Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/waymo-self-driving-cars-arizona-attacks.html <comment><USER2> My brother lives in the neighborhood where this public beta testing is occurring. Folks, let me tell you from first-hand experience- these cars are terrible drivers. They are extremely hesitant, and because of this they cause traffic backups and delays in places where safety is compromised. You better hope you are not behind one when they perform a left-hand turn onto a busy street, because you are probably going to be waiting a while. They stop in seemingly random situations where human drivers would never stop, like a bicyclist standing way off the side of the road (talking to someone) with his bike pointing towards traffic. People have told me they've been in the middle of a turn behind a Waymo car, when all of a sudden the car just randomly stops for no apparent reason, leaving them stranded in the middle of the intersection as the light turns red. The default reaction for a Waymo car under any sort of ambiguity seems to be to just stop (literally) until the ambiguity resolves itself. Unfortunately this causes considerable confusion and traffic backups for human drivers.

I understand why Waymo is proceeding cautiously. But you really get the impression that the technology has a long ways to go. People in Chandler are pissed because this fleet of cars is a huge nuisance and is in fact less safe for human drivers who are sharing the road. I have no doubt that autonomous vehicles will be safer than human drivers someday, but that day is definitely not today.

<comment><USER3> > People have told me they've been in the middle of a turn behind a Waymo car, > when all of a sudden the car just randomly stops for no apparent reason, > leaving them stranded in the middle of the intersection as the light turns > red.

How does that work? My driving experience is limited, and only in Australia, but I can't think of a situation where I'd be allowed to enter an intersection if there is already a car ahead of me that's still in it.

Edit: I'm getting downvoted so maybe I didn't explain it right. Here's a quote from AU law: _It is against the law to enter an intersection if you cannot drive through and into the road you plan to enter. However, when turning right, you can proceed into the intersection and wait near the centre of the intersection for the oncoming traffic to pass (as long as it is safe and the road you are turning into is clear)._ So from my POV it's pretty unfair to blame Waymo for getting stuck in a situation when it's only your law breaking that's making it so dangerous.

<comment><USER4> All you have to consider is the possibility that in some other regions of the world, that law doesn't exist and you're allowed to trail the car in front of you to make the turn you want. This is because for busy intersections, the closer you are to making the turn, the more chance you have of making it successfully. In general, there is greater throughput, and the safety risks are minimal because the yellow light signals for oncoming traffic to stop and gives enough time for everyone waiting to make the turn before it goes red (at least, that's what a yellow light is supposed to be, some people run it, and some people even run red lights).

I take it that in Australia, you drive on the left side of the road? In North America, you drive on the right side of the road, so the logic would apply when you're turning left, not right.

<comment><USER5> The rule has nothing to do with the handedness of the traffic. The rule comes down to 'do not enter an intersection unless you are 100% sure you will clear it before the lights change'. If you enter an intersection so late that it's about to turn red while another car is waiting to turn, you're at fault, not the car in front of you for not turning sooner. The red light transition timing is set to allow one and only one car to exit the intersection before the other side has a green light to enter.

The rule exists to prevent intersections from getting blocked by idiot drivers who enter too late and get stuck, which if not immediately cleared will cause gridlock to begin forming.

I find it a bit hard to believe that such a rule doesn't exist in America.

<comment><USER6> > The rule comes down to 'do not enter an intersection unless you are 100% > sure you will clear it before the lights change'.

Yes, that is how it's supposed to work here. But when you enter because there isn't any traffic coming and you assume the waymo vehicle will do the obvious and turn left, and then it just stops, it's very easy to get stuck out in the intersection behind it - in a situation that wouldn't happen with any human driver.

<comment><USER7> Might I introduce you to South Florida then. Overly cautious 80+ year old drivers that cause accidents for being just too cautious/slow to react. That's what the Waymo cars sound like right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love this quote:

 _"People are lashing out justifiably, " said Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist at City University of New York and author of the book "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus." He likened driverless cars to robotic incarnations of scabs — workers who refuse to join strikes or who take the place of those on strike.

"There's a growing sense that the giant corporations honing driverless technologies do not have our best interests at heart," Mr. Rushkoff said. "Just think about the humans inside these vehicles, who are essentially training the artificial intelligence that will replace them."_

Why is it that for every act of random vandalism or hooliganism, there's always an academic who will find a way to blame the victim?

<comment><USER9> Wait -- Scientist kills innocent bystander with his experiment and the public shouldn't be mad about it? Would you have said the same thing if the professor defended Waymo?

<comment><USER10> I feel like this rapidly moves into Trolley Problem territory. 10,000+ people die in a year due to drunk driving, what's the acceptable death toll for rolling out driverless cars as fast as possible?

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't mandatory breathalyzer ignition locks solve this problem? This is a proven technology that shouldn't kill anyone as it's being rolled out. Move fast and break things is great for websites and apps, but when human lives are at stake it requires strict ethical considerations.

<comment><USER12> What about all the existing cars on the road? What about manual cars that can be push started? Who installs and certifies these, they need calibrated frequently, they are extremely simple to bypass for anyone with even basic vehicle knowledge.

<comment><USER13> If the law starts now, in 5-10 years the vast majority of old cars will be junked. Sure, there will still be a few old cars, but they will be an insignificant minority. It's not unlike how other rule introductions worked. Nobody banned old cars without seatbelts, they just required that all new cars have them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > In some of their reports, police officers also said Waymo was often > unwilling to provide video of the attacks. In one case, a Waymo employee > told the police they would need a warrant to obtain video recorded by the > company's vehicles.

Veering off topic a bit here, but this is a very good decision by the company. Taking a hard line here removes the subjectivity of when to violate your customer's privacy and puts the onus on the police to choose to make that violation.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure if they really care about privacy as much as they do arse- coverage. The sentence before that one:

>The emergency drivers in the Waymo vans that were attacked in various cases told the Chandler police that the company preferred not to pursue prosecution of the assailants.

If I didn't know any better, this statement reads as if the emergency driver doesn't exist to Waymo. One could argue that they aren't the target, but nowhere else can I think of someone attacking a vehicle _because_ of the vehicle, and not the one "not driving" it.

<comment><USER16> It doesn't matter why the emergency drivers attacked. It's a hubris of Google Management that they think that they should be the ones who decide whether the victim (the driver) should pursue prosecution or not, and the company should help the driver in his decision, whatever it is.

It was very sad to see that the forced arbitration case was handled only for sexual offences, Google management has too much power over employees when they are assaulted.

<comment><USER17> Neither Google nor the driver gets to make that choice. The police decide whether to refer the incident for prosecution and the prosecutor decides whether to pursue it. Google saying they don't want to pursue it carries only as much weight as the police and prosecutor give it.

<comment><USER18> If Google refuses to provide video and sensor data, it becomes difficult to impossible to prosecute.

If they do this in _some_ but not all cases, that lends to suspicion that the denial cases could show egregious misconduct on the part of the Waymo software (I.e. avoiding self incrimination).

<comment><USER17> Seems like it would be pretty easy to get a warrant for the video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is interesting how Waymo chose not to pursue charges in a few cases where they had footage of the assailant. They thought it would further antagonize people in the community of making it an us vs them issue, with court cases, lawyers and publicity ensuing. But if charges are not pursued, it might also increase the attacks...

There are already road-rage issues between human drivers, as cars are perceived to dehumanize other side "me vs car". In this case this just gets amplified. A few tricks might help here, for example, making the car look less a "Waymo" car and just make it like a normal car. It might be hard to hide the camera and sensors completely. In that case maybe make a random logo, say Acme Surveyors, inc.

Another trick could be to have the test drivers pretend they are driving the car rather than sit and watch. They could keep their hands on the wheel and pretend to move it, so make it seem like they it's just a human driver.

<comment><USER20> Letting a large number of attacks slide is probably worth a piece of the ~$1 trillion private and industrial transport market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm all for driverless cars, but if you put an algorithm in charge then the creators of that algorithm need to be legally responsible for the outcome. I'm talking engineers going to prison when one of these cars does inevitibly hit someone. Every driver is liable for their actions on the road, for some reason SV thinks being "statistically better than humans" means they aren't responsible for however small a % of crashes they are responsible for. It's like saying I only crashed once in my 50 years of driving so on average I'm not responsible for killing that kid last Tuesday.

<comment><USER22> In what universe would it make more sense to make the engineer liable rather than the larger corporate entity? Also, that's not how human driving works. If you hit someone while following the rule of the road and not doing anything especially negligent, you won't face criminal charges. You use the word "inevitably" but it doesn't make sense at all with your world view.

<comment><USER21> If, in the view of a court of law, it was not the algorithms fault due to negligence or whatever then I agree they are not responsible. I only ask the same rules be applied to the machine as a human. As for who ultimately pays, fine, substitute CEO or whatever. As long as someone actually does time, and it's not just a fine, because you can't put a company in prison. If we were talking about civil engineers designing a bridge that causes a death, I'm sure that chief engineers face at least some personal liability regardless of whatever shield the company offers.

<comment><USER23> Fortunately, the law is actually quite sane in this area, so there won't be any engineers going to prison for vehicular manslaughter:

 _Manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice. It is of three kinds:

(c) Vehicular—

(1) Except as provided in subdivision (a) of Section 191.5, driving a vehicle in the commission of an unlawful act, not amounting to a felony, and with gross negligence; or driving a vehicle in the commission of a lawful act which might produce death, in an unlawful manner, and with gross negligence.

(2) Driving a vehicle in the commission of an unlawful act, not amounting to a felony, but without gross negligence; or driving a vehicle in the commission of a lawful act which might produce death, in an unlawful manner, but without gross negligence.

(3) Driving a vehicle in connection with a violation of paragraph (3) of subdivision (a) of Section 550, where the vehicular collision or vehicular accident was knowingly caused for financial gain and proximately resulted in the death of any person. This paragraph does not prevent prosecution of a defendant for the crime of murder._ [0]

[0] [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PEN&sectionNum=192).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Vandalising cars or causing threats of violence should never be condoned, but their still is something very wrong in the way tech companies encroach on the lives of people unwillingly.

>"They didn't ask us if we wanted to be part of their beta test," added his wife, who helps run the business.

The woman in the article is correct in my opinion. It ought to be up to the people of Arizona to decide what happens on Arizona's streets, not to a company from California, because it's the people of Arizona that are the receiving end of all the social, economic, and safety implications of this technology.

We have had this trend of tech companies creating facts and asking democratic permission afterwards a few times now in the world of social media apps, but now with autonomous driving things are getting a little more physical.

<comment><USER25> If they have a problem with it, they should take it up with the state government of Arizona, which specifically allowed self-driving cars.

<comment><USER26> _If they have a problem with it, they should take it up with the state government of Arizona_

Passing the buck is a very SV-centric response to importnat issue.

Like Google's response from the CCC the other day saying, "Yeah, we track people in bad ways, but everyone else does it too, so it's OK."

"Oh, our self-driving car isn't responsible for killing a pedestrian. It's the governor of Arizona who allowed us to kill the pedestrian who is to blame. Go after him! We're only responsible to shareholders, and the kid wasn't a shareholder."

<comment><USER14> > Passing the buck is a very SV-centric response to importnat issue.

Eschewing responsibility is a very SV-targeted response to an important local issue. I'd rather these decisions be made at the local government level instead of having outliers in the community (i.e. your neighbors) appeal to higher authority usurping democracy. Especially when those squeaky wheels are throwing rocks, claiming the company others asked to have in town are passing the buck, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Unfortunate, but I guess with any new tech there will always be luddites.

Many HN folks probably already know the etymology, but for those that aren't familiar, the word "luddite" itself comes from "English textile workers in the 19th century [who] destroyed textile machinery as a form of protest" [1]

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

<comment><USER27> Unfortunately, there is a common misconception that Luddites were against technology. That's incorrect: they were skilled textile workers that _used_ technology similar to any other skilled profession. From the first paragraph of the wiki page:

> The group was protesting the use of machinery in a "fraudulent and deceitful > manner" to get around standard labour practices.

There is a lot of similarity with modern tech companies (Uber is the canonical example) working around labor in a way that concentrates wealth. As an early form of labor fighting back against capital abusing the amplifying effect of technology, I agree with the Luddites. Learn from them, or - as described in this article - we will see their violent methods again.

<comment><USER28> It's not a misconception. I know a lot of authors have argued, correctly, that there was some nuance to the Luddites arguments, but the fact remains that they did in fact behave exactly as was described: there was a technology that they comitted acts of terrorism against because they prefered the old ways and attempted to slow that progress. People are now throwing in these corrections every time someone mentions luddites even though nothing they said was wrong, simply non-sympathetic. Those aren't the same things. Not agreeing that they should be as iconically maligned as they are isn't the same thing as a common misconception. None of the core fact are in dispute, you just want to defend them while ignoring the central point of it's futility.

<comment><USER27> > they comitted acts of terrorism

I never said they didn't.

> they prefered the old ways and attempted to slow that progress.

Yes, that's correct. _Why_ did they "prefer the old ways"?

<comment><USER29> Because they were against technology.

<comment><USER30> No, they were against this particular technology because its introduction meant they could no longer earn a living and feed their families.

Technology that benefits the few _at the expense of the many_ is going to destroy us.

The only way around it is UBI in some form or another.

<comment><USER31> Macroeconomic forces are complex. Technology has wiped out entire types of work many times over the years, and the workers usually, though not always, make out all right. The problem is not any particular technological advance IMO, but overloading the economic mechanisms that allow people to find new careers. Too much technological advance too fast plus too many industries shipped overseas where labor is cheaper in an environment without enough new job development equals a permanent underclass, with all of the economic tensions that come along with it.

Meanwhile, UBI has many serious problems and we don't have anywhere near the level of job disruption to make it a workable solution.

<comment><USER32> Your entire viewpoint is based on the idea that there will always be jobs no matter how advanced ai and automation becomes. This is the idea that needs to be addressed, not the shrubbery surrounding it. It's meaningless to say that new jobs have always been found and that rapid advancement in technology has not seemed to doom us so far. That's like saying we haven't run out of oil yet so why would we ever run out. The number of tasks that a human can do is _finite_. When machines saturate that set of tasks, something really bad will happen. But even long before, there will be massive problems as we approach it.

I already know you won't be convinced by what I'm saying. Just respond with your strongest counter-argument to my _central point_ about the finite nature of human jobs, or in other words what will happen when machines can do everything we can. Just give me your strongest counter-argument about that. I will then explain why that's wrong, and we can continue until you see that you're wrong. I will be extremely patient about it.

<comment><USER33> Can you please not cross into incivility in HN comments? It leads to flamewars and we're trying for better than that here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > "The behavior is causing the drivers to resume manual mode over the > automated mode because of concerns about what the driver of the other > vehicle may do," Officer Johnson wrote.

Interesting that the drivers don't trust how the autonomous vehicles will handle these cases. In the case of someone actively being malicious, it seems more manual intervention will be desired. I can't see how this will work out with certain car companies touting their cars will not be equipped with steering wheels.

<comment><USER35> As I understand it, a remote operator would be able to assume control

<comment><USER36> At the speeds cars travel at, this seems like a solution that isn't going to work very well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> To all the Hacker News bringing up Luddites:

Why aren't there similar stories of people throwing rocks at Tesla vehicles?

Those vehicles are readily identifiable and have had safety issues from drivers using its cruise control _as if_ it were autopilot. Moreover it's a goddamned battery on wheels which could put an enormous number of car service shops out of business. There are already laws in various states to keep Tesla out for that reason.

There could be a lot of reasons why someone throws rocks at a Waymo vehicle but also thinks Tesla is cool. Ludditism is not one of those reasons.

<comment><USER38> Someone spray-painted my wife's Tesla while she was sitting at a stop light and ran away before she could believe it was happening. In a nice part of Silicon Valley. It happens.

The original Luddites didn't hate all technology, just the tech (powered looms) that was putting them out of work. I suspect that's behind every attack on technology.

<comment><USER39> That might have been out of hatred for people affluent enough to afford a Tesla, rather than a dislike of Teslas. Also many if not most vandals are motivated exclusively by the thrill of avoiding being caught.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> These vehicles will get vandalized even if the public accepts them. Great new graffiti medium owned by "Big Corp" that drives all over metro areas 24/7\. Wonder how much companies will need to spend just to keep them from being covered in tags.

<comment><USER41> As if every aspect of our life is not shaped by "big corp"s. It is laughable actually. They should vandalize their tv, detergent box and cereals as well.

<comment><USER40> You're missing the point of a vandals initiative.

You don't get famous vandalizing things in your home. You do get famous vandalizing things that move through metro areas 24/7\. Look at NYC subways in the 70s and 80s. They needed to create entire cleaning facilities that operated nonstop to finally get the graffiti off the trains. The insides are still tagged up to a degree.

Spray paint is probably the easiest thing to clean. Wait for people to use etch bath on the windshields and windows of these vehicles. They'll need to replace all the windows to get them looking right again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Yes, of course violence and vandalism is never justified, but think of it from a bored high schoolers perspective. It would be so much fun in the future to stop a waymo in the middle of an street, cover its cameras, and watch the aftermath. Pranks involving technology are gonna be way more fun in the future.

<comment><USER43> People who lose their jobs to the new technology can be hired as guards to protect the technology from Luddites. Or as insurance adjusters.

<comment><USER44> not every truck driver can be retrained as private security

<comment><USER43> I'm sorry, I was being snarky, and yes I justly deserved the downvote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Fear of change and new things. People were opposed to cars when they were first introduced. Ironically self-driving cars will arguably save countless lives. The resistance and fear will pass. But I do love driving...

<comment><USER46> In the same way you can go horseback riding today on dedicated tracks and in areas under the ownership of the farm you will still have courses to manually drive cars on for a very long time after the general introduction of self driving vehicles.

And while its not directly comparable, I still see horse and buggy carriages on public roads in PA so they haven't ever outright banned that particular obsoleted mode of transport. If the Amish lobby can keep shit getting dropped in my streets I'm sure the collective car enthusiasts of the world will keep their right to drive for a while at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> IT's the 'misuse'of tech. Sure, we can optimize for efficiency if efficiency is defined by minimizing cost or maximizing safety. But in a world of humans, efficiency should be defined by 'maximizing human utility'. In other words, use tech to make people better, more employable, happier. And no I do not mean borg. If we continue down this path, ultimately we will marginalize humanity because our systems are far more efficient than the evolutionary process that spawned and selected us. in the specific example of 'self driving vehicles' an analogy might be to have an AI supervisor issuing directives. Much as our GPS issues turn directions, an advanced AI could be pointing out traffic hazards hundreds of feet away that many people who are distracted, texting, talking or just have poor vision would miss. OTOH, we have the resilience of millenia on our resume, whereas machines are scarcely 200 years old. If a cataclysm hits the planet, much of the static infrastructure will fail.

</comment><comment><USER48> > A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding > inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

PVC???

<comment><USER49> You could hurt someone with it. Its not as intimidating as copper, but its going to hurt. Never tried to break a window with it.

[https://www.lowes.com/pl/PVC-pipe-PVC-pipe-fittings-Pipe- fit...](https://www.lowes.com/pl/PVC-pipe-PVC-pipe-fittings-Pipe-fittings- Plumbing/4294763909)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> _The antitechnology Luddite movement will grow increasingly vocal and possibly resort to violence as these people become enraged over the emergence of new technologies that threaten traditional attitudes regarding the nature of human life (radical life extension, genetic engineering, cybernetics) and the supremacy of mankind (artificial intelligence). Though the Luddites might, at best, succeed in delaying the Singularity, the march of technology is irresistible and they will inevitably fail in keeping the world frozen at a fixed level of development._

\- Ray Kurweil

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

</comment><comment> village-idiot On one hand, I am sympathetic to fears of driverless car safety and job losses. I would not be a big fan of having my (hypothetical) children playing on a street that self driving cars are being tested on.

On the other, if you threaten the employee within the car or attempt to drive them off the road, you should be prosecuted with the full force of the law. There are still people within those self driving cars, and attempted homicide is still a crime.

Edit: being opposed to attempted vehicular homicide is an unpopular opinion. Never saw that coming.

<comment><USER51> Another position to take against driverless cars (or rather, the proliferation and eventual obligation thereof) is the loss of freedom and control. Instead of the fault of human causing harm to another human, it's replaced with the fault of an opaque, massively complex algorithm; and that is rather unsettling to some people.

<comment><USER52> Ghost in the Shell touched on this really well.

There's the potential for bad actors to plant dangerous training into these algorithms. Hypothetically, someone could turn an entire fleet of self-driving taxis into an assassination mechanism. Every vehicle can wait until a specific individual is spotted crossing the street and fail to stop at a light. The corporation that owns this taxi then will say there was a software failure with the one specific taxi, take it out of commission, and move on with business as usual. A few deaths a year is still less than the death toll of human-operated cars, after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> > The emergency drivers in the Waymo vans that were attacked in various cases > told the Chandler police that the company preferred not to pursue > prosecution of the assailants.

This is part of the problem, IMO. Make it known that you will act lawfully to protect the safety of your drivers and will cooperate fully with law enforcement. This pacifist policy does nothing to discourage future attacks.

<comment><USER54> As others have pointed out, that's escalating. It forces the other party to back down _or escalate_. It forces the conflict into the public eye and undoubtedly costs more in bad publicity than damage to cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Are there any other examples from relatively recent history of new technology that people would spontaneously attempt to attack/destroy in an uncoordinated fashion like this?

<comment><USER56> I remember reading a "how-to" about blinding public surveillance cameras -- not sure how many folks actually did so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Imagine how furious the citizens of Chandler, AZ will get when they find out how many people are killed by human-driven cars every year.

<comment><USER39> That fury has already been folded in to society in the form of the many negative consequences awaiting the perpetrators of vehicular manslaughter.

<comment><USER58> None at all? A citation? That is the reality.

Look at this very story. Erik and Elizabeth O'Polka driving dangerously on purpose, and all police has to offer is a 'warning'? It's even an off-hand joke in this NYT piece.

<comment><USER39> Here is a page detailing the situation in California: [https://www.shouselaw.com/vehicle- manslaughter.html](https://www.shouselaw.com/vehicle-manslaughter.html)

<comment><USER58> You are not hearing me. The theory is clear; the practice is that if you kill someone with your car and you are not DUI (no license is fine), you will be very likely not charged.

[https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2018/07/30/five-weeks-later- broo...](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2018/07/30/five-weeks-later-brooklyn-da- eric-gonzalez-hasnt-charged-the-driver-who-killed-4-year-old-luz-gonzalez-and- left-the-scene/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Probably not a good idea to damage property in protest. Maybe build something cheap and portable that should prevent them from moving. If they do move through the obstacle anyway, you've demonstrate how unsafe they can be.

</comment><comment><USER60> Somehow, this reminds me of google glass hole incidents...

</comment><comment><USER61> > "People are lashing out justifiably," said Douglas Rushkoff, a media > theorist at City University of New York and author of the book "Throwing > Rocks at the Google Bus." He likened driverless cars to robotic incarnations > of scabs — workers who refuse to join strikes or who take the place of those > on strike.

I don't see how violence or vandalism of property is ever justified. Not to mention the fact that pelting self-driving cars with rocks or trying to run them off the road puts others in danger as well.

What I don't understand about these modern day Luddites is why what's considered today's technology is okay but any technological advances beyond this point is harmful. Why not attack washing machines and dishwashers? Surely forcing people to get their clothes washed by hands would create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

<comment><USER62> >The trouble started, the couple said, when their 10-year-old son was nearly hit by one of the vehicles while he was playing in a nearby cul-de-sac.

I would be angry, too. The prospect of self-driving cars excites me, but I can totally understand not wanting your neighborhood to become the testing grounds for this new tech. Uber and Tesla's mishaps in the self-driving space understandably color the public's perception of Waymo's far more responsible efforts to date.

<comment><USER63> I understand the sentiment, but I'd take the word of those who harass random Waymo drivers with a grain of salt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> This article really sums up 2018 quite nicely. A year exemplifying the heights of both technological achievement and human stupidity.

</comment><comment><USER15> It only sounds barbaric until the automation comes for _your_ job.

</comment><comment><USER65> > Officer William Johnson of the Chandler Police Department described in a > June report how the driver of a Chrysler PT Cruiser wove between lanes of > traffic while taunting a Waymo van.

How do we know that it just wasn't the PT Cruiser's driver's normal driving behavior. They did buy a PT Cruiser in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER66> I wonder what the algorithm says to do when a protestor steps in front of a speeding car that would have to brake hard enough to injure the occupants of the car in order to avoid hitting the protestor? Under a comparative fault regime, Google and the protestor would both be partially at fault for the occupants injuries. The protestor is broke, so Google will bare the whole burden of being jointly and severally liable. Or should it make a calculation of how badly it's going to injure the occupant and the protestor and minimize the situation in terms of damage to the company, thus possibly choosing to injure the protestor over the occupants to preserve brand value and future revenue?</comment>


Ask HN: Which cross browser bookmark sync tool do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I use chrome, firefox and safari during my day.
Managing my bookmarks across them it's pretty hard!
Do you know any sync tool that can handle bookmarks from those three browsers and make them synchronized? <comment><USER2> I use pinboard, which I think is a fork of the old delicious bookmark service. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinboard_%28website%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinboard_%28website%29)

Delicious was exactly what I wanted, except it was very annoying for me, as I had to think about keeping links private.

Pinboard _is_ exactly what I want, as I don't have to struggle to keep my bookmarks private.

It costs about $10 for however long they stay in business. You can pay a yearly fee (I forget how much), which gives them revenue (please stay in business!), and return they archive the contents of everything you mark.

It's not a browser synchronizer, because the marks are kept on their server.

However, every bookmark can be tagged, with one or more tags. Any tag, or any combination of tags, has an associated RSS feed. Firefox has Live Bookmarks, which look like bookmarks but it's an RSS reader. So if I tag a bookmark at work, it's available at home because I've set up a live bookmark to view that RSS feed. It's brilliant.

Which isn't exactly what you were asking for, but if you can view these RSS feeds some way in chrome and safari (I have no idea), then you get sort of what you're wanting, and independent of a particular browser.

</comment><comment><USER3> Diigo has been wonderful for me. Apart from bookmarking it allows you to highlight text on pages (and online pdf's!) in 4 different colors and shows them to you again when you revisit.

[http://diigo.com](http://diigo.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> You can export your bookmarks from your browsers and import them into Papaly ([https://www.papaly.com](https://www.papaly.com))

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm using [http://papaly.com/](http://papaly.com/)

<comment><USER6> Been using them for months now and amazed with every update they dish out. No other bookmarklet compares to Papaly.</comment></comment>


The Checklist: If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande

<comment><USER2> I moonlight as an ER nurse while I'm finishing my software engineering degree. I've worked ICU for a number of years as well.

It sounds simple to institute a checklist, but the key issue isn't the checklist, it's about allowing nurses to hold doctors accountable and the hospital backing the nurses up in those disputes.

Say you're a night shift ICU nurse. Your patient craps out at 3am, and your intensivist crawls out of bed to come and "line up" your patient and put them on life support. Do you think that Dr. Intensivist with 15 years of school wants to hear at 3am is a nurse with an associates degree tell him to stop what he's doing and start over because he didn't wash his hands properly before starting. I've had charts thrown at me for stuff like that.

This issue is accountability and incentives. This plan places accountability on the doctors, but it puts a lot of strain on the doctor/nurse relationship when that nurse is the one blowing the whistle on the doctor.

What we need is an incentive system for doctors. You need both a carrot and a stick. Doctors only get paid when the patient is sick. And, if the patient gets sicker, that doctor spends more time with the patient and bills more. There is no incentive to keeping the patient healthy, only payment for taking care of as many sick patients as possible. Doctors don't like it they generally want to take good care of patients. They just have to pay of $200,000 of student loans, and the only way to do that is to rush and see as many patients as possible.

If the doctors received a large bonus every year if their lines did not get infected, or if their patients did not get a pneumonia when the patient was on life support, you better believe that complication rates would go down.

If nurses got a small bonus every year based on our infection control practices, we'd all wash our hands a lot more often. But we don't. We're all paid by the hour on a patient assembly line.

The doctors or nurses haven't set up this system, the insurance system has. It's just the unintended consequences of our third party payer system.

Although, there are winds of change. Medicare is starting to threaten hospitals by not paying them if a patient gets an infection from the hospital.

<comment><USER3> I think you're overly cynical. Docs don't need monetary incentives for "keeping the patient healthy." They need proof that something is wrong and a simple remedy will fix it and help patients. Not every doc, particularly those with relatively fixed salaries, are rushing to see patients to maximize their personal wealth. I'd think it was financial pressures to reduce costs at the institutional level that create an imbalance between # of caregivers and the # of patients. I've seen some new medical practices (e.g., here in Palo Alto) where you can pay a lot more and get seen by docs with a relatively very low patient load.

<comment><USER2> One of the few things that has reduced health care costs the past few decades has been the advent of HMOs. Why is that? Because HMOs give a doctor a financial incentive to keep the patient healthy.

No, I don't think I'm cynical. I'm speaking from over 15 years experience in the Critical Care business. I've worked at over 35 hospitals and medical facilities in 6 different states.

And, it's a plain fact of nature. People do what you pay them to do. Just because someone is in health care doesn't change the fact that they want to get paid. And, we should give people financial incentives to give good care. Pay them to do a good job.

A founder gets paid if their company has a successful exit. So, we bust our buts to make a successful exit for our company. Stock options reward employees for increasing the stock price. So, employees will work to increase that stock price. If you pay people per hour, they work a lot of hours. If you salary people without regards to performance, performance drops. If you pay a person per widget made, they make a lot of widgets.

I'm speaking from experience. The best ER's that I've worked in were ER's where the doctors are paid a base rate and then a bonus for performance based standards. That ensures excellent, efficient practice of medicine. Those are the ER's where the doctors push the nurses to line up more patients to be seen. The ER that I work in now is one of those. I'm working with some of the best doctors I've ever worked with.

I've worked in ER's like that where the group of doctors got paid a flat rate to staff the ER per year. So, if they understaffed the ER, they got paid more. Needless to say the patient wait times in that ER were often over 16 hours. I saw patients waiting a full 24 hours just to see a doctor for a broken arm or a gallbladder attack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh man, that story interests me, but why can't they just get to the bloody point??? I stopped reading after page two, and there still was no mentioning of a checklist...

<comment><USER5> The Boeing B-17 was an early four engine plane and was extraordinarily complicated. Previous planes were simple enough that checklists were unnecessary but the B-17 only became practical with the introduction of a pre- flight checklist. The current state of Hospital Intensive Care is compared to flying a B-17 before the checklist was used.

Empirical evidence is given about IV line infections, a major problem in ICUs. A 5 step checklist lowers the 10-day line infection rate from 11% to 0% at Johns Hopkins, an almost unbelievable result. It is confirmed over 15 months.

These results are again confirmed at an understaffed inner city hospital in Michigan with similarly dramatic results. The study from the Michigan hospital is published in the December 2006 publication of _The New England Journal of Medicine_. Despite these dramatic results, there is resistance against the increased use of checklists.

The checklist study author says he can introduce ICU checklists across America for 3 million dollars at the most. Because of the resistance in the USA, the country of Spain will be the first country to use checklists nationwide. The study author hopes that the USA will not be the last country to start using ICU checklists.

If anyone here has money to burn, lobbying for the increased use of checklists in intensive care units would get more net local social returns (in lives saved) than building Stanford a new emergency room and it would cost less money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reading this, it seems that maybe the first market for Trevor Blackwell's Anybots might be robo-nurses. Being computers, they'll be able to follow algorithms perfectly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Liability's way, way too high for that. Industrial uses where there's no chance (or a small chance) of injury to humans is a lot better application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> An incredibly powerful argument for the effectiveness of "low tech" approaches. Whether it's health care, business, or technology, it's almost always counter-intuitive. That's why it's often such a hard sell.

(Case in point at a client of mine: When the parking lot was scheduled for paving, email was sent to everyone. For whatever reason, about half didn't read it or know about it. The next time, paper notices were posted on both sides of every door. Not one person parked in the lot. Who knew?)</comment>


Ask HN: Why does Google hate us? - <AUTHOR>

We recently switched our site over to a new domain for branding reasons. Before the change we had roughly 200,000 pages in the google index.
For the rollover we submitted a new xml sitemap, set up 301's, and submitted a change of address with GWMT's.
Using GWMT's we can see that our site is consistently being crawled and that the top keywords have been extracted. It also shows that our robots.txt file is working as intended.
1 month later we still see none of our pages in the index with our new .com domain. We have other global domains (such as .cn, .de) that use the same code base and have successfully been indexed (with the same procedures above).
Has anyone else been through a similar situation? Are .com's treated different by google? Does anyone have advice for figuring out why this is happening?
edit: As a follow-up we did follow Matt Cutts guide as all of our 301's had a 1 to 1 url mapping to the new domain name. The domain itself we have owned for a couple of years, but it just was put into use recently with our Company name change. <comment><USER2> There is a step by step procedure on the blog of Matt Cutts about moving your site to a new web host/server.

<http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/>

<comment><USER3> That doesn't really apply because the article assumes you are using the domain name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I go with the assumption that the "1 to 1 mapping" you were talking about is a global 301 redirect on a wild-card page by page basis, right?

Example: oldsite.com/anypage.extension redirects to: newsite.com/anypage.extension

If that's the case, you've done everything correctly. The only other thing I may think of is your new site being on the same IP of a "bad site" in Google's eyes, but that's very unlikely.

It takes a while for Google to re-index all of its URL's, it may take 6-9 months for you to recover your organic search traffic you once had. I remember working for WashingtonPost.com as their SEO manager when one of their properties switched from budgettravelonline.com to budgettravel.com a few years ago, it took forever, but they had 20,000+ URL's

I go with the assumption that your homepage is indexed by Google, but the internal pages are taking its time switching from old URL to new URL in Google indexes? If you don't know, you can either look at it in Google's webmaster tools, or do a simple search on "site:yoursite.com" as query.

I know this isn't easy, but sit tight and wait. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> The process as you describe worked for me.

I moved from londonfgss.com to lfgss.com (as the users called it that anyway and it's nice and short for twitter URLs and for mobile entry).

Before the move I had 600,000 URLs indexed, 1 month after only 100,000 URLs, 3 months after 600,000 and 6 months later I now have over 1,000,000 URLs indexed.

The only thing that has happened is the pagerank hasn't apparently come over. But this is probably just the pagerank indicator rather than an actual loss of pagerank.

The 301's, the GWMT change, the 1 to 1 mapping... all worked really well.

That's just my experience, but anecdotally (for you) it does work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you remember how long it took before you started seeing the links with the new domain appear in Google?

<comment><USER5> That was almost immediate. The quantity was lower but it was less than a week for the new domain to be returned by Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If your site is being properly found by real people with Google, then does it matter if the search results page doesn't show the .com yet? My assumption is that anybody who wants to share your URL with somebody will do it after they've arrived at your page (as opposed to writing down the URL displayed on the SERP). The big issue with switching domains is making sure your pages can still be found, which it sounds like they are.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you think you did everything correctly and followed all of Google's webmaster guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration here:

[https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?pli=...](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?pli=1)

</comment><comment><USER8> You should mention the what the old and new urls are, that would make it easier for people to help you.

One common mistake is to robot out the 301 source, therefore making it impossible for Google to see that it's a redirect. Are you sure you're not doing that?

</comment><comment><USER9> What's the domain? It's near-impossible to tell form the information given.

</comment><comment><USER10> It depends on exacly how your transfer went.

Is is on a new server, was the new domain used before you, did it have backlins, was the 301 setup correctly, how did you check it afterwards?

<comment><USER10> Also, could be duplicate content issues with the international TLD's, how old is the new domain, any tricky browser sniffing going on...

Feel free to hit me up on twitter (@garrettgillas) if you want help on anything specific.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our business deals with content that is regional so each domain deals with data that is available only in that region. Therefore we have no duplicate data amongst the different domains. We've tried very hard to always walk a straight line regarding how are site is viewed by the search engines.

<comment><USER10> It sounds like you did everything correctly but that just one minor detail is off. I hate it when that happens.

Either way, I would have a fairly knowledgeable SEO colleague take a second look at it just to make sure nothing is missed.

A month should be more than enough time but you can try setting up some new links (from new sources) to the new domain just to see if the issue is that the new site is just being really slow on getting indexed for some reason.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: First time US employment, does the company pays the taxes or me? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I've really don't know how to search for this particular information. I'm basically don't know how the tax system in US is working.
Now I'm going to work for a new US based company and the salary is six figures. Of course there are income and federal state taxes to be paid.
Now my question is, how are these taxes being paid? Is the employer responsible of this? Or do I get all the money and I need to pay the taxes? This is really a basic question for you probably, but I'm really curious how the whole system works. <comment><USER2> You are responsible for the taxes, but an estimate of those taxes will be withheld from your paycheck. However your employer doesn't know all the details of your tax situation, so the amount withheld is not exactly correct. Each year by April 15 you file a "tax return" which calculates how much you actually owe, and you'll either get a refund or owe. (The taxes withheld from paychecks are set up so that most people get refunds.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot madcaptenor. This totally makes sense now. And what happens if I start for example in January 15, this means I'm only responsible for 3 months until April 15 right?

Also what happens when I'm absent for example for say 2 months (March,April), can I do it later?

<comment><USER3> also, you can file an extension if you don't owe money. you can use an online service to help or there are tax preparerors also. but you can probably file it your self or online.

<comment><USER4> You can file for an extension on the paperwork even if you owe money, but you need to send a payment (based on your estimate of what you owe) with your extension application, since the money is due on April 15th whether you get an extension or not. (If you significantly underestimate what you owe, you'll be charged a penalty plus interest.)

Also, to clarify what others have said: If you start work in January 2016, you will not need to file taxes in April 2016: the April 15, 2016 filing date is for taxes on income in the _previous_ year (January - December 2015). For income earned in 2016, you'll need to file taxes by April 2017.

 _" Now I'm going to work for a new US based company and the salary is six figures."_

This sounds like you'll be a regular employee of the company, which is what all the people who have replied here are assuming. However, if you're going to be paid as an independent contractor (taxes reported on a 1099 form rather than a W-2), the tax situation would be entirely different: the company won't withhold taxes and you'll be responsible for making quarterly estimated tax payments.

The agency in charge of U.S. federal taxes is the IRS, and they have a huge amount of information on their web site, [http://irs.gov](http://irs.gov), ranging from very basic introductory stuff to the most detailed information for accounting professionals. Every state also has a similar web site for their state income tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> your responsible for the taxes but money is held back in form your check so you don't owe a bunch at the end of the year. in fact if it's off to much you can owe a penalty.</comment>


How I made $3,300 on a short niche philosophy book - <AUTHOR> https://theotherlifenow.com/how-i-made-3300-on-a-short-niche-philosophy-book/ <comment><USER2> Self-publishing is a very underrated way of exchanging knowledge for money with high ROI. I'm approaching $200K in 6 months from 2 self-published info products: one is a short ebook on AWS (160 hours to produce), and the other is a video presentation about building an audience (16 hours to produce).

[https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1268622381964095488](https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1268622381964095488)

<comment><USER3> Do you spend a lot of time on marketing/sales?

<comment><USER4> I'm sure it doesn't hurt to have 35,000 followers :)

I've noticed a trend that these success stories usually flow out of an already existing user base.

Does anyone have any success stories from someone with no social media presence?

<comment><USER2> Yes, I attribute practically all my sales to having an audience. I doubt I would have sold any if I didn't have any followers.

That said, I only had 10K followers when I announced my first product, and 24K for the second. But I've seen a few people get similar results as I had even with 3-5K followers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of that time I made $200 on a short comment in HackerNews by pretending I was doing an hour of coding.

<comment><USER6> You can't say this and not include a link

<comment><USER7> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502507)

<comment><USER8> Well, that is indeed a link.

<comment><USER9> the old hacker news switcheroo, hold my sliderule, I'm going in...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51900848-based- deleuze](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51900848-based-deleuze) for anyone interested. The reviews don't seem great, for what it's worth.

And from a guy who tweets

> "Not even being provocative but if you think Greta Thunberg has the maturity > to guide global policy-making then you cannot object to Jeffrey Epstein > paying 16-year-olds for sex."

and gives courses on "how to be an intellectual".

1\. [https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1176703990056267777?lang=e...](https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1176703990056267777?lang=en)

<comment><USER11> I figure the author is here so 1. Maturity doesn't equal consent. 2\. Even if legal, consent does not equal lack of manipulation 3. It's attacking a strawman, and is inherently provocative. Provocative doesn't have to mean wrong, but in this case it fails on it's premise.

It's concerning to me the author doesn't have a basic understanding of why underage laws exist. It doesn't mean that anyone underage can't make mature decisions. It's there because it's a time ripe for abuse in a manner that's difficult to prove. Without getting very realistic, dark, and entirely off topic I can't go into details, but there are very good reasons why that exists. It doesn't mean they can't not be trusted to drive, or handle money, or whatever. There isn't a relation.

<comment><USER12> You are replying to inflammatory twitter bait in a reply to not-the-tweeter on hacker news.

Seriously, also @orf, why take this here? Clearly the impulse to reflexively argue about this is too big to handle for some. Go do this on twitter where you copied it from.

<comment><USER10> Describing the personal pilosophy of an author of a philosophy book is clearly relevant. It's not an argument, it's a statement of fact: "The author of this book holds these views".

Like most people I feel a certain way about his views but in the original comment I don't share those. If you find it uncomfortable to see those views discussed then I would humbly suggest that it may be your problem to deal with and not mine.

<comment><USER13> the author plays a game on twitter that many people do, which is 'find an apparent contradiction in the prevailing morality and make a reprehensible/funny argument with it'; robin hanson for example is the master of this game. this may not be obvious without context but it is literally just negative attention bait to gain an audience

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > writing, which was my main project for about 2 months.

> The writing itself only took about 70 hours (measured hours of focused time > actually writing, not a vague estimate of my time at the desk)

AKA: How I made slightly under $50/hr for about 2 months of work.

I don't want to take anything away from the author (I've written zero books), but it's not an indication to me of an extraordinary outcome relative to the time, effort, and expertise required.

<comment><USER15> The question, though, is how long he'll continue to make sales. I wrote my first short book on a couple of plane rides, and it has reliably done $50-100 a month in royalties since launch. I'm not doing anything at all now to maintain it, so the effective hourly rate of my time spent working on it just keeps going up.

<comment><USER16> Out of curiosity, what was the book? Seems pretty impressive to write a book in a few plane rides, good for you!

<comment><USER15> [https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Small-Apartment-Buildings- Succ...](https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Small-Apartment-Buildings- Successful/dp/1520291337)

The first version was really short, something like 80 pages and priced at $2.99, though as you can see from some reviews people apparently thought that was too short even for that price. I ended up writing what was going to be a sequel but just added it into the original and upped the price. It's been interesting to see the price elasticity of it... I actually sell about the same number of copies at $2.99 (even when it's the longer version of the book) as I do at $6.99.

<comment><USER17> Sounds like a good enough reason to test higher prices even for the short book. Some percentage of people will always complain about cost, but I (and many others) have found that you actually get _more_ of those complaints at lower price points.

At a certain threshold price: the people buying already see the value in it no matter the length, or they see the value of their time as so high that taking the time to request a refund actually has a low ROI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > It all started on June 20th, when I tweeted an idea for a short book. It > only got 6 retweets, but that was enough to take the idea seriously.

What an epic product test

</comment><comment><USER15> Very cool, congrats. I've published a couple of books on Amazon with similar levels of success ([https://www.amazon.com/Product-Management-Interview- Manager-...](https://www.amazon.com/Product-Management-Interview-Manager- Process/dp/1075470986) is the most recent), and the one thing I'd strongly recommend to you is to try Amazon advertising. It's very simple to set up and has been profitable the whole way. Nothing earth-moving; in the last month I've spent about $30 in ads and that's yielded about $80 in profit (before the cost of ads). The sales from ads also help keep your book higher in search, which can generate organic sales.

Congrats again!

<comment><USER19> Do you have any blog post on your experience of writing the book? I've got a few topics but I couldn't get started at all. Perhaps, the fear of not completing it or the # of pages I see with Packt Books (like ~300 pages). Do you have any tips for cases like this?

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately I probably don't have much of anything that'll be useful. The genesis of that book was that I was on sabbatical and had decided to get a job again, so I interviewed at a ton of places. I took a lot of notes for my own sake, and when I saw how many sales the most popular PM interview book on Amazon was getting, I figured if I even got 10% of those it'd still be worth my time to compile the notes into a book.

In terms of general tips on writing this kind of thing, I just start with a big Google Doc and start writing sections about whatever's on my mind. If I'm thinking about a particular interview question, I write about it and leave it with some kind of a note to make it easy to find when I'm searching later. Once I've got a fair amount of content, then I start organizing and filling in the rest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> as a warning to HN users unfamiliar with the author, this article should probably be taken with a grain of salt -- the guy is known to be somewhat of a jester within that very same niche philosophical community he talks about. think of him as the tai lopez of french theory internet enthusiasts

he's built a reputation basically making memes & posting hot takes on twitter for retweets, and harnessed a sort of following among people who mostly get their knowledge of philosophy through memes and fb groups. the article probably reflects more of a marketing lesson than anything else

you can judge that based on his very content: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmdWfFrevzI;](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmdWfFrevzI;) he gives a very generalized account of the eternal return (one of the central concepts in D&G's, klossowski's and nietzsche's philosophy) which probably wouldn't get a passing grade in an undergrad philosophy course

<comment><USER13> he does have many genuinely good and interesting takes; he is definitely purposefully inflammatory and i can't really evaluate his philosophy writing as someone who doesn't pay attention to any, but his blog has some excellent and well argued essays. this was my introduction to him and my favorite:

[https://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/07/13/supertoxic- masculinity/](https://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/07/13/supertoxic-masculinity/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How I made $3,000 on a short, freely-available Python tutorial ebook:

[https://leanpub.com/learn-python](https://leanpub.com/learn-python)

Spend two hours writing the tutorial, paste it into an ebook and wait ten years.

</comment><comment><USER22> > From beginning to end, I clocked 195.28 hours

Given the author made $3,300 on the book, that comes about to $16.92/hour.

</comment><comment><USER23> Are there any philosophers that make video games? I stopped playing because most games are so repetitive and intellectually boring.

<comment><USER24> Don't know, but there do seem to be philosophers that have trouble dining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I made 3x more 10 years ago on also super short and on point [http://jailfreebook.com/](http://jailfreebook.com/)

</comment><comment><USER26> The recipe seems to be to make moldbug-esque similes and exaggerations, and POOF! now people will buy your book and give it a one star rating. :)</comment>


Want a Flat Tax? I Got a Flat Tax for You - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymptosis.com/want-a-flat-tax-i-got-a-flat-tax-for-you.html

<comment><USER2> What would be the difference between such a flat tax and inflation? If you want to tax everything that is denominated in US dollars, simply print more money and allow a higher rate of inflation.</comment>


M Now Offers Suggestions to Make Your Messenger Experience More Delightful - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/04/m-now-offers-suggestions-to-make-your-messenger-experience-more-useful-seamless-and-delightful/ <comment><USER2> Fourth story down starts with 'Fuck you and die', pretty much sums it up for me. Facebook is the past, most people just haven't noticed yet.</comment>


Show HN: Colons.io – Create a pin board based off your Tweets - <AUTHOR> https://colons.io

<comment><USER2> nice work. keep it up.</comment>