Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-tesla-collision-20180529-story.html <comment><USER3> I keep wondering what the customer benefit of Level 2 autopilot is if not to lower your attention and relax your mind. Tesla's "out" is that drivers are supposed to retain full attention and oversight of the autopilot system -- but then if you strictly follow this rule, what is the benefit of autopilot?

I can see the benefit _to Tesla_ and future Tesla customers of essentially crowdsourced fleet learning. But what is the benefit _right now_ if you strictly follow the rule of remaining alert enough to intervene at a second's notice?

In previous threads the best explanation I got from Tesla owners was that it frees you from the "details of physically driving" so you "can now supervise instead."[1] That just seems suspect. Supervising autopilot to the degree required to correct sudden mistakes seems, to me, to be probably very close to the mental load of the details of steering yourself.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17151116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17151116)

<comment><USER4> _but then if you strictly follow this rule, what is the benefit of autopilot?_

Indeed. When reading Tesla's statement,

"The Palo Alto-based automaker, led by Elon Musk, has said it repeatedly warns drivers to stay alert, keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of their vehicle at all times while using the Autopilot system."

...one can't help but think, "then _WTF is it good for_ , if I still have to drive the car myself while using it?"

 _Supervising autopilot to the degree required to correct sudden mistakes seems, to me, to be probably very close to the mental load of the details of steering yourself._

I'd say the mental load is _higher_ than manually driving --- not unlike being a driving instructor to a student driver who is OK most of the time but occasionally makes a possibly fatal mistake that you need to watch out for and quickly correct. Normally, a car will go in a straight line with no steering input, but the autopilot almost "has a mind of its own" and can steer itself in the wrong direction.

This is subtly different from cruise control, which lets you concentrate on steering and rest your foot on the brake so you can use it quickly if needed. Cruise control doesn't encourage lowering attention, but enhances it.

<comment><USER5> >This is subtly different from cruise control, which lets you concentrate on steering and rest your foot on the brake so you can use it quickly if needed. Cruise control doesn't encourage lowering attention, but enhances it.

What has lead you to this conclusion? Autopilot is really just advanced cruise control. You can treat it the exact same way by leaving your foot on the brake and leaving a hand on the wheel. If people aren't using it that way, that is certainly something Tesla should try to fix. But I am just not sure I buy the argument that cruise control is inherently a safer technology than cruise control plus auto steering.

<comment><USER6> Because the fully-assisted driving ("autopilot") removes the need for interaction completely. Your brain will stop spending power on backseat driving, because the brain is really lazy--and clever about being lazy too.

<comment><USER5> >Because the fully-assisted driving ("autopilot") removes the need for interaction completely.

But it isn't fully assisted and doesn't completely remove the need for interaction. It just is another step forward from cruise control that is more assisted and requires less interaction. I am not sure why everyone assumes the sweet spot for driver assistance ends immediately after adaptive cruise control and before cruise control plus lane keeping.

>Your brain will stop spending power on backseat driving

That is an interesting phrase to use considering backseat drivers have zero responsibility or control of a car but still manage to pay attention.

<comment><USER3> Backseat drivers pay less attention than frontseat drivers, obviously.

Your characterization of autopilot as "just cruise control" is fundamentally incorrect. Mere cruise control still demands significant and continuous attention and manual control on your behalf (steering). Autosteer makes the leap to fully automatic, which opens the door to not paying attention for long stretches of time.

<comment><USER5> I am honestly not sure how to discuss this topic when in the same thread Tesla gets ridiculed for blurring the lines between Autopilot and full self driving while people who are critical of the system say things like Autopilot is "fully automatic", "fully-assisted driving", or "removes the need for interaction completely".

From a practical perspective, Autopilot still needs to be monitored. But more relevant to this discussion, the user still needs to interact with the car to keep Autopilot engaged. It is possible to do that while paying very little attention. It is also possible to drive a car with cruise control while paying very little attention. Both systems can be abused. I have already said Tesla should do a better job of trying to crack down on the abuse of Autopilot. But I don't know why it is controversial to say that if used properly both systems can lead to greater safety by allowing the driver to focus on other aspects of driving.

<comment><USER3> You're mischaracterizing the issue. Autopilot _should_ be monitored but it can go for long stretches without manual intervention (as if fully automatic). Mere cruise control, on the other hand, _requires_ manual steering.

You're just trying to make them sound similar, e.g. "if used properly" or "both can be abused". But there is an ocean of difference. It is vastly easier to ignore a system that is capable of driverless operation for long periods of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the article available to Europeans somewhere? All I'm getting is a message with this:

> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European > countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options > that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We > continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all > readers with our award-winning journalism.

On the other hand, I'm wondering how much I want to read an article from a website where they _must_ track me to when I just want to read something...

<comment><USER8> This is so stupid, they are still infracting on European Citizens that just happen to not be in Europe. For example I can get to the page but I am in Switzerland which is not part of the EU yet smack in the middle of Europe.

<comment><USER9> The GDPR's scope is EU (or EEA, I can't recall) residents in EU territories, it has no provisions at all for EU citizens who reside outside the territory.

<comment><USER10> I'm in San Marino, I can read the page, and San Marino is not EU but it is in the scope of the GDPR law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get it, why is it so hard to detect stationary objects in front of you? wouldn't that be the "hello world" of any self-driving tech?

Every time I ask this question, the response is "radar as a technology has too much noise, not accurate enough to detect stationary objects".

But it DOES detect stationary objects. Otherwise no one would even turn on Tesla AP at all.

Why is it so hard to detect stationary objects in front of you?

<comment><USER12> Subaru Eye Sight does this reliably and actually auto brakes correctly. Going from that to APv2 has been a real step back. There's a curve on 92W that it consistently try to accelerate you into an embankment. I think Elon just doesn't understand the real world reality of how bad AP is.

<comment><USER13> It really bothers me manufacturers are pushing incremental updates to car safety systems. Does anyone besides me think this is a terrible idea?

<comment><USER14> Aren't cars doing that today with their physical saftey systems?

How else would they do it than incremental?

<comment><USER15> > How else would they do it than incremental?

How about... not?

I'm not being disingenious here.

If there's autonomus tech, then I find it scary that it might change its behaviour. You see, I've learned how (say) Autopilot responds in certain situations. I know when to trust it, and when not to.

If this behaviour changes (perhaps even if it changes for the better!), that's a very dangerous thing. Some of my experience is now invalidated, but I don't know which part. But it mostly works as before, which gives me a false sense of security.

Changing the driving behaviour of a vehicle, especially in totally un-obvious ways, is super dangerous, and such changes must have very strong justifications.

Just think of that poor guy whose Tesla drove into the divider. Oh look, it behaves just like before -- except for its lane following behaviour.

<comment><USER14> I dont understand how you would expect not to do incremental improvement. Build it perfectly the first time? That's not realistic.

Pretty much everything humans do is incremental improvement. I understand your point that we dont want to introduce weaknesses in 'upgrades' but this should be a discussion about how to create robust QA rather that stopping incremental improvement.

<comment><USER15> > I dont understand how you would expect not to do incremental improvement

I wonder if we're talking past each other? Sure, incrementally improve during engineering. But don't incrementally change the safety-critical behaviour of a car once it's in the customer's hands.

> Build it perfectly the first time? That's not realistic.

Absolutely agreed.

But for subjects such as autopilots, predictability may very well trump improvement.

I'm assuming that the initial iteration is already reasonably safe and useful (if it isn't it shouldn't have been shipped, right?).

If the behaviour changes unpredictably (how will you predict autopilot changes caused by an update?), this may well be less safe than keeping the existing system, whoose quirks the dirver has noww learned.

> Pretty much everything humans do is incremental improvement. > I understand > your point that we dont want to introduce weaknesses in 'upgrades'

The nasty thing is that even a change to objectively superior behaviour may be problematic, because the driver will expect the car to behave one way, when it now behaves a different way (regardless of merit).

Not even a changelog would help in such cases. I feel like the autopilot ought to inform the driver in each situation where it used to decide one way, and now decides another way. That might be a reasonably safe way of allowing incremental change, but is likely too annoying for most people.

> but this should be a discussion about how to create robust QA rather that > stopping incremental improvement.

Robust QA is certainly a must.

(side note: I used to work in safety-critical automotive projects. I may have a more intimate understanding of the issues)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> People always lament about how Tesla tries to mislead customer's about its capability, but is there actually data that shows this is truly the case among Tesla owners? How many times does "attention needed" beep is needed before customer can be considered reasonably informed that it is not fully self- driving?

Even among non-Tesla cars, whose manufacturers don't try to "mislead", 71 percent of people believe automatic emergency braking can avoid all crashes [0]. Is this percentage higher or lower for Tesla, and is that difference warranted?

[0] [https://newsroom.aaa.com/2016/08/hit-brakes-not-self- braking...](https://newsroom.aaa.com/2016/08/hit-brakes-not-self-braking-cars- designed-stop/)

[1] Quote from above "When traveling at 45 mph and approaching a static vehicle, a scenario designed to push systems beyond the stated limitations, the systems designed to prevent crashes reduced speeds by 74 percent overall and avoided crashes in 40 percent of scenarios. In contrast, systems designed to lessen crash severity were only able to reduce vehicle speed by 9 percent overall."

<comment><USER17> These cars are driving on public roads, so the question is not whether the user is informed but whether they are compliant. It doesn't take many ignored beeps to learn that a particular customer is not using the feature as intended, and deactivate it for the safety of others. Offer to turn it back on after watching a trainig video at the dealer and signing some papers once, escalate to a mandatory counselling session after that, third strike and the feature is permanently off. Put it in the TOS so that asshole drivers can't sue and win in court. The customer should not be king when the safety of others is on the line.

<comment><USER18> So speeding is the manufacturer's fault too? Informed by the car, non- compliant driver...

Oh, and Tesla does disable Autopilot if you ignore the hands-on-wheel warnings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How many non-Autopilot cars have crashed into parked vehicles? It happens a lot, to the extent that a lot of states have "move over" laws explicitly designed to reduce it.

Does Autopilot actually make the problem worse, or is it just more newsworthy?

<comment><USER20> If you go look at IIHS, they have tests that will tell you exactly how good non-Autopilot cars are at this kind of crash avoidance:

I cannot find any current (2018) car that crashes into the parked car.

(I only spot-checked prior years). I found one in 2014 (audi q5) that hits the car at 1mph when going 12mph.

[http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/audi/q5-4-door- su...](http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/audi/q5-4-door-suv/2014)

By contrast, the 2014 subaru outback avoids collision even at 25mph.

[http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/subaru/outback-4-...](http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/subaru/outback-4-door- wagon/2014)

<comment><USER12> Subaru Outback is vastly superior collision avoidance than AP which probably says a lot about software quality. It certainly doesn't have better sensors.

<comment><USER19> They're equally capable according to that test, and it's not optional equipment on the Tesla.

<comment><USER12> My experience says they're not with a few thousand miles of driving but sure, whatever.

<comment><USER21> How often are you attempting to drive into parked cars?

<comment><USER12> Cars in front of you decide to do random things like slam on the brakes or make sudden turns. Eye sight consistently would warn early then brake as much as necessary. I only had it do emergency braking 2 times and both would have been accidents as I'd misjudged the distance and speed of other objects. They have you test driving towards a trash can as part of the sale, it works, so not just cars in a lane. More interestingly though, the warnings, especially as early as they happen, made me a better driver fairly quickly. Tangentially, the warning sound on the Outback is far more compelling than on the Tesla. Weird UX thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Has Tesla blamed the driver yet? They might get away with that here. The road was not divided and unsuitable for their lane-keeping system. The pavement markings are unusual.[1]

Of course, as usual, their obstacle detection failed to detect a stationary obstacle that didn't look like the rear end of a car in the same lane. We need a minimum standard for a vehicle which takes automated control of steering and braking. It must reliably stop for obstacles.

[1] [https://goo.gl/maps/BjqTZoD5Yws](https://goo.gl/maps/BjqTZoD5Yws)

<comment><USER23> Here's the exact spot on that road that matches the picture in the article [https://goo.gl/maps/pj3X4gAuG672](https://goo.gl/maps/pj3X4gAuG672)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I remember reading people saying that insurance premiums will plummet for Teslas because of how much safer they will be on the road.

Today I read Tesla is getting into the insurance business because premiums are getting out of hand. It makes some sense since internally they'll have more data they can use to deny claims.

It's interesting how reality plays out.

[https://electrek.co/2018/05/29/tesla-insuremytesla- insurance...](https://electrek.co/2018/05/29/tesla-insuremytesla-insurance- model-s-most-expensive-car/)

<comment><USER19> I'm skeptical that it's because premiums are getting out of hand. The report that Teslas are the most expensive to insure only looked at the top of the line version of each model. For the Model S they looked at the P100D, which costs something like $140,000, and is one of the fastest accelerating street cars ever made. I'm not surprised that's expensive to insure, but that doesn't mean a more mundane one will be.

<comment><USER25> They seem to have impressive repair costs. If I was an insurer I'd quote high because of that, not because they were more likely to crash. (eg [https://cleantechnica.com/2018/05/20/heres-what-7000-of- dama...](https://cleantechnica.com/2018/05/20/heres-what-7000-of-damage-looks- like-on-a-tesla-model-3/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I live in Laguna, cycled by this accident today, own a Tesla, and can attest to consistent autopilot issues in this section of the highway. The road widens with a turnoff to the right, and in my experience that is exactly the direction autopilot wants to go every time, rather than follow the center line, even when it is tracking a lead vehicle that does so. There are no lines to the right, so I'm not quite sure why it does this. But, I can understand how an innattentive driver might end up in this situation because until this point in the road autopilot works great.

</comment><comment><USER27> I really wish all the car manufacturers would stop with this bullshit "you still have to be driving it" self driving nonsense.

Claiming that the driver is still responsible for driving the car, while using a system designed to encourage the "driver" to not pay attention is a dumb idea, and all I can see is this kind of thing leading to regulations the delay actual self driving cars.

I'm not a self-driving car fanboy or anything. I don't think it's just around the corner, but it's clearly going to happen /eventually/ and I can't imagine it being more dangerous than regular drivers. But this kind of "self driving but not" features feel like the sort of thing that calls to government agencies for regulation, and sufficiently "dumb" mistakes from these systems seems like the sort of thing that triggers a reactive over-regulation.

<comment><USER28> Blame Elon Musk. I'm serious.

He's been promising "self-driving" for years, except the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough for what people are clearly using this from. The manufacturer puts a warning label, but the usage model/UI is clearly flawed.

His engineers know this, which is why Tesla's self-driving group has had such a high turnover rate over the last few years. Musk keeps overriding them.

<comment><USER29> No offense but this is exactly the attitude that inhibits progress and led the auto industry to languish in mediocrity for years. If you wait until the technology would prevent all accidents, you'd be waiting forever.

<comment><USER30> It needs to be as good as an average human. Do we have enough stats to compare yet?

<comment><USER29> As good as a human at what? It's 100% better at not falling asleep behind the wheel or driving while under the influence which statistically are the most common cause of traffic accidents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Come check out our really awesome manual auto-pilot! It's fully manual automatically!"

</comment><comment><USER32> Assuming that every major AP collision, it is pretty amusing that the latest non-fatal ones have all coincidentally involved emergency vehicles. I imagine it must be related to how such vehicles have the right to park just about anywhere, including on roadways in which drivers do not expect parked vehicles.

<comment><USER33> The photo looks like it was parked in a marked parking spot (those white crossed lines indicating each slot along the curb).

<comment><USER34> Half on the sidewalk, half on the road.

<comment><USER33> After being crashed into. Why would they have driven up onto the curb when there's so much empty space and all the other cars in the photo are parked fully in the street? Not to mention, being further in should make it easier to avoid, not harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> One way to avoid these types of crashes IMO is anomaly detection. It's quite simple to do anomaly detection in pixels using modern deep pixel prediction nets like PredNet. In my experiments you get a few seconds lead time on something like a car cutting you off (the car starts to head out of the lane before actually crossing it for example). This allows alerting the driver, and with a full windshield HUD you could even highlight the anomalous pixels on the windshield. The nice thing about this is that it can be trained in an unsupervised manner on all the available data. Some important details are to find anomalies in object bounding boxes, using something like Tensorflow's object detection pretrained net. Otherwise buildings with lots of striations would light up the anomaly detector. Also, you should detect anomalies in a human colorspace like CIELAB so that white cars (#fff) are not artificially weighted as more anomalous.

Finally, you could use this as input to a planner like Model Predictive Control where a higher cost is incurred for approaching anomalous objects.

<comment><USER6> Great you solved AD with this one simple trick!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Elon Musk has constantly underestimated the difficulty of autonomous driving.

This video ([https://youtu.be/wsixsRI- Sz4?t=1h18m28s](https://youtu.be/wsixsRI-Sz4?t=1h18m28s)) shows Elon Musk, two years ago, saying the following:

"I basically consider autonomous driving to be a solved problem".

"A Model S and Model X can drive with greater safety than a person, already. Right now."

"We are less than two years away from complete autonomy".

</comment><comment><USER37> Totaled? Maybe insurance totaled, but that police cruiser looks relatively in fact from the picture. The driver's side door is open and and it doesn't look like it was crumpled in any way in that zone. The rear driver's side passenger door looks like it took more damage, and the entire frame of the cruiser still looks like it's in relatively okay condition. The Tesla is in the same shape.

I'm not trying to downplay the impacts of the driver or Autopilot here, but even if a police officer was in the cruiser, it doesn't look like it would have been as catastrophic as the article implies.

</comment><comment><USER38> From TFA:

> "Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn't make the car impervious > to all accidents, and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a > dialogue box which states that 'Autopilot is designed for use on highways > that have a center divider and clear lane markings,'" a Tesla spokesperson > said in an emailed statement.

Does this dialog box appear every time the car is started or is it a one time thing, just like terms of services?

<comment><USER39> One time thing. The display does tell you to pay attention and keep your hands on the wheel on every activation though.

<comment><USER40> Lovely... But if it works great 99.9% of the time it may just lull you into a false sense of security. Not saying the driver isn't at fault but this is especially true for Tesla where a firmware update may change autopilot behaviour in ways the driver doesn't expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> If you need to stay alert and have your hands on the wheel, why is the damn thing called "Autopilot"!? This should not be legal.

</comment><comment><USER42> Los Angeles Times blocked Europe because of GDPR. Here's a link we can read from there [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-autopilot/tesla- hit...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-autopilot/tesla-hits-parked- california-police-vehicle-driver-blames-autopilot-idUSKCN1IU2SZ)

</comment><comment><USER43> Good reading: [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air- france-...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france- flight-447-crash)

Basically this is a well-known issue in aviation. As automation gets better and better, humans rely on it more and more and get less and less able to handle even minute failures in it. Additionally humans are _absolutely terrible_ at being able to be dropped into a complex situation and have to make immediate rational decisions about it - thus the failure mode of "in case of error, tell human to handle it" is a bad idea if time between "tell human about it" and "crash into things" is under ten seconds or so. This has been the subject of many NASA studies and NTSB reports and the above article does a good job presenting this info in a form a layman can understand.

There are currently no known easy solutions, sadly.

</comment><comment><USER44> I enjoy how "EU" means "outside of us". I'm in South Africa and it's blocked for the eu

<comment><USER45> Maybe they're using browser timezones

<comment><USER46> That wouldn't be enough, there is EU territory outside Europe.

(French Guyana, Martinique, Réunion etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> 2 fire trucks, 1 police cruiser.

Tesla really is sticking it to the man!

<comment><USER48> Usually other types of vehicles get a handsome ticket when they stop somewhere they should not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> They should name the feature smart cruise control. Case closed. IT does not imply self driving capability but rather more advanced cruise control system. Which is basically what it is.

Nobody is going to set a cruise control to a certain speed and look away from the road!!!

<comment><USER19> The numerous drivers I see texting every day would beg to differ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Tesla could still salvage this somewhat by loudly rebranding Autopilot to "Cruise Control 2.0" and issuing a serious apology.

But somehow they (or just Elon?) seem unreasonably averse to doing that. The man is losing hero-status by the minute.

</comment><comment><USER51> "You are about to hit a solid object. Stop."

Why can't we solve the most basic use case? We don't have the sensors and it's all done with cameras?

<comment><USER4> Too many false positives; sensors would only be usable for cars that moved a few km/h at most. Even if you're driving normally, various other objects appear in your path all the time.

<comment><USER52> And yet the forward collision warning on a lot of inexpensive cars like Hondas would have warned the driver and then hit the brakes in this situation.

We clearly don't have an epidemic of cars with forward collision warning systems slamming on their brakes for no reason, so those systems must be able to deal with the false positives somehow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Articles like this should really include incident rates per miles driven for the self driving vehicle and compare that against human rates. Without that this feels a lot like an intentional effort to mislead. What matters are the crash rates. E.g. - how many humans crashed into an unmoving vehicle yesterday? An immense number but of course they also drove far more miles as well. So the question is exactly how many miles?

The first milestone for vehicular automation is not perfection, but to simply be better, and in the worst case - comparable, to humans. Given the media's tendency to try to make big news out of every single self driving vehicle crash, it seems like we're already approaching (if not passing) this first milestone, as these articles are relatively rare while these vehicles have driven hundreds of millions of miles in autopilot. I can't find the latest number, but back in October 2016 Tesla already had 222 million miles under autopilot. It's safe to assume it's now some substantial multiple of that.

Some time it would be interesting to see media releases around the time we transitioned from horses/carriages to automobiles, to see how the state of the media has changed. Or perhaps it has always been this way. " _I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. - Thomas Jefferson, 1807"_

</comment><comment><USER54> Tesla Autopilot doesn't see stationary objects. It sees moving objects with its radar, and tries to avoid hitting them. It sees lane markings with its camera, and it tries to stay between them. Sometimes lane markings are confusing, worn, or inconsistent. If that happens, your Tesla will smash you at 70mph into a concrete barrier/police car. It will not slow down if it is uncertain about the lane markings, it will not beep if there is a stationary object ahead.

</comment><comment><USER13> Let's make the roads out of rubber and the wheels out of pavement. I feel like this is the backwards mentality with autonomous vehicles. I wrote a while ago about how they simply cannot solve the transportation problem, at least not in a way that's cheaper than just building mass transit:

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

I realize this particular case is different with us talking about assistance/safety features, but I still feel we're going the wrong direction here. These features reduce your awareness. They're like a teenage driver you constantly have to monitor, but worse.

They teach people to be comfortable and less alert with systems that have potentially fatal bugs that we can't yet identify.

We can build mass transit now, at a fraction of the cost of developing the tech for automated vehicles. There are so many corner cases, with highways, city driving conditions that simply cannot pan out for autonomous vehicles without a lot of testing; and a lot of people getting injured and dying.

I wish people would shelve this pipe dream for now. Maybe once we have really solid rail transport again in the US, like we use to decades ago, and rich and poor people can have a means to work even in smaller cities; then we can work on frivolous junk that will benefit the few that can afford it. Right now we just run the risk of killing more people who can't.

<comment><USER25> We've had mass transit for a century. I don't see much harm in trying something new that may save a million lives per year.

<comment><USER13> But we haven't, not in America. Sure the rest of the world does, but we've lost most of our mass transit over the past century.

Knowing you can get on a train at 2am and make it home does play a significant role in reducing drunk driving, and can benefit people of all income levels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Another auto pilot crash. List so far: 1 Hebei, Fatal China crash [https://jalopnik.com/two-years-on-a-father-is-still- fighting...](https://jalopnik.com/two-years-on-a-father-is-still-fighting- tesla-over-aut-1823189786) 2 Florida, Fatal Joshua Brown crashes into truck. [https://jalopnik.com/tesla-driver-in-fatal-florida-crash- got...](https://jalopnik.com/tesla-driver-in-fatal-florida-crash-got-numerous- warnin-1796226021) 3 Mountain view, Fatal Model X crash. [https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/30/tesla-autopilot- was-o...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/30/tesla-autopilot-was-on- during-deadly-mountain-view-crash/) 4 Reference to auto-pilot crash in Hayward. [http://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-tesla- crash-...](http://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-tesla-crash-in- september-showed-similarities-to-fatal-mountain-view-accident/3302389/) 5 You You Xue crashes in Greece [http://abc7news.com/automotive/millbrae-driver- says-tesla-mo...](http://abc7news.com/automotive/millbrae-driver-says-tesla- model-3-was-in-autopilot-when-it-crashed-in-greece/3525746/) 6 Utah autopilot crash, Tesla driver injured, Firetruck driver injured. [https://www.sfgate.com/business/technology/article/Unclear-i...](https://www.sfgate.com/business/technology/article/Unclear- if-Tesla-s-Autopilot-engaged-in-crash-12913423.php) 7 Texas autopilot crash 'Car crashed, then continued to accelerate' [https://www.dallasnews.com/business/autos/2016/08/25/dallas-...](https://www.dallasnews.com/business/autos/2016/08/25/dallas- man-says-tesla-crashed-continued-accelerate-using-autopilot-kaufman) 8 SF VC autopilot crash, she took over control just before the autopilot crash, Tesla blamed her for being in control when the crash happened. In her words 'its your fault if you take control, its your fault when you do not take control'. [https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/tesla-autopilot- related-c...](https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/tesla-autopilot-related- crash-dispute-california/) 9 Laguna Canyon road crash into a parked vehicle. Driver injured. [https://twitter.com/LBPD_PIO_45/status/1001541486146547717](https://twitter.com/LBPD_PIO_45/status/1001541486146547717) 10 FenderBender Crash video on youtube. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQkx-4pFjus&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQkx-4pFjus&feature=youtu.be) 11 Wisconsin Model X crash [https://www.carcomplaints.com/news/2018/insurance- company-su...](https://www.carcomplaints.com/news/2018/insurance-company-sues- tesla-model-x-crash.shtml) 12\. Culver City crash into Fire Truck [http://abc7.com/traffic/2-federal-agencies-investigate- tesla...](http://abc7.com/traffic/2-federal-agencies-investigate-tesla-crash- in-culver-city/2985342/) 13 Autopilot crash in Germany [https://www.reuters.com/article/tesla-germany-crash/tesla- cr...](https://www.reuters.com/article/tesla-germany-crash/tesla-crashes-into- bus-in-germany-driver-says-used-autopilot-idUSL8N1C55Y7) 14\. Model X crashes into Semi in California. Not many details. [https://electrek.co/2017/03/27/tesla-model-x-autopilot- crash...](https://electrek.co/2017/03/27/tesla-model-x-autopilot-crash-semi/) 15\. Laguna Canyon road crash into semi at same spot as (9) april 10, 2017. [http://ktla.com/2018/05/29/tesla-on-autopilot-crashes- into-l...](http://ktla.com/2018/05/29/tesla-on-autopilot-crashes-into-laguna- beach-police-patrol-vehicle/) There are probably more crashes that have not been reported prominently and not disclosed by Tesla either.

<comment><USER56> This list is misguided.

How many crashes do we have from people using regular cruise control features? Is the incident rate per mile when using Autopilot from Tesla higher or lower than regular cruise control?

Those are the right questions in my opinion.

<comment><USER55> Why are you asking me? Ask Tesla! And they won't answer. Don't be a fan boy.

<comment><USER56> My point was that your list doesn't answer the most important questions and trying to proxy any information from a selected list like that is flawed thinking.

<comment><USER55> Tesla does not answer the most important questions about their own product.

<comment><USER56> That's a fair position to hold, I concede that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I can't figure out the geometry of this accident. It looks like the Tesla hit the cruiser near the left rear wheel. And the cruiser was pushed sideways over the curb. But its right rear tire looks to be inflated.

So why would the Tesla have been heading toward the roadside? Was the cruiser perhaps parked in the middle of the roadway?

</comment><comment><USER58> How does Tesla fail so badly at basic collision avoidance?? Surely the LIDAR is able to detect an imminent collision, but at least in the recent fire truck and lane-split barrier incidents, the cars didn't even slow down?! That seems really fundamental.

Edit: so they don't use lidar... Is this a machine vision failure, then?

<comment><USER59> My understanding is that they detect moving obstacles much more easily than stationary.

This is because almost everything in the environment is stationary to the car, so it is hard to distinguish between stationary things in your way and stationary things just off to the side.

So if the car in front of you slows down, it's obvious that you'll hit it if you don't slow down.

A car parked partially in your lane might just look like regular noise to the sensors. That is, using the current technology, if they (correctly) classified the parked car as an obstacle then they would (incorrectly) classify so many non-dangerous situations as obstacles so as to make the system infeasible; the car would emergency brake constantly as it drives down the road.

Some would say that until those obstacles can be classified correctly such technology should not be used at all, but I think it's probably doing more good than harm at the moment and hopefully a good solution can be found quickly. Even if they do fix this problem soon, I'm sure we'll hear plenty of stories where something goes wrong anyway, but hopefully they won't seem so obviously avoidable (who hits a parked car!)

<comment><USER60> How dumb of an idea is it to attach the camera/lidar/what have you to a 2 axis rail and move it around at a high speed to introduce some parallax movement to the scene?

<comment><USER59> I assume you could achieve the same thing with less complexity and more cheaply using a fixed system.

Either having more than one sensor or using mirrors or something.

In fact, I'm sure that the camera systems in place are already doing this to some degree. I think it's more that it's not yet good enough at picking out these stationary objects that are in the path of travel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I really wish everyone had a chance to use the autopilot feature and judge themselves. I use it every single day and trust the machine.

Issue is, with every complex system, there are few ins and outs that users need to know - like lane merge buffer lines, sharp lane merges by another vehicle in front of view, etc. Within your first few rides(below 10), users could pretty much guess when it works and when it might have issues.

On labeling the feature, it is marked clearly BETA and wiggle prompt is shown pretty much in all the confusing cases - so alert is never missed for me.

My only gripe is with all these incidents, Tesla is forced to update the feature to make it less user friendly or take out completely. I genuinely feel safe and come home every single day with less stress. Elon's tantrums are not helping the situation either.

<comment><USER62> Blaming the users doesn't seem like a winning strategy. If the system needs users "guessing" about its behavior maybe it should be gates behind a test with periodic checkpoints as the software behavior changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I liked a comment from the hosts of The Grand Tour (paraphrasing): "When the owners of the car companies that promote these self-driving cars will allow the cars to drive them along the Yungas Road in Bolivia without a steering wheel, then it can be classified as safe."

</comment><comment><USER64> This is another problem with the "imperfect specialist". Fortunately and unfortunately we don't need to grow our own vegetables anymore. Most of us have adopted the concept of buying vegetables from "specialists" who grow them more efficiently then we can. So, we use these specialists and detach ourselves from the growing process altogether. Then we receive a batch of Romain Lettuce comes with ecoli and die. This doesn't happen often but we've delegated this task to someone else and inherited the imperfections of their process. I'd argue vegetable growing is pretty damn safe these days. I'm ok with that risk. But I don't think Tesla is anywhere near worth the delegation of my driving. I'll keep my brained turned on for now.

</comment><comment><USER65> Step 1: Stop calling it autopilot.

</comment><comment><USER66> In the car's defense... I think the police cruiser looked a lot like a highway median.

</comment><comment><USER67> The fix is to implement self driving bumper cars.

</comment><comment><USER68> I wish all those advanced assist functions in today's upper middle-class cars would trickle down to cheaper cars faster. That would give us much more safety now.

It seems Teslas autopilot cannot reliably do much more than conventional lane assist etc.

Tesla could disable autonomous lane changing and autonomous changing of streets, requiring driver's input for all changes of direction (that are not smoothing out, but staying in lane), and it would be really good.

But Tesla needs the impression of game-changing, not just best-in-class for financial markets reasons.

I believe authorities should order call-backs and force Tesla to disable all traces of autonomy.

<comment><USER69> The thing is, a tesla crashing while running on autopilot is more newsworthy than a tesla crashing while being driven. We should not let anecdotal evidence drive our fears.

<comment><USER68> I don't see how this comment could possibly be a reply to mine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Tesla and the driver are at fault here. Tesla for not prohibiting operation on the types of roadways where it is not designed to be used and the driver for using it where it's not designed to be used.

</comment><comment><USER71> Why they not partner with Google? I think they have much better talent pool at AI to handle this. I hope they are using all the crash data to make it more robust.

<comment><USER72> Because Google/Waymo is using lidar which adds ~$150K to the cost of the car.

<comment><USER73> The cost of the Lidar hardware was down to $7,500 well over a year ago and may have come down even more in the intervening time: [http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-waymo-reduces- lidar-c...](http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-waymo-reduces-lidar- cost-90-in-effort-to-scale-self-driving-cars-2017-1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Pay up the nose to be a billionaires guinea pig so he can go can down in history as a pioneer of robot cars while while you go up in flames...HELL NO!!!

</comment><comment><USER75> All I see is this:

"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism."

Maybe we should develop a habbit here on HN not to link to geo-fenced sites?

</comment><comment><USER76> "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism."

I can't read the article. Weird. is this because of GDPR?

<comment><USER77> Yep, it's because of GDPR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> > The Palo Alto-based automaker, led by Elon Musk, has said it repeatedly > warns drivers to stay alert, keep their hands on the wheel and maintain > control of their vehicle at all times while using the Autopilot system.

That Tesla is taking so long to learn what "human factors" are is painful, especially since HF has been part of other industries for decades.

</comment><comment><USER79> Also discussed at the RealTesla [https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/8n20d9/this_morn...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/8n20d9/this_morning_a_tesla_sedan_driving_outbound/)

<comment><USER80> I never knew about that subreddit, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> My sinister side is tingling...

How convenient for non-autopilot auto manufacturers... to have a competitor out there boasting semi-autopilot capabilities...

I wonder how many of these "autopilot crashes" could be machinations... if not already, then in the future perhaps?

<comment><USER82> Or, the incredibly more likely and predicted option is that you shouldn't promote a self driving car that requires constant attention from the driver. Comments on every HN thread have literally warned about this for _years_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> To successfully develop self-driving cars, without spending NASA moon mission like time and money, we need to put a value on a human life. Maybe even different values for passenger, driver, pedestrian, other motorists, policemen, etc. Then the risk, time, and money to spend will be easily defined. If some task will take a software engineer (paid $150k/year) half year to develop but only increase safety enough to save 1 pedestrian per decade, and a pedestrian is valued at $50k, then maybe the dev can work on something else. Numbers are made up just to illustrate the point. But this is how Tesla, or any other self-driving car-maker can quickly bring self-driving tech to the public in a cost-effective manner, and within reasonable time- frames.

<comment><USER84> Your guess at numbers, even though made up, have a concerning low regard for human life.

Since they're required to, the us dept of transportation puts it at just over 6 million.

Priceless is of course the right answer, but engineering wise you're in the 5-10 million range.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> That disclaimer wears thinner each time someone does something stupid like this. Tesla can keep repeating it until a third party gets killed or maimed, or it can act responsibly.

</comment><comment><USER86> "Elon Musk, has said it repeatedly warns drivers to stay alert"

Its AutoPilot, why the hell are all those people expecting it to Pilot the car Auto matically? ....

</comment><comment><USER87> Just like humans are self driving and self crashing the car, "auto-pilot" is doing the same. Machines are too good at learning from humans. /s

</comment><comment><USER88> > Cota said. > Cota said. > Cota said.

Three times in a row, has this article been written by a robot? It doesn't feel like something a human would write.

</comment><comment><USER89> they need to reign this in fast before the NHTSA forces their hand. supposedly they already on that agencies bad side and the last thing Tesla needs is a big recall or stop sale. they will upset some of their fans but in the end it may be safer to OTA restrict its usage.

<comment><USER90> Yes Tesla are leveraged so that they are far more vulnerable to a crisis of confidence than any of the traditional manufacturers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> When will the right mirror be replaced with a camera and dedicated screen. Until the 1980s cars didn't even have a mirror on the right side. Getting rid of the mirror will make cars more aerodynamic. It will also make cars safer, no more knocking over cyclists with the right side mirror. It will make cars cheaper to maintain, mirrors are expensive to maintain.

</comment><comment><USER92> In the last 24 hours, 100 people died in car crashes - but 2 crashes a year apart and its "why does this keep happening". I realize the numbers are not comparable - however, 100 people dying a day is seen as act of God, but 100% driver-less society and getting 1 person dying a week will get these cars banned probably.

</comment><comment><USER93> I could be wrong but that looks like an autopilot 1 car which is an older version of the tech that they're not really developing anymore. The newer autopilot 2 and 2.5 is what they're going forward with for now. That also doesn't look like a highway and autopilot isn't designed to handle that yet.

</comment><comment><USER94> Tesla made a huge mistake naming this feature "Autopilot".

<comment><USER49> ditto

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> More overpromising and deadly consequences. He has overpromised on delivery dates, autopilot abilities, he has underestimated capital requirements, and timeline trips to Mars.

Perhaps Tesla should consider a new CEO and Elon take a move to a more figurehead position?

</comment><comment><USER96> Elon Musk: "Fake News!"

</comment><comment><USER97> Unavailable in most European countries. #GDPRproductivity

</comment><comment><USER98> Sounds like Tesla has the right idea?

</comment><comment><USER99> Acab :D

</comment><comment><USER49> how is autopilot feature still allowed to be called auto pilot? it mistakenly leads people to believe that it can drive itself. The name literally means - <USER2> system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft without constant 'hands- on' control by a human operator being required.

After multiple deaths now the head of marketing at Tesla should be criminally prosecuted (or whoever is the big shot who signed off on this name).

<comment><USER100> Its capabilities are about on par with an airplane autopilot.

I have a lot of problems with Tesla, including the way they market this, but the _name_ is accurate.

<comment><USER101> Well, then they should also provide the same regorous training that the pilots recieve, or make Tesla available to those who are equally trained.

<comment><USER100> That, I can agree with. One might also argue that a mere autopilot does not imply good enough capabilities to work in a cluttered, dense environment such as roads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Autopilot is like the steering wheel, brake, stickshift, etc. You don't get to blame an accident on it. Airplanes have autopilot as well. We live in a world where movies like jackass are made, based on real people and their attitudes. It's not reasonable to suggest that safety labels or terminology can fix everything. Some people are plain irresponsible and foolish.

</comment><comment><USER76> Everybody is so hard on Tesla. And I do agree that the name "AutoPilot" gives the wrong impression of what it can do.

But think about it like Elon Musk would: If AutoPilot is _statistically_ saver that a car without AutoPilot then it's good enough to be sold on production cars. Tesla cars are saver that normal cars statistically.

Off course, picking one crash and saying AutoPilot sucks is statistically not the right approach. I do agree that Tesla should improve on this. But crashing into a parked car probably means that the driver was playing with his phone, or the cars touch screen too much. Tesla should have systems in place that detects the driver not paying attention. (something better than touching the steer)</comment>


Wonobo - India's answer to Google Street View - <AUTHOR> http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/internet/wonobo-indias-answer-to-google-street-view/article5236876.ece

<comment><USER2> They deserve to be congratulated for coming up with a alternative to Street View.

That said, this product is all over the place. It seems to be more of a city guide than a street-view alternative. Even in that area, there's so much happening on the screen that it's a painful mess to navigate. The useful portion (the draggable view) itself is a tiny portion of the screen, so after a few attempts to navigate through the city, I gave up.</comment>


New Millennium Falcon is Lego's biggest set ever - <AUTHOR> https://www.polygon.com/2017/8/31/16234672/star-wars-millennium-falcon-biggest-lego-set-ever-of-all-time <comment><USER2> Still smaller than [https://imgur.com/gallery/snxk3](https://imgur.com/gallery/snxk3)

ps: warning, rabbit hole of amazement

<comment><USER3> Holy

<comment><USER2> I know. We all did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Haven't built a set in over 10 years... Thinking I'm going to get back into it slowly with this set perhaps.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll get one for me and another one to sell in 10 years.</comment>


New brain cells erase old memories - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/new-brain-cells-erase-old-memories-1.15186

<comment><USER2> I'm actually okay with this. I'd feel comfortable taking on new brain cells, even if it meant the destruction of existing, positive memories.

This is something that should be done slowly, gradually, and carefully, though. Like decompressing after a deep SCUBA dive, but hundreds of times slower.</comment>


This little town has the worst income inequality in America - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-little-town-has-the-worst-income-inequality-in-america-2016-06-28 <comment><USER2> I suspect that at least some of those outliers are just the usual 'small county --> high variance' issue.</comment>


The Anatomy of Memorable Landing Page Videos - <AUTHOR> http://blog.leadpages.net/anatomy-behind-memorable-landing-page-videos/

<comment><USER2> Leadpages is a great company and provides a ton of content and training on best practices.</comment>


Announcing Ubuntu and Android dual boot developer preview - <AUTHOR> http://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/announcing-ubuntu-and-android-dual-boot-developer-preview/1359 <comment><USER2> Ah, I wish I could port VLC for Ubuntu Phone safely...

But after numerous questions, several mails and IRL contact at tradeshows and conference, I still don't know if I can access the audio output (Pulse) and the video output (either Xv or an OpenGL context).

Their developer website is about HTML5, QML and HTML5 Platform access. If you look closely, you get libcanberra or gstreamer options... But I need lower access... How do I do that?

<comment><USER3> VLC doesn't even seem to be fully ported to Android yet.

<comment><USER2> First, that's not true: almost all features are ported.

Then, Android is quite much more far from a Linux desktop stack than an Ubuntu phone. It notably has a different (very broken) libc, pthread implementation and different audio output stack...

<comment><USER4> Well, it is true...if "almost all" the feature but not all of them are ported, then its not "fully ported".

<comment><USER2> You want DVD and Blu-Ray playback on Android? Or external cameras?

Porting and shipping all features in the default build are 2 very different things...

<comment><USER4> I'm not saying it makes sense, but the GP is correct that its not a full port. Also, there are android devices that can take both CD/DVD and eternal cameras, so it isn't too far fetched

<comment><USER2> Sorry, but we'll have to agree to disagree here. It's like saying the version on Windows is not a full port because there are some plugins missing compared to the Linux version. And vice-versa.

Very little features not possible (mostly because of the OS) can hardly be considered as "not fully ported" as meant by salient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a 7 years Ubuntu user, recent releases has been a turn down for me (Desktop releases are letting me down, servers are keeping their quality so far).

The decisions, choices and the fact I need to work hard to tweak the system to get it into a sane level of satisfaction is disappointing.

Hence, when Canonical announces devices releases, I wonder if it is not more of the same?

I still don't have a desktop replacement, but would be happy to find one and try it on.

What happened to do one thing well principle?

Linux deserves an UI shell that will be head to head with OSx. And it seems lie since the unity fork, we are just going far off-the-track - and OSx wins.

<comment><USER6> I have recently switched to XUbuntu. I tried it a number of times over the past few years but never thought much of it, however, since the 13.10 release it absolutely rocks! This is a screenshot of my desktop:

[http://i.imgur.com/BK2leWF.png](http://i.imgur.com/BK2leWF.png)

The whole GNOME 3 and Unity debacle had me searching for a decent desktop replacement and I was stuck with Ubuntu 11.04 which ran out of support long ago.. XUbuntu is definitely the desktop distro for me.

<comment><USER7> I run Xubuntu on my netbook and desktop. I just randomly went with it some day and really like it. I'm not exactly a "power user" and haven't customized a ton. It does most things the way I want them to be :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anybody confirm the browser is usable ?

I've tried it a few months ago on my nexus 7, while it was still in alpha, and it was not usable even on very basic tasks. I can understand that most apps and features were mocks (that was an alpha after all), but the browser kept on clicking 10 or 15 px under where I actually clicked (and I suspect it was a qtwebkit problem from qt5, so that's why I feel concerned : it may not be fixable directly by ubuntu).

Anyway, I'm glad to see this happen - that's the door for opensource innovations in the field of mobile. Having a true linux on my mobiles is something I really want. I also hope they will make the ubuntu sdk portable. As much as I would love to use and contribute to a mobile ubuntu, I don't want it on my desktop and laptop (and this kind of limitation is the very reason why I didn't ever care to look at ios development).

<comment><USER9> The browser is still WIP, a lot of pieces are still missing(Content Picker, Download manager, Private browsing) they will be integrated in the next months, also the browser will switch to Oxide(based on Chromium Content API).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Personally, I am waiting (hoping) for SailfishOS to be available to install on my Nexus 5 which is fully Linux based and has the ability to run Android apps. Dual-booting on a phone seems clunky to me... Being able to run VMs on Android would be another better alternative that is in the works (Android 5?).

<comment><USER11> Have you actually tried it? We have one to play with at work and it's awfully unintuitive to the point where I gave up trying to learn the gestures. It's definitely not consumer friendly and requires a large effort even to be able to do basic tasks.

<comment><USER12> Are you serious? It took me 10 minutes with my Jolla to get the basic hang of it and after a day of usage, I don't have to think about how to use the phone anymore. It's a lot cleaner UX paradigm than any of the competitors'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll have to give this a look sometime (though I'll likely hold out until they have it stable on Nexus 7).

Adding a 540MB swap file is pretty crazy though. I'd rather not have stuff swapping to the (relatively slow and serialized) eMMC flash.

They could probably look into having the recovery partition kexec their kernel to chain-load it, rather than replace it entirely. The kernel source is readily available, as are init and the recovery/updater userspace tools.

I still think the holy grail here is to just run a stock "classic" Linux userland under Android -- park it in a container, do an X11/Mir/Wayland/whatever port against the SurfaceFlinger, and make Linux native apps first class citizens running alongside everything else. No need for dual-booting or other awkward shuffling about. It'd take some work, but it's entirely doable.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's a way of triple-booting Android, Firefox OS and Ubuntu on a Nexus 4: [http://www.droidviews.com/how-to-triple-boot-nexus-4-on- andr...](http://www.droidviews.com/how-to-triple-boot-nexus-4-on-android- firefox-os-ubuntu-touch/)

It relies on a piece of kernel infrastructure called kexec-hardboot which to me sounds like black magic - it's like normal kexec but also resets all the peripherals so that they can be reinit by the new kernel. Magic.

</comment><comment><USER15> Instead of dual booting I prefer some kind of virtualization support to run the operating systems side by side.

I don't dual boot if I want to run Linux and Windows. Less in a mobile phone!

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't know why I need dual-boot them, plus I am not comfortable to run ubuntu on my small screen devices, though I loved it when I used it for linux development env(and LTS server) on PCs. Now I'm switching back to Debian, first server, then desktop, somehow I think Ubuntu is stretching too thin and lost its focus, you can't do everything at the same time, not to mention ubuntu is still a pretty small company.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have a (probably) silly question: does node.js and other x86 compatible software run on Ubuntu on ARM-based phones/tables? I do not expect them to do so, but who knows.

node.js and IntelliJ IDEA is probably the only things that keep me on my PC, otherewise I would replace everything with one android phone.

<comment><USER18> Did you try Googling? :)

[http://masashi-k.blogspot.fi/2013/08/nodejs-on- android.html](http://masashi-k.blogspot.fi/2013/08/nodejs-on-android.html)

<comment><USER17> Wow, never knew about it (Debian Kit). Thank you!

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11894384/any-web-java- ide...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11894384/any-web-java-ides-for-the- arm-architecture-on-linux) \- even Intellij IDEA could be persuaded to run on Android as it turns out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there a way to pre-download everything downloaded by the Dual boot installer app? My connection is too unreliable for a large direct-app download like this to ever work.

</comment><comment><USER20> Still no Nexus 7 2013 (flo) support for Ubuntu :(

<comment><USER21> Yeah this is very unfortunate for me, personally. I have a Nexus 4 and a Nexus 7 (2013 model) and I'd love to try this out, but the Nexus 4 is my day-to-day phone and it would be terribly inconvenient to monkey with it so much just to try out an early Ubuntu release. The Nexus 7 is more of a toy and I'd be willing to try it out, but they still don't support the newer model of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's that saying? If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

</comment><comment><USER23> This looks promising, I hope it will be tested on a Galaxy Nexus soon.

</comment><comment><USER24> Has anyone tried this on a Moto X?

<comment><USER10> It does not look like the Moto X is supported in anyway right now --> [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices#Working_with_phablet-f...](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices#Working_with_phablet- flash)

<comment><USER24> Ah, thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Free VMs of Windows to test older versions of IE - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11575 <comment><USER3> The VMs are designed for Virtual PC, which is of course only available for Windows.

There's a script called ievms that will automatically downloade those VMs and convert them for use with VirtualBox on OS X or Linux:

<http://xdissent.github.com/ievms/>

<comment><USER4> Virtual PC isn't supported in Windows 8 and I couldn't get these images working in Hyper-V. They are truly almost an afterthought from Microsoft.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't IE10 let you run the past versions of IE with developer mode? Haven't tried with IE10 but i know IE9 had it.

<comment><USER6> No: the compatibility modes aren't the same as the real browser - they try but some features, especially things like CSS or DOM handling of errors, non- standard properties, etc. will not be consistent enough to avoid testing in the real thing.

When IE8 was out, setting IE7 compatibility mode using an HTTP header worked for 99% of a huge internal business app but I had to monkey-patch around a third-party library because the code which worked in IE7 raised an exception in IE8's IE7 compatibility mode due to significant differences in the underlying JavaScript engine. This was an improvement - IE7 should have done the same - but it broke a huge enterprise shovelware system with an indifferent vendor who waited until after IE8 was released to start testing (a support manager actually contacted me asking if they could redistribute my patch!).

<comment><USER7> did you let them redistribute it?

<comment><USER6> I'd already posted it publicly, so I didn't even try to charge them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The biggest problem with these is that they all have an expiration date - <USER2> Microsoft frequently forgets to update them. And getting through to Microsoft to tell them it is out of date... forget about it.

<comment><USER9> Yes! We eventually stopped bothering with these because it was too much time to re-download and re-install them every time they expired.

Instead, we just narrowed our IE support to what we could maintain easily with a legitimate copy of windows installed on a VM.

<comment> at-fates-hands I'm surprised more people haven't done this as it would seem an obvious way to solve the problem.

I've recently been in several large corporations and they won't support anything below IE8 now. Most are dropping support for IE8 after IE10 becomes more widely available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These have been around for years. I put together a guide for personal use a while ago, for how to get them running under VirtualBox on OSX. Should be a similar process under Linux. I don't have a blog or anything, so I'll include them here, hoping they'll be helpful to people here, sorry about the length (I last did this a few months ago, so it should be pretty up-to-date).

\- Extract the RAR files. On OSX use UnRarX: <http://www.unrarx.com/> At least with UnRarX, it will still work despite the first RAR file being a self- extracting .exe file which, obviously, can only run on Windows. You may have to open the multi-part archive using the second file, it will still work.

\- Install VirtualBox from <https://www.virtualbox.org/> Inside of VirtualBox, create a new virtual machine using the wizard. Make sure to choose the appropriate OS (for example Windows 7) and give it enough memory (the default 512MB is definitely not enough). Also, we're using 32-bit OS only. The important part is to select the .vhd file you extracted from the .rar files as an existing hard drive.

\- Do not run the virtual machine yet. It won't work, because it's designed only to work with Microsoft Virtual PC. To make it compatible, click "settings" in VirtualBox to change some things:

\- On the system tab, check Enable IO APIC. This is necessary to get your mouse to work (I think).

\- On the storage tab, remove your VHD from the "SATA Controller" list. Then add the same VHD file back, only under the "IDE Controller" tab. The VHD is expecting an IDE controller, and you'll get a BSOD if you don't do this step. Under the network tab, change "attached to" from "NAT" to "Bridged Adapter". This is necessary to be able to access a webserver running on your local machine, that is outside of the VM. (You don't need to do this if you just want to access websites in general). Start the Virtual Machine.

\- You'll notice the mouse doesn't work. We'll get to that. For now, the Tab key and Alt+Tab are your friends. Log in with either the "IE User" or the "Admin" account. The password is "Password1".

\- It will ask you to activate. Ignore for now.

\- In VirtualBox, go to the "Devices" menu in your OS menu bar and click "Install Guest Additions...".

\- In Windows, launch Explorer somehow. Easiest way is the "run" command (try Windows Key + R) and type "explorer". From within explorer, use Tab and Enter and arrow keys to navigate to the inserted CD. Select the "Autorun" file and hit "Enter" to run it.

\- You are now installing guest additions. During the process, you'll need to Alt+Tab to the new prompt window to hit enter every time you need to confirm something.

\- Once guest additions is installed, use the start menu to restart the virtual machine. Once it restarts, your mouse should now work inside the virtual machine, hooray!

\- It will ask you again to activate. Try to activate online. If it works without asking you for a product number, awesome. If it asks you for a product number, hit cancel, open up a command prompt (run "cmd"), and type the following:

        slmgr -rearm

(If it says you don't have permission, then try logging in under the other account when Windows starts up, if more than one account is listed, e.g. both "Admin" and "Administrator". One of them should work.) This will activate Windows for 30 days, and you can redo this every 30 days. Note: if you don't activate or run this command instead, then Windows will shut itself down after 15 minutes.

\- Open up IE. It should be able to browse the Internet. But it will not open up sites on nonstandard ports, so browsing to your own site at something like

        192.168.0.10:8080

will not work. To fix this, go to Internet options, then the Security tab. Click the Trusted Sites icon. Click the Sites button. Uncheck the "Require server verficiation (https:) for all sites in this zone" checkbox. Click Add, then type in the IP address of your machine (for example

        http://192.168.0.10

). Click Close. Then, with the Trusted Sites icon still selected, change the security level for this zone to the lowest possible setting. Now, browsing non-standard ports like 8080 should work.

\- If you find yourself Cmd+Tabbing between the Virtual Machine and the rest of your programs, you may find that every time you Cmd+Tab back to the Virtual Machine, it opens up the windows menu. This can get real annoying real fast, because it removes focus from whatever you were working on. You can disable the "Windows key" inside of the VM from this Microsoft webpage:<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216893> Obviously, this will disable any windows key shortcuts, but that's probably fine. Remember, normal shortcuts like Ctrl+V etc use the Ctrl key on the Mac keyboard, not the Cmd key.

<comment><USER11> Awesome guide, thanks a lot!

Since the WinXP is just a single exe file, UnrarX cannot extract it. Any idea to fix this besides extracting it on a Windows computer?

<comment><USER12> Hackers don't search for easy solutions ;) You can use any hex editor to cut the PE file: just cut from the beginning to the point where the _Rar!_ signature starts and rename the extension to .rar.

<comment><USER11> Challenge accepted.

Edit: There is no "Rar!" in Windows_XP_IE6.exe :(

<comment><USER12> That's because it's not a RAR archive :( Windows_7_IE8.part01.exe and Windows_Vista_IE7.part01.exe are RAR archives, but Windows_XP_IE6.exe is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just a quick note that one of the easiest ways to get a legitimate license key is to join BizSpark. If you are a startup (which I imagine a lot of people here have _some_ sort of startup) there is no reason not to be a part of it.

<comment><USER14> IIRC, it cannot be just any kind of startup, i.e. if you have a software service house (build software for others / consulting), you are not going to get into BizSpark.

Feel free to straighten out my misconception.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Or better yet, just use <https://browserling.com/> which is from another HN member, pkrumins.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is nice, but it suffers from the same flaw all the other virtual browser services suffer from: No pay by the minute/hour. I probably only need 1 or 2 hours with IE 8 every month or two.

<comment><USER16> Honestly, if it's not worth 20 bucks a month to you, you probably aren't in their target market (deliberately priced out of it, for good reason).

<comment><USER17> Depends, when you look at it another way $20 a month is almost your own virtual server with windows on it.

<comment><USER18> If it saves me ~30mins/month then it has paid for itself

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> These images have been available since at least summer 2008:

[http://weblogs.asp.net/mschwarz/archive/2008/08/30/internet-...](http://weblogs.asp.net/mschwarz/archive/2008/08/30/internet- explorer-application-compatibility-vpc-image.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER20> xdissent made a great command line installer on github for virtualbox and these virtual machines; you can get them running with one command. I've used the script for the last year or so when I've had to set up a new box for testing and I've really enjoyed it.

<https://github.com/xdissent/ievms>

<comment><USER21> I came here to post this; instead I'll mention more features:

\- Handles interrupted downloads for you, continues them. \- Hilariously, each browser comes in a distinct version of the operating system. Windows 95 for IE7, Windows Vista for IE8, and Windows 7 for IE9. A trip down memory lane! \- Debugging for IE7 is not enabled by default on the IE7 image. Thanks, MS ... people mostly use IE8 with IE7 mode turned on, but it _is_ possible to get a full debugger in IE7.

 _shiver_

Now I'm going to go back to pretending those abominations don't exist. Until later next week, when yet another responsive web app needs to be backported to the days of buggy whips ...

<comment><USER22> The windows versions you mention are not right. It's WindowsXP-IE6, WindowsVista-IE7, Windows7-IE8/9

<https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/blob/master/ievms.sh#L150>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> These images work directly on vmware fusion btw.

the converter is built into the application.

<comment><USER24> what about parallels? (arstechnica recommends it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Bear in mind they're time limited. If you're running Windows 7 you can use multiple instances of "XP Mode" (basically Virtual PC + a VHD image you can download from MS) to run all versions of IE [http://blog.dotsmart.net/2009/06/24/using-windows-7s-xp- mode...](http://blog.dotsmart.net/2009/06/24/using-windows-7s-xp-mode-to-run- ie-6-and-ie-7-side-by-side/)

</comment><comment><USER26> We do most of our testing through cloud-hosted VMs now, like <http://browserstack.com> and <http://saucelabs.com>

Sauce also lets you set up selenium/WebDriver testing so you can automate it.

<comment><USER27> Agreed. Spending hours fiddling around with old VM's to test horrible old browsers sounds depressing.

Saucelabs looks good cheers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why use this instead of the setup that I use for years?: a WinXP virtual machine and this IEs collection: [http://www.askvg.com/how-to-run-multiple- internet-explorer-v...](http://www.askvg.com/how-to-run-multiple-internet- explorer-versions-simultaneously/) \- you end up with one VM and IE 3 - 8.

...and since I use Win7 for work I was tempted to try <http://www.my- debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage> but ended up using my old solution out of fear of messy installs/unistalls that such software could do on my "clean" work OS though I'm curious if anyone tried it as it still seems more comfortable and I'd switch to it if I could...

<comment><USER29> In the past (about four years ago) we had a difficult to debug issue which only manifested in IE on one team member's computer - we traced it down to Multiple IE screwing up cookie handling in some odd manner. So you'd be testing with an environment that's not necessarily 100% the same as your end users.

<comment><USER30> Yes, I have also seen peculiarities with Multiple IE. IMO, it's decent for casual testing, but you still need to do testing on real installations of your target platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For web devs, if you want to test your site on IE7, download the XP image and install IE7 on it - the image comes with the installer on the desktop. Don't bother with Vista unless you need to support something OS-specific, which if you do - you should just stop what you're doing and severely rethink your web dev stragedy.

For use with Oracle VirtualBox, you'll have issues with networking, which will prevent you from Activating the VM.

I posted detailed steps to get networking working in VirtualBox here: [http://bittwiddlers.org/index.php/2012/11/xp-vms-with- virtua...](http://bittwiddlers.org/index.php/2012/11/xp-vms-with-virtualbox/)

</comment><comment><USER32> "Windows XP Image:

Expires: This image will shutdown and become completely unusable on February 14, 2013."

</comment><comment><USER24> Installing a whole OS just to test a site on IE seems a bit excessive. Wouldn't it be easier to just test one's site on the cloud? (E.g. see [http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/SuperPreview_Ov...](http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/SuperPreview_Overview.aspx), though its for Windows.)

<comment><USER33> That's always bothered my about Internet Explorer. I can download Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all for under 20MB but I need to download 4GB to test Internet Explorer 8?

<comment><USER34> Seems strange, doesn't it? But the rendering engine is shared with countless other system components, it's not portable between operating systems (no IE9 on XP, no IE on mac/linux, no IE7 on certain x64 windowsen) and all attempts to extract the rendering engine into a portable .dll have quirks of their own (IETester et al).

Sad state of affairs, but a whole OS image is the only way to get guaranteed compatibility with what real-world users are seeing - A better comparison would be to iOS Safari or the Android browser, where the vendor just has zero incentive to make that specific browser work (identically) on other platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Another alternative is using an application virtualization solution. In that case you can run IE6 directly in Windows 7. It works as a sandbox and you don't nees the whole operating system. My company is providing this technology to Symantec.

</comment><comment><USER36> The right thing to do is sometimes just to give it up. People will stop using the old browser, even if that isn't immediate in large companies that can't roll out new versions quickly due to the expense and time involved.

We gave up IE6 as soon as we could.

</comment><comment><USER37> A while ago I used Windows XP Mode to create VMs with different versions of IE for testing - very easy if you have Windows 7 Pro because XP mode can be duplicated/copied around like any other VM and has automagic licensing provided the host in Windows 7 Pro (if you move the VM to a different type of host it will fail to work)

Obviously this is only good if you're already on windows but that was a huge help for development and didn't take much effort to set up.

</comment><comment><USER38> Or several gigabytes less and much faster:

<http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage>

<comment><USER39> I'm fairly sure IETester is not a 100% accurate representation. Although saying that, I have used it before and it certainly is more convenient. I suppose it depends on how important the compatibility of your site is on the older IE versions.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5612170/web-testing- for-i...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5612170/web-testing-for-ie-how- accurate-is-ietester)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> IETester anyone? <http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage>

<comment><USER41> IETester is a great idea, unfortunately it's extremely unstable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Note that these images can still expire after 30 days (or 90 days with "rearm").

<comment><USER43> In Virtualbox you can take a snapshot of the VM after the initial install and revert to that snapshot to reset the trial period. ievms does this for you automatically.

<comment><USER44> Microsoft actually recommends doing so in the documentation for these images (except using Virtual PC, natch).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is awesome. Anyone have a pointer to Win2003 Server (ie7)? We have a bunch of folks there with a hard-to-knockdown bug not showing up elsewhere. Our solution so far has been to say: Upgrade the OS.

</comment><comment><USER46> You don't need VMs or the sort to test old versions of IE.

Open IE and hit F12, this will open IEs equivalent of Chrome Developer tools. It has options to change which IE engine it uses all the way back to IE7 for testing.

<comment><USER8> Which gets you close, but not close enough to say "I've testing in IEX." Although the DOM modelling is very close, the CSS and JS quirks between different versions aren't emulated enough in F12 to catch the problems that using the actual version would expose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Do someone use <http://spoon.net/> and have some thought to share?

It seems to be far more easy to setup, but I don't fully understand how it works.

</comment><comment><USER48> From the title I thought they were hosting VMs that you could RPC into to test your site. That would be quite cool (not that I need it at the moment though).

</comment><comment><USER38> Apparently (free) VMWare Player can import VMC/VPC files now for those that prefer VMWare.

</comment><comment><USER49> or <http://crossbrowsertesting.com>

I am a founder so I am biased. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Lot more expensive than browserstack. Any reason?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This doesn't mesh well with <http://www.ie6countdown.com/>

</comment><comment><USER51> It would serve the world so much better IF THEY JUST LET IT FUCKING DIE! GRAAAAAAGGHH!

</rant>

<comment><USER52> the only way early versions of IE would go away is if the computers upgraded themselves.

Even going out of support won't kill them as some people/businesses still won't allow their computers to upgrade IE, or install anything else.

Example: Over the weekend I was at a big chain store and decided to sign up for a discount card (which is done online). The employee pulls up the browser, and it's IE6.

The website we go to, the company's public website, is broken in IE6, yet they still use IE6 on their computers.

If businesses won't upgrade from IE6, even though the tools they make their employees use don't function properly in IE6, I don't think there's anything MS can do about it.

<comment><USER51> But that's precisely the point - the only thing that can force businesses to upgrade is if the cost of developing, testing and maintaing software for IE6 becomes more than what it costs to do a full overhaul and re-education. Microsoft stepping in to make IE6 support _easier_ and _cheaper_ simply sends the message that it's still a valid choice for development and support.</comment></comment></comment>


The Church of TED - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/opinion/sunday/the-church-of-ted.html <comment><USER2> "TED, with its airy promises, sounds a lot like a secular religion ... The TED style, with its promise of progress, is as manipulative as the orthodoxies it is intended to upset."

Many (though not all!) TED presentations showcase individuals who think highly of themselves explaining in digestible soundbites how they're going to make the world a better place, in front of live audiences who have a high opinion of themselves, for video distribution to online audiences who want to think highly of themselves.

It may not be a religion, but TED definitely has a cult-ish feel to it.

<comment><USER3> Also TEDx has happily adopted a wide variety of nutters and pseudoscientists that have wrecked their brand.

<comment><USER4> You talk about TEDx like if it is a single entity, but it is actually thousands of individuals making independent decisions, with minimal oversight from TED. So of course there are going to be a few mistakes and if anything we should respect TED for opening up their brand and allowing experimentation.

The whole point is staying alert to see these mistakes, whether they come from TEDx organizers or from TED itself because nobody is right 100% of the time.

<comment><USER5> For most things, opening up is noble. But not for a brand -- can you imagine Apple allowing other companies to use their brand for experimentation? Or Coca-Cola?

<comment><USER4> Those brands are for-profit and opening up may indeed not make sense financially.

TED is a non-profit, and their goal is to build an efficient platform for sharing ideas (and not only theirs). In this regard, opening up makes total sense, even if brand damage is a risk. (hence the respect)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The onion has some good TED satires:

[http://gizmodo.com/5950924/the-onions-ted-talks-parodies- way...](http://gizmodo.com/5950924/the-onions-ted-talks-parodies-way-smarter- than-the-real-thing)

(Forgive the gizmodo link, but onion is blocked in China)

I think TED has to do with what I observe happens to corporate, startup, and ya, religious cultures that tend to take themselves a bit too seriously and live in an echo chamber too long.

I would totally pay for inspiring tech talks with sarcastic John Oliver style deliveries. A bit of cynicism and sarcasm goes a long way in making something seem real to me.

<comment><USER7> IMO the best thing the people from Onion have done since this genius piece [http://www.theonion.com/articles/al-gore-places-infant- son-i...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/al-gore-places-infant-son-in- rocket-to-escape-dyin,2495/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Alan Kay has an apropos quote[0]:

> This [The fact that science is a human-driven, human-invented process] is > hard to explain to K-8 science teachers, _who think that science is a new > religion with new truths to be learned. They think it 's their job to > dispense these catechisms._ [emphasis added]

I think viewers of TED talks are looking to be told what to believe. I'm not at all moralizing--I sometimes watch TED talks--but I do think science-as- religion (a bunch of facts or truths to be memorized or internalized) is a distortion that "opiates the people," so to speak.

[0] Is it really complex? Or did we just make it complicated? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY)

<comment><USER9> I think that in science there is an inherent tension between what scientists know and what what the public knows.

Scientific knowledge is covered in asterisks. To read and understand science typically requires an extensive amount of background knowledge; without that it is very easy to misinterpret the strength, significance, or applicability of a scientific finding. Many of the asterisks are themselves scientific conclusions with their own set of asterisks.

The public, at least in areas which are not immediately relevant to daily life, cannot be assumed to have that background knowledge. Therefore, the tension is essentially this: How can scientists make people aware of (or interested in) scientific knowledge if they have to strip out all the asterisks when talking to them?

Making science into a _catechism_ is simply one solution to the above problem. Ignore the asterisks and turn the fundamental findings of physics and chemistry into dogma and dispense it as gospel truth. _I actually am somewhat o.k. with this._ Sure, Joe Public might come away with an over-simplified and over-confident knowledge about what science says, but I think that a clumsy knowledge of scientific facts is better than the impression that scientific knowledge is arcane and out of reach. After all, it is highly unlikely that Joey P. will find himself in a situation where it is very important for him to really understand all the subtleties behind his k-8 scientific knowledge, but that knowledge is likely to come in handy.

The only _problems_ with the science-as-religion solution are a potential "loss of faith" and the perception of arbitrarity with regards to scientific findings. The first can easily happen when someone learns about a new finding which contradicts the dogmatic version of science but is entirely consistent with the heavily asterisked _actual_ scientific consensus. The second problem is basically "rejectability;" if people think that science is a set of arbitrary rules, then they are free to reject them the same way they would reject other religions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> FTA: "TED talks routinely present problems of huge scale and scope — we imprison too many people; the rain forest is dying; look at all this garbage; we're unhappy; we have Big Data and aren't sure what to do with it — then wrap up tidily and tinily. Do this. Stop doing that. Buy an app that will help you do this other thing."

... and at the bottom: Megan Hustad is the author of "How to Be Useful" .... From it's blurb: "There's a lot of career advice out there. Much of it dumb. But what if someone read all the advice books -- over a hundred years' worth -- and put all the good ideas in one place? Could you finally escape the cube? Stop mailing things? Be happier?"

I dunno, but Ms Hustad is doing exactly what the TED talks she derides are doing. Maybe she's upset because she has never been invited to talk at TED?

I have never looked at TED talks as a solution to anything; to me, they're just interesting people talking about what they do.

<comment><USER11> >>they're just interesting people talking about what they do.

I thought this, but then there were a few TED talks on fields that touch my work. I was furious that TED would provide a venue for charlatans. In some ways the people who promise the most, and whose can be boiled down to sound bites are rarely the folks who do the interesting work.

<comment><USER12> Honestly curious here, could you mention which TED talk in particular and what you found to be inaccurate or misrepresented?

I just want to get a feeling for what level of distortion we are talking about. As it is, I assume the talks are hardly accurate by specialist standards, but I have no idea if we are talking "science news in mainstream news (say, BBC) publication" distorted or "Reddit conspiracy theory" distorted.

<comment><USER11> Its `science news in mainstream news`, although `mainstream` news can occasionally be stimulating as it often comes directly from university press releases. Remember that TED sells itself as `ideas worth spreading` rather than `shit worth smearing`.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I will say, this TED talk improved my life immeasurably, if only for two minutes and fifty eight seconds:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s)

<comment><USER8> I watch this Reggie Watts talk when I need a pick-me-up:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc)

<comment><USER14> Simply brilliant. I understand some of the criticism of TED but I've seen stuff - like this clip - that is so damn good, I don't really see what all the fuss is about.

And since we're talking about Reggie Watts, I have to share my fave of his: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bLFO4ZV0i4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bLFO4ZV0i4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Eddie Huang had an interview with Joe Rogan where he talked about the behind the scenes weirdness and cultish feeling he felt as a speaker when he tried to leave.

<comment><USER16> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hwLMBdnbXk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hwLMBdnbXk)

<comment><USER17> This was very surprising to me. I'm glad you linked it. I have definitely changed my mind about ted.

The fact they forced Eddie to have a roommate is weird, and creepy.

It seems like humans just can't live with out religion.

<comment><USER15> I know that story just gets weirder as he goes along. The part about them telling him to pack a poncho because it was going to rain was too good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a lot of the same feelings about TED. The presenters come across as arrogant and usually misrepresent their project as ready to work, when in fact all they have is one dubious artifact.

"Oil Companies hate her: One TED presenter's idea will eliminate the world's oil usage."

<comment><USER19> You write that as if it's an example of an actual TED talk title.

How about you make your point with a real example. I haven't seen anything as misrepresenting as this.

<comment><USER20> Crows that clean up trash

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's incredibly they manage to fill the seats at those prices. Church is free and they can barely manage to coax anybody through their doors anymore.

<comment><USER22> Supply and demand. If they sold seats to witness a new pope starting his gig, I am sure they'd sell for quite a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Irony: the author of this article gives a TED talk about her research.

<comment><USER24> That's not irony. That's Birdman winning an Oscar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am surprised at the cost and the graduate-job-interview style questions just to attend a satellite event like TEDx Sydney.

I applied and was rejected. I am not interesting enough for them I guess, maybe I will apply again once I have been to the moon. So freshly discontented, I am more inclined to agree Ted is a religion, cult etc. :=)

I do find the talks unsatisfying. The first 3-4 I watched were great (but I can't even remember what they are about) then they are same-ish after that. (My reason to attend was meeting people rather than the talks.)

There is a lot of style over substance in TED talks. I rather have an OK public speaker speaking about something very interesting to me than vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER25> The one purported benefit of TED talks is democratizing knowledge and inspiring people. The latter, possibly it does. Some claim its benefit as giving access to knowledge for people without direct access to universities, etc. The former, TED talks fail at, spectacularly and dangerously. In the era of MOOCs, for someone without direct access to good learning resources, or for people who cannot learn stuff from books, TED talks are a dangerous distraction. I tend to some times view more 'academic' TED talks- like the U Penn professor on swarm robots, or the MIT prof's talk on childhood development. These talks are cripplingly inadequate for anyone serious about learning stuff. They present very little, if any discussion of existing literature or about other researchers work. TED talks are the antithesis of 'standing on the shoulder of giants'. Most academic TED talk speakers tend to present themselves as the lone giant in their field of expertise, and their work as being the final truth in their field.

<comment><USER26> TED talks are not edging out legitimate academic coursework. The dichotomy you speak of doesn't exist. There is a market and a need for talks that don't attempt to be rigorous in any sense, but are simply to show what is possible and what is coming. Why do many of you people seem to be against this? These critiques look more like territory-marking than anything substantive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> geez I had no idea it cost $8,500 to attend

<comment><USER28> I'm struggling to understand why anyone would pay this. What is the perceived value?

<comment><USER29> The value is in networking (meeting other like-minded people who can afford the $8,500 price of admission).

<comment><USER28> You're probably right, although I'm thinking that there must be more efficient ways of networking. I was considering going to Google I/O this year for the networking, but have decided that it's probably not worth the $3k it would cost me.

Perhaps someone needs to come up with a social networking tool for people like HN readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> TED's reaction to the article [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOSdRMSG_k&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOSdRMSG_k&feature=youtu.be&t=40s)

</comment><comment><USER31> I'll just leave [this]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5tGpMcFF7U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5tGpMcFF7U)) here.

Dan Dennett has said similar things.</comment>