Texas Teen Still Suspended Despite No Charges, Will Change Schools - <AUTHOR> https://grasswire.com/story/133/texas-teen-arrested <comment><USER2> When a story has already had major attention on HN (which this one has: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10226196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10226196)), we treat follow-up posts as dupes unless they add significant new information.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20%22significant%20new...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

<comment><USER3> Maybe the original article has expanded, but this seems to have more information to me: his invitation to the whitehouse, the fact that the mayor stands by the police, and that he is still suspended and will change school.

<comment><USER4> While interesting, I wouldn't consider those things "significant", especially as they have been covered in the comments in linked thread anyways.

<comment><USER3> I guess your first point's fair, but not everyone reads the comments. (Oh, who am I kidding! ;))

<comment><USER5> For the first few months I used HN I didn't read the comments. Now, occasionally I just read the comments and don't read the article, if there's an interesting thread that sidetracks me that doesn't really require knowledge of the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, should we consider this event a net negative because this poor teenager got perp walked by a bunch of people who were quite likely racist and apparently too dumb to tell a circuit board from a bomb? Or should we consider this event a net positive because he's almost certainly going to end up at a much better high school after getting to meet the president and Mark Zuckerberg?

On the one hand, no one should have to go through what he did. On the other hand, the fourteen-year-old version of me would've happily put himself in handcuffs for a chance at getting out of my cow-town high school.

<comment><USER7> The more I think about it, the more I'm skeptical that the teachers were too dumb to tell a circuit board apart from a bomb. He could have gotten in trouble for making something that _looked like a bomb_ even if nobody that it was one. Just as in most schools kids get in trouble for making (or even drawing) things intended to look like guns even when it's totally clear to everyone that it isn't an actual gun.

That's a stupid policy too, but a different kind of stupid.

<comment><USER8> The first teacher who saw the clock told him not to show it around. They definitely knew it wasn't a bomb. It's not even that hard to have some sympathy for the teachers or even school administrators who are subject to all sorts of stupid policies. The insane thing seems to be that in the entire chain of escalation from teacher to principal to police nobody appears to have thought of some better way to resolve the situation than handcuffing a 14 year old at school and carting him off to juvie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If this kid applies to the University of North Texas TAMS program... he has the highest letter of recommendation coming his way from not only the POTUS but Zuck too.

[http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/16/9338747/mark-zuckerberg- fa...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/16/9338747/mark-zuckerberg-facebook- ahmad-mohamed-clock)

<comment><USER10> Hmm, I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand everyone goes crazy because of the arrest/suspension claiming racism and unfair treatment.

Now Zuck and even the President invite him to visit for the same reasons (because he is a muslim who created a clock and brought it to school) and everyone is excited about this.

In my opinion both acts are seemingly being done for the wrong reasons. It's sad really, because now the boy will never know if he is being invited out because he created a cool clock, or because helping minorities is good PR. It's also disappointing because of all the other kids out there who are working hard on making things that will never get attention because they are not being discriminated against.

<comment><USER11> Put yourself in a 14-year old's shoes. If you had a passion for electronics and invention and were snubbed this badly for building something cool and taking it to school, how would you feel? I, for one would have been devastated. At best, I would have lost interest in school and developed deep mistrust of teachers. At worst, I would have developed an aversion to being a maker and started neglecting my grades. Mind you, 14 years is when people are hyper-aware of such things. If this had happened in college or in primary school, most of us would have weathered it.

Zuckerberg, Obama, Clinton, Dash, and others are overcorrecting for this in order to ensure that the kid doesn't get dejected and discouraged from being a maker.

There's already far too much ostracizing of nerds and geeks in school to add powerful adult actors like school principals and police into the mix. I don't see any room for 'mixed feelings' here.

We just have to hope that the kid comes out of this as happy or happier and as or more successful than he'd otherwise have been.

<comment><USER12> As someone who was once 16 and suspended for much the same reasons, I developed a severe mistrust of authority, became a libertarian, and am pretty highly successful in my adulthood because of it. Unfortunately, it doesn't make me very popular at parties - Most people seems to have some strange stockholm syndrome for the shitty teachers they encountered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I was in HS, I did Bot Ball. Our robot was powered by a HandyBoard, which definitely looks like a bomb: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HandyBoard_GJP.jpg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HandyBoard_GJP.jpg). Remember going through the airport with it on the way to finals, joking around about how it looked like a bomb. Didn't get in any trouble despite being brown. And it wasn't just us--thousands of kids did school projects with the HandyBoard over the years. It was very popular.

I'm tempted to believe that people are just dumber than they were when I was a kid, but the truth is that this sort of thing is a freak accident. A hundred kids bring something like this into school and it's virtually guaranteed that one will eventually hit school administrators that are low on the bell curve.

Also, I'm seeing a lot of "Texas" in comments to this story. It's really unfair. I'm here in the DC metro surrounded by highly educated latte liberals, and they're some of the most paranoid parents in the country. Don't think for a second this wouldn't happen in, e.g., Silver Spring (where those parents got CPS called on them for letting their kids walk home from school).

<comment><USER13> I don't think people are dumber now. They're just scared of different things. This generation has the boogie man of terrorism, and last generations had DnD and Satanism.

<comment><USER14> Pretty much, a definite side effect of the "Security Theater". I wonder what the next trendy irrational fear will be - GMO food?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dear Texas, we'll happily take your unwanted geniuses. Best Wishes, - California.

<comment><USER16> Dear Mr Patel,

Take the reddit stereotypes back to reddit.

-Smart, civic Texan with smart Texan friends.

<comment><USER17> Uh, if you were so smart you'd understand that this is in response to a school in Texas badly handling a smart kid doing smart kid things. Has any high level official in Texas apologized, or said anything decrying this student's treatment? If not, then it seems like Texas is standing behind this.

<comment><USER18> Nah, it's just Irving that's a shithole. Most of the cities around it are fine, including Dallas proper.

Last year, an article about the least LGBT-friendly places in the US was published [0]. Irving landed at #2. That same article mentioned that Dallas proper was one of the _most_ LGBT-friendly places in the US. It's not much of a stretch to say that this applies not just to LGBT people but to all kinds of people that the crazy right-wing fundamentalists dislike, including smart people and Muslims. From my personal observation having lived in Dallas and Richardson all my life, I can vouch for this. It's widely acknowledged here that Dallas is a very progressive city and that Irving is a shithole.

Besides, most of our tech industry is concentrated in Richardson [1]. Between UTD, TI, and the Telecom Corridor, Richardson is a pretty damn good place to be if you're smart.

[0] [http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/11/22/247-...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/11/22/247-wall- st-lgbt-cities/19354553/)

[1] Richardson is a suburb to the northeast of Dallas in the same way that Irving is a suburb to the northwest of Dallas, so it's a pretty apt comparison. Actually, Dallas is kind of shaped like Godzilla: on a map of city limits, Richardson and Irving look like they sit on Dallas's shoulders (though Irving is kinds leaning off the edge).

<comment><USER19> > It's not much of a stretch to say that this applies not just to LGBT people > but to all kinds of people that the crazy right-wing fundamentalists > dislike, including smart people and Muslims. From my personal observation > having lived in Dallas and Richardson all my life, I can vouch for this

My general observation as an outsider in Texas (Dallas 3 years and Austin 4 years) is way off from yours. It's not a question about right wing hatred, that's just hyperbole. There is an attitude in Texas where if "you aren't one of us", you don't belong here (in a subtle way). That in my opinion is undeniable. I bet if this incident was at Highland park, the result would be the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Picture of the clock the kid made: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CPCXrKUVEAApkmV.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CPCXrKUVEAApkmV.jpg)

<comment><USER21> Does anyone else think that this story seems a little bit contrived? There are so many photos of the incident at each of the various stages -- it makes it look like it was engineered as a news story. The youtube video comes across as prepared and polished and the response (no talking without a lawyer present etc.) seems like something you'd see on PR wire.

I'm not saying that the whole thing isn't ridiculous, but I'm skeptical that this is the full story. Honestly, I'm as familiar with working on circuit boards as the next guy, but if I saw someone (anyone, any race) carrying something like that in an airport, it'd raise an eyebrow.

<comment><USER22> A school isn't an airport. And he ASKED to show his ENGINEERING teacher a project he had created. It's not as if he just showed up with an assortment of PCB's and wires that he whipped out in class.

In short, yes, it perhaps wasn't the greatest idea for Ahmed to be walking around in school with something that could be perceived as a bomb, but you'd think the police/school administration would have figured out he meant no harm after he told them several times that it was simply a clock. The outrage here is over the extreme reaction, not over the wisdom of his actions.

<comment><USER23> > In short, yes, it perhaps wasn't the greatest idea for Ahmed to be walking > around in school with something that could be perceived as a bomb

This part of the issue has been less focused on than the racist angle, but the fact that kids are scared to tinker because of the zero-tolerance hyper- sensitivity of schools is in my mind the more interesting part of the story.

You're probably not wrong, but it's hugely sad to me that you consider it a bad idea to bring in a personal project, with permission, advance notification, and repeated clarifications of what it actually is, simply because it "could be perceived as a bomb" (which means it has wires?). I can't think of a better way to discourage kids from tinkering around with electronics.

<comment><USER22> I absolutely agree with you and was going to post a comment to similar effect but couldn't really find the right words. I'm presently a university student so I'm really just a few years removed from Ahmed's age and mindset. It's tragic to me that the default position of figures of authority toward students who are interested in technology (even in today's increasingly technology driven world), is one of suspicion and fear.

While I suspect that a lot of this is due to a generational divide between administrators and students, the message this sends is that students should not be interested in science and engineering because those topics sort of abstractly distant and scary. Students should be ENCOURAGED, not punished for being creative and inventive, even if it means they're being a little bit subversive or have viewpoints that run counter to those in people of positions of authority.

<comment><USER23> > While I suspect that a lot of this is due to a generational divide between > administrators and students

I'm sure this is part of it, but the theory[1] that schools in general are built around churning out uncreative, docile workers for the industrial economy has been around for a long, long time. Hell, "Another Brick in the Wall" was, what, 1978?

[1] Note that I'm specifying that this is a theory since I've never done enough research on both sides to feel certain that this is a particularly well-founded belief. What little I've heard is fairly plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am (yet again) embarrassed to be from Texas. If you read what Steve Jobs did in high school, if that was today and he was Muslim, he'd never started Apple. Here we are looking at diversity in the face, a young engineer proud of his learning, and the hicks in Irving brand him as the next Osama. That stupid mayor's tweet is classic.

</comment><comment><USER25> Lucky boy, to have parents so committed and willing to stand by him, and help him grow into his talent. Unlucky boy, to have to do it in a place filled with bigots and morons. On the other hand, this kind of setback builds character. It teaches clever children of the tyranny of petty adults with petty authority, so they know what to distrust, and what to not become themselves.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is going to be one hell of a college letter. You know, the one that all colleges ask you write? He could write it today or he could wait to write it after he met the President.

</comment><comment><USER27> My alma mater, an early college high school in the Dallas area, seems to want him. [https://mobile.twitter.com/KevinRoden/status/644006028435042...](https://mobile.twitter.com/KevinRoden/status/644006028435042305) Really hope it works out!

</comment><comment><USER28> This is of course the instinctive response of all small-minded persons challenged in their "authority".

In the face of opposition, never change course! It's the ultimate downfall of bureaucracy, humans will burn down the world before admitting their mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hopefully the town remembers this next time they vote for their school board. The principal and the superintendent are answerable to these elected people, and almost no one cares who wins.

<comment><USER29> They're probably still punishing him _because_ of the voters in the district, not despite them.

<comment><USER25> Sad but true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not that this actually matters but out of morbid curiosity - did he actually assemble a clock kit or did he simply disassemble a regular nightstand clock and put it into a little carry case?

I mean it is good he is learning how things work inside but I don't think he actually made anything and actually was fooling around with an openly exposed 110VAC transformer. He definitely needs some guidance and help with this stuff before he hurts himself or burns the house down.

This is like that woman at MIT who had a circuit board clipped onto her clothes and went to pick someone up at the airport and almost got murdered by security.

<comment><USER31> Given that the original freakout on the part of the English teacher was precipitated by the alarm going off while the clock was in his bag, I'm thinking it was battery-powered, not plugged in. Power cords are cheap, easily accessible wire that are not necessarily always carrying grid voltage. Although that picture certainly shows a plug, so who knows? I do wonder how the alarm went off - if that isn't just embellishment after the fact.

That said, _I_ certainly fooled around with live power when I was his age. The house didn't burn down because we had a competent electrician install circuit breakers when we built it.

<comment><USER32> I have fond memories of learning to repair old black and white TV sets over the summer with my uncle at 14. We both managed to give ourselves some pretty hefty zaps. I still look back at the experience as one of the more fun times I had.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Good for whichever school he chooses to go to! Any announcement on that yet, or is he waiting for his letters of admission and full scholarship to all the top private schools in the country? ;)

<comment><USER34> I'm not sure top private schools would just hand out full rides to a high school student who built a clock... if they do, I went to a really shitty school for nothing.

<comment><USER33> Neither would you normally get invited to the White House or Facebook HQ for building a clock. But he should definitely take advantage of the 15 min of fame to go to the best place possible. And I mean top private high schools, not necessarily college yet. Pretty sure anyone who builds interesting science projects while in a clearly unsupportive environment would thrive at a top level STEM high-school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't see anything on this page referring to the student remaining suspended.

</comment><comment><USER36> The mayor _still_ stands by police. Madness, pure madness. Public officials, more and more, are a self-selecting group populated only by some of our worst thinkers.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is ridiculously overblown. Glad to see people defending him and righting a wrong, but all of this is going to inflate his head.

<comment><USER38> I disagree. He seems level-headed and focused enough that he could take this as motivation. If he was arrogant, he would have capitalized on it, created a social media account and a gofundme. He seems humble to me.

Source: 17-year old who faced similar media attention, it did inflate my ego a bit despite attempts to remain humble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I left a voicemail at 972-600-5000 (school district hotline) to voice my discontent.</comment>


How robots are grasping the art of gripping - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05093-1 <comment><USER2> Its always funny to realize how "easy" beating human-intelligence is (Chess AI, Go AI, even Mathematical Proofs), but how hard beating human-simple behaviors are.

IE: Stand up on two legs, walk forward, and move these 10 objects from this bin to that bin without breaking any of those objects. Or fold these clothes (surprisingly difficult to get a robot to do that).

We can build super-advanced Chess and Go AIs that beat out the grand summation of theoretical human knowledge (with Chess theory going back hundreds of years, and Go theory going back maybe thousands!!), but we still can't move a variety of objects from one bin to another successfully and repeatably.

\</comment><comment>-----

Another funny example: AIs (or various algorithms at least) have solved the object camera tracking problem, but still basically fail at depth perception and figuring out if something is "still" or "moving" based on sight alone.

<comment><USER3> A fun way to think about this is by analyzing the 'training-time' for these tasks.

The things we think are easy, we've been trained to do through millions of years of evolution. Running with two feet through a forest is pretty easy for us. Not so much so for computers.

The things that we think are mentally taxing, we've only been doing for a few thousand years or so.

<comment><USER4> >The things that we think are mentally taxing, we've only been doing for a few thousand years or so.

It's kind of fascinatingly serendipitous in the sense that computers/AI are super quick at performing the tasks that we humans find extremely taxing (complex mathematical computation, visual simulation) while struggling with tasks that comes naturally to us humans (gripping objects, running with two feet--as you described) owing to evolution.

I wonder how much of that is because of constituent 'building block' materials that make up the basic structure of homo sapiens and computers -- carbon and silicon, respectively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's not a very good article on gripping and manipulation. Nature was once a serious scientific publication, not PR Newswire.

The state of the art is still bad, and it's been bad for a long time. Watch these two videos: 1960s: [1] 2012: [2] Note how little progress there has been.

Here's the actual winner of the 2018 Amazon picking challenge.[3] The system mentioned in the article did not win.

Throwing deep learning at the problem helps, but not all that much. It's amazing how hard this is.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump](https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeABMoYJGEU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeABMoYJGEU) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U)

<comment><USER6> This is a Nature Briefing, not an article/letter. Nature is still a serious scientific publication, on par with Science and NEJM.

<comment><USER5> Live by the brand extension, die by the brand extension. They put their name on it, they have to take the hit for it being crap.

<comment><USER6> Christ... It's not a "brand extension" (whatever that means); it's a blog post intended for the general public, not researchers. If you want research, look at the journal archives.

<comment><USER5> A "brand extension" means you take your famous name with a good reputation and paste it on something else to boost the new thing. This risks the reputation of the famous brand if the new thing is a dud. AdWeek has a list of embarrassing brand extension flops.[1]

Even if it's not a total flop, it can degrade the brand. Holiday Inn Express and Hilton's low-end product lines are examples. The overall result was to move the brand downscale.

[1] [https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/best-and-worst- brand-...](https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/best-and-worst-brand- extensions-146966/)

<comment><USER6> Great, thanks. Anyway, I assure you that the journal Nature will not suffer any loss of status by having blog posts summarizing recent research for laypeople.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My pet theory is that this is going to be way easier when tactile/pressure sensors drop their cost/resolution by orders of magnitude.

Animals basically have a feedback loop that works a little bit with proprioception / position measures and way more with expectations of tactile sense (to see this, reflect on how you move in the dark: not thinking about your joint angles, but about that not to kick!).

As a hobbyist, for example, there is no way I can have a "video" of pressure maps on an artificial skin, so I can only hack my way with a one-dimensional finger-mounted pressure sensor. How on earth can I program a robot to use his hand only by looking at it? I would magine that most researchers are in a similar way restricted to work with subpar feedback loops.

<comment><USER8> While it's true that animals, including humans have a long list of tricks built into their bodies to increase their chances of a correct grasp, to enable force application in the first place, and in some cases to deliberately damage whatever they're grasping (thus wounding and/or killing prey), I think you'll find that the dexterity required to jump a cat body at all is very, very hard.

Moving a cat body, at 130 kph, on an angle that will take the front claw (they always use the same one) across the throat of a wildly jumping around animal (with enough force to allow the claw to rip it open) while keeping that same cat body away from any hooves (one hit from even deer hooves will at the very least end the hunt of any puma, and can do damage up to killing it) is ... it's not just ridiculously hard. It's almost absurd what sort of control you'd need.

I'm also not very sure how tactile sensors help, even if they could not just register contacts but air speeds as well, that does not seem like it would make the problem much easier.

Plus cats are a very "general" body. The number of ways it can move, because it lacks a fully connected inner bone structure (so almost any cat joint can move remarkably far in almost any direction). I'm pretty sure this adds insult to injury and makes it a lot harder yet again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, it has taken years but seems like Boston Dynamics and similar companies have moderately agile walking robots. Yet somehow these don't seem to be appearing anywhere.

Now we hear there's progress in gripping.

The thing about both these steps is walking and grasping are extremely challenging tasks to robots but even more challenging is the easy integration of these and other movements that humans achieve when doing "simple tasks" and especially cooperating in simple tasks - in the "unstructured environments" referenced in the article.

<comment><USER10> It's hard to find practical applications for walking. The vast majority of environments in which mobile robots can be useful also have smooth floors. Legs have higher cost, weight, failure rate, and power consumption than wheels.

Better gripping, though, has immediate practical applications in manufacturing and distribution. We're much more likely to see that in use in the near future.

<comment><USER11> Next month I'll be going on a weeklong backpacking+camping trip. I don't believe in the notion that modern camping is "roughing" it (tents and shoes and cooking gear are essential tech). So on that note, I'd _love_ to have a low-cost solar-rechargable "pack mule" robot that could carry more gear. (I'll survive without it, of course, but it would be nice.) Wheels on a robot wouldn't work where I'm going, but legs would.

<comment><USER12> Yup, the military has this exact same use case, I think that's where all the funding for Boston dynamics big dog (and probably others) came from in the first place.

<comment><USER11> I'll know I'm living in the future when I can buy a BigDog at REI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >"Some researchers are using machine learning to empower robots to independently identify and work out how to grab objects. Others are improving the hardware..."

Software is the main bottleneck in ML at the moment, imo. That and data. The hardware problem (computation), which the author discusses briefly, has been more or less solved in the industry as newer software require less miniaturization of ICs and peripheral components[0] -- this despite Moore's law effect wearing off. [1]

It's all about striking a fine balance between the hardware's raw computational capability and designing compatible software nimble enough to adapt rapidly to colossal influx of data.

[0] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/01/27/has-moores- law...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/01/27/has-moores-law-held-up- over-the-last-five-years/#10ed1c821d26) [1] [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is- dead...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is-dead-now- what/)

<comment><USER13> _Software is the main bottleneck in ML at the moment, imo. That and data. The hardware problem, which the author discusses briefly, has been more or less solved in the industry_

I'm only a casual long time observer, but I think there's an opportunity here for haptic teleoperation. Data could be gathered from haptic teleoperators in much the same way that Tesla is gathering data for self-driving AI. Back in the 90's and early 2000's, Sarcos corp's website used to have a crappy realmedia video of a full-arm haptic rig operating an over-sized hydraulic arm casually holding an anvil like a beer mug. So evidently, we've been able to do full-body haptics and human-level agility manipulators for quite awhile. (Research in that stuff actually started in the 1970's!) On-orbit teleoperation from the ground could have interesting applications.

<comment><USER14> NASA appears to do quite a bit of on-orbit teleoperation from the ground with the arm on the ISS.

<comment><USER13> The arm on the ISS functions more like a mini space-crane and less like an arm on a worker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting how we have designed the world for humans and now the optimal way for many robots to work is to be designed like humans. I always hoped for some more optimal design, maybe even something that can morph.

<comment><USER9> Well, it's natural for humans to design the world for humans (though a good part of it now is designed for humans inside machines, ie cars).

Note, however, that most robots today actually operate in spaces designed for machines - ie, factories. Getting robots to operate in the "unstructured spaces" the article mentions is extremely difficult and hasn't been cost effective.

A large amount of gains in productivity have been achieved by substituting machines for humans, with "robots" just being the most programmable of machines. But very few of those gains involve direct substitution of machine movement for human movement - rather it's involved imposing structure on the whole productive environment so the rigid motion of a machine has a predictable result.

<comment><USER16> Also of note, the societal backlash of replacing humans with robots has been pretty massive. So it's not just cost-effectiveness that's being balanced, but care with the workforce not to implement too many replacements too fast. The places where we've seen massive substitution are all industries where humans were in physical danger from the work being done. Risky manufacturing lines, etc.

I feel like that's starting to shift a bit where folks are realizing that more automation by robotics isn't actually reducing the potential workforce, it's just shifting it. Again though, it's up to the employers and manufacturing companies to really drive that point home.

It's an exciting time. :)

<comment><USER9> _The places where we 've seen massive substitution are all industries where humans were in physical danger from the work being done. Risky manufacturing lines, etc._

That doesn't really reflect the situation. Machines have been substituted for humans since at least Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin. Substituting machines for humans has had nothing to do with providing safety, rather it has been driven by the desire for increased productivity and thereby profits. Certainly, this increased has provided massive benefit to society along with various drawbacks. That's literally the history of the "industrial revolution".

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

<comment><USER16> No no, you misunderstand me. I'm not saying it's FOR human safety...it's for profit. But the pushback on "losing jobs to machines" is less when the end- result is replacing human jobs that have a high degree of danger associated with them. Which is why, throughout history as well, we've seen larger adoption of automation via machines in those areas. The friction to do that replacement is lower, so we see it more often.

<comment><USER9> _But the pushback on "losing jobs to machines" is less when the end-result is replacing human jobs that have a high degree of danger associated with them._

Well, OK, except for the long history of industrial automation that doesn't bear this out at all. There has resistance to automation from the English Luddites to Detroit Black Workers Union and beyond and arguments that automation is only OK safety is involved have not entered the picture that entire period.

Basically, there's never been a situation where public complaints stopped automation. It has proceeded as fast as technology allowed to the present.

EP Thompson is the reference for early automation and the luddites but it's hard to give a reference for a negative.

If you have any reference for situation where public sentiment limited automation, I'd love to see them. Because it sounds like you are mistakenly thinking the world actually works according to the vague headlines one see sees periodically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Many roboticists think that there is unlikely to be a universal solution to > grasping.

Already found: "Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material" [http://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/18809](http://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/18809)

> Here we demonstrate a completely different approach to a universal gripper. > Individual fingers are replaced by a single mass of granular material that, > when pressed onto a target object, flows around it and conforms to its > shape. Upon application of a vacuum the granular material contracts and > hardens quickly to pinch and hold the object without requiring sensory > feedback. We find that volume changes of less than 0.5% suffice to grip > objects reliably and hold them with forces exceeding many times their > weight.

<comment><USER18> That's a cool appendage, but there are still a lot of problems in grasping / planning with materials like fabrics, right? e.g. this doesn't solve the notoriously hard laundry folding problem

<comment><USER19> Fingernails and Fingerprints. I can't fold laundry after I cut my talons, and I can't fold laundry when the friction is absent.

Training a robot to fold laundry would be like training an astronaut to fold laundry in Apollo era gloves (which btw, I have read were so bad, the lunar walkers lost fingernails inside 'em)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "When you pick something like a pen up off a table, the first thing you touch is the table." I stopped reading for a good two minutes of experimentation.

</comment><comment><USER21> >> "The world is designed for anthropomorphic hands," says Brock

If I may just interject, totally calmly like, the world was not designed, and certainly not for our hands.

</comment><comment><USER22> Did anyone else read this as the robots are grasping the art of "griping"? As if we need them to learn how to complain. :)

<comment><USER12> A robot being able to complain that something is very difficult for it (using more energy for something than it needs to for example) would be really cool!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Bounce Plan – Simple travel planning tools for the frequent traveler - <AUTHOR> https://bounceplan.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi There, I built this app to help me with a major travel project I'm working on to convert a used school bus into an RV and drive it around the US and into Central America. But it occurred to me that it would have saved me some headache on previous trips. So it made sense to offer it to others who may also need it.

<comment><USER2> Hi i think bounceplan is just too expensive for what it does and you do not even have an apps for at least iOS & android.

I think in order for you to make it work make it as a service for travel agencies that can buy this and provide it to their clients as a bonus.

Or even lowering the price would help. I can't imagine somebody would pay 14$ for this kind of thing. 2$ per month is real but this ..

First of all you need to make people want to use your app. After that you can expect them to pay for it. But even stating 14$/m in pricing section can scare a lot of people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback. It is appreciated. :)

<comment><USER3> Each situation I unique, but before modifying the prices read the patio11 "raise your prices" advice: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=patio11%20raise%20your%20price...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=patio11%20raise%20your%20price&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you gus_massa for the link and the feedback. I understand completely. I don't plan on lowering the price. People are signing up and I'm taking in feedback from my target market and moving forward with my improvement schedule. Sometimes things aren't always exact but we get there. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea, but I think that you'd really be able to convince a customer of the value proposition by including a nice demo of the stuff that's behind the 'sign up' page

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your input. I agree. I tried very hard to get a demo video done before launch but didn't make it. I am working on it though.</comment></comment>


Show HN: ByteArray.js – A binary library for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Zaseth/ByteArray.js <comment><USER2> Node has something similar: [https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v10.x/docs/api/v8.html](https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v10.x/docs/api/v8.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice! Any benchmark you can share? I would love to see this compared to JSON in terms of serialization performance and size.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good job! AMF sounds like a great solution when using websockets. Now all I need is a project to try it on...

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool, I wish I had an application that needed this.</comment>


Farewell to MIT - <AUTHOR> http://www.evanjones.ca/farewell-mit.html <comment><USER2> > _The most important thing I learned is that I don't want to be a professor. > This is a valuable lesson, because now I won't have regrets about not > pursuing that career path._

This is a very interesting point.

These days many people argue that it's useless to go to college. But one of the points of going to college is _not having regrets for not having tried_.

Maybe the right approach is to go, and then drop out. You know you were able to go, you know how it is inside, and then if you get out after the first year you save at least 75% of the cost.

<comment><USER3> The quoted line is a good point, but your take on it is completely wrong, I believe. The main point in college is to get a degree. You don't spend approximately $150,000 in order to "not have regrets later on". You spend it to increase your net worth and hiring price in whatever field you wish to work within.

Don't forget that PhD student in most departments _get paid a stipend;_ they aren't accruing debt during their graduate career.

(For what it's worth, I received my PhD and soon thereafter left academia as well, for many of the reasons outlined in the article above.)

<comment><USER4> "You spend it to increase your net worth and hiring price in whatever field you wish to work within."

I don't like the direction the world is heading. Knowledge is not a commodity. Nor are we livestock that is being bred to be sold on The Market.

I still hold the illusion that some people go to academia with non-material motives. How could research in some obscure part of some obscure field ever increase your price tag. Yet how can we hope of any academic progress if we base our research on what the economy needs.

<comment><USER5> Fully agree. Education should be primarily about furthering knowledge, not finding a job. The same should be true about school as well as Uni.

I studied Computer Science because I was interested in it, not because I thought I would make a lot of money.

Frankly I deplore the attitude that the only point in education is to get a job. Many (most?) advancements in science occur because of curiosity, not from perceived practical value.

<comment><USER6> >Fully agree. Education should be primarily about furthering knowledge, not finding a job.

I couldn't agree with you more, but unfortunately I didn't feel this way as an undergrad. While I did enjoy the field of engineering, I was ready to be a "big boy" and start chipping away at my student loans with a real income. Soon after starting my job I was blown away by the level of knowledge of my co- workers and it motivated me to push myself to learn more...about anything! I didn't come from a CS background so I didn't know much about programming or hacking, but I was always fascinated with electronics and technology so I decided to learn how to program. I didn't want to feel like a one trick pony. If I could do undergrad all over again I would have taken more classes that were far out of my realm, possibly even a dual major. I feel like I'm playing catch up, but I'm glad I realized it while I'm only a year out of college and not half-way through my career.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I defended my dissertation in December 2010, and I started at IBM Research in January of 2011. Within weeks of being at IBM Research, I found myself having fantastically productive, ad-hoc research discussions with my colleagues that lead to real work being done - code being written, experiments being run and papers written. Things moved much, much faster than they could have when I was working alone as a graduate student. Three highly motivated people working together on the same problem are more than just three times more productive than a single person working on the problem.

I heartily endorse the author's advice to collaborate. I didn't do it much as I should have as a grad student. But, in some ways, doing so is not encouraged. My last two years, I had one goal: to graduate. I knew what I had to do to get that done, so I plowed through and did it. Because you need to come up with a dissertation that is _yours_ , you have many students who will rationally work on their own projects without much collaboration.

<comment><USER8> I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way. I agree that working alone seems like the easiest or best choice. However, I think it is a local maximum, and not a true optimal solution.

At least for me, working with others makes me way more productive, so I think that my collaborations helped me graduate sooner. I were to start again, I would be more proactive about working with others. Its true that to graduate, you have to write your own thesis, but that doesn't mean you can't collaborate. I've found that parts of work naturally fall to people according to their interests, so it wasn't really a problem for the projects I worked on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think people tend to work alone because of the pressure they feel to come up with something independent and original. I went through this process and eventually realised how much more I enjoy working closely with others on hard problems. It's far more productive as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> > However, there is one important piece of advice I wish I could give to my > past self, when I started my PhD: _Actively_ collaborate with others.

This great advice is hard to underestimate.

<comment><USER11> Yes. And understanding why is important.

Your collaborators/peers will be your most important source of learning. They will also form the basis of your professional technical network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Take the next step with the ones that are really interesting: actually do some concrete work, even if it has to be done as a side project. At the worst, you will learn a lot and have fun by working on something new with other researchers."

It's a very good recommendation. I remember some PhD students reluctant to work on concrete implementations of their theorized approaches. But in the long-term, the most successful ones were doing a lot of concrete works and gained experiences for an academic career and while keeping a strong feet/competence into the private sector.

<comment><USER13> Also, implementing ideas and testing them on real data can be a very good heuristic to drive theoretical thinking by:

\- giving you empirical evidences on the practical limitations of a positive theoretical results that might have been otherwise overlooked.

\- giving you new insights on which approaches (e.g. class of algorithm) are the most promising for a given class of problems.

\- make explicit some assumptions you might have implicitly made in your theoretical work and check whether they can actually be satisfied in practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious how you discovered my post, months after I originally wrote it. Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm was writing a user-space thread library and I found your article "Implementing a Thread Library on Linux", a really nice article by the way, and then found "Farewell to MIT" just through browsing the site.

"Farewell to MIT" just seemed like such great advice, I was surprised when I found it hadn't already been posted here.</comment></comment>


PHP 5.4.8 and 5.3.18 released - fixing over 20 bugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.php.net/archive/2012.php#id2012-10-18-1

<comment><AUTHOR> Changelog <http://php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.4.8></comment>


A native hypervisor is coming to OpenBSD - <AUTHOR> https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=144104398132541&w=2 <comment><USER2> Good to see OpenBSD in process of getting one. I previously thought that OpenBSD, or at least Theo, hated virtualization based on this rant:

[http://www.tylerkrpata.com/2007/10/theo-de-raadt- on-x86-virt...](http://www.tylerkrpata.com/2007/10/theo-de-raadt- on-x86-virtualization.html)

Or just x86's virtualization. Nothing different popped in my news feed until now. Has OpenBSD's position changed on the subject of virtualization? And is there a more recent post that explains their position?

<comment><USER3> Theo is objecting to the view that VMs are a security necessity.

<comment><USER4> Aren't they though? With 0-days it makes sense to be able to snapshot non mission-critical systems, bring them offline, until a patch is found.

Snapshotting alone is a security necessity when patching too. Very easy to rollback to a "good" state.

<comment><USER5> I haven't read it, but I assume the discussion was about sandboxing clients. From that perspective, any additional security would be defeated as soon as a client is able to affect the hypervisor or the host OS. So (according to Theo) if you can't write a secure host and/or client, the VM doesn't improve security.

<comment><USER6> While I agree with him on a lot of things, this isn't one of them; security is all about layers, and it's not like OpenBSD hasn't steered clear of other forms of sandboxing (like chroots and systrace). This doesn't mean that virtualization should be relied on _exclusively_ or even _near_ -exclusively as a defense (which is what I suspect Theo was more objecting to, along with the point of "well if you can't write a secure operating system, what makes you think you can write a secure hypervisor?"), but rather that it should be used as an additional layer on top of (or rather, underneath) a bunch of others.

It's like bulkheads on modern ships. Yeah, if you get a hole in your hull, you're gonna be in some (literally) deep water, but that bulkhead (so long as it's built right) could mean the difference between limping to the nearest harbor or sinking to the nearest seafloor.

<comment><USER7> Somehow back when Amazon had to reboot every EC2 server to fix a Xen bug, my "insecure" hypervisor-less server didn't require such action. I think I'll prefer to keep sailing without that particular bulkhead.

<comment><USER8> The reboots were because Amazon cuts a lot of corners in their Xen setup because instances are supposed to be "disposable". A proper VM cluster would use dedicated storage nodes that export over something like iscsi, which would require just transferring a memory snapshot, or would use the native, slower, disk snapshotting migration. But that's just one of many ways AWS is rather broken from an operations standpoint.

<comment><USER9> Thing is, the AWS philosophy of considering everything short of data sources "disposable" leads to a lot more robust engineering.

Yes, it makes Ops work more difficult, but as someone smart said regarding software: if something hurts, you're not going it often enough :)

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure "if something hurts, you're not doing it often enough" doesn't apply to, say, arm-breakage or self-immolation :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In addition to a new VMM, why not enable OpenBSD to run as a guest VM on AWS/Xen?

<comment><USER7> Indeed. Why not?

<comment><USER10> This March 2015 post lists some known work items, [http://www.joelroberts.org/openbsd/](http://www.joelroberts.org/openbsd/)

      - Kernel hangs when bringing online additional cpus--no working SMP
      - PV drivers for net and disk needed. Probably easy to take from NetBSD
      - System needs testing for stability

An old (2012?) comparison of 4 BSDs on Xen and KVM: [https://gmplib.org/~tege/virt.html](https://gmplib.org/~tege/virt.html)

<comment><USER11> From the link above comparing BSDs on Xen:

"OpenBSD probably works poorly by design, since its lead developer despises virtualisation."

I have seen this before. Can someone summarise the reasons why Theo de Raadt hates virtualisation?

<comment><USER12> Basically he thinks any hypervisor that isn't OpenBSD is not secure.

"x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit." [http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- misc&m=119318909016582](http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582)

(I see justinsaccount already posted this below.)

<comment><USER13> That's quite true, except that _even OpenBSD_ is not _necessarily_ secure as a hypervisor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _" For example, I've been baking in support for things that the other implementations don't care about (namely i386 support, shadow paging, nested virtualization, support for legacy peripherals, etc) and trying to backfit support for those things into another hypervisor would probably have been just as hard as building it from the ground up."_

I don't get it. qemu does all of that already. All he needs to do is implement the same kernel ioctls for OpenBSD that KVM implements on Linux, and he gets all of that for free.

<comment><USER15> qemu runs as a userspace process so it is relatively slow.

Essentially, vmm is to OpenBSD what KVM is to Linux. And yes, a KVM compatible interface can be built, as Mike mentioned.

<comment><USER16> So, is this thing going to run all the IO emulation in the kernel? That sounds like a horrible architecture security-wise, very much not what I would have expected from OpenBSD, which always seemed to pick security over performance.

By far most security bugs in modern hypervisors come from bugs in the emulation of legacy devices, because it's complicated and messy. This is why for example Red Hat's hypervisor solution has had a lot of work put into isolating the qemu process with SELinux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great to see more competition for kvm & FreeBSD's bhyve

<comment><USER5> And Xen :) NetBSD runs it well

<comment><USER18> arguable. Xen has become more and more Linux-centric and there seemingly has been less and less interest in the NetBSD developer community to keep abreast. see stub-domains

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how reusable this will be on the SPARC64 port.

There was never enough interest in Linux/SPARC to make a Xen or KVM port feasible. But OpenBSD's community is a different animal.

<comment><USER20> If you don't mind me asking, I've always wondered - what do you / people use SPARC for?

<comment><USER19> for me, personally, it's perverse historical interest.

in a larger sense, it's because Oracle's support policies make the market- clearing price for used SPARC hardware very, very reasonable. The value of 3-year-old SPARC gear is essentially $1.

As a real Solaris/SPARC customer, it's cheaper to buy new than try to get a piece of used equipment into Oracle's good graces.

<comment><USER21> If you don't mind me asking, where are you finding such cheap SPARC hardware? Even 5-year old hardware still goes for thousands of dollars on the second- hand market.

<comment><USER2> He's full of crap. Any of them that are obviously in good condition go for thousands of dollars with T1 processors. Some of those without HD's, used, and in unknown condition go for several hundred. Not apples to apples, though, as no business will depend on such unknowns for mission-critical stuff that SPARC is best used for.

Interesting enough, even the AlphaServers still sell for good money on eBay. Certainly they were great servers in their day but performance is _way_ behind. While faster Itaniums from SGI you can get for $100-200. Old hardware market isn't linear or predictable. Personally, though, I think those AlphaServers are still worth if if one understands OpenVMS clusters or PALcode. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unclear what this means. Is this a hypervisor that runs under OpenBSD? Or a hypervisor under which OpenBSD runs? Or an attempt to kludge OpenBSD into a hypervisor? Or some kind of Docker-like container system for OpenBSD?

<comment><USER23> Hypervisor that runs under openbsd, and which can run openbsd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Was doing some digging into the research. Perhaps someone happens to have a copy of Bill Broadley's 2007 IT Security Symposium presentation/paper?

It _was_ hosted at [http://shell.cse.ucdavis.edu/~bill/virt/virt.pdf](http://shell.cse.ucdavis.edu/~bill/virt/virt.pdf)

<comment><USER25> [http://www.lugod.org/presentations/virt- lugod.pdf](http://www.lugod.org/presentations/virt-lugod.pdf) and [http://taviso.decsystem.org/virtsec.pdf](http://taviso.decsystem.org/virtsec.pdf)

These seem to be the most popular ones that show up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- misc&m=119318909016582](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582)

      From:       Theo de Raadt

      > Virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits.

      You've been smoking something really mind altering, and I think you
      should share it.

      x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full
      kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which
      barely has correct page protection.  Then running your operating
      system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit.

      You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a
      worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating
      systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around
      and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.

      You've seen something on the shelf, and it has all sorts of pretty
      colours, and you've bought it.

      That's all x86 virtualization is.

<comment><USER8> The past several years have brought many additions to the x86 architecture that makes it more than shit atop shit. When he wrote it, things like Xen required you to build a kernel with special options for it to run, with all kinds of new and exciting bugs to discover. Things like page table virtualization, which provide a lot better page protection, or being able to shadow the vm control structures, which allow for nested VMs, or IOMMUs, which allow vms to access explicit pieces of hardware, just didn't exist. x86 is in a better condition for virtualization now, and layouts can finally done in a semi-sane way.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, but on the other hand one might argue that there is no reason to believe Intel's hardware implementation of such features is more correct and less prone to errors than Xen's implementation in software.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: The 3d universe of npm - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/anvaka/allnpmviz3d

<comment><USER2> This project is really cool! Well done.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get started in web programming? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
A little bit of introduction: I'm a programmer, with appr. 8 years of experience writing desktop application (CAD, in C++), and game programming in the last 3 years. The working experience regarding the programming languages is just bare C, some assembler, and C++ (in C-with-classes mode mainly).
Since I and my partner decided to go for a web startup (the application idea is still quite vague as expected), I've decided to do a research about how to get started in web programming as a beginner (in web programming) but as an experienced developer as a whole. Here is my current plan as a result from my research for learning of the necessary languages and technologies in order to make a prototype for out web application while still holding my day job:
Front-end development: my research concluded that for the beginning front-end development HTML, CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript are the classic bunch of technologies to learn. These are the books that I plan to read:
* "Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML" (O'Reilly) (Alternative: "Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference" (O'Reilly))
* "Head First JavaScript" (O'Reilly)
Back-end development: here I don't have a clue how to get started. I've familiarized with most of the current (I hope) widely used languages and frameworks, but just the names. I'm still searching for a book that clearly conveys the message that it is whole package for back-end development and at the same time showing the big picture. Maybe the multitude of technologies make the research and the choice quite hard, maybe just the inexperience, maybe both, but I'm struggling to decide with which programming language + framework combo to start, and which first book on the subject to buy and read. My personal preferences are towards Python since I've read 2 of most recommended introductory books and I've wrote some simple examples, so generally I've liked it, but this is quite biased and subjective...it's the only programming language from the common back-end choices to which I've been exposed.
Thanks in advance <comment><USER2> 1) If you feel the need to brush up on python, try writing more than few simple examples. A great Intro to Python course, all online, all problem-set based where you actually write a bunch of stuff: <http://cs.northwestern.edu/~akuzma/classes/EECS110-s10/>

Otherwise just jump into Django right NOW.

1) Do the tutorial on the site: <http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/>

2) Get a copy of "Django 1.0 Web Site Development" by Ayman Houriyeh. I think this is hands down the best Django book you can get. Why? Because it has a basic intro to jQuery as well and goes through integrating jQuery with your Django site. Don't worry about it being 1.0, it's still the book most worth your time.

3) Download South and do the tutorial at <http://south.aeracode.org/> . Never start a Django project without South now that you know it exists.

4) Don't get any other books, Just Build It. Consult the docs, mailing-list, and #django-users as needed.

You probably won't need an IDE for your first site as you'll probably be looking up functions in the Docs manually to see the examples, but if you need one later do ECLIPSE+pyDev.

edit: as for struggling with language to choose, if you need any reasons to stick with Python:

-Underlying implementation is getting faster and faster: <http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/>

-It has reached critical mass in a variety of fields in addition to web development. The SEC is even considering requiring companies to submit executable Python source code instead of certain documents.

-You have experience in C\C++ programmer and it is easy to run C from Python. You might find Python experience speeds up desktop application development as well.

-You probably already know enough Python to get started with Django, learning another language will slow down your momentum, you've already made a good-enough-decision that's not worth the resources optimizing more than just trying to launch.

ALSO: get the FireBug plugin for firefox asap and start pressing F12 on every site you visit.

<comment><USER3> +1 for Django

BTW, The free online Django book for you to get started: <http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/> and the brilliant documentations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All you need is this: <http://railstutorial.org/book>

Hartl is a good writer and he covers the whole web stack. Besides, the book is great for all levels.

Yes, I felt the same way as you did about python, but there is nothing wrong with the Ruby camp either. I've spent some time with django as well, but there's definitely some overlap.

I'd suggest that you finish the RailsTutorial book for getting a good exposure to the whole web stack and then decide for yourself if Ruby or Python is right for you. But, seriously checkout the table of contents for a good measure first.

If you don't wanna waste too much time, checkout <http://www.tryruby.org> to get a glimpse into the ruby world.

</comment><comment><USER5> Learn HTLM, CSS and Javascript including (jQuery or Dojo) for the back end pick the language you want to use then learn their JSON library. Write pure HTML / CSS and overlay your dynamic functionality with JavaScript widgets if you need data from, or need to put data on the server use an XHR call to get, or post it, to a JSON service. This is a very clean and simple way to do web development that does not take heavy investment in learning a language specific server framework. If you decide that you do not like your back end language, it is as simple as writing your new JSON services in a different language. This is the direction that web development is heading, because it is decoupled the UI selections from the back end selection.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's a great guide for getting started with Ruby on Rails. It takes you through all the stuff you need to learn to really understand how the whole RoR stack works, in addition to some front-end knowledge. Links to resources are included.

<http://techiferous.com/2010/07/roadmap-for-learning-rails/>

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/></comment>


Ask HN: Was entrepreneur survey censored on the web? - <AUTHOR>

There was a recent thread here with a pdf survey of entrepreneur attitudes towards VCs. It has since disappeared from the web, and google can't find it. Has it been censored? The survey was at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8145547 - I can't find any pdfs named YouGov_Entrepreneurs_Survey_2013_Participants_Summary.pdf on the web. <comment><USER2> I have no idea, but I had downloaded the PDF, so here's a copy for you:

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/ptemp/YouGov_Entrepreneurs_Survey_2...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/ptemp/YouGov_Entrepreneurs_Survey_2013_Participants_Summary.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: Best resources for coding challenges? - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN,
I read about this recruiting practice of strange coding challenges that have no direct relation to the position applied for, but till yesterday I didn't encountered one of them myself.
I designed and programmed software for years, but still was baffled by the challenge I encountered.
It wasn't hard but I didn't expect it and the time I had for it made me rather nervous. After I submitted it, I thought about every piece of code I now would write differently and felt rather ashamed.
If I practiced such things more often, I would probably be more calm in doing them under pressure.
Now I'm asking you, what is the best resource for such challenges? <comment><USER2> It's probably a contrarian opinion in the age of coding katas, dojos, challenges, courses, "academies", and such but I think the best way to improve is to actually work on things that interest and challenge you personally. You'll always be your own harshest critic, but at least when using your own projects for training you're working on something real and without the artifice of challenges someone else thought up.

If you were baffled by the challenge itself, that's probably because you never encountered that particular problem before. This is fine, everybody's got to make decisions about how to spend their resources, including what to learn. If you feel this was something _you should have known_ how to do, take it as a sign and go find out more about that subject.

On a larger scale though, I think interviewing coding challenges are starting to have the same drawbacks as the millions of, say, Javascript coder academies out there: it's that form of artifice which distances the challenges from the real world. Instead, and I believe increasingly, they measure something entirely separate from solving actual programming problems: solving coding challenges in a vacuum.

It's becoming our industry's form of standardized testing. You can learn to do well at it, but beyond a certain level of expertise I'm skeptical this is coupled to actual engineering prowess.

You might say: "okay, but if this is a skill I need to know in order to get hired, so be it", and that's a valid perspective. Google will guide you to a plethora of training sites. But I'm beginning to wonder if it makes sense at all to work for people who expect standardized outcomes in these tests.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was more the algorithmic part that challenged me. The rest was easy, but I lost so much time and nerves to the algorithms, that I didn't deliver the needed quality on the rest.

I don't know how much those things really have to do with the jobs. Like I said, I worked for years as a dev and shipped many products. But they were more of a architectural challenge than an algorithmic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've used the following:

Project Euler, TopCoder, /r/DailyProgrammer</comment>


Photoshop CS5's new "Content-aware Fill" - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI&feature=player_embedded

<comment><USER2> With all the crap Adobe gets for Flash, this is where their primary area of expertise lies. I've been using Photoshop from when there were no layers and very limited number of undos. They never fail to deliver something incredibly useful and time-saving with each iteration.

<comment><USER3> I'm still using Photoshop 4 that I got in 1996 or so. There are layers, but only one undo. I don't use it enough to justify the upgrade, but I have done a lot of everything in this video from time to time and it is extremely time consuming. This is quite an advancement. I usually give Adobe a lot of crap, but this is really very nice.

But I wonder... are tools like this to manipulate reality making really less and less interesting. Are losing our love of reality because of the dreams we can so easily create?

<comment><USER4> > _it is extremely time consuming._

Most importantly, it's not especially interesting. Figuring out what needs fixing takes a human eye, but actually cutting a distracting pole or bit of lens flare out of a picture is work for a patient robot.

> _Are losing our love of reality because of the dreams we can so easily > create?_

Um... no?

How do you define "reality"? If it depends on what can be shown in photographs, then the time to have this discussion was around 1850.

<comment><USER5> Lens flare is kind of nice sometimes. I like how CG movies add it in to make it look more realistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The demo is totally mind blowing. It's so good it almost seem fake (not saying it is).

<comment><USER7> The bottom right area of the last image example makes me wonder...

<comment><USER8> At 4:44 it just looks like they masked off an area and then switch off the mask. Looks fake because it's so good - without actually using it one couldn't tell.

<comment><USER9> Do you mean the fact that it seems to load in two parts? That's quite normal behaviour, as the images that are used probably have quite a high resolution and the downscaling takes some time. Just try taking any picture with a nice big resolution and then applying an effect. It will load gradually and not at once.

If you meant something else, could you explain it a bit clearer?

<comment><USER8> It looks potentially fake because its such a good final result. In short it's almost unbelievably good (in the video).

Elsewhere in the thread I repeated the experiment on one of the images with resynthesizer GIMP plugin and got very good results too, but not quite as good. Of course I could probably have chosen an image which would have appeared to produce equally good results...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You have got to be kidding me. Amazing. Every photograph will have at most 50% original area after this gets into the average photographer's hands.

<comment><USER11> And this is why I shoot mostly film... with digital it's too easy and tempting to resort to parlor tricks instead of taking a genuinely good photograph.

<comment><USER12> I just scored a semi-nice film SLR the other day; it used to belong to my parents but they've gone digital and it hasn't been used in yonks. It's certainly nowhere near as programmable as even a cheap digital SLR, but whatever, it's fun to use.

The difference, in terms of taking shots, is night and day - with my digital camera, I'll snap 10+ shots of the same thing to try and find the right one; with this, I spend five minutes angling around and trying to find the right shot off the bat.

I'm not a good photographer by any means; in fact, I'm substantially below average if I'm honest about it. But raising the bar to entry certains makes you focus on what you're doing a lot more.

Which I guess is a long and winding way of saying I agree. It's more fun when there' more effort involved.

<comment><USER11> I feel the same way - there's a greater sense of accomplishment when you allow yourself only a single opportunity to capture what you see in front of you.

In photography parlance we call it chimping - i.e., jumping around like a monkey and clicking the shutter like crazy, trying to get the right shot. Even if you get the right one, you have no idea if it's your skill, luck, or just law of large numbers...

When I shoot film I feel more purposeful - I rarely ever take more than a single exposure of any one particular thing - it also teaches you to be patient, and hold the shutter until you know you have the right shot. On rapid-fire you will often get a good picture, but no idea what makes it good, whereas with film I'm aware that this picture works because, say, I waited until there was no one in the background.

My current favored camera is a Leica R4s - only manual and aperture priority modes, manual focus, manual aperture control, and only 2 metering modes (you only ever need one - center-weighted). When you strip a machine down to the bare minimum it opens a lot of creative doors.

<comment><USER13> Usually chimping just means checking your shots from the LCD.

<comment><USER14> Yeah. I've heard "clicking the shutter like crazy, trying to get the right shot" referred to as "spray and pray", though. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That made my day. I'm kind of worried though that the examples are hand- picked, and by default it doesn't look so nice. I would _love_ , though, to know the algorithm behind this.

<comment><USER16> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgKjs8ZjQNg>

<comment><USER16> Whoops, I got beat by wallflower. Should've refreshed the comment page before posting...

<comment><USER17> Don't worry, I like the direct link to the video better :)

<comment><USER18> As do I.

Seriously, I love the Google-foo/showdown challenges that sometimes a HN reader poses. This search was easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was pretty impressed just by the first part, but when it got to the desert and finally the cloud, my jaw literally was open by the end. Totally gobsmacked.

Unbelievable.

<comment><USER20> Though the patched up desert image looks a bit boring. I guess there's a reason they went over this so quickly.

<comment><USER21> Still a huge start.

<comment><USER20> Indeed. Especially compared to the lack of effort on the user's part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unbelievable. My head is hurting from trying to imagine the concept behind the algorithm to do this. The desert and sky recreations are especially mind boggling.

<comment><USER23> Mine too. My initial (naive) thought on developing something like this would be to have advanced users perform the tasks that I wanted to automate, and recording the series of actions that they took to perform the task so I could analyze it and try to find the patterns.

How is something like this actually developed?

<comment><USER24> noidi's yotube link explains it pretty well. It searches the rest of the image for sections that are similar to the edges of the deleted area and extrapolates from there. I imagine for large deleted areas this would have to be done multiple times to build up the deleted area. It woudl be kind of lie markov chains, but for image data.

The current patch tool in Photoshop can already adjust contrast and hue to make a patch source match the patched area, so when the algorithm is searching for similar areas to use as a source it can just focus on the image details and not the lightness or actual colours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This can only be described one way: devil magic

<comment><USER26> "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow. Now I need this in the GIMP.

<comment><USER28> This is amazing and all, but this technology has been available for GIMP users for years. I have been using something very similar since 2004 or 2005.

<http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer>

This page <http://slacy.com/blog/2005/04/cool-image-processing/> shows you how to use it to remove an object which will be automatically replaced by surrounding texture (similar to first example in video)

This page <http://schwarzvogel.de/resynth-tut-sa.shtml> shows an example of growing and image by auto-filling the missing edges around a photo (similar to last example in the video)

I suppose the new algorithms in PS are better, but still it's been over 5 years now :-)

<comment><USER29> Interesting. Resynthesizer looks a lot like the technology (and end results) behind the spot healing brush tool, introduced in Photoshop CS2 in 2005.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be in CS5. The engineer says as much and John Nack, who just posted it, says it'll be in a "future" version of Photoshop.

Which, if I'm right, makes this a horrible way to steal CS5's thunder!

<comment><USER31> Any confirmation on this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is absolutely amazing. The PS guys are really pushing the envelope of image editing. I think it's really cool that the editing process is more structural, more high-level, than working with the basic tools. The lens flare removal, especially, is an incredibly common and tricky problem.

At the same time, I am glad that the effects are still immediately visible, even in a low-res youtube video. It's nice to have hints of what the original actually looked like, some times.

<comment><USER33> It is indeed a great algorithm. I think similar algorithms will be used to "create" music in the future, although I shudder to think of how terrible pop music will be when they can just create "content aware" music by selecting a few bars and generating the rest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Only about 7 days left to the April Fools Day.

</comment><comment><USER35> This should make it easier for Iran to have successful missile launches. As long as they can afford the upgrade license. <http://dvice.com/galleries/iranphotoshop/iranmissile_1.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER36> wow. i'd definitely be interested in seeing the full image and seeing if there are any weird artifacts going on at the transition area between the selected border and the generated "content-aware" fill. from what i can tell , this is close to magic.

</comment><comment><USER37> Outstanding! On a quick look back when it came out, I didn't see anything in CS4 to get me to upgrade from CS3.

I'm thinking I need to reevaluate with CS5. If nothing else, perhaps the total diff from CS3 -> CS5 will now be worth the upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER38> It reminds me of that other algorithm that went around a couple of months ago, where they do similar things by combining photographs on the web. Might have been from Google, Microsoft, or some independent researchers.

<comment><USER39> Was it Sketch2Photo from Siggraph Asia 2009 ( [http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/papers/SiggraphAsia_2009_sketch...](http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/papers/SiggraphAsia_2009_sketch2photo.pdf) )? If so, the authors are academics.

<comment><USER38> Yes, exactly - thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The only thing that is keeping me from using Linux fulltime is Photoshop.

I had to literally get my officemates to see that video. It is unbelievable.

</comment><comment><USER41> I guess it wont work with complexity behind complexity.

Two people, one in front of the other for instance.

But it's damn nice for most situations.

</comment><comment><USER42> The panorama example at the end is fantastic. I hate cropping all of my panoramas down, I loose so many great things on the edges.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is going to be really nice when cleaning up old photos with dust and scratches

</comment><comment><USER44> This is an amazing feature. The tree was removed perfectly. Cannot wait to see CS5

<comment><USER45> That was actually one of the less impressive things the demo did, since it replaced the tree with what is essentially a smooth gradient. This is something that can be done by early image inpainting algorithms, such as this one from SIGGRAPH 2000:

<http://www.iua.upf.es/~mbertalmio/restoration.html>

<comment><USER46> Yes, but you have to give it some credit for _deciding_ to use a smooth gradient, when it is clearly not the only choice. (Also, it's hard to tell in this video exactly what it really replaced it with, at the pixel level.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think I just lost my jaw!

</comment><comment><USER47> ... content-aware fill, or MAGIC?

</comment><comment><USER48> hope they do away with the buggy/frustrating flash panels

</comment><comment><USER49> Thinking how many so called "graphics designer"s have just been replaced by a machine makes me smile and shudder at the same time.

<comment><USER41> Not graphics designers.

The hours graphic designers have do spend one something they hate so much has been replaced by a machine. And for that we are very grateful.

<comment><USER50> These kind of problems for graphic designers are like software bugs to developers.

Now they'll get to spend more of their time "coding features" instead of debugging.</comment></comment></comment>