Star Trek Fan Film Guidelines Announced - <AUTHOR> http://www.startrek.com/article/star-trek-fan-film-guidelines-announced <comment><USER2> As has been commented on twitter, this is a pretty draconian set of guidelines that pretty much kills all of the current fan-based efforts, including Star Trek Continues.

Paramount/CBS are idiots.

I'd suggest a boycott of the upcoming film, but people love Star Trek too much.</comment>


PHP – Deprecate implicit nullable parameters - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/3535 <comment><USER2> How much pain and time lost in debugging could have been avoided if this had been the standard from the get-go.</comment>


"If you have 1 good joke out of 10, that's a good batting average" -- Jerry Seinfeld - <AUTHOR>

<comment> daniel-cussen Part of the problem, though, is being able to pack all those jokes into a single, coherent routine.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> When asked how many new jokes he comes up with that work (or maybe it was jokes in general, between different shows.)</comment>


Kobo releases Vox e-reading tablet, based on Android 2.3 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kobobooks.com/kobo-expands-ereader-family-announces-the-new-kobo-vox-with-vivid-color-display-the-world%e2%80%99s-first-social-ereader/

<comment><USER2> Too bad. There are no pictures. It's just a press release.

Since the press release is on the Kobo books website, I'd expect something to entice me other than a page full of text, especially since they state that the device is available for pre-order today.

$199 is a steep enough price for me to want some more details before I pre- order. Hell, they didn't even put hyperlinks in the press release.

Here's a direct link to the Kobo Vox:

<http://www.kobobooks.com/kobovox>

<comment><USER3> The page don't work on a iPad... Fail.

</comment></comment><comment> a-priori If I'm not mistaken, this is the first non-eInk device that Kobo has released. They've switched to an AFFS+ screen, an LCD technology, which means that they're sacrificing battery life (they claim 7 hours, compared to weeks or months on their prior devices) and passive illumination (which is easier on the eyes in low light) for refresh time and colour gamut.

<comment><USER4> I was previously unaware of "AFFS+" screens, and I didn't find a lot of visuals on them. However, I did come across a Flickr set which claims to be a set of photos of an AFFS+ screen outdoors (which is 50% of my interest; the other is whether it is available in a matte display).

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/51608380@N05/sets/7215762661863...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/51608380@N05/sets/72157626618636999/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> now that the spec has been released and (somewhat) settled, I wonder if Kobo will support epub3.

<comment><USER6> I wonder the same thing.

In the "tech specs" page, it says the supported file formats are:

Books: ePUB, including fixed layout and enhanced ePUB. Images: JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP Audio: MP3, AAC, .3gp, mp4, m4a, flac, ogg, wav, mid. Video Formats: 3gp, mp4, webm

What does "enhanced ePUB" mean? Is it the same as EPUB 3?

The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) recently voted to elevate EPUB 3 to a final IDPF Recommended Specification. <http://idpf.org/epub3-a-final-recommendation>

"Based on HTML5, EPUB 3 adds support for rich media (audio, video), interactivity (JavaScript), global language support (including vertical writing), styling and layout enhancements, SVG, embedded fonts, expanded metadata facilities, MathML, and synchronization of audio with text and other enhancements for accessibility."

<comment><USER7> "rich media (audio, video), interactivity (JavaScript)" Great - an ebook format that is going to require virus scanning everytime want to read a book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how well this type of screen would work with a stylus as a note taking device.

</comment><comment><USER7> An Android tablet with more limited functionality for more money than other Android tablets!</comment>


The final test to become a Shaolin Master [video] - open-source-ux https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbow21FKJS4 <comment><AUTHOR> Tibetan monks have to memorize pages every day, starting as little children, and be able to recite any if it any time for the rest of their lives.

When they start they don't know what any of the words mean.

I don't understand how it is possible.

But I also don't understand how a Harlem Globetrotter can loft a ball backward, without looking, from mid-court, and sink it first try.

There is a lot I will never understand.</comment>


A better reading list with Mathematica - momo-reina http://blog.higher-order.com/blog/2015/02/08/a-better-reading-list-with-mathematica/

<comment><AUTHOR> Last year I decided to use a totally random method (after reading an interesting article linked here) to choose my next book among my huge reading list. Was weird and fun, since it let me read things I would have put off for a long time.

<comment><USER2> I've started using a semi-random method. I pick a category, take a random page, and then pick whatever book I want from the twenty books on that page. I've enjoyed it so far. It gets me to read books that I may have put off for a while, but because I'm picking the top one out of twenty they're books that I really want to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did this during that time, with iOS games. Since I work as editor for a large-ish app review portal, I have tons of games. Some I like, some I want to try... But too little time. So, I rolled a dice (well, a virtual one) to know which page and which game to try when I was in a playing mood. Doing this I "discovered" several lovely games I had hidden in my folders, I also did some huge cleanup of games I didn't like or no longer enjoyed and discovered I like backgammon enough to pick it up as one of my favourite board games (long behind go, but backgammon is faster to pick up and play on mobile.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My reading list is also very long but I'm trying to mix on books that I think I'll really really enjoy with books that are good for me (that I'll still enjoy, but not as much).

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there an IMDB Top 250 list out there ranked by percentage of 10/10 ratings instead of average rating?

<comment><USER5> In IMDb it is interesting, as you can (roughly) decompose ratings in 1s (haters), 10s (lovers) and the rest (who actually rate it). But I would say that the last part is the most important, unless you want to get the hype.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> one method that works extremely well for me is to pick a book based on Amazon's "what other customer's bought". I noticed that some of the best books I read appear in clusters that other customers/peers valued equally high</comment>


How Google Works - <AUTHOR> http://www.howgoogleworks.net/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how helpful this will be to a lot of new and aspiring business- owners. In my work, I've had to spend a lot of time reminding both engineers and business-types that You Are Not Google.

Engineers are particularly bad on this front. I've seen teams blow huge amounts of time building massive, distributed, fail-over systems, because that's what Google does. Even though the load could be handled by a couple of dedicated boxes, and existing customers are screaming for crucial functionality.

Scaling is a problem you deal with when your growth rate says you have to -- not when your servers are sitting idle, waiting for a sudden rush of customers will come any day now.

There's nothing wrong trying to learn as much as you can from a bunch of smart people, but that's not the same as copying the things that they've done because "it worked for them and they're successful now".

Statistically speaking, your company is probably a lot smaller than Google, and you have very different problems than Google does.

<comment><USER3> Don't forget the other major class of engineer problems: trying to automate the Human Interaction.

A lot of engineers (myself formerly included) think that Google emerged as a multi-billion dollar company directly from the head of Jeff Dean...ignoring the critical role that things like biz dev (getting that first yahoo deal!) played in their massive success.

One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn in life is that success has very little to do with engineering. The technical side needs to be just good enough to work. The rest comes down to marketing and networking.

<comment><USER4> > One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn in life is that success has > very little to do with engineering. The technical side needs to be just good > enough to work. The rest comes down to marketing and networking.

My understanding is that Google started getting traction because the technology savvy crowd embraced the search engine early on. This was because the search engine was built on a technology foundation that was solid and delivered great results. I think all pieces must come together to achieve success (luck being a piece) but saying engineer had little to do with Google's success doesn't seem correct to me.

I disagree.

<comment><USER3> Read Steven Levy's book ("Inside the Plex"). It provides an alternative narrative to the one most engineers believe. In particular, it says that Google had good early traction from technology people, but the Yahoo deal is what made them mainstream.

<comment><USER5> For those not old enough to remember, (I believe) this is the Google-Yahoo deal referenced: [http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066171/Yahoo- Partners-...](http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066171/Yahoo-Partners- With-Google)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The reason why it isn't available on Amazon is that it's published by Hachette.

I looked up the book on Barnes and Noble, and the publisher is listed as Grand Central Publishing.

A Google Search for "Grand Central Publishing" reveals that it's part of Hachette ([http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/publishers/grand-central- pu...](http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/publishers/grand-central- publishing/)).

<comment><USER7> Looks like the Hachette war has spilled into Audible as well, the audiobook version doesn't list Audible either.

Side note: The bottom of the page has a few interesting choice quotes: For example: ""Think 10X, not 10%. Global scale is available to just about everyone. But too many people are stuck in the old, limited mindset."

Sounds like they're describing a certain rival who only owns a fragment of the mobile OS space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Open page,

ctrl + f: 'creative' = 6 results. ctrl + f: 'engineer' = 0 results.

Oh I see, you creatives now.

I guess it's time to revise some history and let the world know that you weren't just a bunch of super smart engineers... you were creatives along!

So, do I still need to take that code test? Or can I give you that link to my portfolio page?

<comment><USER9> From the page: "Who are these smart creatives? They're the product-minded people who combine technical knowledge, business expertise, and creativity."

That doesn't seem like revising history as much as trying to sell a book. If you have the The Solution (tm), you likely have fancy non-traditional terms.

<comment><USER10> One of the lessons of business should be that "The Solution" is never found in a single book.

I honestly find this publication tacky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _The authors explain how technology has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers_

Said without a hint of irony.

<comment><USER12> It's true. Google's all encompassing centralized nature combined with Eric Schmidt open-door policy to mass surveillance (ie. 'if you have nothing to hide') and destroying privacy helped us realize we need to 'redecentralize' the internet and moved away from silos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Critics, pranksters, and culture-jammers, hurry:

 _howgoogleREALLYworks[.net|.com|.org]_

...are all still available!

<comment><AUTHOR> Forget the 'really'.

The .org is still available. Occupy Google could snatch up howgoogleworks.org, copy the .net content and do a quick and dirty parody site.

<comment><USER13> Good thing they're all at Burning Man.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is an ad the top item on Hacker News?

</comment><comment><USER15> I was hoping for something more technical.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps: [http://www.google.com/intl/en/insidesearch/howsearchworks/](http://www.google.com/intl/en/insidesearch/howsearchworks/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's pretty interesting to me that Amazon is not an available format for downloading the digital version, but iBooks is (as well as Google Play and B&N). I wonder if that is a publisher choice or an author choice?

Looks like an awesome book!

<comment><USER18> Sadly, it doesn't look like there is a .mobi version available :/

Anyone with an idea on how to get this on a Kindle?

<comment><USER19> You can convert to .mobi with programs like Calibre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Everybody who works in marketing is now rushing to update their LinkedIn profile to describe themselves as a "smart creative".

</comment><comment><USER21> A good piece of propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER22> Without the search engine, Google is nothing. Period.

<comment><USER23> I'll have to respectfully disagree. While search is their main product, with AdWords being their main source of income, Google also has maps, local, docs/drive, gmail, google play, wallet, android, etc.

While it wouldn't be a 'giant' without search, search definitely helped increase adoption of their other products and gave them revenue to invest into other things (plus their moonshots).

<comment><USER24> most of these product being ad driven,with the exception of some cloud services,though I really doubt Goggle win that much money on google/drive. It can however scan your files for "metadatas"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can't figure out what the hell this is.

</comment><comment><USER26> where is Amazon?

<comment><USER27> [https://email@example.com,-84.11...](https://email@example.com,-84.11618,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x8fa0fb3946798a95:0x7891377133490958?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I found his Google+ post related to this supremely ironic and hilarious.

[https://plus.google.com/+EricSchmidt/posts/EHwUGHrAPGi](https://plus.google.com/+EricSchmidt/posts/EHwUGHrAPGi)

<comment><USER29> Yes. All that stuff about "creatives" will age poorly, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I read "Now Google works". I thought to myself, finally!</comment>


You Might Not Need GraphQL - <AUTHOR> https://blog.runscope.com/posts/you-might-not-need-graphql#hn <comment><USER2> Reading the article, I come to the opposite conclusion. Of course I need GraphQL! I want these problems solved out of the box. I want to build on the shoulders of smart people who already solved them.

APIs are contracts. As a method of expressing those contracts, REST just doesn't have enough vocabulary and it is too simple. You have to make too many decisions on your own. That is where the "ful" comes from in RESTful :) Plenty of effort has been put into fixing this, but those tools never really received enough traction. They also fail to solve all the problems outlined in a single cohesive way. JSON-API is maybe the closest thing that currently exits.

Contrast that with GraphQL's explicit typed vocabulary. A more rigid and explicit language for API contracts. It is a godsend for writing complex APIs. Everything works out of the box. The developer friendliness also is fantastic (GraphiQL is the killer app). GraphQL places a high priority on developer and consumer UX which is something that previous iterations like SOAP and WSDL were lacking.

TLDR: GraphQL makes building complex JSON APIs easy. Sure you might not need it. But you probably want it.

<comment><USER3> Bleeding edge may look really charming, but it's really easy to get a cut.

It has a lot of niceties and advantages over traditional REST-like APIs, but... Last time I've looked (just a few months ago), the libraries weren't exactly mature-looking, e.g. prone to n+1 queries issue.

Good thing is, there are a lot of people who can experiment and improve things. Sad thing is, if you aren't such lucky, GraphQL may be not exactly something you'd want today.

<comment><USER4> Your argument is basically fear, uncertainty and doubt. Any concrete points?

<comment> vertex-four > Last time I've looked (just a few months ago), the libraries weren't exactly > mature-looking, e.g. prone to n+1 queries issue.

This point seems perfectly concrete.

<comment><USER5> the n+1 comes from the execution module of the reference implementation if you use the "default/simple" logic. But this is just a reference/general purpose implementation. No one said you can not create smarter resolvers that inspect the AST or even create your own execution module. It's possible :) and it works.

<comment> vertex-four Indeed - but there's very little in the way of good examples on how to do that effectively and in a resilient manner, last time I checked.

<comment><USER6> I find this strange, because this has been a solved problem with graphql-js for about 18 months now, and provided as a core feature in other implementations such as Sangria in Scala. I've written about this particular problem, calling out solutions that exist in different languages:

[https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/optimizing-your-graphql-requ...](https://dev- blog.apollodata.com/optimizing-your-graphql-request- waterfalls-7c3f3360b051?source=linkShare-913ef66da585-1492188730)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You might not need REST either. Or SOAP. Or gRPC. Or a formal API at all.

You might not need any of these things. But you do need _something_. If any of them are as easy as any other to implement, then why not choose the most capable one?

GraphQL isn't as easy as the others to implement. But its not that much harder with the help of Apollo or something similar in other languages. And its much more capable.

Great article, though.

</comment><comment><USER8> As pointed out in the comments, this section is spot on:

"That said, I do of course think having all of these concepts implemented and documented in one single "package" like GraphQL is super handy. GraphQL removes the arguing or confusion about what is "the most RESTful way to do something", as it has a spec and example implementations."

Most reasonably complex rest apis have some version of GraphQL build into them. So in a way GraphQL is just standardising existing practices.

<comment><USER9> No the article is right OData offers most of what graphQL has now since 2012. Honestly aside of the HATEOAS principle (see ion).

But the key difference is the community engagement and corporate sponsorship, OData had only a lukewarm support from Microsoft and others like SAP. And aside Apache Olingo there isn't much left in library support. (Trust me I'm sad to have to write this).

GraphQL on the other hand is drawing both community and corporate support including full support from FB. Time will tell if this will diminish, but the support seems to mimick the success with golang.

<comment><USER10> And speaking of OData, is there any good side by side comparison of OData and GraphQL?

<comment><USER9> I saw this slide deck [https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/SumitSarkar10/rest- api-deb...](https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/SumitSarkar10/rest-api-debate- odata-vs-graphql-vs-ords)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> GraphQL might not be the new standard for web, but for sure it has great influence on how we are seeing future of client-server communication.

</comment><comment><USER12> Issues with GraphQL -

\- the GQL server in practice is still going to have fixed contracts/endpoints, because arbitrary queries are a risk. This is what FB recommends as well

\- there is no help in actually implementing the server end to end, since its just really a wrapper over the actual calls that need to be made. Apollo seems to be the new standard way to do this.

\- Mutations/subscriptions are still a work in progress

<comment><USER13> Even though subscriptions are very much in progress from a specification point of view, the community came up with different approaches that are already employed in practice.

Here are some additional resources:

\- RFC for GraphQL subscriptions: [https://github.com/facebook/graphql/pull/267](https://github.com/facebook/graphql/pull/267)

\- How to use Subscriptions in GraphiQL: [https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/how- to-use-subscriptions-in-...](https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/how-to-use- subscriptions-in-graphiql-1d6ab8dbd74b)

\- Using GraphQL Subscriptions with Apollo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo9XFmW0W2c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo9XFmW0W2c)

If you want to use GraphQL subscriptions right now, I encourage you to try out our demo over at [https://demo.graph.cool/worldchat/](https://demo.graph.cool/worldchat/). I work at Graphcool :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I still don't understand why protocol buffers never quite "took off".

</comment><comment><USER15> Dumb question, because I haven't spent enough time to figure it out, but how do you do _writes_ in GraphQL ?

I know how to do those in REST, but trying to Google it for GraphQL is darn near impossible.

<comment><USER2> In graphQL they are called mutations [http://graphql.org/graphql-js/mutations- and-input-types/](http://graphql.org/graphql-js/mutations-and-input-types/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do automated bank transfers take X "business" days? - <AUTHOR>

I'm fighting with a transfer to an Amazon account from my bank, and it frustrates the hell out of me that it takes "5-7 business days". I initiated the transfer almost a week ago, and it's almost 5pm on a Friday, meaning it probably won't complete until next week.
Ok, I can understand that it has to take a little time, but the "A" in ACH stands for Automated. Why does a computer care whether it's Tuesday at 9am or Sunday at 1130pm? Execute the transfer and mark it complete. Case closed.
It just seems ridiculous to me that automated transfers are restricted by business days/hours, and the overall slow speed in general irritates the crap out of me. <comment><USER2> Doesn't happen in the UK anymore, since 2008 most UK banks have been part of the "Faster Payments Service" which means interbank transfers generally happen within 2 hours.

At the time it happened banks considered charging for the new faster service as it meant they would lose out on the interest they would otherwise earn from the slower transfer. So I'm guessing that's the same reason US banks are reluctant for faster transfers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most banks pool their ACH transfers at the end of a business day. Then the ACH tabulates the transfers for the day and sends them to the destination bank.

There is usually a hold when receiving funds for "security reasons".

</comment><comment><USER4> Previous rant on this topic: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=949027>

Unfortunately, we didn't come up with any good answers.

</comment><comment><USER5> An ACH is basically an electronic check. Like a check it has to be routed through a Fed bank on its path to clearing, and it can also be stopped like a real check.

A wire is more instant (usually less than 24 hours), more direct, and more expensive. A wire cannot be recalled by the sender without agreement by the recipient.</comment>


Neovim Configuration and Plugins in Fennel Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://oli.me.uk/neovim-configuration-and-plugins-in-fennel-lisp/ <comment><USER2> For some time, I happen to use a machine with very very meh CPU performance. Turns out, popular scripting languages are slow, except for Lua. (And maybe also Perl, didn't check yet.) I thought that JS has fast start-up, but some Lua scripts of mine that do file IO are finished in less time than Node's 'hello world'.

I now wish people used Lua everywhere instead of JS, Python or Ruby. Some are doing desktop programming in JS, for personal productivity software, like Alfred alternatives Zazu and Cerebro. Eeeeh nah, productivity software needs to be _fast_. Would be lots better to do that in Lua. And it's certainly a better idea for editor plugins than using Python.

Fennel transpiles code to Lua so fast that it's feasible for scripting, even on my machine.

I believe also that Lua might be able to do true parallelism, via libraries. (Haven't tried yet, though.)

<comment><USER3> I build Lua programs in prod. I use fennel or moonscript as the frontend, and everything runs on openresty (cli tools using resty and servers using the full stack).

Parallelism is enabled by a data flow architecture on top on nginx workers (compare TPL Dataflow in C# or Intel TBB in C++).

Concurrency is enabled using coroutines (nginx threads). It's virtually impossible to write blocking code and that's without any async or other bs in sight.

It's really fcking fast. Like, some parts of the overall arch are rust, but in the real, io bound world there's virtually no speed difference. Of course safety is good. But you get types and other neat zero cost abstractions for Lua using Haxe.

This Dataflow architecture also benefits from openresty built in concurrency safe queues, maps etc with atomic commit and cross worker access. Everything feels so damn effortless. I didn't have to do any work on making it scale. Just tweak the number of workers knob and boom, almost linear benefit. That's for rust and Lua, both awesome at parallelism in this case.

Anyway, even though I never write pure Lua, I still think it should have won against python (man did we try, even riding that ML wave).

I'm in love, but me is not many.

<comment><USER4> What sort of queueing mechanism do you use? I've bee trying to get into OpenResty but there are few documented examples of that kind of thing, and anything that does Dataflow is interesting to me.

<comment><USER3> Bidirectional queues are built-ins in openresty[1]. The scheduler is project- specific and uses that.

[1] - [https://openresty- reference.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Lua_Ngi...](https://openresty- reference.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Lua_Nginx_API/#ngxshareddictlpush)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fennel is a Lisp that transpiles to Lua.

One of Neovim's goals is to make Lua a first-class citizen. Eventually, it will be possible to replace your init.vim with an init.lua. Making an init script in Fennel sounds like a great way to bring Emacs ideas to Vim, like how Emacs' evil-mode brought Vim ideas to Emacs.

Recently, Neovim got an official client for the Language Server Protocol merged into master. All the example configurations[0] are written in Lua.

[0]: [https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lsp](https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lsp)

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting to see. The Vim people at work are constantly harrasing us two Emacs users, claiming that lisp is old and silly, and that vimscript is good. Maybe change is acoming.

<comment><USER7> That sounds really strange to me. Even amongst major vim users and proponents I have never heard anyone say vimscript is good.

Maybe I don't get out enough.

<comment><USER5> Vimscript is good for setting simple configurations, but bad for large/complex software.

The Neovim team found that Lua seems to do both pretty well and has a fast implementation (LuaJIT), so they're trying to get Lua to be Neovim's primary extension language. Python and Javascript also seem to be popular languages for Neovim extensions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well I know what I'm wasting next weekend on now.

<comment><USER9> Glad I could be of assistance :D (sorry in advance for any time lost to Lisp fun times)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Standard Vim has support for Lua bindings. Does anyone know of a reason this wouldn't be applicable there as well?

<comment><USER9> Oh does it? Nice! I am a 100% Neovim user so I focus on that but if this works in Vim 8+ with minimal changes I'm totally open to pull requests to support / document it!

<comment><USER10> If I can find some time, maybe I will take a pass at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is why I don't use neovim. VimScript is god awful (emacs lisp is also a pretty bad lisp imo), but this is just adding additional layers of complexity for no measurable gain in value. If I wanted to transpile to an equally bad scripting language and talk over RPC I'd just go become a front end developer (those web devs are out of control). I just want vim to start quickly, not crash, and generally get out of my way. Vimscript is good enough for any sort of scripting/plugins I want/need and I know it's going to just work.

<comment><USER12> > This is why I don't use neovim ... this is just adding additional layers of > complexity for no measurable gain in value

It's a plugin. It is not shipped with Neovim.

> I just want vim to start quickly, not crash, and generally get out of my way

That's a very low bar, which indicates you definitely aren't Neovim's target audience. If you're happy with Vim, carry on.</comment></comment>


Serious Money Is Warming to Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/serious-money-warming-bitcoin/ <comment><USER2> My understanding of this appeal to institutional investors is that it's simply a good risk-reward macro speculation play. A decent amount of macro folks are forecasting some sort of monetary crisis or at least significant inflation in the years ahead.

In the scenario that there is a full-blown crisis that requires a currency reset rather than just restructuring, what are we resetting to? Assign probabilities to gold, silver, a new fiat currency, or cryptocurrency. Given the small market cap of Bitcoin, a small investment would pay off incredibly well if that's where the chips fall down the line.

At a market cap of ~180 Billion USD, Bitcoin has a market cap similar to Pepsi Co. The USD monetary base is something like $4000 Billion and all gold ever mined is worth about $7500 Billion. Of the three, Bitcoin is a growth play plain and simple. Even if it's the least likely system of the future, a probability above 0 means institutions will likely buy some as a hedge. (Edit: That is, if institutions are ever allowed to. Many pension funds in Europe are forced to buy negative-yielding government bonds... sigh.)

</comment><comment><USER3> This article talks about "the crypto industry" and mentions things like "institutional investment in crypto" and so on.

It's odd that in an article so detailed there's just no mention of the fact that there are no fundamentals whatsoever to any of these things, and they've been used almost entirely for speculation since inception.

Where's the actual industry? In what are these institutions investing?

<comment><USER4> Bitcoin was designed to be honest and sound money. In the way that gold once was. Contrary to the way fiat money is.

For now, the fundamentals are simple: supply side is fixed and known, and demand is speculation.

In the ideal case for bitcoin, over time, people will gradually use bitcoin more for actual commerce. As this adoption increases, liquidity increases, and price becomes less volatile. The speculation we have now is the necessary first step on that road, because it gives bitcoin a price (i.e. props it up) and gives it some liquidity.

People complaining that bitcoin is just for crime are slandering it.

People complaining that it has no intrinsic value don't understand that nothing in the world has intrinsic value, including gold. Intrinsic value is bad monetary theory derived from bad philosophy.

<comment><USER3> > nothing in the world has intrinsic value, including gold

This is incorrect. Both Western Europe and uncontacted pre-Colombian America considered gold extremely valuable for use as jewelry. That's what intrinsic value means, people value it for what it actually is.

And nobody says bitcoin is exclusively used for crime. In practice it is used both for crime and financial speculation.

<comment><USER5> > ... considered gold extremely valuable for use as jewelry. That's what > intrinsic value means, people value it for what it actually is.

Oh. So that's why most gold in the world was made into jewlery and is held by jewlery afficiandos. /s

Yes. Gold has some intrinsic value but to determine how much that intrinsic value influences the price it is enough to look at how much of gold is used for its intrinsic value.

Intrinsic value of bitcoin is its ability to transfer value to any place on earth through internet in reasonable time at affordable price without trusted third party.

You can see how much value of bitcoin comes from that by looking at how much bitcoin is used for this purpose. The rest comes from the same place that the rest of gold value comes from, scarcity and durability.

<comment><USER6> I thought india n china , especially india, really bought gold as jewellery.

[https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/gold-supply-and-demand- sta...](https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/gold-supply-and-demand-statistics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure where the sentiment came from (I probably read the article to quickly?) It sounds as if coinbase now had a larger share because a major company switch moved their existing assets.

</comment><comment><USER8> Retail is serious money. I'm actually quite happy that Bitcoin has more retail investors than institutional, and I hope it stays that way (a few billion dollars of institutional money at this point is not important).</comment>


What Happened to the American Boomtown? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/upshot/what-happened-to-the-american-boomtown.html?submit=true <comment><AUTHOR> The article focuses on how economically difficult it is to get find housing in once highly growing cities.

Here are the article's closing thoughts:

"""

"A policy that aimed at reducing barriers to locational choice would outperform anything in the tax reform bill."

For the most part, the federal government doesn't have the power to create that policy. But local cities and suburbs do.

"""</comment>


More paywalls: Hulu monthly fees & YouTube rentals - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/business/93740/more-paywalls-hulu-monthly-fees-youtube-rentals <comment><USER2> First thought: I think it would be great if Hulu offered expanded offerings for a monthly price while keeping the current service free.

Second thought: As much as Netflix is great, the library available for streaming still is very sparse when it comes to movies, and even televisions shows Hulu has a lot of shows Hulu doesn't.</comment>


New ThinkPad X1 Carbon Ultrabook - <AUTHOR> http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-carbon/

<comment><AUTHOR> The good news is that it is available now with an attractive screen resolution of 2560 x 1440. The bad news is that Lenovo still has not settled their changes of the keyboard layout. Look at the keyboard ([http://www.lenovo.com/images/gallery/1060x596/lenovo- laptop-...](http://www.lenovo.com/images/gallery/1060x596/lenovo-laptop- thinkpad-x1-carbon-2-keyboard-3.jpg)):

* F keys are now not physical keys any more!? One step back from the good old accessible design. No way to sense the keys without looking at the keyboard.

* They completely removed the Capslock key replacing it with Home and End keys. For this change I am kind of open because I never use Capslock and agree that it makes sense to reuse it. At the same time it happens that I occasionally press Capslock instead of shift, which is not a big deal because you can just backspace and retype the wrong words. But if it now becomes Home|End it will mean that your cursor will just go to the beginning|end of the line and you will have much more difficulties to come back to where you are.

* And then between the Right-Alt and Control they have moved the tilde and backtick key. It makes ESC now easier to reach, but for touch typers it will mean to re-educate and you will not be able to easily switch computers.

I am sad that they changed the keyboard layout. I would have ordered this machine, will go with a T440s instead. Maybe Lenovo will finally find the best keyboard layout and stop changing it.

Would love to see how good this machine is supported by Linux.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, looks like screen resolutions are _finally_ on the move again. About damn time!</comment></comment>


How Plex is doing HTTPS for all its users - <AUTHOR> https://blog.filippo.io/how-plex-is-doing-https-for-all-its-users/ <comment><USER2> ... to position themselves with access to everything on your computer and everything you watch and everything in your catalog and details on every device accessing your computer, when their server and client software has no ongoing dependency on them.

<comment><USER3> Did you read the article?

They vouch for the certificate signing request, they don't proxy the traffic.

This is an insane privacy win against your ISP, not some obscure centralization evil scheme.

<comment><USER2>
        me <-secure-> Plex Inc <-then-> ????

They have secured one segment.

You have nothing within your independently maintained libraries, usage, computer or devices that _depends_ on sending anything to anyone.

They retain remote access to your computer.

Not a privacy win.

<comment><USER3> Really, read the article.

It's

        you <-secure-> you

<comment><USER2> I should have been more clear. I was talking about additional connectivity to plex.tv and others.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Researchers reverse bacterial resistance to antibiotics - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/researchers-reverse-bacterial-resistance-to-antibiotics?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=25c9e284af-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6de721fb33-25c9e284af-281895037 <comment><USER2> Pretty interesting!

tldr: Instead of trying a random sequence of antibiotics, the authors present "a precise, ordered schedule of antibiotics that doctors could rely on and know that in the end, resistance will be reversed, and an antibiotic will work"

That optimal scheduling is found using the probability of mutations of the bacteria

</comment><comment><USER3> This rotation of mechanisms of action to undo resistance is already widely practiced in agriculture with pesticides. It is part of the reason why organic agriculture and its heavy use of pesticides with low rotation is so problematic.

(In the crops I work most in, organic farmers spray a lot more than conventional farmers on balance. As surprising as that might be to people outside of agriculture.)

<comment><USER4> I must admit that I don't really have the background to process your comment.

Can you... give a paragraph or two on what normal is and what organic farmers are doing differently to cause the difference?

<comment><USER5> I'm confused too - I thought 'organic' meant no pesticides were used.

<comment><USER6> It depends quite considerably on which country you're in. In the UK 'organic' is heavily regulated and means pretty much that, in the U.S it's more lax. But my guess is that the poster is saying that because organic farmers have a much smaller range of less potent sprays available, they have to spray more by volume.

<comment><USER7> Hmmm.. you'd be surprised, mate; I did spend time in the West part of England and the occasional use of artificial pesticide was not uncommon especially when your top soil has been washed away and been battered due to flooding/erosion like it was in 2014 during those storms.

Organic is a label, that while better than conventional is not to be blindly accepted as a panacea--that is why the community part of CSA should not be forgotten.

<comment><USER6> I would be surprised, yes. There is a very short list of pesticides that can be used and a slightly longer list that can be used with specific permission.

Which pesticides were being used on your farm? And did the farm lose organic certification.

But even more - what has pesticide use got to do with top-soil loss? I'm not quite clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For many conditions you can't simply rotate antibiotics. Antibiotics have specific targets and different efficacious for reasons that are entirely unrelated to the reasons that bacteria develop resistance, not to mention different pharmacokinetic and other biological properties.

This is something that looks great in a lab but may be very difficult if not often impossible to implement in practice.

</comment><comment><USER9> And what's the probability your patient will be as well ordered taking their antibiotics? Failing to complete courses is one of the reasons these resistant strains emerge in the first place.

Very cool science!! Real-world applicability? TBD.

<comment><USER10> Most patients who are subject to resistant strain bacterial infection wind up in hospital quicker. I suspect this research is mainly aimed at either serious/critical acute care or debilitating chronic care situations which tend to be costly not only in monetary terms but also in life and death terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are some really neat things going on here! If you're interested in this, check out a paper by one of my old mentors: Darwinian evolution can follow only very few mutational paths to fitter proteins. ([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16601193](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16601193)) In general, the more deleterious a mutation, the more mutational paths we see for escaping a local minima. (The rate of compensatory mutation in the DNA bacteriophage phiX174 [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15911582](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15911582))

</comment><comment><USER12> Journal article here: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122283)

<comment><USER7> If we're throwing peer reviewed journals, I'd like to add this the mix because its siting in front of my desk:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2364932/pdf/MBD-...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2364932/pdf/MBD-01-467.pdf)

(Check out the more recent citations for further reading)

I'm not diminishing the danger of super bacteria, and I believe being in hospitals is perhaps just as bad as being in some war zone in terms of mortality if you're immuno-compromised or recovering from a disease/surgery, but I find it odd (not really, I've seen the self-defeating internal machinations of academia/pharma with my own eyes) that the advent of using silver as an anti-microbial is so neglected in the narrative; Bosch uses it in Germany in their refrigerators, and companies like DeRoyal sell gauze dressings specifically stated for that purpose.

<comment><USER13> I dont think that I've ever seen the idea of silver being antimicrobial be neglected. We use burn dressings that are almost completely impregnated with silver, silver nitrate q-tips to stop bleeding(ouch), as well as topical ointments with some silver in it. Silver is pretty widely used in the medical field.

<comment><USER7> Really? Well, consider you have reiterated one of the ubiquitous applications that I mentioned in my argument, but the use of it to combat the super- bacteria is never considered in these studies; I believe this is more by design than not--in fact I found its absence particular lacking when I was finishing up my studies during the so-called 'pandemic' with H1N1. It was beyond absurd the hysteria that ensued, but perhaps more concerning was the blind and dogmatic line of thinking that occurred that surrounded it all--a (ill founded) faith based confidence in big pharma to solve everything, in this case: Gillenad sciences headed by Don Rumsefeld.

I thought the pervasive theory about how it 'spontaneously emerged in nature' incredibly suspect considering I was completing my courses in Microbio and Biochem and working extensively with bacteriophages to create anti-biotic resistant e. coli with limited success under controlled lab conditions... then I realized my university-health sciences department was heavily funded by a major hospital. And all for something that was patented by Baxter:

[http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/276194](http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/276194) [http://www.globalresearch.ca/big-pharma-baxter-files- swine-f...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/big-pharma-baxter-files-swine-flu- vaccine-patent-a-year-ahead-of-outbreak/14430)

So I find the use of silver nano-partical therapy, oral or sub-lingual administration or atomized silver inhalation methods are acutely lacking as possible means to combat anti-biotic resistant bacteria/infections, as well as viruses and fungi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is brilliant. One of those things that seem obvious once presented.</comment>


Gene that makes human brain unique identified by scientists - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/26/gene-that-makes-human-brain-unique-identified-by-scientists

<comment><USER2> Wow - a mouse with a human brain! Better make two - one's a genius, the other one's insane. Never knew which was which.</comment>


A scientist must go where the evidence leads - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/a-scientist-must-go-where-the-evidence-leads/ <comment><USER2> Even in research, when everyone else is zigging, it may be time to start zagging and pursue alternatives. Neural nets have a lot of attention, but maybe competitors will show sufficient promise once enough research is done. For example, Factor Tables:

[https://github.com/RowColz/AI](https://github.com/RowColz/AI)

Most of the research on early semiconductors focused on germanium. Manufacturers got pretty good at preparing it, but some started looking to silicon as a promising alternative. Germanian had a _head start_ due to experience, but silicon research started paying off after a while. Lesson: the early leader may not be the best finisher.

<comment><AUTHOR> e.g. Blu-Ray v VHS

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised disks are still as prevalent as they are for music and movies. Thumb-drives should have replaced them years ago. Perhaps there are copyright- related reasons holding it back?

<comment><USER3> > Thumb-drives should have replaced them years ago. Perhaps there are > copyright-related reasons holding it back?

IIRC, thumb drives are far more unreliable and unstable than discs.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps because manufactures are sloppy. Redundancy perhaps could be added, but consumers don't seem to reward it yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The discipline of science (and its sibling mathematics) has been one of the great achievements of human civilization. It has been so astonishingly successful, we can't even fathom there being any phenomena beyond its reach, given enough time and enough foundational understanding. Because I like to stretch my mind in uncomfortable directions, I often wonder: is there something else? Something that can lead us to Truth other than mathematics and science? Has human civilization gotten stuck in a local maximum where it appears as though we now have a means for understanding the entire universe, but there is another whole level we are as yet too primitive to reach? I worry that as a species we haven't spent enough time trying to answer this question.

<comment><USER5> It sounds like you may mean philosophy. You are getting philosophical, being meta..(although I'm suspicious of capitalizing things like 'Truth') Philosophy asks "What is X?" e.g. what is science, how does it work? Tries to understand things. When the answers philosophy gets in an area become complete enough, that area is called science/maths/logic etc.. That happened with science itself, which used to be 'natural philosophy'. Also, if there was some new way discovered for increasing scientific-type knowledge, it would itself become a part of science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think a better way to state this is:

If you're not going where the evidence leads then you are not a scientist.

Too often we're using the wrong words, and that further complicates an always complex process (i.e., human communication). Other words that are also often misused are: leader and journalist.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, pretty much. There seems to be a misconception in some circles that pseudoscientific ideas, religious faith, etc are outright despised by 'scientists' because they somehow go against some naturalistic order or something rather than because the evidence for them isn't there/happens to be weak. It's basically the basis for the old 'flat Earth atheist' trope, the idea that fictional scientists will turn up their noses at claims of magic or ghosts or gods because they're 'not real', even if said universe has them clearly existing.

But this isn't how science works. A 'scientist' who ignores evidence because they don't want something to be true isn't a good scientist, and doesn't act at all like a real life one would. If clear evidence for Bigfoot or Nessie or whatever else was found, it'd become a normal part of science. If we suddenly saw religious style miracles occur in plain sight with no other possible explanation, the idea of a miracle would become a scientific concept that we'd try and study. And in the worlds of say, the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Ghostbusters or the Legend of Zelda or whatever other franchise with things that don't exist in real life, those elements would be scientific in their universes too, with their scientists and academics studying them and their literature treating them like everyday things.

But yeah, despite certain fiction tropes and complaints from certain corners, science is about what the evidence says, not about some hard nosed disdain for anything not seen as 'logical'.

<comment><USER3> > If we suddenly saw religious style miracles occur in plain sight with no > other possible explanation, the idea of a miracle would become a scientific > concept that we'd try and study.

I disagree. Even if miracles happened and were observed, I think they'd likely still be outside the realm of scientific study and would therefore remain unscientific concepts. Science is built around the assumptions that mechanistic and predictable processes are being studied, but an actual religious miracle would be preformed by an transcendent agent who is likely aware of all attempts to predict its actions and can react to and influence those predictions, breaking the assumptions. The only secular discipline that could really study them would probably be history.

However, if you replace miracles with Harry Potter-style magic, I think your point stands.

<comment><USER7> Hmm, good point. I guess miracles if they happened would be an interesting kind of beast, since they obviously wouldn't follow any sort of standard logic. That might definitely make them difficult to study, especially compared to other, more logical (but non existent) possibilities like the undead or Harry Potter style magic.

But I guess scientists would still accept they're a thing that exists if they did provably happen, even if there was no logical framework for explaining or studying it.

<comment><USER3> > But I guess scientists would still accept they're a thing that exists if > they did provably happen, even if there was no logical framework for > explaining or studying it.

I think they could, but not as scientists wearing their science-hats. They'd only be able to accept the miracles as individuals with personal experience or as people who trust the historical record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Rather than softening our interpretation of a conflict between our models > and new evidence, we should always seek the simplest explanation and be > willing to abandon failed models.

Sure, but what is exactly is "evidence"? The word is used as if observational data has no ambiguity or subjectivity is the way it is defined.

The book, Range (Epstein), had a great example of this in discussing the Challenger explosion in the last chapter.

The premise: several engineering teams in Nasa had a working theory/model about O-ring susceptibility to cold whether. However, their model was not backed up by the evidence available. Nasa made the call to launch based on data alone.

Why? the evidence collected for decision-making was incomplete and poorly presented. Range presents a thesis that over-reliance on a quantitative thinking can lead to optimization of the wrong thing and actually inhibits learning.

Related, "The Challenger: An Information Disaster" [https://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html](https://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html) \- Tufte's re-examination of the Challenger disaster.

</comment><comment><USER9> What's the subtext of this column?

<comment><USER10> The current state of Physics research, as far as I can tell:

 _[if such and such then] ... physicists should move on to consider alternatives and admit that our original concepts of "naturalness" might have been wrong._

"naturalness" as in: [http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/11/naturalness-is- dead...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/11/naturalness-is-dead-long- live.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like it, especially the constant referal to checking models against results.

For me (and I suspect many others), this is the key to making a convincing argument about the state of climate change. It seems we have lots of headlines (and guesses) about exactly how bad things are, but nobody seems able to correctly forecast even a year or two out.

I think a short pattern of correct predictions would really, really deserve attention.

</comment><comment><USER12> In my mind any perversion of this truth undermines the very credibility of the scientific discipline. For if our scientific leaders are swayed by forces other than facts, how can we be surprised when public opinion turns on science? One of my favorite quotes that resonates with this piece is by John Maynard Keynes:

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

EDIT: to address the possibility that the Keynes quote is apocryphal, here is another (also possibly apocryphal!) quote I enjoy:

"In God we trust, all others bring data" \- W. Edwards Deming

<comment><USER13> Apologies, since I don't want to derail your point, but there is little evidence that Keynes ever said that:

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change- mind/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change-mind/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Too many religious people that I know think that scientists have it out for them and/or are conspiring against them. Enough articles like this and it will prove their point for them (the statement equating being irreligious with acting like an adult), even though I don't think it's true of scientists as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER15> > There are major aspects of our life that remain unexplained, leaving > professional scientists with the choice of whether to accept the general > notion that they will also be resolved one day by the scientific method. ... > This ambiguous state of affairs explains why some of the best scientists are > religious.

This to me reflects huge deficit in the author's thinking and perception.

It also reflects a common sentiment and so reflects a common deficit in many people's thinking and perception, especially in the contemporary Western world.

At some point in history, Science and Religion _both_ got tricked into a debate -- both got tricked into thinking that their propositions somehow exist in the same domain when they do not. Their domains are mutually exclusive and yet the conversation continues stupidly (on _both_ sides) as if they were.

So a Scientist will say the Resurrection never happened and proceed with their proof leveraging physics and biology. The Scientist makes the first mistake by trying to engage on these grounds, as if any of that fundamentally mattered to the Religious person. The Religious person, not recognizing the flub, takes the bait, and tries to answer the Scientist using the scientific vocabulary (the internet is not short on religious apologists doing just this.)

The Religious makes this mistake because they are tricked into thinking that Truth is a pure function of propositions in scientific terms. They are tricked into this rhetoric, at least. They are not fully tricked, though, because after debating on these grounds (and likely losing -- b/c after all Science owns those terms, and brought them to the table), the Religious person will still go home and pray, will still go home and live according to the mimetic behaviors of the characters within their faith.

What a Religious person derives from their beliefs has nothing -- _zero_ , _nothing_ \-- to do with the measurable/observable particle interactions of the material world. Even if they say it does, self-reports are not to be trusted here.

What a Scientist derives from their observations has nothing -- _zero_ , _nothing_ \-- to do with how they approach the world and others in the way of morality, pursuit of contented life, etc. Again self-reports are not to be trusted here.

Corollary to this is that _everybody_ is Religious and _everybody_ is Scientific, and plays the card when its needed.

<comment><USER16> >Their domains are mutually exclusive and yet the conversation continues stupidly (on both sides) as if they were.

This may be true in principle, but your whole argument falls apart because religion _does_ make assertions about the real physical world. They (taking here the example of Christianity) they postulate miracles, divine intervention, life after death, an unlikely and unsubstantiated cosmology, not to mention of course stories about the creation of the universe or biblical floods which have conveniently become "metaphorical" after it became plain enough that they were nothing but fabrication. So your premise is not true, and that is where the whole friction comes from.

EDIT: Engagement rather than downvotes would be appreciated :)

<comment><USER17> I agree with your central thesis, but I doubt one of your other points:

> not to mention of course stories about the creation of the universe or > biblical floods which have conveniently become "metaphorical" after it > became plain enough that they were nothing but fabrication.

People hold (and have held) various beliefs about Christian theology and proper interpretation of scripture. E.g., you rightly point out problems with a literal 6-day interpretation of creation, but St. Augustine and others [0] were skeptical of that interpretation well before modern archaeological methods and/or carbon dating.

So I think it's helpful to look closely at just a handful of testable claims, that cut across many different theologies, denominations, and interpretations.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegorical_interpretations_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegorical_interpretations_of_Genesis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Was there a point to this essay?

You can figure out the ingredients to a soup two ways: taste it and guess based on experience or use fractional distillation too separate and identify the compounds. What a poor analogy.

<comment><USER19> It's an analogy for the second law of thermodynamics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics). The point is that it's "challenging" and that complex events "evade a straightforward explanation". That "challenge" is our intuitive experience of the directional arrow of entropy. A similar analogy would be to consider the difficulty of un-cracking an egg. Also, imagine comparing one bowl of soup to another bowl which was made just from tasting (or distilling) the first. Intuitively these are not likely to taste the same, otherwise a notable episode of Seinfeld would be invalidated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What if the evidence is deemed offensive by a mob because they don't like the scientific findings?

Or what if the scientist has personal beliefs or opinions that are disagreeable to some?

And what if the evidence is politically toxic?

<comment><USER21> Assuming "evidence" in this context is something that has been sufficiently scrutinized and no alternative hypotheses pass muster, why would any of those three things matter? And if you're leaving open the possibility that the evidence in your hypothetical situation is wrong, then what is the point of your question?

The universe is what it is regardless of what we think of it. When we attain better understanding of the truth of things, we need to adapt to the truth. It is literally insane to do otherwise.

Fortunately, we are also part of the universe, so better understanding also grants us tools to change things more to our liking.

<comment><USER22> > why would any of those three things matter?

Because the public is not scientific, and scientists generally rely on explicit or at least tacit approval of the public to do their work.

<comment><USER23> Most basic science is funded by the government, at least in the US, whose money in turn comes from taxes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NGINX Plus vs. F5 BIG-IP: A Price-Performance Comparison - <AUTHOR> https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-plus-vs-f5-big-ip-a-price-performance-comparison/ <comment><USER2> Nice but: \- admin interface? For having managed plenty of Apache servers running as reverse proxy servers, it's nice to have a GUI when there are hundreds of rules you can mess^Wfuck with \- high end appliance? I mean it's cool 2 Nginx Plus running on 2 R730 can have the same RPS than one 11050 but then how do you route traffic to these 2 Nginx servers?</comment>


Show HN: Search within the text of 50,000 Project Gutenberg books with NLP - <AUTHOR> https://bookengine.colorsleep.com/ <comment><USER2> Which model are you using?

<comment><AUTHOR> Google's pretrained BERT Base Uncased!

<comment><USER2> It's uncanny!</comment></comment></comment>


Behind the scenes – Injection molding - <AUTHOR> http://blog.openbeamusa.com/2012/05/18/behind-the-scenes-injection-molding/

<comment><USER2> If you have always had an urge to mold something (small) of your own, and if you are near the Bay Area, Techshop has classes and equipment for reasonable prices:

Injection Molder: [http://techshop.ws/class_signup.html?a=1&i=43224759](http://techshop.ws/class_signup.html?a=1&i=43224759)

Tormach CNC Mill: [http://techshop.ws/class_signup.html?a=1&i=43094304](http://techshop.ws/class_signup.html?a=1&i=43094304)

<comment><USER3> Interesting.

How does this compare to 3D printing on demand?

<comment><USER4> 3d Printing is better suited for prototyping and Injection molding is where you take it once you need a bunch of parts made because a 3d print can take minutes/hours, while an injection molded part takes seconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Weird timestamp on some of the pictures: DD/MM/YYYY?

The image management by the molder is interesting: they're named _Western_ Tool and Mold, and make a big deal about being run by an American; but of course they're based in Hong Kong.

<comment><USER6> DD/MM/YYYY is the most common date format across the world. You can't seriously expect that because one American is involved that the a whole company (who will work with suppliers and end users of any numbers in any number of places) will work on the date format of the country he grew up in.

<comment><USER7> For sorting purposes, I prefer YYYY-MM-DD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I loved polymer technology classes and labs at university. It's an incredibly fascinating domain. If I have I stayed in mechanical engineering, I would have definitely specialised in polymers.

</comment><comment><USER9> I injection mold the BrickCase (smallworks.com)

It's very cool.

<comment><USER10> Is there a gallery of Brickcase contraptions people have built? Can you do stuff like build lego robots with iPhones embedded?</comment></comment>


Twitter blocks neo-Nazi account to users in Germany - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19988662

<comment><USER2> Well, what I really hate about this is the 'local' filtering. Please bear with me while I sidestep into a short one paragraph rant.

Every. Single. Use. Of. Geolocation - is either useless, hindering, infuriating or all of that. Google redirecting to a local domain, blogger (a trend, right? Google?) showing all UI in a language that you cannot read unless it guesses your location right. I could go on, but based on my usage I'd mostly bash Google again and again for doing that (their openid implementation used to helpfully ask me for consent in Hebrew while I was in Israel. etc.). This ban is insane on the same level.

What other commenter lament about is 'free speech' - which is a concept that isn't absolute in the country in question and this particular citizen of that country is happy about it. I think most here don't get the 'I don't agree with what you're saying, but I'd defend your ...' quote. It doesn't make sense here, it just doesn't apply.

Now how do we handle these differences in culture on an international level? Twitter is a US company and might stand for the US values. Here in Germany you're limited by law in your expression in certain ways and the government has the power to punish you for things that might be considered 'free speech' elsewhere.

And from what I understand this is what happened, locally. The organization is totally insane (incidently we have a bunch of nutjobs like that. 'Pro NRW' and 'Pro Koeln', are playing the same game). The German media presents them as assholes, their values are crazy and their methods and goals illegal. They should be forbidden/dismantled, just as happened on Tuesday, because that's what this country agrees on. Comments about 'free speech' just really don't apply on this local level.

But why oh why would you now filter access to a feed based on a limited, useless technology? IF there's a case to be made that Germany has a right to 'ban' social media accounts (I'm .. not sure.. Locally I'm 100% behind every sanction against these .. idiots. Online? Not so much), then accounts should be deleted or hellbanned globally.

This particular 'solution' is just bullshit, neither refusing the request nor fulfilling it.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169222-country- withhe...](https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169222-country-withheld- content)

"With hundreds of millions of Tweets posted every day around the world, our goal is to respect our users' expression, while also taking into consideration applicable local laws."

No more twitter revolutions?

</comment><comment><USER4> How about deleting the account instead? How is promoting hate speech not a ToS violation?

<comment><USER5> Are they promoting hate speech on Twitter? The article doesn't say that, and a cursory read of their feed (through Google Translate) doesn't show anything I'd consider "hate speech" either.

Personally, I'm always sad when they ban these neo-nazi feeds and such. It's hilarious to read their complaints on the "intolerance" of current western governments, or calls to "ban repression".

(Well, it's hilarious because I'm fairly confident they won't regain power any time soon)

<comment><USER6> It's equally hilarious that the western governments use terms like free speech in the same sentence that they announce censorship. I'd lump them in the same category as far as contradictions go.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Would you purposefully slow down a specific website? - <AUTHOR>

If you could configure a VPN or Proxy or ??? How would you create a setup so that all traffic for a specific url was slowed down?<p>For example if I went to www.example.com, the website would still load but it would load much slower than if I were to be browsing www.example2.com. <comment><USER2> The linux firewall includes a rate limiter module (several actually). That would be one way to slow down data from specific IP's. And websites located at that IP would be slowed down.</comment>


Show HN: Petcube for Apple Watch, best way to stay in touch with your pet - <AUTHOR> https://petcube.com/apple-watch

<comment><USER2> $200 seems like a lot. $50-80 would be the sweet spot, but I'm not sure what your costs are, or the quality of the product.</comment>


Show HN: LinkLink – deep link to almost any website - <AUTHOR> http://linklink.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> Cool idea!

When testing, using [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/994c0zb1(v=vs.110).a...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/994c0zb1\(v=vs.110\).aspx) as the target URL, I selected an item in the table in the "Remarks" section of the page and the resulting URL was "undefined/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmsdn.microsoft.com%2Fen- us%2Flibrary%2F994c0zb1(v%3Dvs.110).aspx&top=1442.4700012207031".

I'm using IE11 on Win7.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Kevin.

This has been fixed. Thanks for trying linklink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks good!

I've built something similar, though I've used a different approach: [http://tldr.es](http://tldr.es)

<comment><USER4> This is very nice. Is it open source by any chance?

<comment><USER3> The old site, yes: [https://github.com/spektom/bquot.com](https://github.com/spektom/bquot.com)

The functionality is pretty much the same, there's only difference in styling and Website name.

<comment><USER4> Thank you!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Video suggests huge problems with Uber's driverless car program - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/video-suggests-huge-problems-with-ubers-driverless-car-program/ <comment><USER2> "Uber recently placed an order for 24,000 Volvo cars that will be modified for driverless operation. Delivery is scheduled to start next year."

Wow. The other driverless car players should be all over this lobbying to shut Uber down. If Uber massively deploys a commercial service with subpar quality in order to "win", and then those cars start getting into accidents, the entire field is going to be delayed by 10 years. The general public is not going to just think "Uber is bad", they are going to think "self-driving cars are bad". Politicians will jump all over it and we'll see very restrictive laws that no one will have the guts to replace for a long time.

And honestly if that happens, that's probably what we would need anyway. If the industry doesn't want to be handcuffed they need to figure out some really good standardized regulations on sharing data with law enforcement, how to determine fault for self-driving vehicles, and what penalties there should be. That are fair and strict.

<comment><USER3> Could Uber be doing this on purpose? They're way behind on self-driving tech, so maybe if they can't have it, no one can.

<comment><USER2> The more I think about this the more it makes sense in a horrible way. The important thing for Uber is that they are first to market. If they are first to market there are two outcomes: a) they are successful, they make more money with lower fares because they don't need to pay drivers anymore. They basically take over the market that they are already dominating, beating competitors into bankruptcy. The market explodes as it is cheaper to get on demand cars than to own your own. $$$$$ b) they are not successful. They kill a hundred people in a month or two. The self-driving car industry gets shut down, and for the cost of a few hundred million dollars in settlements they keep their current market dominance in the current industry, but have to keep paying drivers. $$

The alternative, they are not first to market, someone else is and immediately replaces Uber with a network of cheaper self-driving cars: a) Uber goes out of business b) They can somehow convince someone to license the tech or sell them the cars at a reasonable price, making them vulnerable and less profitable, with no market advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > We don't need redundant brakes & steering or a fancy new car; we need better > software," wrote engineer Anthony Levandowski

Any engineer with this attitude needs to learn the lesson of the Therac-25. The issues in the Ars article are very similar to section 4 "Causal Factors" of the report[1].

> To get to that better software faster we should deploy the first 1000 cars > asap.

Is that admitting that they _do not have_ the "better software" and intend to deploy 1000 cars using "lesser software"? That's treading dangerously close to potential manslaughter charges if prove this _willful contempt for safety_ to a court.

[1] [http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf](http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf)

<comment><USER5> I get the feeling based on comments here that there is a severe lack of ethical and critical thinking among engineers and developers. I recognize that this is only a vocal minority but the constant mantra of "move fast and break things", where getting rich at any cost is seen as a virtue, has made me extremely disillusioned with this brand of startup culture. Doubly so when people are trading stock tips on how to profit from tragedy by supporting the worst actors in the field.

<comment><USER6> "Move fast and break things" is the motto of Facebook. It means that Facebook engineers are encouraged to make user-facing changes without red tape. If you are claiming that some self-driving car company has "move fast and break things" as their motto, then you are being willfully deceptive.

<comment><USER7> Have you not noticed that "move fast and break things" is essentially how the entire startup space functions? When a social media company does it, it's merely annoying. Do it with dangerous machines, and people die.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States."

Wow there goes that "safer than human drivers" argument.

<comment><USER9> With one data point, you can't extrapolate much. This is misuse of statistics.

Consider if there was a new lottery and you weren't sure what the odds of winning were. You play it three weeks in a row and the third time you win a million dollars. Conveniently, no one else tries the new lottery yet.

Does it follow then that the odds of winning a million dollars are 1 in 3? Or should you play it a few more times before you declare to all that one in three plays will make one a millionaire?

<comment><USER10> They did not sample three times and win once. They sampled three million times and won once. Hardly "one data point."

<comment><USER9> The point remains: it isn't fair to decide what the probability is with only one data point on one side- especially for rare events.

Would it have been fair if Uber last week were to declare that they have a 0% probability of pedestrian deaths, since they'd never had one yet?

The goal of these statistics is to predict future outcomes. But with such a small data sample, you cannot fairly predict the future- just as in my lottery example.

<comment><USER11> What if Uber's first self-driving car killed a cyclist in its very first mile of operation? Would you find it equally hard to draw conclusions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand how there isn't a non-ML based piece of code that looks at moving radar and lidar returns and preforms an emergency brake, light flash, horn, or dodge if that vector would intersect with any confidence. Even slowing down to 20MPH can turn a fatal accident into an injury.

<comment><USER6> What if it has nothing to do with ML? You see a point cloud that's moving toward your lane at a speed estimate of say 2 mph. If that's below the sensor noise threshold, you might classify the cloud as a stationary object on the other lane (say a stranded car). In that case, by the time you realize that this stationary object has somehow moved itself into your own lane, it is already too late.

<comment><USER13> You slow down anyways, because it will almost always improve the situation and reduce your liability. Secondly, if the vision is so bad that it can't identify objects in its lane or predict vectors, it's not ready for the real world.

<comment><USER14> This will have you unexpectedly slowing for road signs, guardrails, and other stationary objects on the side of the road when they are on the inside of a curve (as they will have apparent motion towards your lane)

Set "too tightly", it will also have you slowing for every car approaching a stop sign from a side street.

Cars that randomly slow out of an excess of caution are also a hazard to other road users. Don't believe that? Go drive for a month and set a series of alarms on your phone every 5-10 minutes. Everytime the phone goes off, abruptly slow to half of your prior speed. Do you think you'd make 1,000 miles without causing a road hazard or collision?

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure what side you are on here, are you saying that the autonomous cars cannot be careful as the technology to do so is not good enough? or are you saying that they should not be required to be careful?

<comment><USER14> I'm saying that a rules based system with "slow down arbitrarily whenever the hell you want" is unlikely to meld well with existing traffic and is likely to cause as well as avoid unsafe situations.

I believe that might mean that autonomous vehicles are not yet ready for road testing if that is commonly required by the current state of the art. (I last worked on autonomous vehicles in 1991; ours was entirely rules-based and we tested on public roads in addition to private tracks. Ours was bad enough that the human driver hovered over the red E-shut button and was always paying attention. It was harder work than just driving the damn thing yourself, but we had to test in order to make progress. I'm sure loads has improved since then.)

I also don't think that zero fatalities is a realistic goal nor is it the standard that should unduly inhibit progress. People have been dying in transit on foot, on horseback, on bikes, and in cars. This is a version of the trolley problem. I don't mind and in fact actively prefer a system improvement that allows 100 deaths while saving 500, even if the 100 is entirely disjoint from the counter factual 500.

In this specific case, I believe the autonomous car allowed 1 death that would have also been allowed by a human driver in the same circumstances, so it's a push.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > We don't need redundant brakes & steering or a fancy new car; we need better > software," wrote engineer Anthony Levandowski to Alphabet CEO Larry Page in > January 2016.

Looks like Uber has attracted Levandowski due to his cultural fit.

<comment><USER17> Hmm, but wouldn't his priorities be correct in the context of this crash? There hasn't been any suggestion (so far) that the crash occurred because some hardware component stopped working; rather, it seems like the software failed to identify the pedestrian in time. So better software seems precisely what was needed. Though I can imagine that better sensors might also have helped…

<comment><USER18> The issue is not that he wanted better software, it's that he appeared willing to compromise safety to get it faster in order to beat his competitors to market, as is clear from the remainder of that quote:

 _" To get to that better software faster we should deploy the first 1000 cars asap. I don't understand why we are not doing that. Part of our team seems to be afraid to ship."_

And from another email:

 _" the team is not moving fast enough due to a combination of risk aversion and lack of urgency"_

<comment><USER19> The rest of the quote is much more powerful. It's pretty irresponsible to ship 1000 self driving cars onto public roads at this point. (Regardless of who is shipping them)

On the other hand, redundant steering and braking seem like probable overengineering. Brakes are already somewhat redudnant (dual section master cylinders were common in the 70s and are almost certainly in any modern vehicle), and better software could periodically verify they're working and if not, coast to a stop. Steering failure could be handled by engaging the brakes. Simultaneous failure is likely rare and catastrophic anyway -- losing a wheel and having the brakes pressure go with it can happen, and when it does, you put on your blinkers and hope you come to rest in a safe manner.

<comment><USER20> So, dual action master cylinders are OK by you, but actuators are apparently so much more reliable you only need one of them? And the same goes for the control hardware and power supplies because you are ready to handle power loss in software? I hope you have common sense to stay away from engineering safety critical systems for the rest of your career..

<comment><USER19> Dual (or triple? I don't know how many you want) actuators don't help very much if the software doesn't know how to activate them properly (as it seems is the case here).

You absolutely need a system to ensure a controlled stop in any type of critical failure in ability to control the system. Assuming you have that, it seems reasonable to regularly verify the controls are functional (jiggle the steering, modulate the throttle, gently tap the brakes) every so often, and rely on your controlled stop procedure in the event of failure.

I do have the common sense to avoid safety critical systems, thanks; however armchair engineering is a national sport.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Stuff like this is why P.Engs should be required in certain software fields

<comment><USER22> I'd upvote you to the top of the page if I could.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why don't we require software engineers who work on self driving car software to go through licensing and certification.

And then, if their code results in a death, they are liable and can have their license completely revoked, and they would be unable to work on self driving cars again.

<comment><USER24> \- Expecting engineers to always write perfect code is insane. Mistakes happen.

\- If bad code makes it into production, that is a systemic failure not an individual one (Why didn't the bug get caught in code review, QA, etc.)

\- No one is going to want to work on a project where a single failure can taint their career.

\- What if I use a 3rd party lib and that is where the bug is. Who is at fault then? What if the code isn't buggy, but I'm using it in an unexpected way because of a miscommunication? If I am only allowed use code that I (or someone certified has written) development is going to move at a snails pace.

\- What if I consult with an engineer who doesn't have a certification on a design decision and the failure is there, who is at fault?

\- What if the best engineer on the project makes a mistake and ends up banned? Does he/she leave the project and take all their tribal knowledge with them, or are they still allowed to consult? If they can consult, what stops them from developing by proxy by telling other engineers what to write?

Not to be a dick, but this is an awful idea that would basically kill the self driving car.

<comment><USER25> There is ISO26262 for automotive about safety.

Yes, there are reviews, QA, and all of that. So, yes, there is no single person responsible (exceptions apply).

But there is no excuse for using 3rd party libs. Just don't use it. If you not know: do not use it.

That is the reason, why certifications are for. The same rules apply for medical and other areas.

<comment><USER26> > But there is no excuse for using 3rd party libs. Just don't use it. If you > not know: do not use it.

Wait, what? That goes against one of the core benefits of open source software --that having many eyes on a problem _decreases_ the risk of bugs. I'm willing to bet that if Uber had to implement their own machine learning/vision libraries from the ground up, there would be significantly more issues.

<comment><USER27> Is there any evidence that this is the case? That simply putting more eyes on a system will reveal its problems?

Certification etc is about process. Open source code can be used in a safety critical product, but it must audited and confirmed against the system requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Move fast and break things" is exactly the opposite of what a responsible driver must do.

<comment><USER29> I've been joking for at least a year that Uber's motto is "move fast and break people". I'm saddened that this has come to pass but not surprised.

<comment><USER30> Actually their motto is "Safety third"

[https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at- ube...](https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at-ubers-self- driving-1793368132)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have two problems with this article.

1) They make it appear that Uber is a car manufacturer.

2) Even though Uber has not been determined to be at fault, the author seems to want to make it that way anyway.

<comment><USER32> Every engineer on this project at Uber knows very well that their car completely failed in one of its most basic expected functions. It's incredibly obvious, and a number of independent experts have said as much.

I'd be fairly surprised if there's any real appetite at Uber to continue with this now. It was never anywhere near their core competency.

<comment><USER33> > core competency

3 years ago Uber hired ~50 specialists from CMU to work on autonomous vehicles. I'd call that a core competency.

[https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ub...](https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/uber- self-driving-cars-carnegie-mellon-poached)

<comment><USER34> Core focus, competency implies being competent. With this I'm less convinced.

<comment><USER35> My measure of core competency is capability + capacity. (Tesla and Ford, for example, do not have the same core competencies, and to your point, have core focus in each of the others.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why is everyone considering it a forgone conclusion that self driving cars will quickly become much, much safer than human driven cars? Yes, lots of people die every year in human driven car accidents. But it is equally true that our most sophisticated AI/ML can only really operate within very narrowly defined parameters (at least when compared to the huge sets of uncertain parameters humans deal with every day in the real world). Driving is perhaps one of the most unpredictable activities we can engage in, anecdotally supported by my daily commute. What if our self driving software never becomes good enough? How many more deaths are we willing to go through to find out?

</comment><comment><USER37> I was at SXSW a few weeks ago and went to an Uber driverless car talk. They spent the first half of the talk discussing driver safety, it felt incredibly hollow.

If you really cared about safety, there are far more immediate and impactful solutions then spending billions on self-driving cars. If they came out and said that they were doing it to make money or make driving easier, it would have carried more weight. But you just can't trust a word this company says.

</comment><comment><USER38> Are you suprised? Uber is a company that:

* Flouted Taxi regulations

* Living in legal gray zones in regards to contractors vs employees

* Designed a system to avoid law enforcement

* Performed shady tactics with its competitors

* Illegally obtained the private medical records of a rape victim

* Created a workplace where sexual harassment was routine

* Illegally tested self-driving cars on public roads in California without obtaining the required state licenses.

* Possibly stole a LIDAR design from a competitor

Now their vehicle killed a pedestrian in a situation that the self driving vehicles should be much better than humans at (LIDAR can see in the dark, and the reaction time of a computer is much better than humans.)

Uber has exhausted their "benefit of the doubt" reserve. Maybe, they need to be made an example of with massive losses to investors and venture capitalists as an object lesson that ethics really do matter, and that bad ethics will eventually hurt your bank account.

<comment><USER39> if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, right?

edit: wow this triggered some people. somehow 'if they are at fault they should be punished' got interpreted as 'they are not at fault and should not be punished'

<comment><USER40> From the article:

> But zooming out from the specifics of Herzberg's crash, the more fundamental > point is this: conventional car crashes killed 37,461 in the United States > in 2016, which works out to 1.18 deaths per 100 million miles driven. Uber > announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is > probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means > that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a > typical human-driven car in the United States.

We have a sample size of 1, granted, but it's not looking very good. At the very least they were expected not to be less safe than humans.

<comment><USER41> You have a sample size of 1. Acknowledging that doesn't suddenly make the sample evidence of anything, good or bad :P.

Almost all the miles driven are going to be in near-ideal circumstances (daylight, no rain, good road surface, driver familiar with normal road traffic conditions and drives the route regularly). I have nearly no insight into the uber death, but I gather it happened at night. It could easily be that humans are also an order of magnitude more dangerous at night.

<comment><USER42> Of course it's evidence of something!

Suppose, as a massive oversimplification, Uber's self-driving cars crash with some constant probability P for every mile driven (i.e. a Bernoulli process).

We now have learned at least one thing with absolute confidence: P > 0.

The first mile driven before the accident, of course, also showed P < 1.

But beyond _absolute certainty_ , we also have a _better idea_ of the actual value of P. (Intuitively, the longer we go without a crash, the lower we suspect P to be, and for every crash, we increase our estimate of P).

If there was only one crash in 3 million miles driven, this is evidence for values of P near 1/(3 million), and evidence against values of P far from it.

Is it strong evidence? Nope! But it's evidence!

<comment><USER41> You obviously want to be technical. Technically you are correct. However, the evidence that this car is a worse driver than a human is currently so weak we're both wasting time talking about it. We need more of the stuff for it to be worth considering.

Your pedantry has managed to upset me and I would encourage you to be a little more understanding of people using language in the way it is used outside of the world of mathematics. Walking into a practical discussion of safety with an existence proof of all things is disrespectful of the fact that lives and enormous quantities of human attention are at stake.

Obviously, technically everything is evidence of something. I know that. Using the language in that sense is not going to help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Machine learning and AI are data hungry algorithms and the concern is there isn't enough "emergency situation" data. Also a detector can not have both a 100% probability of detection and 0% probability of false alarm. You have to sacrifice one for the other and that is usually influenced by weighted probabilities and priorities (e.g., a smooth ride).

</comment><comment> d--b Uber's culture is bad for anything really...

</comment><comment><USER44> I hope on-road testing could be more like human drug testing. After all, both affect human lives.

<comment><USER45> Drugs are tested under informed consent, not on unwilling third parties.

Maybe testing of autonomous vehicles should be done off public roads (at least at this stage of development).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This event has me thinking about job of the behind-the-wheel backup driver. They get an easier job than a real driver, at the cost of potentially taking the fall if an accident occurs. I wonder if the pay is better.

<comment><USER47> It's an equivalent job to a train driver

<comment><USER48> Train drivers have immense amounts of regulation and systems in place to verify that they are paying attention and actually driving the train:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sifa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sifa)

<comment><USER47> Yes exactly, we should be applying similar rules to the self-driving drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I thought the speed limit was 35mph, but the article claims 40mph.

</comment><comment><USER49> "Testing" of driverless cars seem to be the wrong way around. Software should try to learn from human drivers: watch them instead of being watched by them.

The way it would work would be: the human is driving and the software is, at the same time, watching the driver and figuring out an action to take. Every time the driver's and the software's behavior differ, is logged and analyzed to figure out why there was a difference and who guessed better.

But the way testing is currently going on, it seems millions of miles are wasted where nothing happens and nothing is learned.

<comment><USER50> No, what that gets you is smooth normal driving and poor handling of emergency situations. People have tried using supervised learning for that - vision and human actions for training, steering and speed out. Works fine, until it works really badly, because it has no model of what to do in trouble.

<comment><USER51> While I understand the issues, it's still much better in the sense that it doesn't kill anyone while failing to learn how to drive. The fact that we fail to develop something without exposing people to risk doesn't create a right to expose people to risk. It should be seen as either an impassible obstacles, or motivation to solve the problem of learning safely.

Some argume that it is okay, because it will decrease risks in traffic in the long run. This is not a valid argument to allow on road bug-testing, as there is a lot of medical research that we as a society don't allow because of ethical concerns, even some research where the risk of death is essentially zero. Applying research ethics to the Uber situation, Ubers vehicles would under no circumstances be allowed on the road until it could be _proven_ that they were at least as safe as all vehicles already operating on the road.

So while the technique suggested might not work well to solve the problem of safe autonomous cars, the more dangerous alternatives should absolutely not be allowed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Surprising no one.

"win-at-any-cost" and "second place is first looser" (sic) do not cohere with safety.</comment>


Forty-seven is the saddest age of all, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://calgaryherald.com/health/health-and-wellness/forty-seven-is-the-saddest-age-of-all-study-finds-hill-shaped-unhappiness-curve-is-to-blame/wcm/f542db1f-01e0-4b4b-b2e4-0a482e6539e5 <comment><USER2> In my mid 40's I can believe it. I feel a lot more depressed than in my 30's or 20's. Things seem a lot harder to do.</comment>


Ask HN: Working parents in SV big tech companies - <AUTHOR> We are looking at a job offer at a FANG company, and with the pay offered we'll both need to work in tech to afford a home in good school district and commute. How is the environment for this? Would we reliably be able to have one of us leave at 3 or 4 for kid wrangling — maybe working more after they are asleep. Would love to hear from working parents in tech. <comment><USER2> You need to be more specific. Are you in engineering role? Its very usual for both husband and wife to work, if you want a home in good school district and nice commute. It can get a little hectic at times. Leaving at 3-4 everyday may be tough but one of you can do 3 days a week and the other 2 days a week. Else, with two salaries, you can hire a part time nanny and ask her/him to bring kids from school. That way, stress levels are manageable.

I don't work in FANG but have a similar lifestyle. Since the money is good, I would suggest you take the offer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I work in tech as an engineering operations lead, wife would be in a policy role. Total possible comp for her $400k, mine $250k.

I think this may be limited funding to afford a nice home with good schools and commute.

So it seems like we likely could alternate early departure for both of us? Or do most working parents just hire someone for every afternoon and summer logistics?

<comment><USER3> Today I learned that $650k may be considered limited funding by someone in the same universe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, I know right? I'm just repeating what has been drilled into me by everyone I've talked to who lives in the valley. I'm coming from the South so thought I had won the lottery, but apparently this won't cut it b/c fixer uppers with decent schools and commutes are $2M+. And traffic is really bad so just 'drive till you qualify' is a Faustian bargain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not specific to this question, but I've enjoyed the episodes of Parent Driven Development that I've listened to: [https://www.parentdrivendevelopment.com/](https://www.parentdrivendevelopment.com/)</comment>