Police chief said Uber victim "came from the shadows" – don't believe it - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim-came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/ <comment><USER2> If Uber's self-driving cars are no better than the visual acuity of humans, they shouldn't be on the road. There is no point to this at all if we can't make robots better than humans.

Self-driving cars should be able to use sensors that pick up stuff better than human eyes.

I can't believe that radar and LIDAR were completely unable to see this woman until the visual cameras picked her up. This seems like either a serious flaw with the sensors or with software. The driver, despite looking down at a phone, still seemed to react faster than the computer!

I'm not that comfortable with Uber doing self-driving cars. I don't really consider them a true tech company. They are not built on world-class engineering and design. They are largely a company built by getting around legal regulations and getting rid of staff workers. They've done incredible legal work with regulatory environments.

A company like Google, I think they have the talent and the culture to build something really good here. A company like GM would understand the stakes at hand here and would be cautious. Uber just doesn't seem to have the talent, mission or ethics to be in the self-driving car business. It's no surprise they are the first company to kill a pedestrian.

<comment><USER3> >There is no point to this at all if we can't make robots better than humans.

How about saving human time that would otherwise be spent on driving?

<comment><USER2> This is more an argument for better land-use policy (allowing more density), more public transportation (proven technology) and more remote work. All of these much better solve giving humans more time than self-driving cars.

Self-driving cars don't promise to save time. It's still driving. Their promise -- their only real promise -- is to save lives. And I think saving tens of thousands of American lives every year is a worthwhile goal. Worldwide, more than 1 million people die in car crashes every year. Humans have proven that they can't drive cars well, but we have put up with it because it is convenient.

I know some people will say that they could work on their way to work, but I can't do work in a car. Staring at a laptop in a car gives me motion sickness, along with a lot of other people. And, of course, this would only apply to people who do computer work in the first place.

As someone who has been in serious car crashes and lost friends to them, I for one am all for self-driving cars. It's going to be a revolution, but we shouldn't be testing them on public roads if they are this bad.

<comment><USER4> >I know some people will say that they could work on their way to work, but I can't do work in a car.

But some can, and they would benefit from a self-driving car that can drive _at least as safe_ as themselves. Granted, it'd be great if they could improve on safety, but I think GP's point is that this is not their only possible use.

<comment><USER5> But why we should allow such a car that is not safe, it could be 10 times faster but 10 times less safe, for years we are trying to make transport safer, this included making cars more expensive so why should we go back in our investment in safer cars because company X wants to be the first on the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sure the Uber footage is either extremely low dynamic range (and not similar to human vision) or was modified to make it look darker.

However, the driving footage is from after release of the story. The moon on the 21st had illumination of ~17%. The night of the accident was the day after the new moon with an illumination of 1%. Someone needs to film the same section sometime between April 15 - April 17 to get a more accurate estimate of the light on that night. I expect video will still show much lighter conditions than that shown on the suspiciously dark video, but without the same moon lighting conditions we are comparing apples and oranges.

(accident) [http://www.moongiant.com/phase/3/18/2018](http://www.moongiant.com/phase/3/18/2018)

(filmed) [http://www.moongiant.com/phase/3/21/2018](http://www.moongiant.com/phase/3/21/2018)

EDIT: masklinn pointed out the accident occured _before_ the stoplight in the much more lighted area, not later area where the news crew was filming and was commented on in the second video. It was near the stoplight with the parking deck in the background rather than only the long spaced overhead lights. Incredibly misleading video from the dashcam. Maybe good to know for defense of the true conditions, but it probably won't make that much difference. _look at the slideshow_

<comment><USER7> > However, the driving footage is from after release of the story. The moon on > the 21st had illumination of ~17%. The night of the accident was the day > after the new moon with an illumination of 1%.

Most of the illumination from the driving footage clearly comes from the street lights, not from the moon. In the Uber dashcam footage, the street lights barely illuminate their own foot, some seem to not even reach the ground. The phase of the moon is essentially a non-factor.

Not to mention _LIDAR is not affected by external light source_. So the phase of the moon is _doubly_ irrelevant.

<comment><USER6> Most, but not all of the illumination. Especially between street lights. That first video is from a section of the road where the accident did not happen. You have to go past the stop light where the first video ends to get to the section where the accident happened (second video).

I understand LIDAR should have handled it, and visible spectrum may not be much different with and without moon lighting. But I would like to see a similar conditions comparison to see exactly how bad the video is compared to actual lighting conditions.

One video pointed out a black splotch _over_ the pedestrian. If you pause and the video you can easily see it. A very unusual artifact to say the least.

EDIT: see masklinn reply -- the accident occured _before_ the stoplight in the much more lighted area, not later area where the news crew was filming and was commented on in the second video. It was near the stoplight with the parking deck in the background rather than only the long spaced overhead lights. Incredibly misleading video from the dashcam. Maybe good to know for defense of the true conditions, but it probably won't make that much difference. _look at the slideshow_

<comment><USER7> > That first video is from a section of the road where the accident did not > happen. You have to go past the stop light where the first video ends to get > to the section where the accident happened (second video).

You don't need the videos, the slideshow has a comparison of the exact spot on pictures 1 and 2 (you can see the shoulder bend on the right). Picture 3 (a few frames back) shows the victim was struck pretty much under the streetlight.

> One video pointed out a black splotch over the pedestrian. If you pause and > the video you can easily see it. A very unusual artifact to say the least.

Standard artefact from the sensor bottoming out, as soon as you're below threshold there's literally no signal anymore.

<comment><USER6> Oh damn. Thank you for pointing out the slideshow. I hadn't really noticed it. It was in the well lighted area before the stoplight, not in the darker area afterward where the news crew was filming and comment was made on the second video.

Not only does it have brighter street lights, there are illuminated signs and parking deck lights in the background.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think a big problem with this whole debacle is that we're discussing cameras and lighting, before discussing the actual matter: a person died and someone is responsible.

It doesn't matter if I were to run someone over when it's dark. I would still be accountable.

The discussion about footage removes focus from the actual issue which should be a legal issue, not a technical debugging session.

Edit: Sorry, am not native English speaker. What I meant when I wrote accountable was that I would have to own up to what happened. Not that I would get a sentence if it was an accident.

<comment><USER9> I don't think this is accurate. I'm not a lawyer or even very knowledgeable about law, but I would be very surprised if the driver is at fault here. This is anecdotal, but I know someone who was in an eerily similar accident (as the driver) and unfortunately killed a person who walked in front of his car. While tragic, he did nothing wrong and there were no legal repercussions.

I live in NYC, where jaywalking is a way of life, and I've adopted two policies over the last few years:

1\. Never jaywalk. Just don't do it. Find the appropriate and safe crosswalk, and wait. 2\. Never assume it is safe to cross a street, even when you have the right of way. People laugh at me when I look both ways when we have the right of way, but logic is simple: just because I have the right of way does not mean the drivers coming from either side are aware of that or are paying attention.

<comment><USER10> I've just approached navigating streets as a pedestrian/cyclist as if I were invisible, because I might as well be to any driver that hits me with their vehicle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Everyone who saw the video has said it's the fault of camera for seeming so dark (since even the street lights have almost no effect anywhere), and regardless of that AVs work with lidar and such. Where is the telemetry and analysis? If it didn't see the pedestrian, then why?

<comment><USER12> And it begs the question: did Uber alter the video?

Will it alter the telemetry, too?

If the Tempe police doesn't get forensics experts on this, they're doing their job wrong. Uber is already known as a company that tends to hide and destroy this sort of evidence.

<comment><USER13> It would be really hard to believe that Uber would do this. There is only downside, the probability of being caught is high (given they have to hand over a ton of data streams to the NTSB).

<comment><USER14> Uber's history defends the position that they're willing to do things regardless of the chance of getting caught and being willing to deal with the fallout later. That's kind of their whole thing - drive in a city no matter the regulations of taxis and the like, and deal with the bureaucracy after. Why wouldn't they alter things if given the chance?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For reference, I found this video over on reddit (from /u/ghdana) of the area. It looks _very_ different with even a cell phone camera.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0)

Edit: I guess this video is also referenced in the article, after Brian's.

<comment><USER16> To be fair, cell phone cameras as I recall have a tendency to push the ISO up, so it potentially could look different IRL (I'm purposefully being vague).

Ideally /u/ghdana would have posted the camera settings which filmed this, so you could get a better understanding of the situation.

Not that I'm defending UBER on this, as others have said LIDAR and IR in addition to the cameras should have picked the woman up.

<comment><USER17> >To be fair, cell phone cameras as I recall have a tendency to push the ISO up, so it potentially could look different IRL (I'm purposefully being vague).

That is true, but raising the ISO for proper (well 18% grey anyway.) exposure is something pretty much every retail camera made in the past decade does. I doubt UBER is using some experimental esoteric camera here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not trying to be inflammatory, but should we expect the Tempe AZ City administration to be a neutral source of information in this case? Might they be biased by their decision to host this experiment in their jurisdiction (in the sense of anticipating criticism)?

<comment><USER19> As an occasional commuter cyclist, I'm well aware of the position cars and drivers hold in our social pecking order. It's a well known "joke" that if you want to get away with murder, you do it with a car.

While we should not absolve Uber, including the driver who was too busy looking at his phone to intervene, I do wonder if a standard driver would have also been deemed not at fault by the police. The answer is likely, "yes".

<comment><USER7> > including the driver who was too busy looking at his phone to intervene

I've yet to get any information on one thing though, are safety drivers operating under the assumption that the car works at SAE2 or at SAE3? Because if it's the latter, the driver has no cause to keep looking at their phone. If it's the former, the car should have a deadman's switch to ensure the driver stay alert.

An other thing that is not clear is whether they were looking at their phone or at instrumentation (e.g. telemetry or the like).

<comment><USER20> The safety drivers should theoretically be operating under the assumption that the self-driving system can fail randomly at any moment. Of course, humans are not wired as reliable backups to handle random split-second problems when the system, in fact, works correctly most of the time.

<comment><USER7> > The safety drivers should theoretically be operating under the assumption > that the self-driving system can fail randomly at any moment.

Then the car should be equipped with a dead man's switch / vigilance devices to ensure the driver pays attention, trains have been equipped with these equipments for _decades_.

> Of course, humans are not wired as reliable backups to handle random split- > second problems when the system, in fact, works correctly most of the time.

Indeed, but again that is a long-known issue and we've had solutions for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm surprised to hear a top police authority say this. I come from a family of police and it's always said that when telling your side of the story in a traffic incident, saying something along the lines of:

"But Officer, they came out of nowhere!"

never really holds up too well for you. It's the same as saying "I flat out didn't see them, so not my fault." It's quite the opposite in fact... and any cool-headed person will pick that up. I'm sure the investigation is well underway in any event.

<comment><USER22> Arizona officials carrying water for corporations is not a new thing by any rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding](https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky- driving/speeding)

> Speed also affects your safety even when you are driving at the speed limit > but too fast for road conditions, such as during bad weather, when a road is > under repair, _or in an area at night that isn't well lit_.

This vehicle was _speeding_. Uber is at fault. How is this disputable?

Edit: One More link.

[https://www.123driving.com/dmv/drivers-handbook-speed- limits](https://www.123driving.com/dmv/drivers-handbook-speed-limits)

> You will need to drive with extra care at night. You cannot see as far ahead > or to the side, and glare from oncoming cars can reduce your vision even > more. Follow these guidelines for driving at night:

        Use your headlights (low beam or high beam) between the hours of sunset and sunrise.
        Low beam headlamps are only effective for speeds up to 20-25 MPH. You must use special care when driving faster than these speeds, since you are unable to detect pedestrians, bicyclists and others.
        High beam headlights can reveal objects up to a distance of at least 450 feet and are most effective for speeds faster than 25 MPH.
        Don't use high-beam headlights within 500 feet of oncoming vehicles.
        If you are behind other vehicles, use low beams when you are within 300 feet of the vehicle ahead.
        When leaving a brightly lit place, drive slowly until your eyes adjust to the darkness.
        If a vehicle comes toward you with high beams, flash your lights to high beam and back to low beam once.
        Don't look directly at oncoming headlights. Instead, watch the right edge of your lane. Look quickly to be sure of the other vehicle's position every few seconds.
        Drive as far to the right as you can if a vehicle with one light comes toward you.

</comment><comment><USER24> Would love to see how Google would handle this situation. Have to believe their algorithm would be smarter and handle.

Remember Google had to deal with bike corner cases a couple of years ago.

"A Cyclist's Track Stand Befuddled One of Google's Self-Driving Cars"

[https://gizmodo.com/a-cyclists-track-stand-totally- befuddled...](https://gizmodo.com/a-cyclists-track-stand-totally-befuddled- one-of-googles-1727024285)

</comment><comment><USER22> There is another aspect of this as well that is important to consider.

I will 100% bet that the police had to interact with/rely on Uber to provide them with the video and data. With Uber's history, and the importance of this to the company, can we trust they didn't manipulate the video (i.e., make it darker)?. In the end, as much distaste as I have for Uber, this isn't even about them...its about process and chain of evidence.

In a non-autonomous accident if there was a fight between two opposing drivers, the vehicle manufacturer is a neutral party and it seems reasonable to rely on them to extract and hand over data. If, however, the fight was between the driver and the manufacturer (e.g., the driver asserted a failure of the vehicle) there is no way that the manufacturer would be allowed to extract the vehicles' data logger. It would be done by an independent third party.

As these accidents happen (and no matter your perspective on this one/cars/autonomous vs. human drivers/etc. - they will happen) there needs to be methodology for extracting data and assessing it from the vehicles that does not rely on the manufacturer or any other conflict of interest party.

Further, this hole debacle shows how important it is that experts be involved in these decisions, discussions. The police chief has no knowledge or experience with the technical details of autonomous vehicles. His statements have, from the beginning, been irresponsible and inappropriately deferential to Uber at the expense of a citizen of his town.

The rush for LIDAR/Radar technology makes clear just how much of autonomous tech relies on the nonvisual range. However, the chief obviously...based on his statements...is judging performance entirely on the visual range. He is not an expert. As an ex-Tempe resident, I doubt Tempe has independent autonomous vehicle experts. I would almost guarantee they are relying on the companies being truthful and open with them.

That is bad.

<comment><USER25> > I will 100% bet that the police had to interact with/rely on Uber to provide > them with the video and data.

For the video released so far, not necessarily. It seems to be from an off- the-shelf dashcam, which the police most probably not only know how to download, but also has already done so several times in other accidents. For the rest of the data (and the video from the self-driving cameras, if it's stored instead of just used in the control loop and then discarded), I agree with you that the police (and the NTSB) will probably need the help of the Uber engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm gonna wait for the NTSB report because they are not armchair journalists citing misunderstood optics laws.

</comment><comment><USER26> The takeaways from this tragic accident for me are:

1\. We need to have better suited (much better low light performance) frontal cameras equipped for self-driving cars and dashcams. Be it a dual sensor/lens setup or whatnot, if Apple can make it for iPhone X for $35 [1], the technology is available now and shippable now. Compare to the cost of tens of thousands of the price of a car and hundreds/thousands for the price of packages/options manufacturers to add on to a new car, that's virtually nothing.

2\. We need better more sophisticated headlamps and new laws to better suited for today's technology advancements[2] - something like a 3rd mode of wide beam on top of hi/low bean modes. From ubiquitous adaptive headlights to matrix laser beams, these improvement can increase driver visibility and perhaps save lives in situations like this.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-x-teardown-parts- cost-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-x-teardown-parts-cost-ihs- markit-2017-11)

[2] [https://blog.dupontregistry.com/mercedes-benz/why-are- adapti...](https://blog.dupontregistry.com/mercedes-benz/why-are-adaptive- headlights-illegal-in-the-usa/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Why do we only have the dashcam videos? I want to see the LIDAR data. Also, Uber definitively has ways to render all the sensor data into a video which shows the objects which was detected (or lack of detection).

</comment><comment><USER28> The car driver was half the time not looking at the road! Who the hell drives like that.

Jaywalking or not, the victim was clearly a pedestrian (not riding her bike), the insurance of Uber (Uber itself?) should compensate the victim's relatives. If it doesn't I expect a huge backslash.

<comment><USER29> He wasn't driving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe the took the mid-range from a HDR* video and published it? This way they technically did not add contrast, but just conveniently dropped all the info in the shadows to "make it accessible"

* not tone-mapped, I mean what HDR truly stands for

</comment><comment><USER31> Is Uber paying off the police chief to blame the victim?

I'm with the majority here -- the LIDAR should have picked the pedestrian up and decelerated. Uber's self-driving tech is less safe than a human driver, and should be shelved.

</comment><comment><USER32> There needs to be a process in place for autonomous cars accidents. Required telemetry and data provided to independent organization (financed by manufacturers). If it deems the car (hardware or software) was at fault, whole fleet needs to be immediately disabled until the issue is resolved.

Dead pedestrian here and there won't hurt the companies financially. There's not much reason for them to push for perfect products. They can just shoot for 99% and account for the rest in damages. Disabling their service will hurt them.

This needs to be treated like planes, trains, or medical devices are. Not like consumer device.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think it was extremely irresponsible of the officers on the scene to imply that there was "nothing that could be done" or a lack of fault before a real investigation had even started!

</comment><comment><USER34> The concept of a safety driver in SDC testing needs refining.

The guy here was clearly distracted. He only looks up at the road a fraction of a second before the crash.

My bet is that he'll be prosecuted as if he were a distracted driver: he's responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle (otherwise, why's he there in the first place?). He'll go to prison, probably, and rules will change very quickly as a result.

Driving a car is an active process, it's fatiguing but not inherently boring (excepting really long, straight, empty roads through unchanging scenery). Sitting in a SDC while it drives itself however _is_ boring: there's a well- researched and well-understood attention deficit problem which nobody seems to be discussing here.

It's the same thing that makes TSA security screening such a tough thing to get right, or sentry duty: you can't expect humans to sit for hours passively monitoring for unpredictable and rare events that they then have to react decisively to. Brains don't work like that. These safety drivers need short shifts with frequent breaks, they need a partner, and they need an active background task that keeps their eyes up and forward and their brain engaged (giving a commentary, for example).

</comment><comment><USER35> They should release the LIDAR sensor data, so we can learn what the car "saw". This dashcash is basically irrelevant compared to the sensors on the car.

</comment><comment><USER36> When I learned to drive, I was taught to slow down when you see that you're coming up on lower visibility areas of the road. This could be a turn in the road, a part of the road that reduces slope or a darker part of the road. I still do practice this safe precaution. And while the technology is in its infancy, drivers in an autonomous car should be just as attentive as a driver in any other car.

</comment><comment><USER37> What seems horrible from a SW engineering point of view is that they probably didn't QA this scenario. I mean, it's not a corner case, it's basically the scenario where someone appears in front of the car "all of the sudden".

I just hope engineers working on software that can cause serious injury or kill someone do the appropriate diligences to ensure this doesn't happen again.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't want to sound like a crazy person here, but could it be that the video released was edited to look super dark? The difference between the Uber video and the amateur cellphone videos is striking!

Could it be that the police//Uber employees//municipality have a political goal to make this look like it was unavoidable? It looks so to me.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's pretty common to ramp up contrast in cam used for self-driving inputs for basic computer vision to make lane markers pop up. So such a camera won't have much chance of detecting a person casually crossing road without any concerns for traffic. The crash points more to failure in sensor fusion; LiDAR should have detected it, but clustering algorithm might have either removed it, or she appeared in too few scanning frames to be reliably detected as an object, due to heat map thresholding to avoid false positives.

<comment><USER17> But why would they alter the recorded bits? An imaging sensor streams the RAW data (w/o tone curve). Wouldn't they prefer just storing the RAW bits (which probably have a higher dynamic range anyway) and then apply various transforms - contrast, edge-detect, etc.

<comment><USER39> I guess it's speed concerns? Maybe they have a custom ASIC they use to pipe and adjust images from the camera, achieving optimal contrast? Using CPU for that is very very slow and self-driving car companies try to push latency down as much as possible, so it might be a limitation of specialized hardware.

<comment><USER17> Sure, but if they have to process the RAW data anyway, they could easily send an unaltered copy in parallel to storage for offline use. I guess depending on the resolution & bitness, they'd want to downsample/compress it to save space. Heh, anyway its just pure speculation on my part. They probably have a good reason to do it one particular way...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Most of the illumination when I drive comes from my headlights. All of it that I need, no matter how dark or "shadowy" it is (give me a break).

</comment><comment><USER41> A lot of people are focusing on why the car didn't stop or even slow, but what about the human driver? I feel like this practice of having a human driver behind the wheel doesn't work as well as we might think it does. It is likely giving people and legislators a false sense of security if they think a human has the ability to intervene properly to stop an accident

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it possible that the released video was so dark because the dashcam was behind a tinted windshield? The other dashcam videos from the same place might be from cars with non-tinted windshields. Of course, any video cameras used as self-driving sensors would be outside the windshield, so their view would be clearer.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder why they don't want to show its LIDAR "video", I thought that all autonomous vehicle are using it. I agree that a cause of the accident can be that LIDAR had failed but I wonder why in this kind of technologies they don't have redundancies system. :/

</comment><comment><USER43> I understand people are focusing on the video because that's all we have at the moment, but it entirely misses the point: this is primarily a LIDAR failure. This should have been prevented even with the cameras off.

</comment><comment><USER44> Maybe there should be some limits to when these vehicles may travel until they have proven they can deal with more difficult situations.

Driving at night or in a snow storm is a very difference environment than on a nice day.

</comment><comment><USER45> We'll miss the good old times where road accidents were a matter settled between two humans on equal rights, no a individual vs multi-billion corps and their army of lawyers

<comment><USER46> When was that? Right now if you are part of an accident, you only have rights via your insurance company and their lawyers. I suppose there's small claims court or hiring your own lawyer, but that ain't the same.

<comment><USER45> Where I live the insurance company does not act until the case is clear and it's known who is guilty and of what. Sometimes it's just police documentation, sometimes an investigation and court case. But insurance company does not represent you in the court so what exactly are you talking about?

<comment><USER46> If the other person is at fault, your insurance company will in fact go after them for money. Depends on the plan and the circumstances, I suppose.

<comment><USER45> This is their business, not yours. They wouldn't pay you a penny if they could, and have whole departments for figuring out how to pay you less

<comment><USER46> So it sounds like status quo ain't "a matter settled between two humans on equal rights".

<comment><USER45> No, your idea of insurance company role is totally wrong. It still you vs Uber.

<comment><USER46> I'm confused. Are you saying today it's two individuals in contest or today it's an individual vs Uber?

<comment><USER45> No driver to hold responsible, just machine and billion dollar company behind it. And their lawyers ready to punch a hole in your face... confusing, isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> If the car is at fault here, then Uber should bare the full consequences.

At the same time though, the person with the bike had no reflective markings, wasn't blind or anything, and was crossing the road without any respect for the incoming traffic at an unmarked spot. They didn't even flinch when the car was about to hit them. The guy in the car looked away for like 5 seconds. He clearly wasn't absent-minded. If the visibility wasn't that bad, any suspicious activity on the left would have grabbed his attention.

</comment><comment><USER48> Where was the LIDAR?

</comment><comment><USER49> The Uber victim did come from the shadows. Arizona gets _dark_ at night, especially during a new moon. The question isn't why the optical cameras didn't see her, it's why did the LIDAR failed to detect her?

<comment><USER50> AZ gets dark at night. The workaround is for cars to have headlights.

Not knowing the law as it applies for (semi-)autonomous vehicle testing in Arizona, I am very curious how this one turns out.

Based on my experience driving at night (In Norway, where it also gets pretty dark), even in rural areas with no street lights, you tend to discover pedestrians -even the ones not wearing safety reflectors- significantly more than a second and a half before you cross paths with them.

So - while the vehicle is driving autonomously, there's still a driver (or whatever we should call it, seeing as they do not drive as such) behind the wheel.

If the driver had paid attention to the road, rather than her cell phone, this accident likely wouldn't have happened.

So - who is to blame, legally speaking? The 'driver' for not paying attention? The coder implementing the control algorithms? The HW engineering team deciding which sensors to use? Someone else?

This will be a lot simpler when vehicles are 'properly' autonomous - but right now, it seems AVs simply give the 'driver' all sorts of incentive for not paying attention, while still not absolving them of responsibility. That's the worst of both worlds.

<comment><USER33> Uber is a corporation, so it as a legal entity is liable, any kind of individual liability is possible to be litigated but very difficult to win. One problem is that corporate charters once granted are never revoked so corporations just keep doing terrible things and diffusing the costs of their actions onto society with minuscule repercussions. You can bet if I was looking down at my phone and not at the road and then hit a woman in the dark (all captured on camera) I would be going to jail... But, Uber has done some really despicable things (stealing the medical records of a rape victim to use for intimidation), and now they've likely killed someone and no one will ever see cell time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The videos that show everything super bright look like they have their high beams on, whereas the Uber video looks like the standard headline mode. Although I can not be completely sure. If that is the case it is apples-to- oranges.

<comment><USER52> Which might form an excuse if it was a human driver. However the human wasn't looking at the road. (I can't blame them, its pretty difficult to concentrate when you are not _actually_ driving) So headlights or not, it's irrelevant.

However the article goes on to explain that dip'd beam headlights don't dramatically increase your vision.

However you are correct its apples to oranges. The Dashcam sensor is had not adjusted correctly to the light conditions, or it isn't sensitive enough. However thats not entirely relevant, as the dashcam doesn't (or at least I hope it doesn't) form part of the sensor array.</comment></comment>


The 10 safest countries in the world for women - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-safest-countries-in-the-world-for-women-2018-1?r=UK&IR=T <comment><USER2> The speaking of English seems to be a pretty good indicator.

It would have been interesting to see countries ranked crimes against women normalized by crimes against men+women. That is, given that a crime has occurred what is the conditional probability that the crime was against a woman?</comment>


V8: a tale of two compilers - <AUTHOR> http://wingolog.org/archives/2011/07/05/v8-a-tale-of-two-compilers

<comment><USER2> It's amazing how much faster dynamic languages can run with some engineering effort. It's also frustrating, because it contrasts starkly with my PHP code's performance. I wish the PHP team had the resources to do this kind of work, because at this point it's the slowest subcomponent in my stack.

<comment><USER3> > It's amazing how much faster dynamic languages can run with some engineering > effort

It's a bit more than just "some", and it's an evolution 20 years[0] in the making[1].

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language)>

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongTalk>

<comment><USER4> I learned about this when watching Avi Bryant's great talk "Bad Hackers Copy, Great Hackers Steal" : <http://vimeo.com/4763707>

He explains that dynamic languages are not inherently slow. It's their current implementation that's slow. Java is not fast thanks to static typing, it is fast thanks to the Hotspot VM, which builds upon the StrongTalk VM implementation.

Quote taken around the 13" mark (some trolling included ;) ): "Ruby has the dynamic part, and Java has the fast part. And this has led to this assumption that people have that the reason that Java is fast and Ruby is slow is because Java is static and Ruby is dynamic. And that's just not true, that's just a myth. Nothing about Java being fast has anything to do with it being static. It's simply that the papers that the Java people read were the ones that told you how to make it fast, and the papers that Matz read were the ones that told you how to make it usable."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I guess that v8 is leading a revamp in the languages. Even perhaps the bytecodes will die!! the AST IS the bytecode :D

<comment><USER3> > I guess that v8 is leading a revamp in the languages.

1\. v8 is an implementation, not a language, so it hardly makes sense to say v8 is leading a _revamp in the languages_.

2\. most of v8's behaviors were pioneered by Self and put to task in JVMs (HotSpot and — even earlier — Jikes RVM) and Strongtalk (v8's assembler comes in significant parts from strongtalk, I believe), so it hardly makes sense to say that v8 is _leading_ unless you restrict this to the pretty small world of javascript in-browser runtimes.

3\. finally, other browsers were already walking down the route of JITs when Chrome arrived (Tracemonkey landed in Firefox trunk in October 2008)

V8 is definitely a strong work of software engineering put to good use, but the amount of inane praises are grating: it's not magic and it's mostly the application of preexisting _practical_ research and development (meaning stuff which was already used, not just research papers).

<comment><USER6> in fact firefox trace and jaeger monkey are pretty nice themselves if not more than v8. theyre also faster often time</comment></comment></comment>


"Bore Rat" Robot in Oil Well Powered by Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/893454507409121280 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/893450693981470720](https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/893450693981470720)

[https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/893450763996979200](https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/893450763996979200)

[https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/893450978783055872](https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/893450978783055872)

[https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/893451219498356736](https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/893451219498356736)

[https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/893454507409121280](https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/893454507409121280)</comment>


New Windows 10 Secured-Core PCS Block Firmware-Level Attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-windows-10-secured-core-pcs-block-firmware-level-attacks/ <comment><USER2> > The APT28 cyber-espionage group (also tracked as Sednit, Fancy Bear, > Strontium, and Sofacy), for instance, used a Unified Extensible Firmware > Interface (UEFI) rootkit dubbed LoJax as part of its 2018 operations.

So if you build a huge complex thing when a small simple one would do and then completely ignore security it will be hacked? Who could have known?

I don't think any tpm and dtrm magic can fix the issue as long as uefi is there with its huge attack surface

</comment><comment><USER3> Will sec-core also block Linux from booting?</comment>


Real Time Data compression using LZ4 - <AUTHOR> http://fastcompression.blogspot.fr/p/lz4.html <comment><USER2> With such compression ratio for text, and compression speed, this algorithm fits well to the Google Snappy / LZO / FastLZ group. Every database engine should use one of these, they are operating at disk I/O speed.

<comment><USER3> Only for certain kind of data. Like a document index. But not for numerical or many other types. RLE, delta encoding and many other simpler algorithms are a better match on many cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just integrated it into the programming language I am developing, thanks for such a small and handy library!

<comment><USER3> You should consider zlib, it's compatible with everything and has very nice options. Also it's very low in memory usage (around 500KB vs *MB). Check out how pigz implements it with pthreads (one thread per block).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Speed is good, but how does it perform in terms of compression ratio against other algorithms?

<comment><USER6> From Compression Ratings website I've catched this:

        program    comp-ratio  comp-time  decomp-time
        bzip2      34.1%       468.09s    167.03s
        gzip -5    37.6%       141.30s    34.76s
        lz4 -c2t4  43.9%       52.72s     5.84s

<http://compressionratings.com/sort.cgi?rating_sum.full+p3>

<comment><USER3>
      program       comp-ratio   comp-time  decomp-time
      pigz -1          40.3%       26.92s      20.31s
      lz4 -c2t4        43.9%       52.72s       5.84s
      info-zip -1      41.3%      122.31s     119.81s

More relevant would be a comparison with gzip -1, lzop, snappy and rolz.

Also the test data is mixed. It is not very helpful to see where this algorithm shines.

Also note the memory usage shots up from 5m/2m for info-zip -1 to 46m/42m for the specific case of lz4 you picked.

EDIT: also bzip2 seems to be paticularly bad for this specific dataset, other algorithms in that category get better compression ratios. Added pigz to the comparison (info-zip with pthreads).</comment></comment></comment>


Free security advice - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/grugq/353b6fc9b094d5700c70 <comment><USER2> iPod or iPad I understand, but is it still true for say iPhone vs Nexus phone? iOS has had a ton of bugs since iOS8 when they "opened it up" to extensions and whatnot. I think AOSP is more stable and secure at this point. The iPhone/latest version of iOS are also targeted much more.

If the choice is some random Android phone or even Samsung or LG, then yeah, the iPhone is still probably the better choice. But if the choice is between an iPhone and the latest Nexus, I think I'd go with the latter.</comment>


Ask PG: Is growing income inequality in the US a sign of health? - <AUTHOR>

In 'Mind the Gap' you said, "I'd like to propose an alternative idea: that in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health. " <comment><USER2> For people who haven't read that essay, I should explain that one of the points in it is that there are two distinct ways to get economic inequality in a society: an ancient zero-sum game where a ruling class appropriates wealth generated by a large number of peasants, and a newer form that is not zero- sum, where some people become richer than others by generating wealth faster. For various reasons, people who write about economic inequality tend to conflate the two sources. But whereas the older sort of economic inequality is bad for societies, the second is, if not in itself good, a sign of a good thing: variation in productivity. (The reason variation in productivity is a good thing is that if you have no variation in productivity, it is very unlikely that the reason is because everyone is highly productive.)

For more details, see <http://paulgraham.com/gap.html> and <http://paulgraham.com/gh.html>

So your question becomes, do I think that the economic inequality we see today is increasingly of the old form rather than the new form? No, I don't see any evidence of that, not in the US.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time to answer, and I completely agree with the framing of the two types. The reason I asked is that it's hard for me to believe that the rise in CEO pay is a result of a rise in productivity of said CEOs. Another example would be wall street, they are taking a larger and larger cut of the pie, but I can't see how they are adding to the pie commensurate with their increasing rewards.

In short, this seems like the old form to me.

The counter points are of course Jobs, Zuckerberg, The Waltons, etc. But it feels like these are not the majority case, but I admit I don't have any hard numbers on this.

<comment><USER2> It's clearly _possible_ for CEOs to be worth the sort of money they get paid. E.g. Steve Jobs. If I had started a company and wanted to retire, and was looking to hire someone to run it for me, I would have no problem paying the right person 5% of the total revenues, or even more.

From what I've seen (and I am old enough to remember the old days), the main cause of the rise in CEO pay is that CEOs are now the equivalent of free agents in baseball.

The hedge funds are an interesting case. I'm not absolutely sure about this, but I suspect they are irrelevant, because while they don't create wealth, they don't confiscate it either, at least not in the old way.

<comment><USER3> Why don't hedge funds create wealth? How do they do it less than, say, DST or any other investor?

<comment><USER2> I'm not 100% sure where investors fit in, but my current hypothesis is that "pure" investors (i.e. people who supply only money) are like armed forces: they do not themselves create wealth, though they can sometimes create an environment in which it's easier for other people to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Depends on what the inequality is caused by, if it is caused by a shrinking middle class, then no, it isn't a sign of health. If the middle class isn't shrinking but the rich are making more money, then I'd argue that it could be a sign of health.

</comment><comment><USER5> It may be a sign of a healthy market, that ultimately can become unhealthy to the society. So it depends on which aspect of the US you are looking at.

As people get disproportionate amounts of money, they get disproportionate amounts of power that they can then use to distort the rules of the game. When there is a small but very wealthy class (say .1% of the population owns 80% of the net worth) then maybe the rest of the population can become oppressed.

It is difficult to get good stats on this, but this site has data that suggests since 1983, the top 20% have improved their lot at the expense of the bottom 80%.

Income isn't really a good way to measure the gap. If someone makes 500K/year and spends 100% of it on non-assets, they are just returning their money back into the system.

It is actually a complex problem to determine if the changes are good or bad, if wealth vs. income is the right measure, and what percentile groups make up the "elite"

</comment><comment><USER6> It's probably too coarse of a measurement. In the same essay he says there are two ways to accumulate wealth: create it or steal it. Increasing numbers of wealthy people don't necessarily mean more wealth is being created.

<comment><USER7> That's a false dichotomy, unless you define every zero-sum game in economics to consist of theft.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, are the continually rising CEOs salaries theft or a sign of health?</comment></comment></comment>


GrimoireLab moves its repositories to CHAOSS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chaoss/grimoirelab/issues/47 <comment><AUTHOR> GrimoireLab, an open source Software Development Analytics toolkit, is moving to a new home in the Linux Foundation's CHAOSS organization at GitHub. Track the migration process.</comment>


Happy Day of the Programmer! 256 Prizes to Celebrate - <AUTHOR> http://dayoftheprogrammer.hscampaigns.com/ <comment><USER2> Can it be #DayoftheProgrammer forever? I'm glad to be part of the community.

</comment><comment><USER3> Every bit of love & happiness to all the programmers out there

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool Video! Good to see some OutSystems JEDI MASTERS there. :-)

GO OUTSYSTEMS!!!

</comment><comment><USER5> Its cool to see Outsystems people in single video

</comment><comment><USER2> #Dayoftheprogrammer forever? Maybe it should be:)

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool video from developers to developers!

</comment><comment><USER7> Free stuff for being a programmer?!

</comment><comment><USER8> Happy Developers day for all :)

</comment><comment><USER9> And I love the 2^8 give aways...

<comment><USER3> Well said ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> #DayOfTheProgrammer Cool Video

</comment><comment><USER9> Developer love - awesome :)

</comment><comment><USER11> A little developers love

</comment><comment><USER12> Happy programmers day!

</comment><comment><USER13> Yey \o/</comment>


Warren Buffett: Stay Away From Bitcoin. It's A Mirage - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-bitcoin-is-a-mirage-2014-3 <comment><USER2> Warren Buffett is known for not investing in things he doesn't completely understand. He's the type of investor who only invests if he can completely wrap his mind around the business model at hand. Which is why he doesn't invest largely in the technology sector.

Several times in the past he's consistently said tech companies such as; "Apple", "Google", and "Facebook" are far to risky of investments. He didn't invest in IBM until 2012.

<comment><USER3> Do you have sources where he specifically says Apple, Google, and Facebook are "far too risky of investments?" Genuine question. I know he largely avoids tech stocks as they're not in his core competency, and he also justifiable avoided investing in the dotcom bubble.

<comment><USER4> It's oversimplifying to say he avoids them because they're not his core competency; he avoids them because valuing them is not anybody's core competency. Their value comes from products that are too lacking in historical context to lend them the degree of reliability he's aiming for in an investment.

He also seeks out companies whose stock has a history of producing ongoing income for investors in the form of a regular dividend. Tech companies rarely offer this. Without a dividend, the value an investor derives from the stock hinges solely on its current price. Dividend income diversifies this, providing a return even if the stock remains flat and buffering losses if you need to sell short.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Despite the fact that he may not understand bitcoin fully (hint: if you claim you do, you're a fraud), his advice is sound. It's obvious even. The value of bitcoin has been driven up by speculation and most of the transaction volume are not people buying actual goods and services.

While bitcoin may prevail (and if it doesn't, I'm pretty sure another crypto- currency will) but it needs to stabilize, it currently flucuates way too much. So the advice for investors to stay away from bitcoins, at least currently, doesn't seem unreasonable.

<comment><USER6> > "if you claim you do, you're a fraud"

What do you mean by this? I always assumed I don't fully understand Bitcoin because I don't have a crypto background.

<comment><USER7> It's possible that there are people who have _both_ the crypto background and the economics backgrounds to "fully" understand bitcoin, but even then, the market is ultimately driven by humans and is an irrational and unpredictable beast.

And if Buffet is wrong on bitcoin, so what? He's still Warren Fucking Buffet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "But they also said the underlying technology may hold potential."

That is exactly my position. The underlying technology is very compelling, but Bitcoin's present valuation is nutty.

It's like the web. Pets.com and Flooz were silly, but the web was not.

<comment><USER9> Do you think it's nutty for all the gold in the world to be worth $6 trillion?

<comment><USER10> "Today the world's gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold's price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

Let's now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world's most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

Beyond the staggering valuation given the existing stock of gold, current prices make today's annual production of gold command about $160 billion. Buyers – whether jewelry and industrial users, frightened individuals, or speculators – must continually absorb this additional supply to merely maintain an equilibrium at present prices.

A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond."

<comment><USER11> "The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything."

I find it staggering that the calibre of a Warren Buffet can demonstrate so little capacity for sound thinking about value, wealth and wealth assets.

Is the Mona Lisa worthless because it's priceless? What about a Picasso, do you expect it to produce crops or refine oil? When you fondle a French castle, do you expect it to respond?

"I ask you, how can currency price gold? Indeed, no price will work!" ~ Another

"how can paper currency that represents "the thoughts of a nation blowing in the wind" be used to value real money of ancient world class proportions, gold? It cannot! Any price you can think of will do, as in no price will work!" ~ Another

Gold could absorb the worlds derivatives debt tomorrow in value and not a thing would change in the world, except many headaches gone. Gold could be managed at around production costs for many many decades since 71 and not a problem was found with this. Gold's currency price is meaningless, it's utility for "inter-generational" wealth preservation at a "giant scale" is priceless indeed. Because it is so unproductive, representing "great wealth" comes at no cost infringing on the "productive economy". Why hoard rice or industrial-strength silver to represent your wealth across currency regimes, social upheavals and technological fads and whims and political and market ups and down, when there is gold that can represent "much wealth" in very small physical chunks! Come on Warren, you gotta be kidding me. This piece must be intentional disinformation. He must have been walking around much old-world wealth in his life, and here he pretends "gold, I'm not getting it, gimme ExxonMobile shares any day" (or why not Enron if you're so into energy?).

Then again, he prefers giving all his excess wealth to charity instead of doing the old-school "intergenerational family wealth" thing, truly American I suppose, so yeah, makes sense he see's no value in gold. Someone like Warren Buffet must truly believe that the American Dream will never expire, its currency never weaken in the eyes of the world, it's stocks always be cutting edge. At his age and with his life experience, can we fault him for that? Guess not.

<comment><USER10> > Why hoard rice...

Why hoard gold? Inflation-protected treasury bonds can "represent wealth" in an even smaller, more efficient manner.

> Someone like Warren Buffet must truly believe that the American Dream will > never expire, its currency never weaken in the eyes of the world, it's > stocks always be cutting edge.

As he says, "400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, _whatever the currency may be_ "

Even if you believe that in the future humans won't need to eat crops, or that climate change will so damage the environment as to render US farmland barren, the general case for owning productive assets over holding unproductive stores of value seems like a good one.

<comment><USER11> See my reply to mcguire above ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Buffet and his business partner Charlie Munger have a simple philosophy: You can't make intelligent evaluations about everything, so focus on the (simple) things you can evaluate well, and pick the best of those to invest in.

It works well enough as an investment strategy, assuming the political landscape affecting the moral view of businesses doesn't change radically, or at least it has worked well for the last ~half century. It also means you end up investing in candy companies, sugar water companies (Coca Cola), sugar tomato sauce companies (Heinz)... (and did they invest in a tobacco company? I don't remember, but Buffet was on record in the 1980's praising the business model of big tobacco, even though he later changed his tune.) Note the externalities and lack of vision: some major BRK investments are in companies that are rather bad for people's health.

Buffet and Munger are very smart. They know their limits, and they are fanatical about avoiding cognitive bias. They're very ethical within the small domain of their business. However, they don't concern themselves with, or dream about, the big picture. They have avoided most tech companies, for good reason, but individual tech companies have flourished (e.g. Microsoft and Oracle, then Apple and Google, and now newer startups). Being too complex to be favored by Buffet and Munger does not necessarily mean you will fail.

Seeing Buffet complain about bitcoin, I have to wonder why he's warning investors about something he doesn't understand (nothing against him; neither do I) rather than focusing on his core competency. The sad answer, I fear, is that Berkshire Hathaway is in the politics business now because their business has gotten too unwieldy (which they're honest about; they openly admitted long ago that returns would decline). Slowing the decline in their rate of return is their business now, and that means playing politics. Bitcoin, whether it's viable or not, could be a threat to the economic establishment. Therefore, it threatens Berkshire Hathaway, and rather than staying silent on the subject like he does about almost everything else he doesn't understand, he makes a public statement against bitcoin.

<comment><USER13> The foundation of Berkshire Hathaway is insurance. If you think insurance is simple, you're either much smarter than I am, you know a lot about things that I don't, or you're delusional.

My understanding of BRK is that it is the business of resource allocation (i.e. "management") for the purposes of investment. (Did I mention the insurance thing?) I suspect that provides enough of an understanding of the situation for Uncle Warren. I don't believe BRK is involved in currency speculation as a primary business either. ( _" Primary"_: currency risks are unavoidable. What I doubt is that Buffet regards them as a profit center.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think Bitcoin will not be a significant long term player in virtual currencies, because it does too much. It provides a pseudo-anonymous virtual currency, a pseudo-anonymous virtual commodity, a distributed transaction processing system, a distributed ledger system, a distributed analog to mining, and the various interesting uses people have come up using the block chain for things other than those things already listed.

For most applications for a virtual currency or virtual commodity, only a subset of those are necessary, and for many applications some of them are undesirable, and for many applications there are additional features that would be good to have.

I think the historical role of Bitcoin will be as a proof of concept demonstrating that a whole bunch of feature, some that were thought to be very hard to do in practice, are feasible to design into a system, but that in practice it will be replaced by several different systems each addressing particular classes of application and optimized for those applications.

<comment><USER15> You say only a subset are necessary. Necessary for what? Necessary to conduct banking as it exists today where we are faced with choosing between global cascading debt default due to a system that has no true demand deposits or hyper-inflationary spirals from ever larger (debt funded) bailouts of that system?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As an investment, Bitcoin _isn 't_. It's no more an _investment_ than storing rolls of quarters under your mattress. A Bitcoin in your wallet today is a bitcoin in your wallet tomorrow. An investment today is, at least potentially, an enterprise or a service or a product tomorrow.

Bitcoin as a medium of exchange is more interesting, since it in many ways behaves as cash while still being digital. It doesn't have some of the downsides of credit, which is the only other convenient digital medium of exchange.

On the other hand, as it stands, Bitcoin is not a very good medium of exchange, for the precise reasons that many people want to mistake it for an investment. It's too volatile, there is too much speculation; exposing your transactions to that kind of currency risk without really understanding what you're about is insane.

Further, the deflationary behavior of Bitcoin ruins it as a medium of exchange in precisely the same way that feature makes it appealing as an "investment". A Bitcoin that will buy you a cup of coffee today might buy you a yacht next week; as soon as you realize that you have significantly less incentive to spend it on the coffee. Meaning that there is a disincentive to use it as a medium of exchange today and that same incentive will be there tomorrow, too.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's one thing to say _" I don't understand it, that's why I'm staying away from it"_, it's another thing to say _" I do understand it, you should stay away from it and here's why"_, but I'm not sure why anyone would listen to somebody who says _" I don't understand it but you should stay away from it."_

</comment><comment><USER17> I've studied Warren Buffet for over thirty years. I love reading his annual investment letter. If you know anything about him you know about his refusal to invest in tech. Says he and Charlie Munger don't understand tech so they're not going to invest in it. He's best friends with Bill Gates but has refused to answer any tech questions even if they're about Microsoft.

So suddenly he's comfortable commenting on Bitcoin? I have a hard time taking his criticism seriously.

Mark Cuban bashed Bitcoin this week too. But Cuban owns Bitcoin and admits he's made money with it. While I disagree with his criticism at least he's making it with a bit of understanding. I think Warren Buffet is finally starting to lose it.

<comment><USER18> This asshole Warren Buffett has also bad mouthed tulips, yet I doubt he knows much about botany. Tulips are due for a comeback any day now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What form of currency isn't a Mirage?

<comment><USER20> Let's face it: catastrophic devaluations as seen in Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe are actually rare and preceded by political instability. With currencies you know where you stand, the political history of a nation tells you.

<comment> atom-morgan _Rare_? Quite the contrary. The average life expectancy of a fiat currency is 27 years [1]. This is across 775 currencies.

[1] [http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/08/average- life-e...](http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/08/average-life- expectancy-for-fiat.html)

<comment><USER21> I expect that's dominated by "infant mortality", because situations that cause currencies to die aren't fixed by rolling out a new currency. If that's the case, it tells us very little about the safety of well established currencies.

<comment> atom-morgan They aren't fixed by rolling out a new currency if they're just repeating the previous process (printing money aka inflation, backed by nothing, etc).

<comment><USER21> Sure, but the ones rolling out a new currency here are bitcoin, which fixes only some of the issues.

Incidentally "printing money" is not "aka inflation" \- it _causes_ inflation _if_ the money supply grows faster than demand for the money but they are different things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Warren Buffet said the same thing about Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.

On the whole, he might be right about 50% of the time there, so, about as good as tossing a coin.

</comment><comment><USER23> Imagine if we took all technology advice from 80-year olds.

<comment><USER24> Alan Turing would be 101 and Claude Shannon 97 if they were alive today. Our field has an ageist reputation in no small part due to comments such as yours, that think that age alone is somehow an indicator of competence.

<comment><USER25> It's not a field it's a pop-culture just as Kay said ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU- Xc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc)).</comment></comment></comment>


Firefox/VisionStatement - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/VisionStatement <comment><USER2> Here is the full vision statement "Discover, experience and connect with apps, websites and people on your own terms, everywhere."

Two problems: forgettable & undifferentiated. Seems like this applies to just about every technology company out there. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, ...</comment>


Never mind the language, the programmer is what matters - <AUTHOR> http://p.einarsen.no/?p=151 <comment><USER2> >For all program aspects investigated, the performance variability due to different programmers (as described by the bad/good ratios) is on average about as large or even larger than the variability due to different languages.

Yes, but that doesn't mean the language doesn't matter. If programmer productivity is variable by 10x, and this study shows that the language affects their productivity by less than the difference between programmers, that's still a huge difference.

Using the wrong language can drop the performance of a rockstar programmer down a weight class.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention the fact that really good programmers hate, hate, hate working in lousy languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd much rather have good programmers on a bad language than bad programmers on a good language.

<comment><USER5> I'd rather have good carpenters working with a few blunt tools than rubbish carpenters working with a good stock of sharp tools, but I don't think the good carpenters would stick around very long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thankfully, we don't have to choose between good programmers and good languages. Organizations that care can have both.

<comment><USER7> Many organizations care, but frankly have little to no hope of actually differentiating good and bad programmers.

I personally have seen this in both sw dev firms and other firms (financial and biotech) that have internal teams of programmers. Hiring a poor developer was somewhat in the noise in overall outcome - in other words, a slow programmer who produces some code that "kind of" works might be judged as above average based on other, non-engineering talents (personal communication skills, perception as non-trouble causing, etc)

Part of the problem boils down to "it takes one to know one." Even that assumes that you've already got a good programmer and that person has hacked the hiring process enough that they can effectively filter out bad programmers.

I'm thinking lately about how we (the hacker community) can help non-IT people judge programmers. Credentials don't seem to be the answer, personal networking is hard, judging code is usually a flame-war between language acolytes, and in the meantime . . . users are working too hard. Heck, your typical (non-software oriented) organization can't speak to whether or not language X or Y is the appropriate fit for solution development.

An interesting angle for me would be to hear your thoughts about how to build a good programmer and how you would market that person to employers, assuming that employers don't have a super-hacker on board who can help with candidate filtering.

<comment><USER8> A lot of organizations are completely hopless when it comes to identifying a "good language" (for the problem domain), too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think the issue is as black-and-white as the headline. It reminds me of the bit Top Gear did where they "proved" that a BMW M3 got better mileage than a Prius. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKTOyiKLARk#t=50s> Their point, of course is that the diver makes a huge difference - enough to offset a huge difference in cars. But obviously the show wouldn't exist if all cars were equal!

</comment><comment><USER10> In ALL areas of skilled performance, the performer matters more than the tools, including mental tools. Like the old adage, "There are no dangerous martial arts, only dangerous martial artists". What the individual brings to the project matters more than what tools he uses. As for "it is the culture that matters" nonsense - a culture is just support for the individuals involved; a few competent people are going to trounce incompetents no matter how they are organized. Culture is just another type of tool.

</comment><comment><USER11> Most programs are written by teams these days... it is the culture that matters.

Culture provides support, best practice and good staff. Some good languages will never be widely used unless they have good communities/projects associated with them.

</comment><comment><USER12> just the level of entangled abstraction that C++ can bring to your project is staggering.

</comment><comment><USER13> this kind of reminds me of the quote in "balls of fury" movie "game not in paddle...game in you..."</comment>


Dyon 0.36 is released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/dyon/releases/tag/v0.36 <comment><AUTHOR> This is a scripting language I've been working on since 2016. Originally, I did not plan to make a language, but I had a couple weeks available for some project while waiting for Gfx upgrades. It turned out to be so much fun to work on that I've continued working on it.

It uses a lifetime checker (like Rust) for safety instead of a garbage collector. No borrowing semantics, so the language is simpler than Rust. The language is parsed using Piston's meta-parser, which is fed in parallel to the lifetime/type checker and the AST constructor. This makes Dyon a bit faster at loading scripts.

Modules are loaded dynamically without polluting the environment of the loader. You must call a function using `call` or `call_ret` to make dependent modules part of the environment.

Dyon supports 4D vectors, HTML color literals, Go-like coroutines and a special link structure with its own template-like loop which makes text generation fast and ergonomic.</comment>


Don't start with a monolith - <AUTHOR> http://martinfowler.com/articles/dont-start-monolith.html

<comment><USER2> Reddit discussion since this one didn't pick up: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/39656q/dont_sta...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/39656q/dont_start_with_a_monolith/)</comment>


What I've Earned (And Learned) From Writing a Ruby Programming Book - <AUTHOR> http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing, Peter - one always hears numbers being tossed around, but it's interesting to hear the whole story.

It sounds as if you've burned your bridges with Apress to some degree - do you have any interest in continuing to write books with a better deal (e.g., with Pragmatic Programmers) or are you burnt out of the whole thing entirely?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't _think_ I've burned my bridges - though they might disagree! I've mostly appreciated the experience with them; it's just some of the institutional policies I take umbrage with. I bet many writers feel the same way about publishers they work with time and time again :) I don't think that being OK with people pirating my book is detrimental to Apress either. They already let other authors "open" their books (e.g. Scott Chacon, Mark Pilgrim) and I want to _boost print sales_ which benefits them far more than me.

On the second question, I definitely want to write more books. I didn't think this after completing the first edition of _Beginning Ruby_ but the reviews I got just blew me away.

I suspect I've sorta prematurely burned any bridge I had to the Pragmatics (as cool as they are) with a slightly hasty negative reference to one of their books a while back (I've been nice since, honest - sorry!) but if I were sticking to the Ruby theme, I have a big enough audience with my own Ruby sites to self publish (and maybe avoid print entirely).

<comment><USER3> "I bet many writers feel the same way about publishers they work with time and time again."

Almost every time in my experience. It sounds like the deal they give you is good though, better than I would have expected really.

Self-pub is definitely the way to go if you can pull it off. It's not hard to get 5x profit per volume if you have any volume at all, and programmers are extremely easy to make aware of your product, especially once you've established your name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > but the Apress contract states that if you don't, they have the right to do > it without you, have someone else's name slapped on the book

Trying to find the original interview, but I remember reading an article with Laura Lemay (of 'Teach Yourself HTML' fame) of how they basically abused her name to sell books (even after she said she didn't want to write any more books). She lost control and there ended up being a whole franchise of 'Teach yourself X with Laura Lemay' books.

EDIT: Found the link. Thanks archive.org!

"I wrote a lot of books from 1994 to 2000. Both my HTML and Java books did really well, and I had a series that I didn't write that nonetheless had my name on it. It felt like I was riding this wave of popularity, I would probably never be this successful again, and I felt that I had to milk it, to push it as far as it would go. My publisher was all too happy to accommodate me in this goal. They reworked my writing over and over again, customizing it, repackaging it, reselling it under different titles and for different purposes. I cheerfully and naively agreed to a lot of this repurposing, but a lot of it happened without my knowing it under the terms of existing contracts. I would go into bookstores and find books there with my name on them that I had never seen or agreed to or had any idea they existed.

With this much writing being produced not all of it had to be great. Towards the end not much of it was. By the end I didn't feel like I had much control over my own work. even with the writing I was actually doing I was so stretched and overworked that the quality wasn't there. Eventually I felt I didn't even have any control over my own identity.

Who is this Laura Lemay person who has her name all over all these books? Me, I think I'm an OK writer, I'm good at explaining stuff to people. Laura Lemay just produces huge numbers of not very good books. I felt really overwhelmed and disassociated from my own work and from my own name."

[http://web.archive.org/web/20061027193901/www.dispatchesfrom...](http://web.archive.org/web/20061027193901/www.dispatchesfromblogistan.com/interview- with-laura-lemay/)

<comment><USER5> I was solicited by APress to write a book a few years ago, based on another book I'd written, and after having such a good experience with No Starch Press, I was somewhat keen to do it again (though the pay for tech writing sucks, it's still satisfying to see your book on the shelf at a book store, and it's good for most other aspects of business to have a book)...but the APress contract was not pretty. It granted them rather incredible rights to second editions with no involvement by the original author, several routes to making future versions of the book worth less or nothing for the original author, and a somewhat disappointing royalty rate and advance payment. I wasn't finding them very flexible on those terms, either, and frankly, I didn't really want to work with anyone that, by default, considered me a cog in their machine. Needless to say, I passed on that opportunity.

I can recommend No Starch Press, however. Nice folks all around. And, when I moved to California, they went to rather impressive lengths to track me down so they could send me my royalty checks (tiny at this point, six years after publication, but still coming).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are a couple books I've wanted to write for a long time. I'd like to pay a copyeditor to fix my long-winded prose, and pay a designer to typeset it, then post it online as a PDF that will cost, say, $15.

Peter Cooper's unusually successful Ruby book sold ~8000 copies in print and 500 copies as ebooks. He made $19,000.

To gross $19,000 with a $15 PDF, I'd have to sell ~1260 copies. Compare to ~8000/500 paper/print, noting that the PDF will be the only available format for the book, and this doesn't sound impossible. If I raised the prices to a place that still undercut an Apress ebook, I could get that number down to 900 copies.

Of course, whatever number I hit, I own the book free and clear, at all points.

I'm interested in what Cooper thinks about the strategy of foregoing publishers altogether.

<comment><USER7> I just got into the process of self-publishing so I thought I could give you some numbers.

Background: I run a blog (betterexplained.com) which has built up a solid base of traffic over the years. I've had some requests to make the content into a readable, printable, ebook-able format which I've just taken:

[http://betterexplained.com/articles/betterexplained-math- ebo...](http://betterexplained.com/articles/betterexplained-math-ebook-get- the-beta/)

Editing: The oft-unspoken benefit of blogging is that it can really improve your writing. Over time I've learned how to cut down my writing and take in feedback from readers. You get direct feedback on what works and doesn't, so I used my best-performing posts to make a book.

Also, my mom is a really good writer so I run my posts by her :).

Layout/Design: I originally hired a designer (~$500) to layout and typeset some of the HTML in InDesign. Ultimately, I decided to go with LaTeX (I kept the cover design he made) since the book is math-heavy and I wanted the text to look as good as possible (with InDesign I had to use images for the equations, which is a pain, especially for inline).

LaTeX is very powerful, but finnicky, and if used you _must_ (must! must!) customize the layout lest you look like the other 99% of research papers out there. I recommend the "memoir" package. Take a look at a sample page here:

[http://betterexplained.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/09/chapte...](http://betterexplained.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/09/chapter.png)

Marketing/Pricing: Amy Hoy had a great post highlighting some lessons learned (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=632104>). The biggest tip for me was to have a paid (vs free) beta. Beta users get a free upgrade... it's just a good way to validate your market and give a deal to your early-adopters.

Use e-junkie to sell/manage your lists (it made the process very simple, and it's only $5/month for the basic plan). I haven't determined the final price, but I'm planning $19 or $24. I'll probably do a printed version (with Lulu/Blurb) and some combo deal.

Overall: So far, the book has been out for 3 weeks and sold pretty well (hundreds), mostly to long-time readers who wanted to support the site (thank you!). I haven't advertised it elsewhere on my site except for that post, which I'll do once the final version is ready -- the primary target will be search traffic who came for a specific article.

Technically speaking, I paid for the cover design since I did the editing/typesetting myself. Of course this involved a lot of learning over several years (LaTeX) so it's free if your time has no value :).

Hope this helps! Feel free to email me (kalid.azad at that well known gmail address) if you have any specific questions.

<comment><USER6> Buying immediately. I've always loved your blog. Thanks for this comment.

<comment><USER7> Thanks -- and you're more than welcome. I'm always happy to share what I've managed to learn... what Amy, Peter & others have said has made the process so much less daunting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The best way to use a book is to promote some other product or service, because for the most part when you calculate the time spent writing, rewriting, and re-rewriting you realize you're working for less than minimum wage.

This probably works out okay as part of an overall strategy for Mr. Cooper, who is building a publishing empire. :)

However as a money-making strategy, I believe most of the people here at HN could make more doing almost anything else.

In the mid-90s Laura Lemay (graciously) introduced me to her publisher after no more than a simple e-mail query. As a result I got to contribute a chapter to a Web-related title and officially became a published author (yay!).

After that I somehow connected with an agent who started bringing opportunities to my attention. One was for the second or third edition of a semi-successful title; however as part of the deal I'd have to share the (already meager) royalties with the original author. Thanks but no thanks!

The next opportunity seemed golden: the chance to write a brand new title as part of a very well-known series (something like "Selling Online for the Technically-Challenged Among Us").

I started submitting outlines and sample chapters, and assembled a list of e-commerce software ranging from open source to commercial packages (mostly written in Perl). After each submission came the feedback and tiring rewrites, but I still thought it would work out. And that's when it happened. ;)

Apparently the whole department at the publisher had just returned from a Microsoft conference, and had learned about the new software package that was going to set the world of e-commerce on fire: Site Server (maybe Mr. Graham will get a chuckle out of that).

It was expensive, large, and proprietary, and in my opinion not a good match for most of the small-to-medium businesses I thought would most benefit from the book. But guess what (I was told) should be the focus of the new book?

In the end it just wasn't worth the hassle. So that ended my publishing career, but it was sort of fun while it lasted.

P.S.: IIRC some of the big guys, like the first Word and HTML authors, made seven figures.

<comment><AUTHOR> _This probably works out okay as part of an overall strategy for Mr. Cooper, who is building a publishing empire. :)_

A little, perhaps, but it's not been a big part of it. I was working on a RSS related startup (which I later sold) when I wrote Beginning Ruby and Ruby Inside was created solely to promote the book. It turns out, though, Ruby Inside has now become my main gig after selling all my other sites.. :) So, a serendipity, rather than a plan.

 _As a result I got to contribute a chapter to a Web-related title and officially became a published author (yay!). After that I somehow connected with an agent who started bringing opportunities to my attention._

Wow. That sort of thing hasn't happened to me. I've written a chapter for another book and done some technical reviewing on a couple of others, but I haven't had any book related leads come my way. A shame really!

 _The next opportunity seemed golden: the chance to write a brand new title as part of a very well-known series (something like "Selling Online for the Technically-Challenged Among Us")._

If it's the "For Dummies" series - which it sounds like - I've heard a lot of negative things from other authors about the line but.. just because of how famous it is, I'd consider it "golden" fame-wise and probably do it too ;-) There's only so much "noble" work I can do.

Anyway, awesome post - thanks for sharing your story, I enjoyed it.

<comment><USER8> Well I was going to call you a "media mogul." [I'm a regular Ruby Inside reader.]

I forgot to mention that I too was a technical reviewer for one book prior to getting the first writing gig. So that's another "in."

It's been a while but I think you could get an agent if you wanted one. Due to the technical nature of the material I think it's always difficult for publishers to find authors who are both willing _and_ able to do the work. Because of that technical authors still have opportunities authors in other markets can only wish for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can I suggest that you remove or change the blowjob analogy? It's needlessly sexual, somewhat jarringly out of place in the rest of the article, and also carries an implication that all of the readers of your book are male. We've seen far worse recently, and I don't think there's anything demeaning in what you said, but still I wonder: why go there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I've made it more gender neutral. I think a sexual reference makes the point stronger though, because I wouldn't find getting 10% of anything else at a time to be so frustrating (though ideas are welcomed!). Even 10% of a Big Mac wouldn't be _that_ bad ;-)

<comment><USER10> Maybe a tenth of an orgasm?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _See the 30% withholding in taxes at the bottom right?...the US tax man will still steal 30% of your royalties_

The good news for US citizens: you pay no FICA (Social Security & Medicare, currently about 16%) on royalties, which are not considered regular income.

<comment><USER12> What about self-employment tax?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't answer the US question, but for any UK potential (or existing) authors who are reading.. you have two options:

1) Treat the after-tax "net" amounts you receive as regular income - which are then taxed in the usual way - and "forget" the US taxes paid.

2) Treat the pre-tax "gross" amount as income, then fill out a separate "Foreign Income" form on your self assessment. On this, fill in the gross US- earned amount, the amount of US taxes paid, and calculate the UK tax deduction. This is a mega pain in the butt, but if you earned over, say, $10k, you can get a nice savings. About £600 worth in my case - it's not worth it for much lower though..

The HMRC is okay with either, but you can't do both ;-)

<comment><USER13> Alternatively: get an ITIN (individual taxpayer ID number) from the US IRS, and jump through the hoops under the UK-USA double taxation treaty to declare yourself as a UK taxpayer. Double taxation treaties are bilateral arrangements between countries so that taxpayers can declare one of the signatory countries to be their country of residence and pay income tax earned in the other place in their home country. Result: you get back the US withholding tax money, although you have a larger income and consequently pay more tax to HMRC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Minus the ITIN part, that's what I'm going to be doing for 2008-09 (and what I outlined in option 2 above). It's not necessary to have an ITIN and to declare anything to fill out the "Foreign" portion of the tax return and use the treaty's benefits to deduct the withheld US tax locally. Though if you know any more, I'd love to learn more :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great writeup and thanks for sharing! All of the numbers and specifics were great, but I really think this bit of imagery made the piece:

 _The only compromise that was reached was that a couple of chapters could be released per month, separately – which is about as appealing to readers as getting a tenth of a blowjob at a time._

</comment><comment><USER14> About Apress refusing to make the eBook free, I think you're too hard on them:

 _What really flipped my lid, though, was seeing other Apress books like Dive Into Python and Pro Git getting the treatment I wanted. You can read both of these awesome titles online, in full, for free. Offering electronic content for free to promote print book sales isn't an alien concept to Apress so someone's playing favorites over there._

More likely, the idea sounds crazy and/or scary to them, but they decided to try it out with a few of their books to see how well it works. You're in the control group. Maybe that's the result of "playing favorites," but a less whiny way to put it would be that other authors had more influence or did a better job of advocacy. Or you were just unlucky.

But you can take comfort in the possibility that your campaign to make the _Beginning Ruby_ PDF free helped convince Apress to make some of their other PDFs free.

<comment><AUTHOR> While Pro Git is a newish book, I believe Dive Into Python had that licensing long before my suggestions. There might be some history there though, as I think that book might have been developed online initially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Peter - loved the writeup. After being in the technical education industry for so long, I know that no one writes "just one book" and makes money but it's good to show people in such an easy to understand way (like you did).

There were a few things that I had questions on - since you are answering here at HN, I'll try you here!

You mentioned, "I'd argue that unless you're writing a very niche book (that's unlikely to earn back its advance) ..., you should avoid the major publishers and instead find a mid-sized publisher that can offer more attractive royalties..." It has been my experience that, "the bigger the publisher, the bigger the advance" and/or "the smaller the royalty, the bigger the advance". When I think of this conundrum, I always think back to, "Why is this author writing this 'very niche book' - what is their motivation?" If it is money, then I would suggest they perhaps follow your advice and go with whoever gives them the biggest advance (and just forget about negotiating royalties since they are 'unlikely to earn back' in your words). However money is often not the major motivator as you mentioned.

For example, if the motivator was, "I want to increase my profile so that I can speak at big events and raise my consulting rates", they are probably better off going with a bigger company who can flood the market with marketing instead of a small/mid-sized company. Sure they'll give up royalties but they will receive what they want. Small and medium-sized publishers will generally not have the resources and expertise to perform those same functions at the scale a big publishing house can do them.

Also, I would ask the author, "What is success to you for this book?" Some will say, "I want it to sell a bunch of copies because of x, y, and z" then they won't be as likely to do that with most small/mid publishers. Your case of selling 8500 copies through Apress vs. 2000 through Pragmatic Programmer is important since some might perceive that the book was a failure because it "only" sold 2,000 copies. And those "some people" might include potential employers, industry colleagues or the author. It also does not take into account the perceived prestige someone might feel with being accepted to be an Apress author vs. a PP author (again "some people" might have never heard of PP books and so it might not have the same weight).

The final bit I'd say is that negotiating the best possible advance + royalty rate for yourself may not always be the wisest thing to do long term. Example: Let's say that you went with PP and had written "Beginning Ruby" and it was a moderate success selling 2,000 copies over at PP. Apress starts to take notice and they hire someone to write the Beginning Ruby book for them and they market the shit out of it. What do you do now? You l-o-s-e, that's what. PP can't afford to market your book - they don't have any budget left after your 50% royalty and paying their staff - so you are SOL. Your "greed" (and I don't mean "you" as in Peter Cooper; I mean the collective "you") let you miss out on an opportunity: the opportunity to write a beginner-level non-time-specific book (which generally outsell more advanced titles or, as you say, time- specific titles) for a major publisher that will sell for 10-20 years (or as long as (a) the language is popular, and (b) you create new editions). You opted for a small, short-term payday with instead of the potential longer-term success which, yes will have certain confines that aren't ideal, but would be more predictable and more stable. Trust me: although major publishers may not be cutting edge with their titles/technologies, they are paying attention to the small/mid-sized markets. Once something becomes popular, the big guys will emulate it.

Full disclosure: I am the founder of a small publisher (<http://www.learnitfirst.com/>) albeit in the ebook and video markets exclusively. I know that it sounds like I'm arguing for Apress but I'm not - just a different point of view, I suppose.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for some interesting insights!

 _If it is money, then I would suggest they perhaps follow your advice and go with whoever gives them the biggest advance (and just forget about negotiating royalties since they are 'unlikely to earn back' in your words). However money is often not the major motivator as you mentioned._

I might have explained myself poorly, but I disagree here. I'm saying that if money (long term) is the motivator they should go for whoever offers the biggest royalty rate. As I showed, if PragProg published my book, I'd have earned the same with 2000 copies as I did at Apress with 8500 copies (or thereabouts) :)

 _Sure they'll give up royalties but they will receive what they want. Small and medium-sized publishers will generally not have the resources and expertise to perform those same functions at the scale a big publishing house can do them._

Not always. I think the Pragmatic Programmers do an incredible PR job - especially as they have a PR umbilical cord with O'Reilly. Apress, on the other hand, shut down their entire Berkeley marketing department recently (and lost some great people).

 _Your case of selling 8500 copies through Apress vs. 2000 through Pragmatic Programmer is important since some might perceive that the book was a failure because it "only" sold 2,000 copies. And those "some people" might include potential employers, industry colleagues or the author._

But.. most authors don't publicly disclose their sales. There are quite a few other Ruby books published at Apress and I'd be interested to know how they've sold.. ;-) There are ways to get rough figures but they're as accurate as using Compete for Web stats (IME).

 _It also does not take into account the perceived prestige someone might feel with being accepted to be an Apress author vs. a PP author (again "some people" might have never heard of PP books and so it might not have the same weight)._

In my limited experience, and especially amongst the Ruby world, I'd argue being a PP author has more prestige than being an Apress author - perhaps only trumped by being an O'Reilly author.. I know this isn't your point though ;-)

 _Apress starts to take notice and they hire someone to write the Beginning Ruby book for them and they market the shit out of it. What do you do now? You l-o-s-e, that's what. PP can't afford to market your book - they don't have any budget left after your 50% royalty and paying their staff - so you are SOL._

You make some good points in this paragraph but I don't think they apply for _me_ or my market - though they might in other situations. There are other introductory Ruby books from more popular publishers out there but mine still outsells them - and this isn't because Apress is doing a great marketing job.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for taking the time to give such a detailed response.

 _"I'm saying that if money (long term) is the motivator they should go for whoever offers the biggest royalty rate."_

If you re-read what I wrote, I was specifically talking about the "very niche book" that would not likely earn back the advance (hence the royalty rate is not something to worry about). For other situations (i.e. the book you expect will be very popular) then of course I agree with you. If money is the primary motivator and you still want to write books then do what you said: get ready to write several books.

All together, a fun diversion for my day. Thanks, Peter!

<comment><AUTHOR> _If you re-read what I wrote, I was specifically talking about the "very niche book" that would not likely earn back the advance (hence the royalty rate is not something to worry about)._

Good point. Sorry, I missed that reference. In that case yes, I agree on the math, though gleefully accepting a (relatively) big advance for a book you believe won't sell too well could burn some bridges ;-)

<comment><USER15> Possibly - however there is a difference between "gleefully accepting" a big advance and "squeezing every last dime out of the bastard publishing company"!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Peter I've always been curious about how these sort of agreements worked. After publishing a few books, you hope negotiating gets easier. $170,000 in 2 years is a nice return.

Thanks.

<comment><USER6> Just to be clear: $170k is what Apress made off of him. He himself made $19,000. His book was an unusually strong seller (it outsold Resig's book). For most books, the advance is calibrated to cover all the expected royalties.

Authorship contracts are a ripoff.

<comment><USER17> I'm almost afraid to ask, but what happens if the sales don't cover the advance?

<comment><AUTHOR> With most publishing contracts I'm aware of, nothing. From what I understand, this is in stark contrast to the music industry where artists can need to pay back certain expenses.

In terms of Apress (and, I believe most non-fiction publishers), the money you get in advance is, I believe, non returnable. That's why the advances aren't that generous.

<comment><USER8> IIRC most of the authors used to view the advance as the only real money. Any royalties that might appear were like manna from heaven.

I hope everybody doesn't mind me brain-dumping in this thread--it's the only place this stuff can go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> \- "That's why most tech books seem to either be by authors who've written one book or many books."

All books are written by people who have written (1) book or many books.

<comment><AUTHOR> An interesting semantic snafu! I've changed it to "a single book" rather than "one book." Since, yes, anyone who's written, say 10 books has written "1 book," "2 books," and so on - _technically_ speaking ;-)

<comment><USER8> Made sense to me. I got that "previously" was implied. You meant those who weren't first-time authors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice find, but sadly it only demonstrate how insane the system abuses authors - I though pragmatic programmers 50% was way too high, but this just seems an industry that badly needs to be shaken up.</comment>