the women so much. I could see China fighting a pretty brutal war in Asia at some point in the next 30 years.

That's if there isn't a civil war first. They're built as a highly centralized empire where the Han Chinese have basically all the power, and the other groups - Xianjianese, Chen Chinese, Hong Kongese, Taiwanese, Macanese, and Tibetans all have no power and basically don't want to be part of China. Historically that produces civil wars. I think as soon as one of the areas pushes hard for independence, others will follow. It happened to the English, Spanish, French, and Dutch at various periods, happened to the Greeks and Romans, happened basically everywhere. The only way an empire holds itself together with diverse groups is through decentralization of power, and representation of all groups in the central government. To truly bond a nation, you need to mix blood and local groups so it's diverse. That means encouraging movement and mixing of people, but the Chinese are pretty outwardly racist (and it's not really seen as a bad thing there - there's not the same moral judgment about it was have in the West). Talking down and making racist jokes about people from lesser provinces or areas of China, and especially China's neighbors is par for the course. People do it at formal dinners and nobody really bats an eye unless the person goes too far with it.

I see China being a world power over the next 50-100 years, but they do have some bad things coming up on them: The male:female ratio imbalance, the old/young ratio, and the lack of representation under a powerful central government and oppression/conquest of minority groups and parts of the nation are going to be a problem. If China can liberalize (in the classical sense, not the modern - basic individual rights) and grant representation and bring the distant parts of their nation willing into the fold, they can probably weather the storm. Or who knows - perhaps the conquer parts of India or Russia, or find a pretense to "stabilize" North Korea after it starts falling apart, or invade Japan if it loses its status as an American protectorate (perhaps because the US goes bankrupt and needs to cut foreign military bases - improbable but possible).

Interesting to look at that part of the world. They have the potential to be the dominant world power and set the pace for the world, but they face a lot of problems. If they sort their house out and move away from Communism and the Party fast enough, the nation could have the influence over the next 50-100 years of the world that America has had over the last 50-100.

<comment><USER9> I took a class on "Revolution in the 20th Century" as an undergrad, and the professor there pointed out that Chinese agriculture is built on marginally- fertile land; they absolutely depend on large irrigation networks and on using human waste from the cities to fertilize the countryside. And those networks require a large centralized government to maintain them. Which is why China has _had_ large centralized government, of one form or another, for so many centuries (although not continuously).</comment></comment>


Managing config variables inside a Node.js application | Chovy's Blog - <AUTHOR> http://www.chovy.com/node-js/managing-config-variables-inside-a-node-js-application/ <comment><USER2> I just use nconf <https://github.com/flatiron/nconf></comment>


Language Oriented Programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/martin/papers/middle-out-t.pdf

<comment><USER2> makes me want to learn lisp, but not until I'm speedy in python

LISP, you're next and I do expect to have my mind thoroughly blown when I 'get it'... I was thinking about code-emitting and meta programming in C#, and I realised that what you're really after is access to the AST... which I hear LISP lays bare..</comment>


Ask HN: How to get timestamp from HN comments? - <AUTHOR> I am doing a small project that implies parsing the HN comments, and I would love to be able to read the time of the comments displayed. However the webpage only gives this information:

    <span class="age">
      <a href="item?id=____">X days|hours|minutes ago</a>
    </span>
 Is it possible to retrieve the exact date somehow? I see that Firebase is doing it somehow [1], but it might be:
1. They have a special partnership which allows them to plug into their data in a different way
2. They are parsing threads every N (10?) minutes and rounding the seconds
I think it'd be ridiculous to have to load a full API request for each comment in my project to Firebase only to get their timestamp, so I'd love some advice on how to get that. If any HN developer sees this, could we get something like this (or any other standard way)?

    <span class="age" data-timestamp="Mon Oct 31 16:05:12 2016">
      <a href="item?id=____">X days|hours|minutes ago</a>
    </span>

 [1] https://github.com/HackerNews/API <comment><USER2> The |contact| link at the bottom of the pagel is probably the best way to get more information...at least if accurate information counts.</comment>


YouTube - Did You Know? - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY&feature=fvst <comment><USER3> It's a nice vid - although perhaps a little old now.. That being said - <USER2> found it more interesting than the Did You Know 4.0 that came out last month -- the new ones seems like a "new media rules, old media sucks" rah-rah video - than anything of much substance.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8>

(although - I've gotta give it full credit for having a list of sources at the end!)</comment>


Show HN: Get into the zone, edge AI that gently nudges when distracted - <AUTHOR> https://zen.veda.ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN, Lot of students are learning remotely(& alone), as we know it's hard to stay focused.

AI that takes a picture periodically, analyse if they are looking away or at their phone and gently nudge to continue learning.

Everything happens on device and nothing is sent anywhere

Please try it and share your feedback/suggestions</comment>


This person does not exist - <AUTHOR> https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ <comment><USER3> Thanks for all the upvotes! Since I made this site, people have already started to train on datasets beyond just real faces. Turns out it can disentangle pretty much any set of data.

Gwern has applied this to anime dataset [https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1095131651246575616](https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1095131651246575616)

Cyril at Google has applied it to artwork [https://twitter.com/kikko_fr/status/1094685986691399681](https://twitter.com/kikko_fr/status/1094685986691399681)

This was to raise awareness for what a talented group of researchers made at Nvidia over the course of 2 years, the latest state of the art for GANs. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf) ([https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan](https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan))

Rani Horev wrote up a nice description of the architecture here. [https://www.lyrn.ai/2018/12/26/a-style-based-generator- archi...](https://www.lyrn.ai/2018/12/26/a-style-based-generator-architecture- for-generative-adversarial-networks/)

Feel free to experiment with the generations yourself at a colab I made [https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1IC0g2oDQenrDmwbtkKo...](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1IC0g2oDQenrDmwbtkKoNQsWpjwBcncL8)

I'm currently working on a project to map BERT embeddings of text descriptions of the faces directly to the latent space embedding (which is just a 512 dimensional vector). The goal is to control the image generation with sentences, once the mapping network is trained. Will definitely post on hacker news again if that succeeds. The future is now!

<comment><USER4> Cool page, and great job.

> Turns out it can disentangle pretty much any set of data.

All the example I have seen (including your links) are variants of face generation algorithms. Any ideas on how this could be useful beyond image generation in some style? Specifically for (data) science?

Sorry if this is a naive question.

Edit: By "variants of face generation algorithms" I mean any image generation really.

<comment><USER5> The original Karras et al 2018 paper did both cars and cats, which aren't faces. Worked very well, unsurprisingly. (ProGAN also did well on those, though it was the faces everyone paid attention to.) Look at the samples in the paper or the Google Drive dumps, or at the interpolation videos have posted on Twitter.

Aside from the original work, on Twitter, people have done Gothic cathedrals very well, graffiti very well, fonts very well, and WikiArt oil portraits not so well. On Danbooru2017 full anime images (linked in my thread), one person has... suggestive blobs but has only put 2-3 GPU-days into it and we aren't expecting much so early into training. skylion has been running StyleGAN on a whole-body anime character dataset he has, and the results overnight (on 4 Titans) are pretty impressive but he hasn't shared anything publicly yet.

<comment><USER3> Great job on the Danbooru training! I've been following you on twitter and machinelearning for the longest time haha

<comment><USER5> Thanks! The wait on training is killing me, though. I've been doing large minibatch training to try to fix the remaining issues in the anime face StyleGAN and it's frustrating having to wait days to see clear improvement. Checking GAN samples is so addictive and undermines my ability to focus & get anything else done. I'm also eager to get started on full Danbooru image training, which I intend to initialize from skylion's model - whenever _that_ finishes training...

(Who says we aren't compute-limited these days?!)

<comment><USER3> Haha, having to work around the computation limits are welcoming! It feels like building web apps back in the late 90's again. These days we have so much memory and disk space at hand it doesn't even feel like a challenge anymore.

That is, until Graphcore delivers their IPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> more details since none were provided:

> Recently a talented group of researchers at Nvidia released the current > state of the art generative adversarial network, StyleGAN, over at > [https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan](https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan)

> I have decided to dig into my own pockets and raise some public awareness > for this technology.

> Faces are most salient to our cognition, so I've decided to put that > specific pretrained model up. Their research group have also included > pretrained models for cats, cars, and bedrooms in their repository that you > can immediately use.

> Each time you refresh the site, the network will generate a new facial image > from scratch from a 512 dimensional vector.

([https://www.facebook.com/groups/DeepNetGroup/permalink/80536...](https://www.facebook.com/groups/DeepNetGroup/permalink/805364403189777/))

</comment><comment><USER7> Googling "nvidia face generator" lead me to "A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks," (6 Feb 2019) a paper showing the faces on the site.

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Code: [https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan](https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you reload this page enough, you will eventually find your own face. And then things start to get weird....

<comment><USER10> Luckily the dataset is photogenic people so no danger of that for me.

<comment><USER11> Luckily the dataset is attractive people so no danger of that for me.

<comment><USER10> thatsthejoke.jpg

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For all of these "this is a simulated face"-claims I wish they would show the 2-3 most similar faces in their training set. For all you know, it could just be spitting out a random training image. How would you know the difference?

<comment><USER13> take a look at "Figure 8" from the original paper:

[https://imgur.com/a/rZsWzDa](https://imgur.com/a/rZsWzDa)

we can smoothly interpolate between faces, so it seems impossible to me that these are just memorised from the training set

<comment><USER14> I just realized that the eyes, nose, and mouth are always in the same place in these images... even though the head might rotate around them.

<comment><USER5> That might be because they cleaned the dataset thoroughly. I vaguely recall there was something about 'facial landmarks' and alignment in the ProGAN work which was presumably carried over to StyleGAN. Doubtless helps the final quality.

However, aligned faces are definitely _not_ required - I didn't do any kind of alignment for my anime faces and you can see the eyes/nose/mouth in all sorts of positions in the samples & videos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been wondering what is going to happen when bots start using these images as profile pictures?

Previously it wasn't trivial to do a GAN image generator, now as this site shows it's, if not trivial, also not particularly hard.

<comment><USER16> What's the practical difference between a synthetic fake profile photo and a stolen filtered real one?

<comment><USER15> Speed of content generation. You can create thousands of synth ones a second.

<comment><USER17> Since it uses a deep neural network, I don't think it's "thousands a second". Also, you can download an image and crop a face out of it in several seconds. You could even automate the process.

The biggest problem is transferring faces to existing photos. It was hard to do manually. Now it's much easier. Also, people are generally _trained_ to ignore various artifacts by CGI-ridden movies and compression algorithms. So much of our notion of how the world looks comes from digital imagery, it's kind of scary.

I think we need to change the threshold of quality for an image/video to constitute "proof" of any kind. You can hide most of the weird artifacts by scaling things down or passing them through heavy compression.

<comment><USER5> > Since it uses a deep neural network, I don't think it's "thousands a > second".

The generator is like 150MB. The forward pass is <0.1s. Hypothetically you should be able to generate on a decent GPU like a 1080ti with 11GB VRAM at full utilization <730 images per second. Use a few GPUs and you're at thousands per second.

<comment><USER17> Where is this data from? I see 300MB model on their Google Drive. And if I understand correctly, you also need source and destination images to transfer styles from and to, so it's not like the model generates photos out of thin air.

<comment><USER5> The 300MB model covers both the G and D. You only need G to generate. The style transfer is just noise. And I time my own 512px anime StyleGANs at ~21 images per second per model; half that throughput to account for the increased model size and depth of a 1024px. No matter how you tweak the numbers - <USER2> it again if you wish! - it's clear that thousands per second is entirely attainable with a few GPUs at low cost. (For comparison, 8 V100s is ~$7/hr on AWS; 10x1080ti is ~$1.3/hr on Vast.ai.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I should hope not!

[https://imgur.com/a/ptgKbh1](https://imgur.com/a/ptgKbh1)

<comment><USER19> The presentation is very interesting. That's always what amazes my with those GAN outputs. These people do not actually exist. Obviously, there are some funky examples. Nothing wrong with mine at first, although his buddy should probably see a doctor: [https://imgur.com/a/dkS8Ux5](https://imgur.com/a/dkS8Ux5)

<comment><USER20> I noticed that whenever there was more than one person, or something touched the face, the results looks horrific.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 1-6 A Lorem Ipsum for faces... It looks like a great way to build an employee profile page for a site.

<comment><USER21> Facum Ipsum sounds like an entertaining side-project. Coupling one of these images with a random profile generator for each employee and outputting to JSON. One button press would populate your app with relevant data.

<comment> 1-6 \+ [https://www.fakenamegenerator.com](https://www.fakenamegenerator.com)

<comment><USER22> Interesting that the Vehicle Record lists cars that are only available in Europe and Asia despite generating exclusively US addresses/personas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Related: the technology behind this has a harder time with cats than it does people, and the results are hilarious:

[http://aiweirdness.com/post/182633984547/gancats](http://aiweirdness.com/post/182633984547/gancats)

</comment><comment><USER24> People keep saying this'd be great for fake profile photos, but seems to me that's not realistic yet, at least not as demonstrated here.

A social media profile with a single picture is pretty suspicious.

To be convincing you'd need a steady stream of pictures of the "same" fictitious person, doing typical social media thing -- selfies with friends, vacation pics, appearances in _other_ peoples' pictures, etc.

<comment><USER25> Not necessarily, If you're talking about platforms like LinkedIn where people hardly change their profile pic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is literally the first AI image processing project I've seen posted here that actually shows high resolution images.

Every single other one I've seen has a bunch of tiny low res thumbnails on a github page that serve to completely obscure any potential artifacts or issues with the system.

(I could clone their code and run it, but that's not the output that any of the discussion they've prompted is operating on, and that's kind of the point of hacker news).

So thanks for doing the bare minimum for an image processing project, finally.

<comment><USER27> Bare minimum, how come? Most standardized image processing datasets have very low resolution images.

<comment><USER26> Yes, my point is that that is not good enough.

Two problems that I can see:

1\. What use cases are there for a photo processing algorithm that only spits out tiny thumbnails?

2\. If it _can_ output higher resolution images, why are all of the examples tiny thumbnails? You can hide a lot of otherwise obvious flaws with a tiny thumbnail.

<comment><USER28> Because of computing power issues - training a good model with a significantly higher resolution becomes a lot more expensive. If you're doing a proof of concept or analyzing algorithms, you stick to lower resolutions; at larger resolutions the algorithm (and its effects) are the same, but you just need ten or hundred or thousand times more hardware and/or time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> GAN creating faces purely at the pixel level still seems a strange approach to me. In some years it will feel very restrictive. I guess it's the only tractable method at the moment.

Is anyone working on a GAN to generate bone structure then flesh and skin/mouth/eyes textures and pipe the result in a ray tracer?

It's incredible what can be done in 2D solving directly for the result, but imagine where this goes when this works in volume and multiple levels more driven by physics.

<comment><USER30> I guess finding training data for bone structure, flesh, and skin textures is harder than finding pictures of faces...

<comment><USER31> Oddly, one's bone structure likely possesses more intrinsic privacy protections despite being, arguably, less personally identifiable than one's face.

Of course, this is also why training data is more difficult to acquire, as you mention.

<comment><USER32> Wouldn't being less personally identifiable mean it also offers more privacy protection?

<comment><USER33> He means that there are rules preventing the data from being shared, making it harder to find a training set.

<comment><USER31> Upon further reflection, my observation's mostly a straw man. HIPAA covers a patient's face when a dermatologist takes an image just as a x-ray covers a bone structure.

Privacy is hard to talk and reason about without defining everything specifically.

This projects images were sourced from Flickr. You can find medical imagery on Flickr reasonably easy as well it turns out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> *This person is a composite of several people who do exist

<comment><USER35> I hear ya... Don't you think you're stretching the meaning of the words "composite" and "several" a little far though?

<comment><USER36> Asking as an ML layman, isn't it mixing something like 6 maybe 10 features of different people?

<comment><USER37> With tens of thousands of training images, and hundreds of dimensions in the latent space, I don't think I would assume this is true. You may be thinking one feature is "eyes", but the eyes may instead be built out of 10 sub- features. Those sub-features may be inextricably linked to other, identifiable, macro-features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> But how synthetic are they? I.e., what does the "most similar", however you define it, sample in the training set look like?

<comment><USER39> Good question! I'm guessing not very synthetic, with high similarity to examples in the training set.

<comment><USER40> This issue is covered in this Two Minute Papers video - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ct_P3IZow0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ct_P3IZow0) (relevant section around 2:27)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Hmm, it does babies and infants too. I was not expecting that.

Other commentators mention that Ashley Madison, stock-photo companies, and other spammers will take this and run with it. Honestly, I suspect that has already happened for a while now and may explain the issues that FB and Twitter are having [0].

Though I can't find the thread, there was a discussion here on HN a while back about the 'Inversion' issue. Briefly, Youtube uses some ML and RNN stuff to help determine spammers vs. real-people (after pre-processing and cleaning things up a fair bit). However, if the number of spammers becomes too high, such that the spammers that DO make it through the various filters become over 51%, then the filters will 'Invert'. Meaning that the MLs and RNNs will start to classify the spammers as 'real' and the real-people will likely be told they are spammers.

I can imagine that this site will quickly exacerbate that issue.

Honestly, in reading Cal Newport's new book [1], I can't say I'm all that sad about it. The 'casino' like design of the modern web is obviously bad for us. In moderation, yes, but to the level we are at currently? Not a chance. Driving users away from these sites and devices isn't a bad thing for anyone that isn't earning a paycheck via the FAANGs.

Hopefully this kind of tech will cause a bit of a restructuring of the modern web in the long haul. I doubt it, but one can hope.

[0] Not that Jack can even properly use twitter to begin with: [https://danluu.com/karajack/](https://danluu.com/karajack/)

[1] [http://calnewport.com/blog/](http://calnewport.com/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm waiting for the time where all this neural technology will start to be used for something good, like making better games with more NPCs who can really talk. Maybe never. The life-cycle seems to be research -> malicious use -> hipster nonsense -> memes -> abandonment.

Edit: the problems with these images look very much like application of anisotropic smoothing. G'MIC has filters like that. You can make this stuff look more realistic by blurring it (gaussian) and adding noise (uniform). Blurring hides small-scale irregularities, while noise makes blurring less obvious by adding small-scale "grains" that you perceive as detail/texture.

<comment><USER5> Things do get applied. If you want applications of GANs to better games, did you notice the past few weeks discussion of using ESRGAN & other superresolution GANs to upscale artwork of old games to make them far prettier and highres?

<comment><USER17> I was thinking more along the lines of an RPG with generated town population. Indie devs usually don't have resources to draw hundreds of portraits and record tends of hours of dialog, but if they could use ML to generate portraits and synthesize decent speech, it would allow them to create much bigger, more immersive worlds.

Also, this stuff could be used to take a hand-drawn portrait and animate it with different expressions without rework.

<comment><USER5> "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." Stuff like that will come, eventually. Like any cutting-edge R&D, there's a long valley of death from a lab demo to a globalized real-world product. It's a lot of work to package things up so reliably & cleanly that harried game devs can easily & usefully incorporate them into games.

<comment><USER17> _> Stuff like that will come, eventually._

Well, I'm not so sure. On one hand, games use graphics techniques that were developed couple years prior to their development. On the other hand, they fail to capitalize even on relevant AI research of the 60s and 80s. When they do, it looks amazing (e.g. FEAR AI), but it's very rare.

<comment><USER5> The excuse I always hear is that those techniques might be smarter but not as fun. That doesn't appear near as applicable to graphics stuff, where game developers have always been eager to apply and extend the cutting edge.

<comment> crooked-v The FEAR AI is actually simpler than you might think, though with some really good insights in term of applying behavioral design to gameplay. [https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear...](https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear.pdf)

> As much as we like to pat ourselves on the back, and talk about how smart > our A.I. are, the reality is that all A.I. ever do is move around and play > animations! Think about it. An A.I. going for cover is just moving to some > position, and then playing a duck or lean animation. An A.I. attacking just > loops a firing animation. Sure there are some implementation details; we > assume the animation system has key frames which may have embedded messages > that tell the audio system to play a footstep sound, or the weapon system to > start and stop firing, but as far as the A.I.'s decision-making is > concerned, he is just moving around or playing an animation.

> Now let's look at our complex behaviors. The truth is, we actually did not > have any complex squad behaviors at all in F.E.A.R. Dynamic situations > emerge out of the interplay between the squad level decision making, and the > individual A.I.'s decision making, and often create the illusion of more > complex squad behavior than what actually exists!

> Imagine we have a situation similar to what we saw earlier, where the player > has invalidated one of the A.I.'s cover positions, and a squad behavior > orders the A.I. to move to the valid cover position. If there is some > obstacle in the level, like a solid wall, the A.I. may take a back route and > resurface on the player's side. It appears that the A.I. is flanking, but in > fact this is just a side effect of moving to the only available valid cover > he is aware of.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I've read that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> As this stuff gets better and better, I wonder if it will actually increase our distrust in digital imagery and in doing so, increase the demand for in person interaction, at least in matters of consequence.

Either that, or digital communication will have to include defensive fake detection features, and the rest of that thought is a Philip K Dick novel ;)

<comment><USER43> Photos have been faked since the beginning of photography. Mathew Brady (famous for photographing the American Civil War) moved dead bodies to stage shots, had live soldiers lie down and pretend to be dead, etc.

<comment><USER42> Agreed, but the difference today is the scale.

<comment><USER43> Absolutely, and the ease of creating a convincing fake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Note: I'm not trying to be an ass, or start a fight, I'm literally just asking...

Does it only generate white people? I've been refreshing for a while but don't see any people of color.

Edit: No, I finally got someone who wasn't white, it just seems to have a helluva bias.

<comment><USER45> The dataset is compiled from flickr portraits, and the model was trained to generate sampels from that distribution, so there will definitely be bias towards the sort of people whose portraits end up on flickr. Per the paper:

>The images were crawled from Flickr (thus inheriting all the biases of that website) and automatically aligned and cropped. Only images under permissive licenses were collected. Various automatic filters were used to prune the set, and finally Mechanical Turk allowed us to remove the occasional statues, paintings, or photos of photos.

It's still much more diverse than previous datasets (which used U.S. celebrity photos), but would require some additional work to match the actual world population distribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used my anime face StyleGAN to make a similar website: [http://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/index.html](http://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/index.html)

</comment><comment> WD-42 Advertising companies are going to be stoked that they don't have to pay real to model anymore. Stock photos especially.

<comment><USER46> Not as stoked as "blockchain" ICO scammers will be that they don't have to steal pictures for their "staff" pages anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> And yet, every few page refreshes or so... "I'm in love".

<comment><USER14> I'm in love with this toupee. [https://imgur.com/a/EnkHWnc](https://imgur.com/a/EnkHWnc)

<comment><USER48> I had a similar one ... and yet, not quite enough to outright convince me it was a fake. Because some people do wear weird hats and toupees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I've never read any benchmarks around render time on sophisticated GANs, so maybe the answer to this is obvious, but: Is this showing a random selection from a set of offline-generated images, or is the GAN actually generating these on each request?

<comment><USER50> It's definitely not generating an image for each page load. If you refresh the page you get the same image more often than you get a new image.

<comment><USER51> It looks like there is just throttling on requests, if you request a new one too quickly, it will just give you the same one

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's worth noting that although at a first glance the face looks extremely realistic, there are some details that don't quite make sense and hint at a randomly-generated face.

This is what I got: [https://i.imgur.com/iCfzjkZ.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/iCfzjkZ.jpg)

In no specific order:

\- weird hair above the person's right eye, that doesn't match with the overall hairstyle (the patch of short hair) or realistic hair behaviour (straight bit of hair)

\- what seems like beard on the chin, with unrealistic lighting

\- hair turns into _leaves_ at the bottom

\- weird reflex in the left glass

\- mismatching shapes for glasses (there's a small bump only on the right glass)

<comment><USER53> Hrm, your example was quite glaring in its flaws, most of the images I saw, on the other hand, looked quite flawless. I actually came here to disagree with someone else who stated the images he saw had alien-like alarming characteristics, or something along those lines. I can't tell most of these are fake even at full size on an XS Max.

<comment><USER54> There are some weird and disturbing artifacts if in one of the composite images, the person was touching their face: [https://imgur.com/a/ptgKbh1](https://imgur.com/a/ptgKbh1)

<comment><USER55> More disturbing examples: [https://imgur.com/a/UoaYha8](https://imgur.com/a/UoaYha8)

Also a LOT more in this subreddit: [https://old.reddit.com/r/SyntheticNightmares/](https://old.reddit.com/r/SyntheticNightmares/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Most of them are CLOSE but still pretty Uncanny Valley, then there's [https://i.imgur.com/A2ThWBE.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/A2ThWBE.jpg) which was...shocking to say the least. Crazy how far this stuff has come though, and how many more applications it has. Also interesting how the oddities of the images look a lot like how some of the visual effects of psychedelics manifest. Hair blending into an ear, the lines around the eyes trailing off, the "hairiness" of some of them, and of course the nightmare fuel I linked above.

</comment><comment><USER57> The teeth seem to be the give-away. There seems to be a bias of having the two top front incisors facing the camera, even when the head is turned.

<comment><USER58> Glasses seem to do weird things, especially if they're frameless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I wonder why it doesn't generate any people with African features

<comment><USER60> It does, I got this image: [https://i.imgur.com/oSh8DsS.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/oSh8DsS.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Looks like a perfect tool for generating profile photos for troll bots. TinEye will soon no longer be able to help us.

</comment><comment><USER62> Wouldn't it be possible to add a real human feedback on each face presented on thisisnotaperson.com, in the form of a simple button « Fake » « Not fake » that would help the disciminator in its analysis with thousands of inputs?

</comment><comment><USER63> This is a strong, clickbaity claim, which seems quite hard to prove :)

But seriously: it may be essential for legal reasons to be 100% sure that an automatically generated face does in fact not depict a real-life person.

<comment><USER14> No more than it is essential to be 100% sure that a painting does not depict a real-life person.

<comment><USER63> A painting is usually immediately recognizable as a work of art / fiction. Do you want to appear as a team member on an escort service site which uses automatically generated placeholder images to protect their employees? Do you want your face on a billboard ad for Viagra?

There is a huge difference between "hey, that painting looks like you" and "hey, that is a photograph of you".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> This will soon get good enough to be indistinguishable from real faces. What's more, there will be collisions with real faces too, which could be amusing or disturbing when it triggers a conflict.

</comment><comment><USER65> Very interesting. I'm sure this technology will get better. It's in its infancy.

But what's "off" to me about these pictures are the eyes, every single picture. I don't get that feeling of human connection. In some of the pictures, the "person" has two different eyes. In some others, the eyes just make me feel sick to my stomach if I look at them. They're "off" at best and super creepy at worst.

That being said, as others have pointed out, in profile pic size I'm sure I couldn't tell.

<comment><USER66> It's the uncanny valley in action! About 80% of these faces look a bit off to me but some of the others I find really hard to tell it's a fake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> So is now not the time for me to be starting my modeling career then?

</comment><comment><USER68> biggest weakness of this system seems to be generating realistic backgrounds, the faces look amazing - but around the edges some photos appear to "swirl" with the background

</comment><comment><USER69> Some of these have really odd and interesting errors [https://imgur.com/a/oFBqRws](https://imgur.com/a/oFBqRws)

<comment><USER70> That last one is funny. Basically: expect anyone photographed at this angle to be wearing one of those TED-talk wireless microphone things _usually_. Rendered probabilistically?

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Really cool stuff, but aside from the obvious nightmare fuel stuff downthread, there's often still some interesting artifacts. I doubt I'd have noticed them before reading a medium piece on the subject, but they are there: [https://medium.com/@kcimc/how-to-recognize-fake-ai- generated...](https://medium.com/@kcimc/how-to-recognize-fake-ai-generated- images-4d1f6f9a2842).

</comment><comment><USER72> This guy wants to sell me a SaaS

[https://imgur.com/a/pTOZto4](https://imgur.com/a/pTOZto4)

<comment><USER73> The heterochromia and slit pupils are really what sell me on the product...

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Not to go all Black-Mirror here, but imagine training a model based on individualized user preferences to generate some sort of idyllic "person", leveraged for surreptitious advertising. For instance, analyzing what kind of Instagram models one engages with regularly and using that data to generate individualized "influencers". Just a thought :)

<comment><USER75> I feel like there's probably already a department at Alphabet working on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> this is quite disturbing: [https://imgur.com/JkBte93](https://imgur.com/JkBte93)

</comment><comment><USER77> This is likely drawing from the set of pre-generated faces. If so it is violating the attribution requirement of the license.

(Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International) [https://drive.google.com/open?id=1TKGTq6XgMBzA29EfOGD6RB9jjP...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1TKGTq6XgMBzA29EfOGD6RB9jjP56s9Vn)

<comment><USER78> Are you sure? I would think the pre-generated list would weed out the obviously incorrect/malformed ones that you sometimes get.

<comment><USER5> Karras et al 2018 dumped a random sample, not a screened sample. (This avoids cherrypicking accusations.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I apologize if this is a silly question but could someone provides some context for what this site is a demonstration of?

</comment><comment><USER80> Hmm. You could take a subset of photos, label them on attractiveness, figure out the vector for your personal sense of human aesthetic, and then generate pictures of people that you specifically find beautiful. Sounds like a good business idea for... uh... ads.

(Or a service that makes you prettier in social media photos. Yay dystopia!)

</comment><comment><USER81> Found one with a microphone embedded in their cheek. Another with half a pair of glasses embedded in an eye socket.

</comment><comment><USER82> Awesome job. any chance of adding a filter for Gender or Age?

e.g. [https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/?$gender=Male&MinAge=30&M...](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/?$gender=Male&MinAge=30&MaxAge=35)

</comment><comment><USER83> The first 3 I viewed were all incredible except for a weird little flaw around the edge of the hair/background line, first 2 had an unnatural notch out of their hair and the third was a weird discolouration/thinning of hair.

<comment><USER14> There's often some issues around hair, glasses, and... other people in frame. [https://imgur.com/2CjLFEP](https://imgur.com/2CjLFEP)

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Absolutely awesome! Some faces seem to have some weird horizontal asymmetry, though (I'm not saying that people are perfectly symmetric, but in these pictures the two halves of the face seem to belong to different people).

</comment><comment><USER85> The first time I heard of GAN's creating faces of people who never existed was from the show "Person of interest", where the "machine"(an AI) creates a face and assigns it to its identity.

</comment><comment><USER86> I have got a clone of the original site.. check it out [https://thispersondoesnotexist.scholarguider.com](https://thispersondoesnotexist.scholarguider.com)

</comment><comment><USER87> Is there any service that let's you pay to play with GANs? I have some art projects but don't want to go through the trouble of setting it all up. Certainly someone would rent me their GPUs?

<comment><USER88> AWS has GPU instances - [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dlami/latest/devguide/gpu.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dlami/latest/devguide/gpu.html)

<comment><USER87> So does Google with collab, right?

I could use those but was hoping for something more turnkey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> I've had a small (nerdy) dream of converting current generation Pokemon sprites into older palette and size constrained sprites using techniques similar to this.

Anyone have any suggestions on how I might start?

</comment><comment><USER90> This image generator does not understand the concept of earrings. Or stretched earlobes with plugs in them. Now and then I get a person who has these weird jewel-sores on their cheeks.

Kinda nifty.

</comment><comment><USER91> Spent some good minutes on this. Scary as hell. Thx for sharing it

</comment><comment><USER92> Uh, somebody want to explain this to us riff-raff? All I see is a web page that generates faces. No menus, no "About", nada. WTF is going on?

</comment><comment> ur-whale Either his GANN hasn't figured out that people's front teeth are usually symmetrically identical or I only know people with good dentists.

</comment><comment><USER93> I got the same exact face twice, so what's the deal? Is this not real-time generation and just grabbed from some pre-generated face database?

</comment><comment><USER94> Could be improved by "This person does not exist... and never has before."

Some might just think they are deceased with the current title.

</comment><comment><USER95> I only looked at a few. I was afraid I was going to see a woman and have love at first sight and be forever heartbroken.

</comment><comment><USER96> This looks like it will be extremely useful for people generating plausible- looking Twitter sock puppet accounts.

</comment><comment><USER97> Interesting to imagine this as an npc generator in a vr video game. I could imagine that feeling pretty lifelike

</comment><comment><USER98> One thing I think I noticed is that the children's faces have older looking skin than would be expected.

</comment><comment><USER99> Ted was right.

</comment><comment><USER100> When there's another person on the side, their face is really messed up for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER101> Ears always give it away. In every single picture I got so far the ears are malformed.

</comment><comment><USER102> If a generated "random" person happen to be identical with a real person then you must say the person exist. It's very likely that some images describe real people and therefore the domain name makes no sense. Like if a process happened to generate a real equation it's not the case that the equation doesn't exist.

</comment><comment><USER103> Simultaneously the coolest and most frightening thing I've seen. Good work.

<comment><USER104> Seriously, these photos are really creeping me out. They've _almost_ escaped uncanny valley but the little details (wonky ears, unnatural hair, weird artifacts) make them super creepy.

The worst I've gotten is this guy: [https://imgur.com/A2SsmVn](https://imgur.com/A2SsmVn). He's mostly normal but some glitch (presumably a partial pair of glasses) makes it look like his robot face mask is coming unpeeled. Extremely unsettling.

EDIT: Holy crap, I might have found one worse. This woman is smiling away as her mutated hand stabs a piece of glass into her face and I am so uncomfortable: [https://imgur.com/z6UKVWn](https://imgur.com/z6UKVWn)

<comment><USER55> More creepy photos: [https://old.reddit.com/r/SyntheticNightmares/](https://old.reddit.com/r/SyntheticNightmares/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> So how long before we have a dataset to say if an image was generated or not?

</comment><comment><USER106> There's at least one doppelganger that looks exactly like you in the world. It's interesting to think that some of these GAN rendered images of people could actually be people that exist in the real world.

</comment><comment><USER107> Yeah, clearly. It showed me a boy with widespread stubble.

</comment><comment><USER108> Can you get multiple photos of a "person"?

<comment><USER109> Looking to fill out your dating profile?

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> Well there goes the Image Turing Test....

</comment><comment> Nevada-Smith Would this work with ASCII-art faces?

</comment><comment><USER111> Ashley Madison should acquire this tech.

</comment><comment><USER112> What kind of viral marketing campaign is this for?

<comment><USER113> Some ML face generator I assume

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> You aren't killing them as we click the photos, are you?

<comment><USER115> You joke but the first image I got was a Chinese looking guy. I was expecting to scroll and see a story about how he "disappeared".

<comment><USER116> ha ha, classic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER117> GANs are fascinating, but I'd love to see a post-processing effect that removes some of the pixel fringe created during GAN composition.

</comment><comment><USER118> Why doesn't this show up on the main page? It has 696 upvotes in 18 hours! It's not on the main page, it's not on Show HN.

</comment><comment><USER119> This would be so much cooler and useful if you could generate several pictures of the same person in different angles/lighting.

</comment><comment><USER118> Please add a way to share a generated face.

</comment><comment><USER120> These people all definitely exist. The algorithm is breaking up photographs of real faces and recombining them. It's portrait soup.</comment>


Engineering salaries at Silicon Valley startups - <AUTHOR> http://howtowriteabusinessplan.com/2012/12/engineering-salaries-at-silicon-valley-startups/ <comment><USER2> For those of you entranced by the top-line numbers here, you have to also remember that the cost of living in San Francisco (especially with regards to housing) is also extremely high. For example, according to Wolfram|Alpha a $95,000 salary in Seattle is worth $137,000 in San Francisco [1].

1: [https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2495%2C000+salary+in+...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2495%2C000+salary+in+Seattle+moving+to+San+Francisco)

<comment><USER3> This is something I've always wondered about. If, as an example, you were moving from Seattle to SF and you told prospective employers you were looking for a salary of 137k from a prior salary of 95k based on cost of living data do you have any hope of landing a job with that expectation?

I'd be interested in hearing the experiences of anyone who has made a move like that and if they felt their increase in salary was on par, above, or below the change in cost of living.

<comment><USER4> I've made the move from Washington to Bay Area, and the salary reflected cost of living. Was a big company, with salary bands, and all. You should consider it for your specific case. You also don't have to live in San Francisco as long as the office is close to public transportation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really dislike the trends I'm seeing in infographics. It's information porn with no substance.

      - The sources are very vague, there's no way to
        verify anything for yourself.
      - There's no indication of statistical significance
      - Visualizations are not accurate, such as the
        "salary by experience" graph which even by visual
        inspection is not to scale.
      - The connected line graph from "C" to "Other" under
        salary by company stage is meaningless and misleading
      - The visualizations are for the sake of visualization,
        not for clarity. See "Average # of companies
        competing" section

</comment><comment><USER4> Riviera typically places people for senior positions - their business model is to charge a retainer percentage (25-30%) salary for a placed candidate, so it's not economically viable for them to deal with five-digit salaries at the low-end.

</comment><comment><USER6> What's the point of talking about salaries at startups?

I don't understand why you would give priority to a salary figure at a startup. It's largely illusory. The startup could shutdown 2 weeks from now and nobody will pay you anything.

If you're just after a high salary, join an established corporation. If you're after equity, or working on cutting edge stuff, join a startup.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hum, suddenly, the $80/hr I charge as a remote freelancer seems low...

</comment><comment><USER8> This is like using the average rent prices in Manhattan to represent the average rent prices of New York State.

The median prices would be much more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER9> C# and Flex being in the top 4 "high demand" technologies is mind blowing. Flash on 6th is also quite surprising...

<comment><USER10> This is probably more prevalent at mega-corps than startups - and those mega- corps are hiring more programmers than startups, adding skew.

Breaking down the "high demand" technologies by investments (Round A, Round B...) would likely bear different results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm in the wrong field..

</comment><comment><USER12> This looks like Small Data. Here's why:

<5 years work experience:

T20 school => $102,500

non-T20 => $123,300

... which seems to be counterintuitive, with more prestigious schools correlating to lower salaries, but stranger things have happened.

5+ years of experience:

T20 school => $128,500

non-T20 school => $123,100

In other words, the people from non-T20 schools stagnate as they cross the 5-year mark, while the T20 students improve considerably. That makes no sense, because the effect of a T20 degree is _highest_ early in one's career.

<comment><USER3> I have three theories.

1\. They are taking jobs at very early stage start-ups or starting their own companies as that culture seems to be more prevalent at many of the top schools. On the other hand your typical university is much more focused on the traditional get a job at mega corp scenario.

2\. In my limited experience working with recently graduated interns I've found that the ones from "top schools" tend to be worse. They seem to have a chip on their shoulder that certain things are beneath them, give up easier, and are hyper sensitive to feedback. Students from more normal schools seem to have much less mental baggage in those regards.

3\. The info graphic is BS and however they collected their numbers was flawed.

<comment><USER12> I think these are all quite possible.

I'm not as negative as you are on top-school students. My experience is that Harvard/MIT programmers and quants are no worse or better than anyone else. Now, Harvard/MIT PM peoples... different story. Programming kills that entitlement mentality because the compiler does not give a shit who you are. Bossing people around reinforces it. After a few years, though, the effects of whatever school the person went to are pretty much gone.

What I think you are encountering is that, at a given level, the Ivy students who ended up there are going to be worse than the state-school kids who got to that same place. The best Harvard students are not going to be interested in a 0.02% equity slice of a mediocre startup, because they have the connections to be, if not Founders, VPs at least.

Speaking of equity, I'll add a 4th likely element:

4\. Salary in startups has a relatively thin band: currently, about $110-150k in SV and $90-130k in New York. The real variation is in equity, titles, and glory if the thing succeeds.

<comment><USER3> "at a given level, the Ivy students who ended up there are going to be worse than the state-school kids who got to that same place."

Yes, I agree.

<comment><USER13> I must say, there are a lot of presumptions being thrown around about "Top 20 School" alum. There are numerous benefits (and draw-backs) to going to such schools but to make broad assessments about individuals who attended the schools is asinine, like any other stereotype.

Essentially the argument here is that ivy-leaguers have better options when leaving college so, all things being equal, with an ivy-leaguer and a lower- tier school alum in the same job you'd expect the ivy-leaguer to be less skilled.

The point that is neglected is that the screening process for top-tier schools is substantially more difficult, so much so that it is feasible to see a student from the lowest quartile of the student body at a top-tier school that would have performed in the highest quartile at a less rigorous school. (note: less rigorous is not meant to be a comment on educational quality, only a comment on the intensity of the academic assignments). In this context it's unclear to me why the above comment makes sense. Maybe there's some anecdotal evidence that was not included but, lacking a decent sample, assertions like this are more representative of the biases of those that post them than reality.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The beauty of mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://so-makeshift.tumblr.com/post/55014636209/the-beauty-of-mathematics <comment><USER2> I've been playing around with the Riemann zeta function recently just as a math refresher, and I've got a few layman's theories floating around I might like to bounce off someone who actually knows something someday. Particularly to do with how it converges to -1/12 when s=-1 and what that (and similar bizarrely converging functions) actually really means. I actually kind of wonder if our common conception of what an integer really is might be all wrong. One thing that interests me is that between complex numbers and the identity between e and cos/sin, is that it seems like numbers often lend themselves remarkably well to lying on a curve or a circle even when you'd think they wouldn't. Also, the Riemann zeta function is pretty closely related to the harmonic function. What if instead of thinking of integers as discrete objects, we need to think of them as waves, with a frequency and interference?</comment>


Floppy Discs Still Used in Nuclear Bases - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/328852/floppy-disks-still-used-to-control-u-s-nuclear-bases/ <comment><USER2> Here's the report: [http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-696T](http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-696T)

        Information Technology:
        Federal Agencies Need to Address
            Aging Legacy Systems
        GAO-16-696T:
        Published: May 25, 2016.
        Publicly Released: May 25, 2016.

That was submitted here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11771147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11771147)

The story has been submitted many times from many sources, and the stories and commentary in the is different in many cases. The submission that got the discussion is this one:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772966) (77 comments)

Oh, and this got a little as well:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11776631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11776631) (9 comments)

There got the occasional largely content-free comment, but most were ignored:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11785773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11785773)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11785644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11785644)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11785596](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11785596)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11784701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11784701)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781730)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11779854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11779854)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11777594](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11777594)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11771469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11771469)</comment>


"Dropbox and Third Parties allowed to access, scan, store and duplicate content" - <AUTHOR> https://tldrlegal.com/license/dropbox-terms-of-service

<comment><USER2> From the actual document:

> _These and other features may require our systems to access, store and scan > Your Stuff. You give us permission to do those things, and this permission > extends to trusted third parties we work with._

This is nothing new...

Dropbox security is horrible (at least after they made _everything_ public without asking) and I'm worried about the "trusted third parties" which could include the NSA, etc.</comment>


Some Savers in Cyprus May Lose 60 Percent - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/business/global/some-savers-in-cyprus-may-lose-60-percent.html?_r=0

<comment><AUTHOR> IMo, they are at least three issues with Cyprus: donor fatigue, even though the amount is tiny relatively speaking.

EU hates small islands that act as money laundering /low tax heavens.

Lastly, this: _"In 2004, Greek Cypriots again defied international expectations when they voted down a United Nations-backed reunification plan they believed was unfairly weighted against them.

A few days later, the island joined the European Union and some EU leaders were left fuming at what they saw as Greek Cypriot deceit for promising to sign up to a peace deal in exchange for EU membership.

Nearly a decade later and European acrimony at the Cypriot "no" hasn't entirely dissipated. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaueble told the Sunday edition of German newspaper Welt am Sonntag that "Cyprus was admitted to the EU in hopes that the plan of then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to overcome the (island's) divide would be honored."

"I interpret (that) as indicating a sense of vindictiveness rather than rational, result-oriented thinking." said University of Cyprus Associate Professor Yiannis Papadakis._ [http://hosted2.ap.org/OHCAN/CREPnewswire/Article_2013-03-30-...](http://hosted2.ap.org/OHCAN/CREPnewswire/Article_2013-03-30-Defiant%20Cyprus/id- cf1a4dace5a04e6a9ad2891e78a86769)</comment>


Is 'Web 2.0' Another Bubble? 2006 - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116679843912957776-fF7CtrdMDTE4n1h5Ju5pv0HKhgM_20071227.html

<comment><USER2> In Web 2.0 the turnover rate wasn't too high and most "services" were toys made in the spare time as a mashup of other services. To think it was a bubble, even at the time, is nonsense.

Today I see a different case: shady accounting practices, lots of companies going from zero to public with little market validation, high customer acquisition costs, and high employee turnover rates (at some companies).

Today I think we're in a bubble, but nobody can say for sure until we see it pop. But if you're smart, it doesn't really matter whether we're in a bubble or not.

Just don't be an idiot and get solid funding now so you have money to float above the failures.

</comment><comment><USER3> In fact, I also think that Web 2.0 is a bubble in that time and I still think it was. But luckily, iPhone launched and changed the world.

</comment><comment><USER4> A lot of startup will fail. Some bigger startups will fail at some point too. Corporate giants will fail and have to dissolve into smaller parts.

Do I think a new bubble is about to pop? Half and half, depending on how you think about it.

First, web 2.0 probably will continue to do well just because most people consider the Internet is a necessity. With government, business and education now moving to cloud-based operation, Internet will continue to be popular.

On the other hands, I got a lot of thoughts about buble popping.

Take Apple for example. Its market price can continue to last for several years as long as Apple continue to offer durable products as it has always been. Its market branch is now etched into everyone's head. It's like seeing MS Word - you just can't live without one (or a MS Word clone).

But competitors like Samsung is competing with Apple. The wheel is turning because Samsung offers more phone choices and in a way offers more features - well bigger screen, upgrade hardware spec, etc. So the Apple's dominant is being challenged. A company can't live on old reputation forever. It has to continue to surprise consumers. If Apple can't do that within, say, 5 years, and if its competitor offers more attractive products, I am sure the price will fall.

Blackberry is doom to dissolve anyway. It's just a matter of time. MS will have to give up some of its flesh to save its ass in the next 5-10 years. It just can't stay like this forever. People lose interest. Spending tens of billions on R&D produces little market attraction is a thing you don't want to end up with.

Google is boring too. So much criticism. Mozilla is facing challenge too: DRM or not? Mozilla has a long way to go. If has several years to observe the impact of DRM. Will FFOS take off in North America a few years from now? Will the market shrink more? How long more can Opera survive. Will Apple finally give up safari and say fuck that?

In the startup world, let's look at education. So many startups are building around education, offering either Coursea-like service or BlackBoard/Moodle like learning manamgnet service (I think Khan academy is in that direction, primarily for k-12, and I think Kewton too). But you got edx, coursera, udacity and a few other ones competing. Open learning seems hot but we start seeing some fragmentation. Who will win?

Twitter made some good money but also had some bad loss this year. Can it continue to do well next couple years? Are companies growing too fast?

So bubble will pop. Some will shut down, some get acquired, and some will win.

<comment><USER2> In fragmentation, there is not always a winner. Sometimes they just all survive.</comment></comment>


Europe Takes First Steps in Electrifying World's Shipping Fleets - <AUTHOR> https://e360.yale.edu/features/europe-takes-first-steps-in-electrifying-worlds-shipping-fleets <comment><USER2> 2 out of the 5 ferries running between Helsinborg and Elsinore are now battery powered. The ferries leave every 15 minutes nearly 24/7, and arrive after 20 minutes: it's the largest amount of ferry departures on a single rout in Europe.

The route supposedly was mentioned as far back as the 11th century and the bridge across the Øresunds strait has yet to kill it.

The ferries are 8 _thousand_ tons (the article says just 8 tons) and take 1200+ passengers and 200+ cars with them. They contain 640 6.5 kWh batteries which recharge in just 5-9 minutes (the ferry is only very shortly in the port before leaving for the other country).

As you go on board you get the usual tax free shop but amusingly you can buy tax-free alcohol only while the ferry is the Danish waters. Halfway through the journey, a bell sounds -- and you are now allowed to buy tobacco, as you've entered Swedish waters.

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

<comment><USER3> 640*6.5 kWh in less than ten minutes must require impressive cables. That's something like 25 MW flowing into those batteries.

<comment><USER4> They do top up charging on each side to prevent the need for such much power.

[http://corvusenergy.com/all-electric-car-ferry/](http://corvusenergy.com/all- electric-car-ferry/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _... but the task of greening the high seas fleet is far more daunting._

I think large ocean-going vessels is one place where hydrogen might make sense. The biggest problem with hydrogen is storage, but when you start talking about really large fuel tanks storing liquid hydrogen becomes a lot more practical. All of the hydrogen powered automobiles I've heard of rely either on high-pressure gas storage (requiring heavy tanks) or metal hydride storage (requiring heavy metal hydrides) which pretty much make them inferior to modern battery-electric vehicles.

Storing cryogenic liquid hydrogen doesn't have the same weight penalty, but has a huge volume penalty, plus it has the additional problem of keeping the hydrogen really cold until you're ready to use it. However, on a cargo ship, the large volume of the tank probably isn't a big restriction, and keeping the hydrogen cold enough is going to be a much smaller problem. That's because heat-loss is going to be proportional to the surface area of the tank, rather than the volume.

Hydrogen still suffers from energy loss at production. Hydrogen production by electrolysis is nowhere near 100% efficient, nor is turning the hydrogen back into motive power, either with internal combustion engines or with fuel cells.

On the flip side, I think as long as wind power makes up a substantial portion of electrical generation capacity, there will be times when the cost of electricity actually goes negative. If you can do most of the hydrogen production at times when electricity is really cheap, and you are planning to store it for relatively long periods of time anyway, then most or maybe even all of this overhead can be offset.

<comment><USER6> I wonder about just converting the hydrogen to methane for storage and transport. There seems to be a bit of serious research into it.

Being able to reuse existing infrastructure is a pretty big win.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Ammonia is a much better candidate, since it doesn't contain any carbon, so using it can't cause any CO2 emissions. But as others have said, the efficiencies are horrible, so its better if we just figure out H2 transport and storage.

Edit: for large ships, my personal bet is on liquid H2 storage and then combustion in gas turbines. You get a lot of synergies between cryogenic fuel and a gas turbine. Tupolev even built and flew a liquid H2 fueled narrow-body jet in the 80s.

<comment><USER6> If you get the carbon from the air it doesn't cause any carbon emissions either.

Or an existing stream that is currently being emitted into the air.

<comment> semi-extrinsic To your first point: correct. But the concentration in air is so bloody low for any chemical process (air is <0.5% CO2) that you'll have to put in huge amounts of energy. It's not going to be economically feasible.

To your second point: capturing CO2 and then re-emitting it is completely off the table. It will be (or already is, depending on your interpretation of Directive 2008/98/EC) banned in Europe, likely with an exception for greenhouses (where they need to use CO2 for growing plants, and currently get it from burning natural gas).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kind of diappointing that the word "nuclear" didn't show up in this article. Exceedingly low-carbon nuclear-powered ships are a very mature technology (Navy), and the shipyard construction environment offers very interesting solutions to the biggest problem with nuclear (cost). For instance, you can serialize production of very large structures. It's Henry Ford to the rescue again but where economies of mass production meet economies of scale.

A few merchant ships with nuclear propulsion have sailed before, like the NS Savannah [1].

If we're going to have a serious conversation about low-carbon long-haul shipping it really should involve consideration of the vast and high-density energy resource in the nucleus.

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

<comment><USER8> First you need to develop a economic naval reactor type that works with minimal manning that keeps the crew within Minimum Safe Manning Certificate. Replacing Pilipino engineering watches with expensive certified nuclear engineers is not cheap.

Secondly you need to make them tamper proof. They must withstand terrorism, theft, hijacking and collisions and the core must be easily separated in the case it's needed.

Thirdly you need to deploy security force that can retake ships within limited time-frame everywhere they operate.

Overall global shipping is has very low CO2 footprint per tonne. Changing to LNG, building thinner and larger ships etc. to reduce CO2 footprint is cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Important because shipping produces 2% of global CO2 emissions and is the lowest hanging fruit given how few sources there are.

Also important: marine dispels stink. Sitting on the beach downstream from one is not fun.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_ship...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shipping)

<comment><USER10> I second the observation about stinking. It became much more pleasant to cross Norwegian fjords with electrical ferries. Now one can enjoy the scenery while staying outside. With disel ferries staying on the upper deck in front with strong wind one still feels the smell and on the back side, with wind blocked by the ship, the smell can be rather terrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We could try adding some sails to save energy: [http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/09/sailing-ship- re.html](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/09/sailing-ship-re.html)

<comment><USER11> I'm curious, I saw this talked about a lot approximately 5 years ago. I'd have expected this to be relatively standard by now, but it appears not. Does anyone know why this happened?

<comment><USER12> The notion recurs ever few years. I've seen it periodically over the past 50.

A windjammer fleeet operated profitably thrrough the 1940s on long-haul routes:

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The fossil oil is an issue, but massive use of batteries is another one. Besides liquid carburants have proven themselves. I just don't find proper explanation why there is no massive investment in carbon cycle carburants such as seaweed agriculture.

</comment><comment><USER14> Will they make electric oil tankers?

<comment><USER15> hahahahaha

<comment><USER16> Please don't do this here.</comment></comment></comment>


Your Game Doesn't Belong in the Bargain Bin – Why I'm Charging More for My Game - <AUTHOR> https://techraptor.net/content/play-nyc-2017-a-conversation-with-frank-dicola-about-where-shadows-slumber <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, Frank DiCola of Game Revenant here. This is a long interview, but the key point is near the bottom. It's all about app pricing and marketing.

If anyone thinks I'm off-base, let me have it. But I can't see the flaw in pricing the app initially high. If you start at $0.49, you've left yourself no room.</comment>